As novice birdwatchers, this book was indispensable for planning our birdwatching trip to SE Arizona. It gave specific locations to visit for birds that you could expect to see there. Directions were clear and concise. With help from this book, we saw nearly every bird species we had hoped to see. This book is a must for this region!

This book was fascinating! Mark Morris' work is brilliant, beautiful and new. This book offers insight into the artist's childhood and early introduction to the arts, traces the evolution of his company from its humble and informal beginnings to its present place as one of the outstanding modern companies in the world, and explores the themes Morris' work so often addresses. The insight into his complex character makes watching his work still more rewarding. Includes many great photos.

Jason Horn offers the first thorough investigation of the relationship between Mark Twain and William James, emphasizing Twain's friendship with James beyond their shared intellectual interests. He uses James to understand Twain as thinker and to illuminate Twain's often vaguely defined religious and philosophical observations. The book provides a fresh estimate of Mark Twain's later years and challenges readers to discover a new way of seeing one of America's important and endearing writers.

This is my all time favorite. Even Mark Twain, in the books forward, claimed this to be his greatest achievement. The story flows, with vivid depictions which enable you to nearly live Joans' experiences, and at times brings tears to your eyes as you imagine and feel Gods hand guiding the young Joan of Arc. Trust me if you like inspirational stories like "The story of my life" by Helen Keller, you'll love this book. Read it, and share it with others!

If you are writing software which must be internationalized, then there is no question that you need this book and you need Unicode. What ASCII is for the United States, Unicode is for the rest of the world. In this world (particularly this software world) of pontificating know-it-alls-who-don't, it is getting rarer and rarer to find complete compendiums of an entire domain of knowledge which can serve as the seminal reference for all successive work. This book is one of those rare seminal references which has in it the greatest quantity and greatest quality of wisdom and knowledge on the alphabets of the world for use in computer software.

From the perspective of domestic software developers within the United States, Unicode is essentially 7-bit ASCII in a 16-bit unsigned integer. In the immensely popular C and C++ languages Unicode strings behave like ASCII strings:
. Unicode 0/null terminates C/C++ strings, just like ASCII 0/null.
. Unicode has a type in ANSI Standard C and ISO Standard C++ (and ARM-defined C++): wchar_t. For C/C++ programmers, char=ASCII wchar_t=Unicode.
. Unicode has a plethora of standard string manipulation functions already standardized in ANSI Standard C and ISO Standard C++, usually substitute the str with wcs (e.g., strcpy=wcscpy, strcmp=wcscmp, strcat=wcscat) and substitute the char parameters with wchar_t parameters. Abracadabra, your software is well on its way to being able to have strings in any foreign language as well as English.
. Unicode characters are all the same size (16-bit), just like ASCII (8-bit).
. Unicode's first 127 values are essentially 7-bit ASCII values.
. Unicode completely eliminates all that darned "code page" baloney.
. Unicode completely solves all that "How do we stuff that odd foreign character into the printable characters on screen/paper?" problem.
. Unicode is an ISO standard which came from a defacto United States computer industry standard. It is not ivory tower; it is in common use.
. Unicode was developed with you the software engineer and programmer in mind from day one. Unicode was developed with C++'s/C's wchar_t in mind from day one. It all fits together with Unicode.
. Unicode is used as a supported string technology (or the only string technology) in: Java, C++, C, Windows NT, Novell Netware, Solaris, and numerous other computing environments.
. Unicode supports all alphabets in use in the world today, plus alphabet-less languages such as Chinese, as well as languages whose alphabets are still being formalized.
. Because Unicode characters are all the same size, Unicode characters are random-access in that one can access any character (pick a card, any card) and know by looking at its value what that character is. Other multi-byte character sets must be parsed sequentially from the beginning of the string to assure that one has detected what mode some escape sequence has shifted that portion of the string into.
. Unicode seeks to solve every defect of previous multi-byte character sets. Unicode is the fittest to survive. All other multi-byte character sets should be (and will be) abandoned.
. Unicode = exportable software world wide in the global economy. ASCII = limiting your market to the English-speaking minority of the world.
. Unicode = supporting the information systems of all of the foreign branch offices of your company. ASCII = crippling your information system so that it supports nothing more than the English-only offices.
. ASCII = string equivalent of the Year 2000 Problem. Unicode = the fix to language-crippled software.

(And we won't even discuss the obvious and total superiority of Unicode over EBCDIC!)

In short Unicode is good for the software industry. This book is the official reference for Unicode from the inventor of Unicode: The Unicode Consortium.

The views contained within this feedback is in no way associated with my employer nor any other organization.

This book is basically a manual for Unicode 3.0. It is not a light read but well worth the price and then some just for the glyphs from all of the various scripts that Unicode supports.

At 1040 large (8.5 x 11) pages it is the ultimate guide to unicode. With information on scripts and glyphs I had no idea even existed.

However if you are just getting started with Unicode I would recomend you get Unicode a Primer written by Tony Graham from M&T books. If you understand or feel you are starting to understand Unicode then The Unicode Standard Version 3.0 is the best comprehensive reference on the subject out today.

Consider it an overview of the developing UNICODE standard. As such, it will serve the engineer working on software in English and many other European countries rather well. It will be a good _starting_ _point_ for engineers developing software for other languages.

This book is essential for software engineers, at least for the next ten years or so. All programmers should understand characters, and UNICODE is the best we have for now. Even if you don't need it in your personal library, you need it in your company or school library.

The standard is flawed, as all real standards are, but it is a functioning standard, and it should be sufficient for many purposes for the near future.

The book itself is fairly well laid out, contains an introduction to character handling problems and methods for most of the major languages in use in our present world as well as tables of basic images for all code points. Be aware that these are _only_ basic images. For most internationalization purposes, be prepared for more research. (And please share your results.)

**** Finally, UNICODE is _not_ a 16 bit code. ****

(This is well explained in the book.) It just turned out that there really are over 50,000 Han characters. (Mojikyo records more than 90,000.) UNICODE can be encoded in an eight-bit or 16-bit expanding method or a 32-bit non-expanding method. The expanding methods can be _cleanly_ parsed, frontwards, backwards, and from the middle, which is a significant improvement over previous methods.

Some of the material in the book is available at the UNICODE consortium's site, but the book is easier to read anyway. One complaint I have about the included CD is that the music track gets in the way of reading the transform files on my iBook.

This is not just a reference for computer people, but for anyone interested in alphabets, symbols and character sets.

Central to the book, taking up the larger part of it, are the tables of the characters themselves, printed large with annotations and cross-references. If you enjoy the lure of strange symbols and curious writing systems then browsing these will occupy delightful hours.

For the Latin alphabet alone there are pages of accented letters and extended Latin alphabet characters used in particular languages or places or traditions: Pan-Turkic "oi", African clicks and other African sounds, obsolete letters from Old English and Old Norse, an "ou" digraph used only in Huron/Algonquin languages in Quebec, and many others, particularly those used for phonetic/phonemic transcriptions.

The Greek character set includes archaic letters and additional letters used in Coptic.

Character sets carried over from previous editions with additions and corrections are Cyrillic (with many national characters), Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Arabic (again many national and dialect characters), the most common Hindu scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam), Tibetan, Thai, Lao, Hangul, Bopomofo, Japanese Katakana and Hiragana, capped by the enormous Han character set containing over 27,000 of the most commonly used ideographs in Chinese/Japanese/Korean writing. Then there are the symbols: mathematical/logical (including lots of arrows), technical, geometrical, and pictographic. You'll find astrological/zodiacal signs, chess pieces, I-Ching trigrams, Roman numerals not commonly known, and much more.

Scripts appearing for the first time this release are Syriac, Ethiopic, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherookee, Runes, Ogham, Yi, Mongolian, Sinhala, Thaana, Khmer, Myanmar, complete Braille patterns, and keyboard character sets. And yes, there are public domain/shareware fonts available on the web that support these with their new Unicode values.

There are very good (and not always brief) descriptions of the various scripts and of the special symbol sets. Rounding out the book are some involved, turgid (necessarily so) technical articles on composition, character properties, implementation guidelines, and combining characters, providing rules to use the character properties tables on the CD that accompanies the book. After all, this is the complete official, definitive Unicode standard.

Of course this version, 3.0, is already out-of-date. But updates and corrections are easily available from the official Unicode website where data for 3.1 Beta appears as I write this. My book bulges with interleaved additions and changes. And that's very good. Many standards have died or been superceded because the organizations behind them did not keep up with users' needs or the information was not easily accessible.

Caveats?

The notes on actual uses of the characters could be more extensive, particularly on Latin extended characters. More variants of some glyphs should be shown, as in previous editions, if only in the notations.

Some character names are clumsy or inaccurate (occasionly noted in the book), because of necessity to be compatible with ISO/IEC 10646 and with earlier versions of the Unicode standard. For example, many character names begin with "LEFT" rather than "OPENING" or "RIGHT" rather than "CLOSING" though the same character code is to be used for a mirrored version of the character in right-to-left scripts where "LEFT" and "RIGHT" then become incorrect. And sample this humorous quotation from page 298: "Despite its name, U+0043 SCRIPT CAPITAL LETTER P is neither script nor capital--it is uniquely the Weierstrass elliptic function derived from a calligraphic lowercase p."

Huck Finn, I could take or leave. Conn Yankee is among my favorit e classics. Joan of Arc---better than other interpretations of
warrior women. I recommend this collection and "Damsel in the Rough" by Ann M. Tempesta.

for fans who wish there were another Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer, you will find Mark Twain's 'joan of arc' just as beautifully written as his more famous 'prince an the pauper' and 'connecticut yankee'. for catholics, 'joan of arc' is even more of a must read, a stunning proof how this great saint has captured the hearts of so many, regardless of their skepticism or creed. Library of America editions are beautifully bound, lightweight, and readable. here they contain the two most famous of his non-mississippi writings with a gem most of us never knew existed. a keepsake for the decades.

This collection contains my 2 childhood and all-time Twain favorites - Prince & Pauper, and Connecticut Yankee - and added the magical ingredient of a historical romance I never knew Twain had written - Joan of Arc. Now that I have read this as well, I see that it may be even better than the other two!

The wry sense of humor characteristic of Twain definitely is most in evidence in CT Yankee. All 3 of these works deliver Twain's wide understanding of human nature in different times and sociological conditions, and his admiration of human nobility and greatness of heart in adversity. Joan of Arc unquestionably is the most inspiring of these tales, being the story of the greatest hero (or heroine). The Prince and the Pauper, however, remains a jewel of an adventure story, which any child can identify with, and learn from.

It is a collection to keep forever, and re-read frequently.

I found this book in a library and read it. I was surprised that Mark Twain wrote such a serious piece -- it did not contain his typical wit or sarcasm, but was a rather sentimental account of Joan of Arc. I wasn't sure when I started or finished it if it was actually a translation he made from a real account or if he had written it himself as a sort of historically based piece of fiction. I gather from what I have seen elsewhere that this is considered fiction -- a novel -- but he was painstaking in his attention to historical details and facts. It was a wonderful book, and I found it inspiring. He persuaded me to believe her story.

Albert Paine's biography, "The Adventures of Mark Twain" says: "It was just at this time [while Clemens was still in Hannibel working for his brother's paper] that an incident occurred which may be looked back upon now as a turning-point in Samuel Clemens's life. Coming home from the office one afternoon, he noticed a square of paper being swept along by the wind. He saw that it was printed . . . . He chased the flying scrap and overtook it. It was a leaf from some old history of Joan of Arc, and pictured the hard lot of the 'maid' in the tower of Rouen . . . . Sam had never heard of Joan before -- he knew nothing of history. He was no reader. . . . But now, as he read, there awoke in him a deep feeling of pity and indignation, and with it a longing to know more of the tragic story. It was an interest that would last his life through, and in the course of time find expression in one of the rarest books ever written. The first result was than Sam began to read. He hunted up everything he could find on the subject of Joan, and from that went into French history in general -- indeed, into history of every kind. Samuel Clemens had suddenly become a reader . . . ."

Mark Twain's best. I couldn't put it down. I was away for the weekend, found it on a book table in the lobby, and bought it for bedtime reading. The rest of the weekend was devoted to living Joan's story. A great weekend. An incredible book.

This book will make you feel like you walked with Joan, knew her, loved her - READ THIS BOOK. Truly one of the greatest reads of my life! A Book that really changed my perspective on a lot of things.

"The Personal Recollections of Joan Of Arc"

In the novel "The Personal Recollections Of Joan Of Arc" a childhood friend, The Sieur Louis de Conte, tells of her adventures from beginning to end, as he remembers playing with her in childhood, standing by her in adulthood, and watching her in anguish because of his helplessness at the end. This book is one of Mark Twain's novels, and I think is one of his best. "Joan Of Arc" had a lot of action but hardly any gory or really gross bits to sicken a reader or destroy a good story. One example of that is when she speaks to nobles, lords, even the king himself with her passion for France and justice in her quest to free France. the spirtualness and human natures colliding in this story ,like when she was grilled by the church council and jury regarding Christ, war, people, and the miraculous happenings following her, making this a very exciting read, whether you like to skim the surface and just know the story, or if you would rather dive deep into the hidden messages of love, life, and liberty buried deep withen these words. The only thing I can count aginst this book is that 425 pages makes for a long read, but it's worth it. I recommend this book to someone who wouldn't mind being caught up in the wonderful balance of words and thought of "Joan Of Arc" for an afternoon. I really liked this book, and think that everyone should have the chance to enjoy it. Kudos to Mark Twain, I give your book 4 stars and two thumbs up.

This is one of the grandest jokes in all of literature, if it isn't unique. All in all, you have a complicated structure where Twain plays a contemporary chronicler, feinted away with a gag scene on this personage as a faux poet, with somewhere toward the end the awful, imperishable story about the bee-stung bull.

..............the captivating story of Joan of Arc come to life through the writing of Mark Twain! This work is remarkable not only due to Twain's writing ability, which thoroughly conveys the moving and powerful story of a heroine and martyr, but because we are aware of the twelve years of research he did before embarking upon putting it in writing. We trust and become enthralled over the story he presents. This is a story I want my future children to read.

Twain, through a ficitional narrator takes us through the story of Joan's simple and modest upbringing to her response to God's command that she save France from the English. We follow her into battle, see her become the teenage commander-in-chief of an army, win victories, struggle with a weak French king, and finally fall victim to the leadership in Burgundy and the corruption within the church. Twain brings us through her entire trial, where we see young Joan withstand grueling questioning and physical and psychological torture for months on end. Through it all she never falls victim to traps deliberately set for her that are solely designed to prove her an idolater, sorcerer and heretic. Ultimately, we walk with her as she takes the last journey of her life, to the stake to die by fire.

This work is based on well preserved information about the experiences of Joan of Arc. Twain makes a point of telling us that "The Official Record of the Trials and Rehabilitation of Joan of Arc is the most remarkable history that exists in any language; A deeply fascinating story.............found in its entirety in the Official Trials and Rehabilitation". We therefore know that his sources are well researched and ones we ourselves can access. Twain beautifully reconstructs Joan's early life based on this information, doing her great honor throughout the novel. We realize, too, that as the story progresses, we are presented her trials in their full, true detail. Twain also tells us that Joan's story was almost one that was lost, having not been very well known for approximately four hundred years after it occurred.

Reading this book is truly to experience the incredible life and achievements of Joan of Arc. I highly recommend it.

I just had to read an account of Joan's life after seeing the made-for-t.v. version in early 1999. I was reading the book from a Catholic perspective, looking for inspiration in the life of a person deemed a saint in the eyes of the Church. The book was a jewel...Twain wrote this with an eloquent style and portrayed Joan as a gentle, humble, obedient girl. It inpired me not only on account of Joan's holiness but also because this reads like a fairy tale...isn't it amazing that God can do such a thing as raise up an illiterate farm girl to lead an army! (And be successful militarilly!) An awesome story and an awesome read!

I read Twain's Joan of Arc simply because it was included in a collection with 2 of my perennial favorites: The Prince and the Pauper, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. I loved Joan of Arc also. But it is a very different cup of tea.

Nowhere else does Mark Twain rein in his irreverent spirit as in this work! He allows his sense of humor to emerge only in the stories of Joan's peripheral friends and fellow villagers (the Paladin, most notably, and even the narrator in the story of the love poem.) The sense of the author's genuine respect and admiration for his amazing heroine permeates the book.

The story of Joan of Arc, always a moving tale, takes on greater weight when a man like Mark Twain - a worldly, cultured, highly intelligent, and totally irreverent man - not only gives 12 years of grueling research to it, but then produces a book that is so unequivocally respectful and devoted.

Such a picture he draws! THIS is a character to excite anyone's admiration, and to inspire us all to give our best selves. And throughout the tale, while one recognizes that it is indeed a "story", it rings convincingly true. No matter what construction a religious or non-religious reader may put on the happenings of Joan of Arc's story, it is still a story of an enduringly noble character and amazing intellect. A woman who stood - and still stands - above the remainder of her species.

This is an inspiring and uplifting piece of work.