I like all the Babar books but the plot of this book, Babar looking for a lost bird, didn't interest me that much. I wouldn't recomend this one unless you have all the others already.

My mother bought a bunch of these books for my 3 yr old because she remembered how much I loved them as a child. These are great books for introducing concepts such as imagination, manners, and friendships to young children. My son is thrilled with this book and I look forward to adding to his Babar collection!

Plus
1) provides information of each ship, upgrades, etc.
2) good photographs of before and after

Minus
1) ships should be listed by pennant not alphabetically
2) incomplete appendix tables
3) typographical errors
4) difficult to get a clear picture of fleet status
5) a little skimpy in details

Recommend for next edition
1) list ships by pennant no.
2) update status and disposition of ships
3) fix up the appendixes with better table organization
4) add more researched factual text and pictures

FFW

Gives the usual preparation tips. Has reasonable road directions and outline maps but the actual highway maps are useless. Gives several multi-day trips, broken into 1 to 5 day segments. Very poor guide to details of road conditions or difficulty. No information on where to stay or eat. The site descriptions struck me as about what any tour book on France will have.

This book, written in a very simple, "self-help" style, seems to be geared to the senior citizen suffering from chronic illness and emphasizes developing and implementing management plans for exercise, diet, and medical care. While much of it is common sense, it does offer bulleted, structured outlines for communicating with medical professionals, managing medicines, planning for the future (and possibly greater physical degeneration), and most of all acknowledges the feelings and depression that often accompany chronic illness.

The "Virus life in diagrams" seems to be a fully helpful handbook for med.-students, but also for practical physicians, that would like just make a short look for remembering some key steps in virus life cycles. I think, that it don't would like to be a comprehensive fully covering "Virology textbook" (There is a number of other books also on Amazon.com that more accurately cover this topic, like Fundamental Virology, Principles of Virology, or "Virology bible" Fields of Virology...), it just would like to be a good quick reference..., and from this point of view it could be really very useful.

For those who are fashion addict, but not only for the trends, this book is a "must have". In a group of very representative photos you will find a good summary of his work. One jewel, Mister Bergé, former Yves Saint Laurent Couture President and close friend of him introduce the book with the conviction of somebody who was with him since the begining. I love it.

O.k. first, let me say, it's my own fault. With picture books it's best to have a look to see if you really want to spend the $. I didn't. I made an assumption that with YSL retiring this would be a retrospective of his glorious career. Not so. Fuzzy, boring, behind the scenes pictures of people at work in his atelier. Very few dresses and those shown aren't shown well. All in all a disappointment.

Though the producers and editors of this book have obviously taken great care and reverence in assembling the images seen in this hefty Rizzoli hardcover edition, it is nonetheless lacking.
There is an eight-page, albeit in very-large typeface, essay extolling the philosophy behind the decades of YSL's influence and visions of modern fashion, as well as journal entries in Yves Saint Laurent's own handwriting that are written mostly in French. There are several famous quotes from him: among them the most famous of all "there is nothing more beautiful than a naked body."

The photographs number in the hundreds, though only a handful of family photographs from YSL's childhood in Oran, Algeria are captioned with names. Otherwise, the documentary's images shot mostly in the atelier at 5 avenue Marceau are without caption or description, though you can discern the sense of creativity and endless discussion that is the process of the haute couture. The masterpieces of tailleur (suits) and flou (dresses) are often one-of-a-kind. Their numbers are usually limited to one or two copies, so the 2000 or so women who can afford the prices are not likely to see someone else wearing that same opera coat or evening gown which ends up photographed in the society pages of Paris and New York among other places. If you are paying $50,000 for a hand-embroidered Lesage suit jacket, you don't want to see it on the shoulders of a half-dozen of your fellow couture followers. Ca marche pas!

Most interestingly the editors did not include many quotes from some of Saint Laurent's inner circle, except for a small contribution from his life and business partner, Pierre Berge. There is one short blurb from Catherine Deneuve, but no words from Loulou de la Falaise or Betty Catroux, or even Marie Munoz, directrice of the YSL atelier for years. There are some very old press clippings from the 50s and 60s when YSL was hitting the peaks of creativity, but very little from the pinnacle of his career, which would be most of the 1970s. In the 70s we witnessed some of the greatest moments in fashion history with the Chinese and Russian collections that set the trends for womens' wear for years after the clothes were shown in Paris.

The book is full of images, but short on text. For those who are unfamiliar with all the innovations introduced for women's clothing, their number is second only to that of those brought forth by Coco Chanel. Saint Laurent created the women's pantsuit, the "smoking" or women's tuxedo, the trenchcoat, the safari look, khaki, the list goes on and on. Seeing the documentary would be more than helpful, as it would fill in many of the gaps.

A beautiful book that leaves you only wanting much more...

If you are looking for a book about the designer YSL look somewhere else. If however you are interested in the flow of fashion design as done by YSL then this is a wonderful creation. To me it feels like a work of gratitude to all those involved behind the YSL name.

I've attempted to use this book to teach first year French, and ended up spending obscene amounts of time supplementing it with personal materials so my students will have SOME idea of what things like relative pronouns, compound tenses, and locutions triggering the subjunctive are. The students HATED the daher exercises, the CD crashed all computers at the language lab, and the kids ended up frustrated, linguitically stunted, and angry about the monumental amount of money they had to spend on a worthless textbook. The book is a travesty, and is sure to damage any students subjected to it in place of real language instruction. Multimedia for multimedia's sake is just damned stupid, and has no place in a thinking, caring faculty: as a teacher and someone who wants the best for my students, I would NEVER touch this book again.

This text is French instruction gone berserk. Students will have to go through so much visual junk and marginally relevant contextualizing that they may be exhausted by the time they actually get to any substance. There are dozens of typefaces and colors, formats, sections, subsections, boxes, icons, references to tapes, to videos, to CD's, differently colored backgrounds and edge shadings, ad infinitum, to say nothing of pages of full color pictures of smiling multicultural young people and so on which intellectually impoverished American students are presumed to require in order to "relate" to the material. The book is supposed to be a totally integrated multimedia approach to teaching French, based on people in a city (Besancon) in France. I wonder how many French instructors succumb to handing over classroom hours to passively sitting and looking at the videos around which so much of the text is based rather than stressing needed drill and interactive instruction? Why couldn't the video-based sections have been broken out as a separate text for teachers who want it, so that students wouldn't have to sprain their wrists and pocketbooks lugging around so much irrelevant material? But it is clear that all this packaging isn't really intended to benefit students anyway; rather, it is aimed at textbook selection committees. Look at the very first page of the book: a flow chart, in extra thick paper, showing how carefully edited the manuscript is. Is this useful to the students who had to purchase this flowchart? Where is the table of contents? If the student wants to look up where something is discussed, he or she will have to leaf through pages of flow charts, prefaces, maps, dedications and so on to an indeterminate section about an eighth of an inch into this massive hunk of marketing to find it. Want the index? Well, you have to ignore the four pages of credits in big type at the back of the book (how else inflate the page count and price heft of the product?). In my opinion, a French text ought to contain grammar and exercises to learn it. All the rest can be brought in optionally. Maybe it's time to start going back in that direction. One can only hope that this dinosaur is the end point of a trend destined for extinction.

I have used this book througout college and I have found it to be the easiest to use out of all of the books I have looked at and tried using. Vocabulary they present is useful in real life settings, and the grammer explinations are complete and easy to comprehend.

While the intentions are good, there are much more informative and actionable books than this one. The most insight comes from the introduction.