Like so many pieces of work about the effectiveness of aid, this piece by Lancaster has its strengths as well as its obvious blind spots. Lancaster does a relatively good job of analyzing the bureaucratic strengths and weaknesses of many of the larger national and multinational aid agencies. It is in this respect that the book shines. On the other hand, it is obvious that Lancaster is strongly wedded to neo-classical economic theory and this bias runs throughout the book and leads her to condemn many aid practices based almost solely on these fundamentalist beliefs. Even more damning, though, is her near absolute ignorance of the international economic and political realities that have destabilized Africa and that have been almost completely uncontrollable by the aid agencies that she so easily critiques. She even goes so far as to give her greatest praise to one of the few agencies that can be directly credited with much of the economic instability plaguing the continent, the World Bank. She is honest in her critique of USAID and DFID being partly handcuffed by their country's larger foreign policy goals, but fails to place blame at the feet of these agencies' mother nations for their roles in producing or at least aiding in the creation of political instability of the region. Still, with these very serious critiques aside, Lancaster does do a very good job in providing valuable organizational critiques of several very important aid agencies. In this respect, this is a valuable piece of scholarship. I just wish she had the ability to be more honest (as she is a former government employee and recipient of significant US government funding, it may not be realistic to expect this of her) or less blind.

Teachers are always looking to improve their instructional methods. Reading professional journals, taking graduate courses, and networking with colleagues are the ways most teachers find out how to refine their techniques. Andrea Fishman did it differently. In the early 1980s, she got a chance to visit a one-room Old Order Amish and Mennonite schoolhouse for a semester as part of her doctoral work. The resulting book details her ethnographic study and the changes she herself made in her own English courses upon her return to the classroom.

You need not know a lot about Amish society before opening these pages, because you'll quickly learn about the demands that special community has on an individual's life. And even if you were raised in the "Amish country" of central Pennsylvania like I was, you may still find some surprises here. Reading and writing are important parts of daily life for Amish people. They read a variety of books and magazines and write letters and newspaper account about their congregations' activities. Even if you're not a teacher, you can catch intriguing glimpses here. One example is the circle letter, where each recipient writes an entire page about himself/herself, then sends it on to the next person in an eventual circle of friends. Whenever the letter returns to the originator, he/she removes the previously written page and writes another...after reading everyone else's pages, of course.

Though the one-room schoolhouse environment has some merit to it, Fishman is far from saying that we should return to it. Some things she saw mirrored her own practices so much that she questioned their relevance in a more contemporary and diverse classroom. Some lessons were better; some seemed to stiffle student individualism -- but then again, the scholars and their teacher had to answer to their deeply-ingrained religious background.

Though published in the 1980s, this book still has ideas to offer to contemporary teachers interested in perking up their kids' literacy. At the very least, it'll make them think.

I want to make a tesis of duration models and this book is the appropriated

Charles Esdaile's short monograph provides students a basic outline for twenty-three years of warfare in Europe -a continuum traveling from Valmy to Waterloo. Solid maps and chronologies compliment the author's readable prose as, chapter by chapter, Esdaile deals with the efforts of succeeding anti-French coalitions. The author concludes with a chapter investigating the recent historiography of the era, discussing key points of the various works. He concludes with a short but useful bibliographic essay. I think this book is ideal for those who want to begin serious study of this period's conflicts. I recommend following it with Esdaile's The WARS of NAPOLEON, Gates' The NAPOLEONIC WARS and Owen Connelly's BLUNDERING to GLORY.

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the brief description.

Ruth McKenney of MY SISTER EILEEN fame and her husband, Richard Bransten, have lived in England for the past three years. To say that they have fallen in love with that green and pleasant land is putting it mildly. Theirs is an evangelical passion which they are eager to share with their readers. The result is the liveliest book about England which has appeared since WITH MALICE TOWARD SOME.

HERE'S ENGLAND is aimed squarely at American tourists -- it's replete with history, architecture and practical travel information, but first and foremost it's a book to read for sheer enjoyment. In the hands of an eloquent novelist like Miss McKenney, history comes alive; the stories of Thomas Becket, Old Sarum and the Wars of the Roses take on color and a contemporary urgency. All through the book there are passages of lyrical beauty and flashes of humor which are equally delightful.

The first section, on London, its sights, its spirit and its people, is followed by seven easily manageable journeys into various sections of England. They range from Canterbury to Cornwall to the moors of the Border Country, and every one of them has its full quota of excitement and pleased discovery for both tourist and reader.

Osbert Lancaster's line drawings are both witty and characteristically distinguished.

The photos in this book are wonderful. While the authors developed their own fairly useful scheme for identifying appropriate growing areas (less useful than USDA or Sunset magazine zones, however), they give no information about the size of the plant, its rate of growth or amount of water needed. The information about types of soil required is sometimes questionable (e.g. both daphne and hydrangeas are listed as successful in "any type of soil"). The book is poorly bound and pages became loose even on my first reading.

There are many other books I would recommend before this one.

The Pastons and their England by H.S. Bennett is a interesting story about the lives of a 15th century family and their struggle and truimphs along the way. This book is a great reference through the letters written by various family matters for historical matters. If you are a history major in college or just a history fanatic this book is one you can't let slip through your hands.

This book helps the computer scientists who are willing to find the way of developping Search Engines in the Web.

This book has reasonably valid information in it (checked against more reliable sources), but the author makes no attempt to differentiate the reliable from the unreliable, and far too much of it is unreliable. I suspect the author doesn't even keep his database in a computer genealogical program because there are many internal inconsistencies (I'm my own grandpa kinds of inconsistencies) that all the respectable genealogical software would catch.

No genealogical researcher should touch this book. All editions have been riddled with errors, and the latest is no exception. The spellings are frequently wrong, the lines are often inaccurate, mythical lines are not distinguished from historical ones, highly conjectural lines are not distinguished from proven ones, and most of the books and articles associated with many of the lines are completely unrelated to the material they allegedly cover. No statement in the book can be trusted at face value. Even if you want to use it just as a finding aid, double check everything.

Chris Bennett

This book is a great bargain for anyone interested in early and middle medieval history and genealogy. Accumulating this data by acquiring other books would cost at least 10 times as much. A caution: legendary, mythical and even fictional lineages are mixed in with the historical lineages, so care should be taken when using the book. Applicable references are given with most of the lineages, so the list of references can be checked for the known scholarly sources (Schwennicke etc), especially on anything before AD 1000. There are also silly errors (I'm my own grandpa type stuff), but most can be spotted by careful reading.