A brilliant story, and a brilliant play on words, even in the title. Tale of a typical transition man caught between an old world and the new where he is obsolete, but unable to change.

a great tale of the last true englishman, all the bravery and heroics of a viking epic, worth spending the money if you can ever find a copy which are now harder to find than rocking horse poo

A well researched tale, as good as Scott's Ivanhoe, that is as lively to read as many a modern tale. The visual imagery and prose are a joy to read.

This book may be considered a reference in the study of electric machines, because it brings the main aspects of electromechanical energy conversion devices without being difficult to understand. Its way for explaining the relations of power/current/torque in induction machines is the best one I've seen in any book.

The most powerfull book in Electric Machinery for the beginners and experts, at the same level of complexity (it's hard to read but it's very interesting in the way of presenting the contents...), requires some background in theory of electrical circuits and systems

This commentary by C.K. Barrett is much more thorough than any of the other commentaries I have read by him. It does not appear to be in a series being confined by the thoughts of the editors. The first 146 pages are devoted to background information. He seems to do the best job of any writer I have read on John. In John 1:1 he addresses the word "logos" better than any writer I have read. The book is 638 pages. In those pages Barrett gets to the point without a lot of fluff.

Human Diseases and Conditions is an up to date, comprehensive and readable encyclopedia of information thoroughly covering issues of mental and emotional health, addiction and compulsive disorders and related topics. It includes community resources, websites and other relevant references for kids, adolescents, and families who need more information and support. It is a must for the family library, schools and clinics, and any organization that serves families.

I read Kingsley's The Water Babies in 1976 when I received a very old copy of it as a gift. I have always loved babies and this book delighted me. It is both sad and wonderful. Read it as soon as it is released -- you won't be wasting time.

This book is really good. Some of the words are a little hard for young kids, but if your parents can help you it's enjoyable. Kingsley's style and allegorical references make this a delight to the senses, not only as a story, but as an example of a writer who truly enjoys his craft.

This book was a wonderful novel to read. It showed how little kids were treated durning this time period. Once the faries found Tom his life changed forever. The author explained how he started out as little boy and saying bad words to how he changed and in to a understanding boy. The book is a wonderful read because it shows what happens to others who don't know what it's like. Not all of this is true because it is a fairy tale. The author's one quote that stayed with me the most is "You're not supposed to belive all of this because it's a fairy tale even if you do believe. This is a powerful story and should be read to little children. It will show them that being bad is not the way to go. If kids learn tpo be nice when they are young then it can stop hatred and people being mean in future years.

The Water Babies is an excellent example of British Literature that should be promoted just as much as the works of Lewis Caroll or Dickens. Charles Kingsley's work was banned for quite a while. There is no question that this cleverly written fairy tale has a lot of hidden information to explore. Makes one wonder if one can still be an Anglican minister and promote evolution? Perhaps, one can. Mr. Kingsley has other wonderful works to explore and in addition, there is his niece, Mary Kingsley who wrote on Africa.

David Copperfield, Dickens' favorite child, is an experience. Forget what your high school teacher or college professor told you. Forget all the terribly bad film representations of this book. Forget the glib one-liner reviews about Dickens people being caricatures instead of characters. READ this book. This book is one of the few Real Books in this world.

The great storm scene alone will thunder forever in your memories. You will encounter with Copperfield:
• the evil, chilling Uriah Heep,
• the mental and physical destruction of his mother by a Puritanical,untilitarian step-father,
• the always in-debt Mr. Mawcawber who somehow transcends his economic and egocentric needs into something noble,
• the betrayal of Copperfield by his best friend and Copperfield's shattered emotions by this betrayal,
• the ruination of another close friend's reputation, and her step-by-step climb back out of the mire,
• Copperfield's own passionate step into marriage while too young with an irresponsible, yet innocent child-woman, her death,
• Copperfield's own rise from poverty and orphanhood into worldly success but empty life until mature love rescues him.

Dickens has a real gift for creating people that irritate you, yet gradually you come to love them - just like folks in real life. If you never have read Dickens, come meet David Copperfield. You'll find that your impressions of David from the brief snippets by critics, teachers, reviewers, professors and know-it-alls completely different than the Real Thing.

In an age when we have not much time to read one short book from cover to cover, few long books will ever be good enough to read twice; David Copperfield is one of them. It has, perhaps, the most unforgettable cast of characters ever assembled in a work of fiction: Mr. Micawber, Uriah Heep, Aunt Betsey Trotwood, the Murdstones, Mr. Dick, Peggotty, and, of course, David Copperfield himself.

The story is simple enough to start. David's mother marries a man, Murdstone, who makes life hell for her and young David. David has the courage to rebel against the tyrant and is sent off to boarding school and later to a blacking factory. For readers who want to compare childhood rebellion to authority in the movies, Alexander's defiance of the Bishop in Ingmar Bergman's great movie, Fanny and Alexander, is equally dramatic and sad.

David runs away and finds his Aunt Betsey Trotwood, who takes him in and supports him, with a little help from her wise/fool companion Mr. Dick. This is story enough for many novelists, but it is only the beginning for Dickens. David has yet to meet one of the great villains in literature, that "Heap of infamy" Uriah Heep. Uriah's villainy is terrible because it is hidden under a false pretense of humilty and service to others. The final confrontation between Heap and Micawber is one of the great scenes in literature.

None of what I have said answers the question, Why read this book more than once? The most important answer to this question for the nonacademic reader is "for the fun of it." From cover to cover this novel gives so much pleasure that it begs to be read again. We want to revisit David's childhood and his confrontation with the terrible Mr. Murdstone. Mr. Micawber is one of Dickens's great creations and anytime he is part of the action we can expect to be entertained. When we pair Micawber with Heap we have the explosive combination which results in the confrontation mentioned earlier in this review.

These brief examples only scratch the surface of the early 19th century English world Dickens recreates for the reader. Some other of Dickens' novels like Bleak House may be concerned with more serious subjects, but none lay claim to our interest more than Dickens' personal favorite "of all his children," that is, David Copperfield. Turn off the television, pick a comfortable chair, and be prepared to travel along with David Copperfield as he tells us the story of his life.

Charles Dickens has been one of my favorite authors since I was forced to read him in high school. I had not picked up one of his stories since, but upon reading that David Copperfield was Dicken's personal favorite book he had authored, I decided to try him again. I was not disappointed. Dicken's creates an incredible cast of characters and paints a vivid portrait of 19th-century England. Aside from fulfulling those crucial elements of writing a novel, Dickens tells a terrific story. The initial serialization of the story into 19 monthly parts required Dickens to create many dramatic buildups and twists and turns that kept the audience buying the next installment. When it is all put together the novel is an unexpected roller coaster that has many climbs, dives, loop-the-loops, and sharp curves. In the end everything of course comes together beautifully and the characters all get their just desserts. This is yet another clinic by Dickens in how to write a well organized, though unpredictable, novel that maintains the interest of a reader through approx. 900 pages of writing. It is a wonderful experience that all lovers of good fiction should at least attempt.

The title should really be _Evolutionary Wars: The Billion Generation Battle.._. The book is a description of various defenses and offenses animals have developed through evolution to aid them in the great natural selection. However, he didn't go into as much detail as I'd hoped for about those specific defenses/offenses, and exactly what species they have possibly made obsolete. It was more of a listing it seemed. Snakes have venom. That is cool. Salamanders can change color. That is cool.

The author mixes dry science with enough pizzazz to evoke the kind of wonder a child has for small insects and other creatures featured in the book. I wouldn't say that I couldn't put this book down. I enjoyed it more by reading bits and pieces at my leisure.

As a kid, I use to love watching insects. The ants impressed me the most, with their organization and ferocity. Sometimes I'd play a game to see how long I could hold my hand on the nest. Caterpillars were another curiosity, with their spines, toxic hairs, and camouflage. And what kid hasn't had the experience of picking up a lizard or snake, only to find it excreting its feces all over the place, to ward off potential predators?

When I saw Levy's book in the bookstore at the University of Washington it caught my attention immediately. Reading it was like going back in time, to the woods behind our house, where my fascination with animals and their modes of attack and self-defense originated. Levy's book is for all the kids (including the ones over 30) who find something intriguing about the microscopic kingdoms hidden under a log, or in a pond, and the ferocious battles that are wage there.

Evolution wouldn't exist without competition. The subtitle in Levy's book elaborates on the content: "A three-billion-year arms race." This is a book about plants and animals, and how they evolved to eat and escape from each other. The ones that are most effective in either evading or executing capture are the ones that propagate their DNA, and the result of this battle of pursuit and escape over the last 2 billion or so years has been some truly amazing life forms, employing some really interesting solutions.

Like any good book, Levy begins at the beginning, describing a little about the competition that existed among the very first forms of life on earth. Throughout the book, Levy describes different dimensions of the conflict. Some dimensions lead to flight, others to eyes, some to incredible speed and agility, others to stealth, and still others to ears of great acuity. Many conflicts resulted in chemical defenses. And some of the most bizarre resulted in camouflage.

A common theme throughout Levy's book is the manner in which evolution, over hundreds of millions of years, has resulted in extraordinarily complicated and refined mechanisms for both defense and attack. The discussion about bats, for example, describes how these small mammals use their acoustic sonar to track flying insects with the sort of accuracy we (who, by comparison, hardly use our ears at all) can scarcely imagine. Reading the section on bats, I had to remind myself that, while they do some incredible things with sound, animals with eyes do equally impressive feats with their eyes. Bats can decipher an incredible amount of information in an unbelievably complex mix of acoustic signals. Animals with eyes, on the other hand, manage to make sense of a bewildering barrage of electromagnetic radiation, and even discern the tiger in the grass. It's just that the difference in the evolutionary paths our ancestors took is so incredible that I cannot imagine doing with my ears what comes naturally to those bats with their ears.

Levy frequently compares the evolutionarily designed characteristics of animals with what we see in modern war machines. The flying bat, for example, hones in on its prey with far greater efficiency and accuracy than any guided missile. The chemical sensors in the noses of many animals are sensitive to an extraordinary degree. Some fish bring down flying insects by spitting water at them. To make the kill, they have to account for relative motion, and parabolic flight of the water drops. Other fish (the Anableps dowi) spend a lot of time near the surface of the water. To search for objects in both the water and the air, they have to account for the difference in the index of refraction in the air, and under water. The solution? They have evolved two eyes: one for seeing above water, and one for seeing below.

Of the many features in this book, some of the best are the many excellent black-and-white line drawings. The book is full of them (they average about every other page). It's also well written, and has a generous index. The subject matter is what captured me, though. If you are someone who finds fascination in the incredible, but possibly little-known facts about animals, especially insects, then I think you will enjoy this book as much as I did. It certainly kept my attention. It's one of those books I had difficulty putting down.

Westward Ho transplants the famous Greek Epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, into Elizabethan England. Complete with Achilles (Amyas Leigh), Patroclus (Frank Leigh), Helen (Rose), Paris (Guzman), and a Trojan War (The Defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588). The Odyssey too comes in, with the great wanderings in distant lands. Rather unexpectedly for a novelist of Kingsley's calibre and values, the book has transformed the Elizabethan English into a noble race of Godlike Heroes and the Spanish into villains far worse than the Trojans have ever been depicted as being. Jesuits are particularly maligned, and Indians are unfairly portrayed. This tends to dampen the reader's enthusiasm somewhat, as he/she realises that the author himself may be more remote in value system from our day and age than the characters he portrays. The one redeeming feature is the high tension it generates, but this is - probably consciously - influenced by the epics, as the author himself hints.

Charles Kingsley,the Victorian socialist clergyman,would seem hardly a figure to arouse much respect today.An ardent defender of the poor-he nevertheless upheld the status quo and did little to improve the actual quality of life.A railer against celibacy and a firm believer in the normalcy of (married)sexual life-he was one of the biggest prudes in Victorian literature and maintained the double standard regarding women.A deeply learned and cultured scholar-he was incredibly ethnocentric and scorned primitive people as degenerate.A man of God,who used his writing as a pulpit to instruct and enlighten- he was consumed by an intolerance and bigotry towards Catholics.He displayed all of these faults to varying degrees in his writing,but yet was able to produce some memorable work.At his best("Alton Locke"and "Hypatia" and to a lesser extent-"Yeast" and "Water Babies")his work was measured,thought-provoking,involving-giving a real sense of the intellectual ferment of the time.But at his worst,as in "Westward Ho",all of his faults come in to play,throwing reason,justice and truth out the window."Westward Ho",tediously recounts events in England leading up to the war with Spain-according to Kingsley a war between hell and heaven(you can guess who's who).The novel seethes with hatred towards Catholics and constantly depicts them as psychopathic,cruel idiots,incapable of truth or decency,whose only purpose in life is to make others the same as they-by any means possible.Demonized as an evil bufoon,the canonized poet Robert Southwell is probably the most savagely cannibalized.There is of course not a shred of historical truth in all of this,which wouln't matter if Kingsley didn't keep reminding his readers how fair and free from prejudice he has been.The book doesn't help its cause with its anachronistic priggish "muscular Christian" hero-blond and unintellectual,but oh so superiorly Victorian,fighting against the papist evil and deigning to love a native girl,who is so lucky to experience this contact with civilization!The only thing that redeems the book from utter worthlessness is a long trek for survival through the South American jungles,though marred by a condescending attitude,is exciting and suspenseful to read and reminds us that when Kingsley chooses not to be goaded by irrational fears what a good writer he could be.Unfortunately,"Westward Ho" is one long,rabid insult against the imagination and intelligence.

An exciting tale of the "Spanish Main", South America, "The Inquistion", and adventure, Kingsley 's tale is onpar with Dumas, Dickens, Haggard, and Doyle. Though the prose may be dated for late 20th (alomst 21th)century readers and the tale may strike some as virulently anti-Catholic, the action is epic and story detailed with all the requisite twists and turns. A "ripping" good yarn.

I wish the Rev. Charles Kingsley were here to speak for his book ... but it's a century and a half since he wrote it ... I might not do it justice but I'll do what I can ...

I found a copy of this book at a garage sale and wondered what is Hypatia In Kingsley's preface he suggests that an innocent or tender reader might rather not know. It was a violent era, those first five hundred years after the time of Jesus. Kingsley is right. Even more than I wish I didn't know, I wish this didn't happen.

One of the best things the author says in the whole book is an aside to one of the faithful cautioning that this church might not be God's. You read it and see if you hear it that way. Probably Kingsley didn't like the Catholic Church anyway. I can't say that I blame him right now.

As the Roman empire settled into its form of Christianity, social conflicts resembled the teachings of Jesus not at all. They much more resembled issues of power, acqusition of land, holding of influence.

I wonder how I could live half a lifetime and not know Hypatia's story. For some reason, I am enraged to learn her story from a prolific church writer.

Kingsley writes well enough. He takes a true historical horror and wraps it in plot. I could point to the characters as archetypes and symbols that constellate around various types of betrayal of beauty or truth.

Kingsley creates a fiction to wrap the unthinkable truth. Then he messes a bit with the history and the clerical consciousness of the times and in that, he may be well informed.

Kingsley's portrayal of Hypatia's murder reads more euphemistically than the histories I found using a search engine online.

The already plundered and dominated pagans and Goths were fast becoming the 'minorities' subject to Roman ethnic cleansing. In fact, many of the seasonal celebrations of the pagan religions were co-opted as we know to drag people into the state religion.

Hypatia, the graceful, scholarly, astute, and renown daughter of a father who believed in education no matter the gender of the child ... Hypatia, called The Mathematician, becomes an illustrious teacher in Alexandria ...

her death at the hands of an enraged mob is seen as the end of the classical era and the beginning of the dark dark ages ... it is a dark story. I hate that this story can be true.

Kingsley gives us Hypatia as she lectures, counsels Orestes, and ignores the jealous and hostile church men who seem to play Iago/Saliere to her genius, health, and scholarly devotion. While Hypatia enrages them for her celibacy she is also suspected by them, Kingsley suggests, of sharing more than counsel with the governor. This fantasy of her influence may have been what made her dangerous enough to murder.

Who knows ... whether she was as dangerous as these hostile rivals found her to be. Certainly she threatened them to the extent that they had to look in her mirror and see themselves.

Kingsley's Hypatia's is tragic because her flaw is a pride in her aristocracy and freedom of thought and opinion. She either did not accept or did not notice the exclusive claims of this new religion on her mind and opinions.

Too bad for her, she gets murdered in the cruelest manner.

History speculates, but no one really knows, that Peter the Reader and Cyril the bishop (later St. Cyril I believe) intended to and did incite the mob against Hypatia. Thus ending the life of their rival for the governor's ear ... and the people's.

Kingsley apparently believes or allows the reader to speculate that the churchmen orchestrated this murder and blamed the mob for it.

Unlike St. Joan, Hypatia was not elevated later by a guilty church. I was surprised to find that Kingsley takes us, with one of his charaters, right into the church where Hypatia was dragged, defenseless, stripped of her clothing, and cut to pieces by a mob, we think, of Christians wielding tiles made of mollusk shells ... other sources say these people scraped her flesh from her bones with these weapons ...

Euphemistic as Kingsley's scene in the church is, Hypatia screams until she dies and then her body burned. I supposed this book needs to be read now, sickening and heartbreaking as it is, because now we need to look at our species and the things we have done in the name of righteousness.

When our conflicts are truly about power, resources, position, image, our righteousness is a poor disguise. No one believes it any more.

And hatred for independent thinking and aloof beauty, is, well, certainly not God's work or love's work, and is not welcome on the planet.

It is no wonder we've had to rehabilitate a belief in our little daughters that they can, after all, do math. There'a memory to heal by facing it.

Yes, the church tortured and burned women to death. And sometimes other people who were hated for some scapegoating reason ... This is true. In Hypatia's case, there's evidently no historical acknowledgement of the church's role.

Otherwise, Hypatia might also be sainted today. But I cannot think she'd like that. Do I recommend Kingsley's book? I cannot recommend it any more than Kingsley does in his preface.

But here is another dark truth we need to know. It is a part of who we are, I think.