Ancient Monuments (more familiarly known as "Squire and Davis") is the undisputed primary reference source on Indian mounds in the eastern US till the mid-1800s. While there were a few others (such as Caleb Atwater's book), Squire and Davis offers the grandest illustrations of what remained of the unbelievable civilizations that inhabited this continent. Even as they published in 1848, hundreds of mounds were being plowed into oblivion; so few are still extant that theirs is the only guide to what was lost. The text is enjoyable on many levels, and can be forgiven for any lapses of scientific accuracy. They trekked over Ohio at a time when we weren't even sure who made the mounds, so everything they recorded is gold. The engineering prowess, the sheer magnificence and scale of some of the works, is astounding.

Interviews with makers of San Francisco's "beat scene" are captured by Metzer, himself a Beat generation artist, in San Francisco Beat, a oustanding and informative collection of recent interviews which relate what happened. Ferlinghetti, Everson, Rexroth and other major literary figures of the times reflect on experiences and philosophy.

This is an excellent book, written at an "entry level" for the general public to enjoy. This book treats a complex and hotly debated topic (peopling of the Americas) and treats it in a comprehensive, exhaustive, yet comprehensible manner. The authors are experts and the information is very valuable. Also, the illustrations and graphics are fantastic. This book is great a great buy for the information/text or the graphics alone -- but for one price you get BOTH.

A good book, and useful for fifth grade through graduate level understanding. In other words, very well written.

The reissue of this this collection of excerpts from the secret Rabbinic tradition merits the attention of anyone interested in genuine as opposed to "new-age" or "pop" Kabbalah in English. No other volume contains so diverse and tasty a sampling. These writings can be recomended for their awe inspiring poetic merit alone, but also provide much grist for the mills of the most serious mystical practitioners. The editors published poetry, and the recordings of his 1960s band "Serpent Power" mark him as an interesting and genuine seeker of truth. "Secret Garden" celebrates his return to his roots. The difficult material is treated with the respect that it deserves. Read this now. Study it for the rest of your life, and then some.

I kind of trashed Meltzer's "Reading Jazz," so let me make it up here with a big thumbs up for a really fun collection. The poems in No Eyes are accessible and lyrical with a great feel for the music--they spread down the page like tasty sax tootles in a classic Young solo. I especially like how Meltzer balances the beauty of Lester's playing against the tragedy of his life. Snippets of song lyrics, conversation and Young's private slang weave through the poems to give a clever snapshot of the man behind the sax. And Meltzer's love for the music is clear from the downbeat. Big eyes for this one.

David Meltzer's long meditative poem on jazz giant Lester "Prez" Young is a moving (both swinging and poignant) tribute to this unique tenor sax stylist. Based on the last year of Young's life, which he spent mostly in a hotel room in New York City, and on a photograph of the great jazzman printed in the New York Times that shows him sitting on his bed cradling his horn, Meltzer's poem reproduces Prez's jivy speech patterns and diction as a way of exploring the jazz master's music, his attitudes toward his audience, his imitators, his detractors, and his experience with racism in the military that has been blamed for his near mental breakdown and his increasingly reclusive nature. Meltzer also incorporates popular song titles and phrases into his poetic lines in order to delve into the jazzman's psyche, utilizing especially the song "All of Me" as a way of suggesting, for example, that when the police found his lifeless body in his hotel room they confiscated his few possessions but did not take "all" of him because his music lives on. Beautifully designed and printed, with photos of Young and musical motifs at the beginning of Meltzer's beat, bop-like meditations, this is a striking edition and the long poem is fully worthy of Black Sparrow's fine production. Meltzer's poem is one of the most convincing literary treatments of jazz ever conceived and created.

If Carole Swann Meltzer was actually trained by a venerable master in Hong Kong, he's turning over in his grave right now! A true "master" would NEVER falsely promote Feng Shui as a trendy product line that serves only her financial gain. Real Feng Shui? No Way!

This book shows us ALL how to lighten up a little! It is fun to read and encourages one of the most important things to have in life - a positive attitude. I found the book and it's colorful techniques wonderfully uplifting.

I enjoyed this book and found all of the suggestions for incorporating color into my wardrobe really helpful. Feng Shui Chic explains why you can feel down when you wear all dark colors all the time (like I used to!) -- and how and why other colors can affect your mood -- Feng Shui Chic really works, good stuff!

Well...where to begin without going further back?

This book is a compendium of papers, most from members of the Sante Fe institute. That is, the papers are by the self-proclaimed "experts" in the field of complex adaptive systems (complexity as it is termed by some). Although published in 1999 it is mostly out of date as a reference but it stands as testament to something I think is more interesting than pure science.

What we have here is a prime example of how dogma (religion) begins and sadly, impedes any chance for progress. At this point, perhaps I should suggest that anyone reading this who hasn't heard of Kuhn, Wittgenstein and Prigogine to go and read a bit. And then you need to understand that we have completed the whole genome-mapping fiasco and "discovered" something that goes against what the high gods of complexity, genetics and evolution have been preaching: we don't have more than 100,000 genomes we have 30,000.

Ok, now back to the book. The papers, as I stated, are out of date. All interesting results here are tied back to the "magic" number of 100,000 genomes. That is simply due to the fact that according to the diverstity of cells and specific proteins in our bodies combined with present theories we need that many. So one would think, right away, that any new theory that is "more correct" than the old ones would quickly point out this large discrepancy.

Well, no one did find this. Instead they just muddle around withsome nifty math and even more exciting computer simulations and then settle back to make pronouncements. And what bombastic statements the high priests of complexity pronounced! The best part of this book are the transcripts of discussions about the papers from the big names, notably Gell-Mann, Anderson and Kauffman.

One would think that a bit of reading in philosophy would really have helped this lot to see beyond their noses. That is, how can there be a "true science" (uttered by one during a discussion) when science is simply a compression of knowledge and the whole idea of "truth" implies more compression? This is laughable when your own theory says that you can never tell if something is optimally compressed (just read Chaitin and Kolmogorov); I ask again, how do you know you have a "true science"?

Yes, egos are rampant here and it is enough to make you alternately laugh and then cry now that we see how far off the mark the "science" is. There are slights on Freeman but really, Freeman has more "science" ("theory that matches observation" to quote Gell-Mann) than anyone in this collection. In fact, Anna Wise has more science in her books about brainwaves than this group.

Disappointed? You bet. I fail to see how winners of Nobel prizes and "Genius" awards could end up being so far off the mark. So in the end, I can only rate the intended content (science) as "2 stars" but the high comedy and drama make the historical content worth 5 out of 5. Enjoy it for that only!

Some fine writings on jazz here, but Meltzer's intro to my mind seriously hurts the collection. Meltzer's an old-school beatnik whose often delightful poetry led me to expect a real celebration of the music's liberating promise. Instead he writes like a doctrinaire poststructuralist, blowing the whistle on "power" and the colonial control endemic to jazz writing. To hear Meltzer tell it, the story of jazz is a Manichean battle between the (good) blacks who perform it and (bad) whites who write about it, coralling its utopic possibilites into the racist domains of record collecting, criticism and canonization. He goes so far as to call jazz a white construction: a discussion primarily by, for and about middle-class whites anxious to diffuse the music's subversive power.

Apparently Meltzer, white himself, is off the hook for being hipped to jazz so young: his radio knob wasn't a tool of white omniscence, but channel to a cool postmodern squelch. Still, the self-consciousness he brings to white writings on jazz in the intro seems to discount the pieces that follow. Why write about jazz at all if writing by its nature betrays the magic of its performance? I think Meltzer wants us to see the kind of racism that disguises itself as praise. Fair enough. But his detector's set so high that I had trouble seeing how ANY jazz appreciation, even his own, can avoid being racist. My advice--put down the book, enjoy the music and don't worry so much about the color. Jazz has a strange way of defying categories, even the Chinese finger-pulls Meltzer's devised for it here.