Great story about a great woman, Harriet Tubman, american liberator. I read it with my children and they seem to delight in the cadence of the soulful prose and the beautiful bold art.

First published in 1968, this artistic book tells the awe-inspiring story of Harriet Tubman. It ought to be on the list of children's bestsellers, for it gives children the stories of two American heroes for the price of one. The first is the title figure, Harriet Tubman (1820-1913), who escaped from slavery but courageously returned south 19 times to lead more than 300 others to freedom. The second is Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), who made this magnificent series of illustrations in 1939 and 1940.

The text is poetic. Early in the story, on a hot summer day in about 1820, "a group of slave children were tumbling in the sandy soil in the state of Maryland," Harriet Tubman among them. She dreamed of freedom and escaped, but returned to help others. The story builds as the selfless African-American leader risked her life many times to help others reach freedom. "Some were afraid, / But none turned back, / For close at their heels / Howled the bloodhound pack."

As the story closes, young readers find an enthralling figure of Harriet Tubman building support for the anti-slavery movement. At every convention within 500 miles, she could be found speaking in words and tones that brought tears to the eyes and sorrow to the hearts of all listeners.

Lawrence's paintings, made in tempera colors and poster paints, are poetic, too. Trained in the art workshops of Harlem in the 1930s, including the Utopia Children's House and the Harlem Art Workshop (sponsored by the New Deal), Lawrence became one of the finest African-American artists in U.S. history. His extraordinary talent was recognized when he was still relatively young.

Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, he moved to Easton, Pennsylvania and then at seven to Philadelphia. At 13, Jacob moved again, to Harlem. Drawing on Bible stories and the powerful Christian sermons, often given on street corners, Lawrence remembered orators who spoke with reverence of Harriet Tubman and determined to show the African-American struggle for freedom in his art.

The Tubman series was one of Lawrence's earliest. It predated by only a couple of years the 60-panel migration series that made Lawrence's career in 1941-42. Half that series was bought by the Philips Gallery in Washington D.C. and the other half by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

But Lawrence's Tubman work is among his best. This book's only shortcoming is that it does not reproduce all of the Tubman paintings. Several were excluded and can be seen only in an art museum, or the pages of an art catalogue. But don't let that stop you. Children will find themselves doubly enriched. Alyssa A. Lappen

This children's book helps us to better understand the true feelings of an African-American person in the south. It is great for those of us who don't really have a grasp of what was going on.

If you are looking for a short, comprehensive, encyclopedic catalogue of Aesop's Fables then this book is a steal. There are 83 fables in all, including the more famous ones such as the Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Lion and the Mouse and the Goose That Laid the Golden Egg. Each fable comes with a half page or so re-telling of its story plus a one sentence synopsis of the stories' "moral" at the end.

My problem with this is that the stories are so short, there is no magic in them. They are stripped of all but the bones. I can't imagine a child being interested in the stories told this way. I would have preferred them cutting the number of stories and instead fleshing them out by a few pages. I recommend paying a few bucks more for *The Aesop for Children* (ISBN:0590479776) by M. Winter which does just that.

Culturally we are now at the point when "Slow but steady wins the race," "Look before you leap," and "Necessity is the mother of invention" are considered wise sayings passed down from generation to generation. But even if you know these proverbs you might have forgotten, or probably never knew in the first place, that they were first said by an ex-slave named Aesop two thousand years ago and each was the moral to one of his fables. This particular collection of Aesop's fables is based on the 19th-century research and translation of George Fyler Townsend, for whom the stories were moral lessons intended for an ADULT audience rather than simply children's stories about anthropomophic animals. Because he used animals with human strengths and weaknesses, Aesop's tales have been directed over the years more towards children; I heard of lot of them for the first time on a record by the Smothers Brothers. But Townsend restores the style and sophistication that are not commonly found in the juvenile editions of Aesop. In addition to the familiar fables like "The Fox and the Grapes" and "The Hare and the Tortoise" there are dozens of lesser known fables uncovered by Townsend and included in the over 300 fables included in this edition, which makes this collection one of the more comprehensive of its kind.

Culturally we are now at the point when "Slow but steady wins the race," "Look before you leap," and "Necessity is the mother of invention" are considered wise sayings passed down from generation to generation. But even if you know these proverbs you might have forgotten, or probably never knew in the first place, that they were first said by an ex-slave named Aesop two thousand years ago and each was the moral to one of his fables. This particular collection of Aesop's fables is based on the 19th-century research and translation of George Fyler Townsend, for whom the stories were moral lessons intended for an ADULT audience rather than simply children's stories about anthropomophic animals. Because he used animals with human strengths and weaknesses, Aesop's tales have been directed over the years more towards children; I heard of lot of them for the first time on a record by the Smothers Brothers. But Townsend restores the style and sophistication that are not commonly found in the juvenile editions of Aesop. In addition to the familiar fables like "The Fox and the Grapes" and "The Hare and the Tortoise" there are dozens of lesser known fables uncovered by Townsend and included in the over 300 fables included in this edition, which makes this collection one of the more comprehensive of its kind.

The two stars are to give credit to the authors for an otherwise useful work. However, this format is unacceptable. I'll be pursuing a refund (yeah, right).

Here's how it went:

1) Go through the hassle of booting a Windows box.
2) Download and install the Adobe eBook reader (15 minutes, reboot)
3) Download the book itself.
4) Can't print a page. Can't copy a page to write on.
5) The reader application itself seems weird, and is not integrated with the Windows GUI very well.
6) 45 seconds and ten page flips later, "Application Adobe eBook has crashed due to an unhandled error."

So, I ... have nothing to show for it. You'd be wise to learn from my mistake.

My advice: kill a tree and actually get access to the information you paid for. The Adobe solution is [not good].

If you need to know Is-136, this is the book. Very good done!

An excellent guide to how IS-136 really works. Found it very helpful in understanding the basics of the architecture. Love those books by Adrian Smith. So clear and lucid.

I found this book very helpful in determining the most important issues in deciding how to make mutual funds work for you. The information is presented in a straight forward way and tries to present the pros and cons of different buying options. It certainly helps you feel informed enough to make a decision.

This book not only offers a well-written, informative overview of Jacob Lawrence's life but also offers snapshots of historical events that were part of his times and of his people's past, which he recounted in his powerful paintings. The book uses Lawrence's art beautifully, showcasing its brilliance while also using it to help tell the often-compelling story of the artist's life; excellent opening quotes in each chapter (from various cultural figures throughout Lawrence's lifetime) also subtly enhance the meaning of the text. Worth it for the art reproductions alone, and a story that shows how an artist and a person can be an interesting product of culture, society, and innate genius.

My review of this book is somewhat good and somewhat bad, thus I have some good news and some bad. I shall now explain to you the good things about this book. Some of thy good things about this book is that if your deciding to do Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman this is a good book for a project but the bad things about the book. Is that say for example you are just doing Harriet Tubman or your just doing Frederick Douglass, it would be difficult to just find information about one, because you could think thier talking about about Harriet you could get the wrong information, and research the wrong information. That is why i would not buy this book, for myself or for anyone that I now. PS: I lllooooovvvvveeeeeeee BILLY

Parents hoping to introduce their children to modern American art could do worse than to buy this edition reproducing two series of paintings by Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), one of the finest African American artists in U.S. history.

Published in 1991 by the Hampton University Museum in Virginia, this book contains four essays and reproductions of two Lawrence series, all 32 Frederick Douglass paintings made in 1938 and 1939 and all 31 Harriet Tubman paintings made in 1939 and 1940. Lawrence painted both series and wrote the captions to tell the stories of hope and emancipation of African Americans.

The first three essays, each running 10 to 12 pages, relate how Lawrence developed his series format and, specifically, how he developed the ideas and art in each of these two stories. He was influenced by a belief that African Americans, while not still enslaved, were in 1940 still in "an economic slavery." The stories he featured, while historical, remained relevant to his own period as well. The fourth covers the imagery of struggle.

Bold and unforgiving, Lawrence's vibrant works grew from his own childhood migration--from Atlantic City, New Jersey to Easton, Pennsylvania, to Philadelphia and finally, at 13, to Harlem, from his exposure to African-American culture--and his intensive training in the Utopia Children's House and New Deal-sponsored Harlem Art Workshop of the 1930s. In Harlem, he studied old masters like Giotto and Pieter Breughel the Elder and modern masters like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse.

At that time, the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was still funding public art murals, but Lawrence was too young to gain a commission. Instead, he determined to show the African-American struggle for freedom in real-life stories, tying past to present. From 1938 to 1941, he used the New York public library for research, creating in swift succession five series of paintings telling the stories of Toussaint L'Ouverture, Douglass, Tubman, John Brown, and The Migration of the Negro.

In the middle two series, Lawrence hoped to speak artistically of the legendary escapes from slavery made by two African-American heroes, each of whom led the struggle for ultimate freedom for all. The paintings depicted beatings, coercion, repression and ultimately courageous escapes. The faces and bodies in these works speak of the brutality of slavery and the exhilaration that came from its escape. Lawrence wove bold colors and themes throughout the series, thereby joining each set of paintings into a whole.

He succeeded, too, because these works are as beautiful and wild as anything ever created by van Gogh, and a great deal more hopeful.

Even if you don't want to know all the personal and American history that Lawrence melded in the creation of these works--which I can't imagine--you will relish owning a book containing color plates of two entire series, complete with Lawrence's enthralling captions.

This book is a gem. Alyssa A. Lappen

This short, lively booklet is designed to inspire you to action! It briefly lists 25 things you can do to prepare for the Big Day, January 1, 2000, and beyond. While nobody will do all 25, they may make you think of things that you haven't considered. We buy them as gifts for those we care about.

This book has been widely touted, so I talked two other political scientists into plowing through it for our reading group. We found the book to be a major disappointment.

The authors have an argument to make, but the quality of their qualitative and quantitative evidence is at best uneven. The survey analysis seldom includes multivariate tests and the interview sources, while extensive, are episodically not comprehensively analyzed. By the end of the book, we had little confidence that the conclusions the authors presented were well supported by their evidence.

It's a readable book, but it is difficult to put much faith in
its conclusions.

Reading this book, one phrase kept floating to mind - dash it all. I think..... well, I don't know. This book, er, doesn't do justice to the concept of intercounty by-elections, what?

This is a wide-ranging, theoretically rich and empirically focused look at whether politicians simply "follow" the polls or whether politicians use polls to help "sell" proposals to the public. The answer is both, of course, but Jacobs and Shapiro explain how and why public leaders develop their own policy views, and how the public's acceptance of those views shape how policies are ultimately formed. Politicians are "trustees" in the Burkean sense, but how they explain their actions have to be placed in a "delegate" framework. Their case study on health care policy is especially instructive. This book won the 2001 Goldsmith Book Prize, it should be read by serious students of the media and politics.