Reviewing the stuff of legends is not easy, especially when both author and text are deservedly recognized as the best ever in their fields.

Sir Donald George Bradman, AC, is quite simply the greatest exponent of cricket batsmanship to ever hoist the "willow wand." This is no claim based on partisan emotion; I am an American, and no partisan of any one cricketing nation. The proof lies in the astonishing Test batting average accumulated by "the Don" between 1928 and 1948: 99.94 runs scored for every occasion that he lost his wicket, so far ahead of other great Test batsmen that no serious comparison is possible. (The extremely gifted Barry Richards of South Africa averaged 72.57 runs per wicket lost in a brief international career, cut short by the international ban on South African cricket in the 1970's and 1980's. No other Test batsman has ever averaged over 62 runs per wicket lost in a career of more than 20 Tests played.) It is as though Babe Ruth had hit 100 home runs in one season, or Ty Cobb had maintained a career batting average of over .500.

As great a player as Bradman was, his volume on cricket's art is as monumental a work of instruction. The Art of Cricket dissects the game segment by segment: batting, bowling, fielding and captaincy. The section on batting includes instructive photographs of Bradman and contemporary greats playing the various shots - drives, pulls, cuts, sweeps and hooks - that comprise the arsenal of the cricket batsman. The segment on the pull shot is perfect in every sense - as instructive writing and as cricketing guidance. It has been remarked that an average reader will come away from the passage believing she can play the pull shot as well as Bradman himself.

If there is a weakness to the text, it is that Bradman devotes less time, and arguably less thought, to captaincy than he does to the aspects of on-the-field play. Readers in search of instruction on captaincy every bit as solid as Bradman's text on playing the game are encouraged to search for Mike Brearley's The Art of Captaincy, also out of print.

Indeed, the third book in my cricket "how-to" library is also out of print: Brian Wilkins' The Bowler's Art. None of these works has been matched in their areas of expertise, if we concede that Bradman is at his best discussing batsmanship. Brearley brings years of English County and Test captaincy to his book, and is as thorough as possible in his examination of the minute details which make for captaincy great or indifferent. If anything, Wilkins' book is the most important of the three, as it applies the science of physics to the fascinating topics of swing, swerve and bounce - of how a bowled cricket ball gets from Point A to Point B.

That such original research and analysis should be unavailable to the cricketing public is less unfortunate than it is criminal. Indeed, all three of these books deserve to be in print as standard and essential references.

This book features an exhibition at the Portland art museum in 1997. George R. Stoemple's collection is an excellent representation of two and a half decades of Chihuly's work, and it shows some pieces rarely seen by the public. I highly recommend this book.

Whether you are a figure skater or not, Donald Jackson's biography will help to inspire you to push yourself farther than you ever thought possible. An entertaining and easy-to-follow book, Mr. Gross profiles the career of 1962 World Champion and men's Canadian figure skater Donald Jackson, who landed the first triple lutz in skating history -- a jump that was so difficult at the time it would be years before anyone else duplicated his feat. This skater's tale of overcoming obstacles, the sorrow of the 1961 plane crash that killed the entire US figure skating team and coaches, and most of all, dealing with the weight of the expectations of the skating world will surprise you -- mostly in how hard you will find to put it down! Excellent, excellent book and a GREAT look at skating in the early 1960s. If you are a fan of the sport of figure skating, this book will find a place of distinction in your collection.

This is an excellent Earth Science text book. It covers a wide variety of topics such as astronomy, geology, and meteorology. The activities manual designed to be used with this text has great ideas and investigations that appeal to Junior High School students.This book is well thought out and written from the Creationist's point of view.

It is difficult to know where to begin. This book is a must have for any archaeologist who works in the Great Basin. However, It would be of benefit to anyone who works in North America. Beck put together a splendid volume that includes articles by many of the movers and shakers in Basin archaeology. The title describes the contents of the book, with a review of important archaeological questions and models that Basinists were dealing with in the past and how that leads up to what we are doing now. My copy is already well worn.

Donald Ault is an inspiring and unique mind. No boundaries, for they are always re-examined, as he does here with a response and re-thinking of his own arguments towards William Blake and his responses to the Newtonian Universe. Donald Ault is a mind stretched as it should be--lobes in literature, lobes in Disney, lobes in Coca-Cola. His books do not yet show his utter vastness, but I hope one day his thoughts on Donald Duck will come to the bibliography.

Don Horn's book finally portrays General George Armstrong Custer accurately as one of the great heroes in US military history. Instead of learning history from modern-day revisionists, Mr. Horn's research and factual accounts taken from peers of Custer capture the feelings of the day of Custer. Portrait of a General takes you back one hundred years and allows you to hear first-hand what the people who really knew Custer thought of him. Their comments indicate Custer was truly an American hero.

Collaboratively compiled and written by Tiffany experts and appraisers George A. Kemeny and Donald Miller, Tiffany Desk Treasures: A Collector's Guide is an informed and informative history of the wealthy American artist Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) and his especially crafted desk sets, as produced by Tiffany Studios and Tiffany Furnaces between the late 1890s and 1933. Full-color photographs showcase memorable works of art, while the "reader friendly" text accessibly describes the pieces' histories and subtle nuances of their creations. A superbly organized and presented history for Tiffany antique collectors (it also includes a Catalogue Raisonne of Tiffany Studies and Tiffany Furnaces Desk Accessories), as well as a gorgeous book for connoisseurs of fine art to simply page through, Tiffany Desk Treasures is far more inexpensive than (and the next best thing to) owning a personal Tiffany collection.

Most books and reports on Civil War events come from white writers and voice white viewpoints. This one speaks with a black voice, as George E. Stephens wrote as correspondent for the (New York) "Weekly Anglo-African," from the events of John Brown's rebellion (Nov. 1859) through September, 1864. Along the way he shifted from member of the press to acting patriot-soldier, recruiting and then enlisting in the Massachusetts 54th, that leader among black regiments depicted in the movie "Glory." Donald Yacovone provides not only notes for the letters but also information on Stephens' family background. After the 54th disbanded Yacovone follows Stephens' ongoing struggles to educate freed slaves in Virginia; the story of many black patriots' efforts to move their people upward by finally granting them some education is not widely told or appreciated. These chapters fill a need today. So the life taken as a whole is both glorious and tragic: it's distressing to follow Stephens' hopes, from fresh optimism through disillusionment to despair, time and time again from the events of Fort Wagner to the last anguished efforts of his life. At its end he had to sue the government he'd served all his life to obtain the commission denied to him because of his race (though illegally), and provide for his wife with a higher pension. He never lived to receive it, dying in 1888 before the promotion came through. In this Stephens is typical of black men of his time, and it's deeply saddening.This is not a happy, but it is a useful, book, and a corrective for many cheap heroics about how well we treated our black veterans. We need to ponder its message today.

For a clearly written, concise, reliable summary of Western military history with an operational-level focus, this is the book to buy. I use it to teach military history, and my students (cadets) rate it highly.