In this book, Babar and his family go to the haunted Black Castle for a picnic. But while they are there it starts to rain, so they have to go inside and wait for it to stop. As they were waiting, the children went and roamed around. While they were roaming around the castle, they ran into a ghost. At first they were scared, but the ghost told them he was a good ghost. So he went home with them, but when Babar found out that the children had a ghost there, he sent the ghost straight home. The children were sad, but they knew that they could go and visit the ghost any time.
I liked this book as a child because I always thought that stuff with ghosts, haunted houses and stuff like that were interesting. My favorite character in this book was Zepher the monkey, he was kind of funny. So if you think you are interested in this kind of story, you should read it.

The Babar series is just wonderful for beginning readers. There are many qualities that parents will like- the cultural aspects, messages about responsibility, family, and community, as well as engaging, but not-too-complex plots for youngsters. My daughter particularly likes this one- it has just enough mystery and intrigue to interest her without confusing her.

I just read this story to my four-year old daughter. It's a classic story from this author, nothing "wrong" with it, but you do need to watch out and may want to explain some parts. In the storyline, the girl elephant wanders off by herself and accepts a boatride from a stranger...then she knocks on the door of an unfamiliar house. Two male characters invite her inside and they all play together until they overhear a news alert that Babar is looking for his missing daughter, so they take her home. After reading it, I explained to my daughter that I didn't want her to wander off, accept boat rides from strangers or knock on unfamiliar doors and go inside a stranger's home. This story was written in a simpler era when concerns were a bit different than in today's world.

If you are a Babar fan, you know Pom, Flora, and Alexander quite well. In this book, Celeste is about to have a baby. Babar is hoping for a girl, so he will have equal numbers of daughters and sons. When Celeste unexpectedly gives birth under a tree, he gets his wish! The remainder of the story describes Isabella's babyhood and her personality. I enjoyed this first Isabella story, and look forward to hearing more about her in future Babar books.

Isabella brings great pleasure to the royal elephant family. Babar is a proud papa. "Celeste loved to show her off at every opportunity. Pom, Flora, and Alexander were enchanted . . . and so was everyone else."

Everyone agreed Isabella was an "amazing baby." She soon stood in her cradle and hurled her toys at her siblings. She had a hearty appetite and was "full of energy." But she could be very quiet, and would sit peacefully watching a grasshopper (her favorite insect) in the grass.

As an independent child, she began to present challenges. At her fifth birthday party, she went off alone and Babar had to scold her.

A few days later the whole family went for a walk. Isabella had already forgotten about the scolding, and went off to play hide-and-seek with herself. Soon, she was nowhere to be found. Then her great adventure began.

When it was over, cousin Arthur didn't believe a word of her story, even though it was all true. Babar scolded her, and she fell asleep on his large lap. "Our little girl is very special," he said.

This book is excellent for introducing the idea of having a new sibling in a family, and that life will be different than anyone can expect. Parents who are about to have a new offspring should get this book as one of many to help ease the transition.

I also liked the idea that children have unique personalities, and will express those personalities as easily as they breathe. I was glad to see that Isabella was made more distinctive than the other Babar children in this way, who often seem to be a little on the uninteresting side.

The other appeal of this book is how a family adapts and becomes different with each new arrival. That message is carried out in a positive and pleasant way, that is totally credible. Nicely done!

The book is good, too, for reinforcing the idea of getting help from family friends. So if you child is accidentally locked out of the house, it will seem natural to go to the friendly parents of a neighbor child to get the key you have left there. This story should make every child feel more wanted, and part of a wide support network of loving adults and family.

After you finish enjoying this story, I suggest that you ask your child to tell you more about what a family is, what each person in your family is like, and what she or he hopes for from being part of the family. You can use the Babar stories as one point of reference. One good connection here is that the Babars have lots of friends who have relationships with the children. Does your child like or not like that feature? In this way, you can help your child begin to visualize what kind of life he or she will want to build as an adult.

Appreciate the specialness of each person, animal, and plant!

A book that is both lovely and practical, with a mouth-watering selection of do-able recipes, 64 in all. It includes brief chapters on the history of the food, regional cooking, palace cuisine, and more; and an informative chapter on Thai ingredients describes 48 exotic ingredients, some with photos, from 'agar-agar' to 'water spinach'. The recipe directions are concise and clearly written. I like the fact that the recipes are not overly complicated and the number of ingredients called for in most of the recipes is fairly small. Many of the recipes are simple and in my opinion authentic and non-westernized. One thing they do not tell you is how spicy the resulting dish will be. "Red Chicken Curry with Bamboo Shoots" and "Pumpking Custard" are my favorites. Last but not least, if you are like me and love the visuals, sumptuous color photos abound, with exquisitely presented food in beautiful (table) settings, some with fascinating antiques or objets-d'art.

I started with the Food of Asia, which I think is excellent. I decided to check into some specific cuisines, such as Thailand, of the seven cuisines that are presented in the Food of Asia. I am a little torn about many of the other cuisines, but not for Thailand.

The individual books in the "Food of" series by Periplus have extensive introductions. There are not as many recipes as I had hoped for. The ingredients list, along with the accompanying commentaries, are about the same, with an equivalent number of photos, as the Food of Asia. The Food of Asia contains many of the recipes, however, some do not have a photo.

The variety of main ingredients here is quite good, including chicken, duck, fish, beef, pork, all the shellfish, a couple of specific vegetables such as kale and green beans that go with a meat, and a general vegatable stir-fry that can be used with any vegetable.

The ingredients list is thourough, and there is little need for substitutions or omissions. Also, many of the spice pastes can easily be purchased pre-mixed. Some of the ingredients are obtainable primarily online, but unlike many of the other cuisines in the "Food of" series, Thai and Indian online stores are plenty.

In the case of "Food of Thailand", I think it is definitely worth the purchase if you really like Thai food, rather than my general suggestion that "Food of Asia" is the place to start. "Food of Asia" contains many of the recipes that are in "Food of Thailand", but the extra ones in "Food of Thailand" are worth purchasing this cuisine separately.

Hope this helps.

I had already been visiting the West for 3 times and I've got a lot of information about this area, but this guide was really very usefull to organise my last summer trip and I discovered this time several fascinating nature spots (like Coyote Buttes / The Wave !) that lots of tourists miss (even if they are very close to them) if they have only got classical touristic guides.

This excellent guide gives you detailled information about how to find theese fabulous sites, how long you need to hike (without backpacking), what moment of the day is the best to take pictures, what is the opinion of the author about each site, where you can find more information...

So, I've been hiking (not too hardly...) in a lot of theese sites and I can promise you that following the advices of this guide will really improve a lot your next trip in the West (North Arizona and South Utah), even if taking artistic pictures is not very important for you!

Pictures in this book are black and white so I rate this guide 4 stars (comparatively to guides with color pictures), but for people who don't care about color pictures and prefer very good information, I can rate it 5 stars without a doubt.

I sincerely hope that Laurent Martres will soon write new guides about other areas of the West of United States.

I bought this book prior to my 21 day vacation to the Southwest. With few exceptions, I taylored my entire trip around the suggested places mentioned in this book, and visited most of them. The majority of suggestions are off the beaten path and a little aventurous, which I prefer. The author pays a lot of attention to photographic concerns, which helps immensly if you are a photographer, but you need not be to benefit from this book. I found the directions to be very accurate, although route finding skills were still necessary for some of the more remote hikes, such as The Wave, in the Paria Wilderness Area. This book is perfect for getting ideas of places to visit, including numerous slot canyons, and then following up with some additional info from the internet. I would definitely recommend this book for anyone visiting the Southwest, who wants to visit places you've only seen in photography magazines. You won't be disappointed!

Science is exploration, both systematic and creative, and as such, it is an activity innate to humans.

"Oxygen" offers an insider's glimpse into two facets of science often shrouded in mystery, but filled with expressions of human splendor--and folly: the struggle for recognition of ones scientific discoveries and the awarding of a Nobel Prize for discoveries deemed singularly important.

The playwrights, Carl Djerassi and Roald Hoffmann, have each contributed their own singular scientific discoveries and literary creations to the world. They use the occasion of the centenary of the Nobel Prizes to mirror fictional experiences involving the historical chemists Lavoisier, Priestley, and Scheele--and the women in their lives--with the arguments and self-reflections of a committee of modern-day Swedish scientists trying to award a retro-Nobel for the most important discovery in chemistry before 1901.

Both sets of characters, those of the 18th Century who discovered oxygen and those of the 21st who seek to honor that discovery, act out the passions that drive the men and women who pursue science--and do so in ways at home in either century. The play reveals to the reader, whether a student of science (of any age) or not, the issues and emotions that underlie a scientist's compulsion to question, and hopefully to understand, the workings of the natural world, all the while striving for primacy in discovery. The book offers a voyage of discovery worth taking.

The year is 1777- the American Revolution and the chemical revolution are both burning brightly. In a Stockholm sauna, Mary Priestley and Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze Lavoisier, the wives of Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier, and Sara Margaretha Pohl, the companion of Carl Wilhelm Scheele, open this imaginative play and set the stage for the scientific, emotional and ethical struggles that follow. It is a tempestuous period: the wealthy Lavoisier was guillotined during the Reign of Terror in 1794. Joseph Priestley, a founder of the Unitarian Church and also a friend of Franklin, was forced to flee England for America, as a mob burned his church to the ground.

The authors of this play comfortably inhabit both of C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures". Roald Hoffmann is a winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Carl Djerassi performed the first synthesis of a steroid oral contraceptive. Prior to "Oxygen", Hoffmann had published widely acclaimed poetry and other "cross cultural books" for scientists and non-scientists while Djerassi had published successful novels as well as a play and a book of poems.

Nobel Prizes are awarded to living practioners and the practice has been, where sharing is appropriate- usually in the sciences- no more than three co-awardees. But in 2001, the hundredth anniversary of the Nobel Prize, Astrid Rosenquist, the first female chair of a chemistry Nobel committee springs two surprises on her three male committee members. The first is that the Swedish Academy of Sciences will begin a new Retro-Nobel Prize for early discoveries. The second is the participation of a mysterious and alluring recorder or "amanuensis" named Ulla Zorn.

The play alternates scenes between the Court of King Carl Gustav the Third and the Stockholm of 2001. The discussion of candidates by the modern committee rapidly converges to the discovery of oxygen and the understanding of fire that transformed chemistry into a modern science. The problem is this-we now know that Scheele first discovered oxygen around 1771-2; Priestley discovered it totally independently in 1774, disclosed his discovery to Lavoisier during a visit to Paris in that year and published first. History proves that Scheele also disclosed his discovery in a letter addressed to Lavoisier two weeks before Priestley's visit. Lavoisier never responded to Scheele's letter. But Priestley and Scheele did not understand the significance of their discovery. They believed that the new "fire air" sucked an essence of fire (phlogiston) from burning matter. It was Lavoisier who understood that burning, rusting and respiration all involved addition of oxygen (oxidation) rather than loss of something to the air. One committee member, Bengt Hjalmarsson, is reasonably fluent in French and is assigned Lavoisier. Scheele is assigned to Sune Kallstenius, comfortable in the German language frequently employed by Scheele. Ulf Svanholm is assigned Priestley. Not surprisingly they each become advocates for their "charges". But other human frailties emerge. Bengt and Astrid have a history. Ulf harbors a grudge against Sune, who he is convinced, caused him to be "scooped" on his major discovery. The stage has been set to play off the issues of scientific priority, ambition and motivation, complicated by human passions, among powerful women and men of the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries. Indeed, it is the women who, according to Ms Zorn, are "...usually expected to clean up the dirt" and so they do by clarifying history and moving the modern committee to an acceptable concensus.

The issue of priority for the discovery of oxygen is to be settled in The Judgement of Stockholm. Did Lavoisier, Scheele and Priestley ever meet together? Probably not- but what an exciting thought. And in the best tradition of modern science, the critical experiments of one must be performed by another. There are thrilling scenes here: Lavoisier performing Scheele's generation of "fire-air" under the latter's supervision; Antoine confiding his intuition about Scheele to Marie ("I trust him"); Joseph to Mary about Scheele ("I trust him"); Carl Wilhelm to Fru Pohl on Lavoisier ("I do not trust him"). And there is an extra bonus. There is evidence that to celebrate their chemical revolution, Antoine and Marie performed a brief play or masque. Alas, the script, if one ever existed in writing, is unknown. But Djerassi and Hoffmann offer us a delight- Marie, as "oxygen" publicly humiliates and vanquishes Antoine, as "phlogiston", in a performance witnessed, with amusement, by King Carl Gustav and with increasing discomfort and then consternation by the Priestleys, Scheele and Fru Pohl.

The twists, surprises and the denouement will be left for the discovery of the reader. The authors have succeeded wonderfully in combining solid history, with the informed nuances and rich humor of two of the world's most accomplished scientists. Hoffmann and Djerassi do not recognize the boundaries of the "Two Cultures" and readers of this play will be the richer as a result. One last thought- the number of actors in this play is quite small and the settings simple. A reading of the play can be readily staged by high school or college chemistry classes. What a way to enliven chemical history and bridge the sciences, humanities and fine arts!

This is a pretty decent book and is good for a generalized overview.

I found this book invaluable in helping me to choose the right color paints for my wargaming miniatures. This book spans the war years and allows you to see the changes in uniforms and the various colors of cloth used as the war dragged on.

This is really a good book but it is not a primary reference for XML, nor would you want to learn from scratch here. For these functions I recommend Professional XML by Anderson et.al. (currently mis-identified by Amazon as by Boumphrey et.al). The strength of this book is that St. Laurent really knows why things are the way they are in XML and how to use it effectively. He writes clearly and gives real good advice and insights. The examples are excellent, but it would have been nice to have more of them. I read this book cover-to-cover and enjoyed it.

We used this book as the basis for a quick class on XML here at work. Of all the XML books we have reviewed for this class this book follow the XML 3W commettes standard 1.0 the closest of any of them.It is clear and consise with good examples given through out. It does a good job pointing up problems with non validating parseing tools too.

3ds max 4 magic is full-colour, glossy and packed with 13 projects covering a variety of common tasks, individually written by professional 3D artists. There are detailed chapters on for example simulating flowing water (without expensive plugins), creating realistic underwater scenes, using the new max 4 IK, churning out textures for games, and even a bit of camera matching. And as usual, they are detailed enough to be usefull but advanced enough not to be patronising and time-wasting for the experienced reader, for whom the book is intended.

The small critisism I may have centers around the lighting effects in certain chapters. They seem somewhat basic, explaining much to very little effect. In general though, the tutorials do expand on many of max 4's new features - and the accompanying CD features bonus materials and projects from those authors that got a little carried away. Good stuff!

I rented the last max magic book out from my college library; now working as a 3d artist I decided to buy this latest book. A fine improvement on the last max magic book, this one delves deeper inside max 4 and explains how and why every step should be taken. New features such as parameter wiring are used, and the cd is a wealth of information. This being said, one or two of the chapters do let the side down ever so slightly, mainly due to the end result not being too hot, but the techniques you learn through these chapters are what this book is all about.

Heartily recommended! Well done to the Max 4 Magic team!

Definitely I give this book 5 stars, and mostly because it's not a tired treatise on the POTENTIALITY of what can be done with Max 4, but gives practical, workman-like exercises that provide an excellent jumping-off point. Given the burgeoning explosion in animation techonology, there is still only limited, specialized groups of professionals working to provide clear, concise instruction in these books and bring in new artists who will expand the medium with powerful ideas and fresh perspectives. The book is fast and lean, looks good, and approaches Max 4 like it's a TOOL to unlock your imagination, which it is. You can look at '3d Max 4 Magic' like the old Chemistry 101 text Ash uses in the ARMY OF DARKNESS movie. It's all about application, baby.

Not many people are aware of how the whole idea behind SOAP and, later, Webservices, started from XML-RPC. It covers some interesting background information on how XML-RPC was born, and good coverage of its strengths and shortcomings, plus examples in five different languages (Perl, Python, ASP, PHP, Java)

Good coverage but a bit repetitive since it explains
the same thing for each of several languages. Only
read the chapters you need... Sadly XML/RPC seems
to be losing ground to .NET/SOAP which is a shame
coz RPC is much simpler and less bandwidth intensive.

This book explains fully how to use XML-RPC in five languages: Java, PHP, Perl, Python, and ASP. Becuase XML-RPC is so simple to use (I got it working for both Java and PHP), it does not take much explanation to set up this technology and actually use it. This book is a good up-to-date reference for this technology, which will has been established and is being implemented in more and more languages as time progresses, making this technology an alternative to CORBA.
This is a small book, because the subject is very easy and fast to learn. By using the Universal Language XML, This technology enables programs in one language to call procedures in programs in another language across the internet, regardless of firewalls, because it runs on HTTP.
Some of the possibilities of using XML-RPC are in SOAP applications, distributed applications, even internet games.

No one should mistake this volume for a biography of one of jazz's most influential, enigmatic figures. It's a 200-page appreciation of Monk's music, but it's a mediocre one at best.

It's obvious the author has done a lot of listening to and dissecting of Monk's music, and he writes of it knowledgeably. But his over-the-top prose and Monk-can-do-no-wrong attitude becomes burdensome after the first 100 pages, and by the end of the book, I questioned whether the author had put any of the distance between him and his subject that would allow a thoughtful, valid critique of Monk's music and his place in jazz.

Adding to the flatness of the portrait of Monk is the fact that there is virtually no biographical information of note in the book. We learn nothing of his life, his bouts with mental illness, his drug use, his devotion to his family, his modest lifestyle or his wit and intelligence. The author alludes to these occurrences and qualities throughout the book, but never provides any detail. I came away frustrated and in search of a better book on this most interesting giant of jazz.

DeWilde is French, so the translation may have failed him, but the writing is rather scattershot and too dependent on "hipster" conversational asides. Biographical information is presented out of sequence and often without context. Where this book shines is in DeWilde's explications of Monk as a composer and technician. Those interested in a full-blown biography of Monk will probably have to wait until Peter Keepnews forthcoming book appears.

For an academic dissection look elsewhere but stop here for sheer enthusiasm and insight into Monk from an obvious admirer. I coulnd't put the book down and learned much from the numerous insights into the music business and cultural/social environment in which Monk lived. I recommend the book to anyone who wants to better understand appreciate Monk's music.