Without a doubt, this ranks high in the accomplishments of human endeavor. The three intrepid cyclists, who rode 15,000 miles, through 32 countries, on six continents, in order to raise funds to benefit the Dana Farber Institute in Boston and raise cancer awareness in general, display courage, strength and resiliency in meeting the challenge of riding over 70 miles per day for over 344 days. Ride with them as they get lost on the first day, suffer from flat tires, broken spokes, faulty handlebar stems, illness, a torn anterior cruciate ligament, hilarity and pathos. Tour the capitols of the world from London, Edinburgh, Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Talin, Riga, Berlin, Paris, Rabat, Tunis, Athens, New Delhi, Kathmandu, Dacca, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Sidney, Auckland, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Sau Paulo, Rio de Janerio, to Los Angeles and finally back to Boston. Whew!!! What a long, strange trip it's been.

"The Worst Helper Ever" is a very good book I thought. Farmer Pig has a lot of work to do so he decides to go into town to get some help. He runs into Charlie Cat and asks him to give him some help on the farm. The only problem is that Charlie Cat is very clumsy. He tries very hard to help him but every time he messes up Farmer Pig gets angry with him. It is very comical for a young reader especially since the illustrations are so good. At the beginning of the story when Farmer Pig first goes into town to get some help you realize what kind of person he is and also how different he is form Charlie Cat. On the way back home from town Charlie Cat offers to drive the truck so that shows that Charlie Cat is a good person to have help you. But on the way home as they're going over the bridge they fall in... that is how most of comical story goes. But at the end of the story Farmer Pig messes up but Charlie cat doesn't get mad at him like Farmer Pig did to him. Charlie cat tells him that everyone makes mistakes and that's true. I think it was a good moral to the story for younger readers and I think that they would learn a lot form this story.

This book is a wonderful source of information on many band works of different grade levels and styles. I liked the fact that this book has an extensive bibliography, enabling a person to study band music in even more depth. I wish that the author had included some band works that can be played by bands without full instrumentation. (my band has two trombones for a "low" section, and it is hard to play the beautiful pieces to their full perfection. I would recommend this book to college students, and I would also recommend that they try and listen to recordings of some of the pieces discussed.

I bought this book after having taught for 12 years. I really wish that someone would have written a reference such as this for my first years of teaching! This is a comprehensive volume designed to help the band director develop a concise curriculum for the high school (or college) band program. Included are chapters on rehearsal techniques, conducting basics, philosophies of music education, and justification for our music programs!!! The standout feature of this book, however, is its coverage of wind literature. For each piece, there is historical background, instrumental difficulties, suggested listening lists, and various activities related to the piece. This should be required reading for all college music education majors.

The book "Teaching Music Through Performance in Band" Has already been a great tool for me. I am only a Sophmore in Music Education school and it has given me numerous ideas of ways to teach and what is appropriate to teach. The book breaks down many pieces to show ways to explain the music to children in band how to perform them musically. It also offers them insight into the composers life and how the piece fit into it. This helps students relate so that emotion and thought can be put into the piece that they are playing.

Well written and with occasional engaging flashes of humor, Five Miles High gives a well-drawn picture of the large Himalayan expeditions of the past. At the same time as expedition members are having their food cooked for them and having their gear carried by numerous "coolies", they are walking a much greater distance, and in some ways subsisting in harsher conditions, than climbers do today. The contrasts with the present day are perhaps the most interesting thing about this book. "Boy's First Adventure Book"-ish illustrations at the chapter headings add a charming retro touch.

Five Miles high is an extremely interesting and very readable firsthand account of the 1938 American Expedition to climb K2, the second highest peak in the world. The book is a reissue of the original book describing the expedition and is authored by two team leaders with additional contributions by the other four team members. Of particular interest is their description of their trek through the Karakoram just to reach the mountain in the days when the primary hauling of supplies was done by ponies and porters. The contrast between the preparations and efforts involved in this expediton and the efforts described in all of the current Mt. Everest books is amazing. All in all, you'll find this a very enjoyable book to read. The same authors also wrote a second book describing their 1953 expedition - K2, The Savage Mountain. This one also has been recently reissued.

While this book is a nice quick read, I find that it lacks unity. Alley spends much time discussing the 'conveyor belt' of ocean currents, and how it's shutdown causes world cooling. However, in later sections he states that greenhouse gases will likely warm the planet. This contradicts his earlier statements that short term warming causes ice melting, shutting down the ocean currents, and utimately _cooling_ the earth - possibly even putting it in an ice age.

If anything, the book is a mosaic of the tools scientists use to try and study earth's climate. However, what one takes away from this book is that we really don't know how it works -we just have good ideas. The final chapters are laden with comments about how we have no idea what the future holds in terms of climate. This detracts from the earlier discussion since it seems like we have no reason to believe Alley.

The analogies used in this book are also quite poor. Please give your readers some credit. The analogies are so dummed down that they are outright ridiculous. They would be appropriate for a 10-year old (or younger).

Although I never completed the degree, I have most of a baccalaureate in geology. Since paleontology and earth history were my main interests, the title Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future by Richard B. Alley naturally caught my eye. The book is an excellent exposition on the recent data collection from ice cores obtained from the more stable portions of the Greenland ice sheet. I had come across this data source before while on a geologic field trip on Santorini helping with research on the volcanic activity that occured there during the Minoan period. It had been information from this source that had helped to date the volcanic event, so I was particularly interested in learning more about how it was obtained and about its reliability.

In part two of the text, the author lucidly describes the rationale behind the selection of ice and of Greenland as an "archival" source. He discusses the methods in and problems of obtaining and preserving the material intact and uncontaminated and the methods of analysis that produced the data. Throughout the following chapters, he lays out for the reader the thinking that went into its interpretation and how this information can be used as a paradigm with which future outcomes of climate change might be predicted. Because Alley, a professor of geoscience at Penn State, took an actual part in all of these proceedings and is an active scientist himself, he is well positioned to give an informative account of the topic. He also has a readable writing style which many such individuals do not.

Although I felt that his attempt to "get down to" the level of his non-technical audience was sometimes a little patronizing, I did think that his explanations of some of the physical systems was very clear. The description of the events leading to and during the Younger Dryas got a little confusing with the comparison to a roller coaster with a bungee jumper and a yo-yo, but by the end of the chapter one still had a fair idea of what he was trying to convey.--I think he was just trying a little too hard. His explanations of important environmental cycles with which I was already familiar--like those of the carbon, the water, the heat distribution, the oceanic and lake water overturn, and atmospheric cycles and those of the Coriolis and Milankovich effects--were very clear. In fact they were clearer than some textbook descriptions I've read. Although I had read of the effects of fresh water on the North Atlantic "conveyor belt" and its subsequent effect on global climate, I had not encountered the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle or the Heinrich-Bond oscillations in my reading in the past. The author's presentation was therefore of interest to me.

For most readers, part five will probably be of greatest interest. Here the author puts what is known or suspected of climatic mechanics to work in predicting possible impacts of human activity on global climate and the world's population. Here too he points out the nature of the scientific method and its limitations. He is quite clear that some of what he states in his final analysis with respect to the future is personal opinion and not science.

As an earlier reviewer points out, the book is an excellent portrayal of how science works, particularly in the aspects of framing a problem and a means of approaching it experimentally, and interpreting the data that arises therefrom. I found it a very entertaining book.

The Two Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future written by Richard B. Alley is an engrossing book about how do we get to take a look at our past. What this book is about, global climate changes as revealed by reading the annual rings of ice from cores drilled in Greenland.

Now, this sounds like a way to our past via the ice cores. We can measure the oxygen content of the atmosphere when the snow was laid down, we can get a sample of the dust in the snow. We can tell that the last ice age ended very abruptly, only three years, all from core samples in Greenland.

But what they found that intrigues me moreover is that the earth goes into deep freezes alternating briefly with mild conditions. Man has been keeping records of the weather for approximately 200 years and we've expierenced unusually temperate climates... what happens if we go into the deep freezer. Drilling down two miles into the ice, they found atmospheric chemiand dust the enabled then to construct a record of such phenomena as wind patterns and precipitation over the past 110,000 years.

This is a well-written book with a pleasing narrative keeping the read interested in the subject matter. It provides an excellent survey for the general reader and those interested in the history of scientific exploration.

The explaination of the discovery process in terms the general reader can understand is one of the benefits of this book. The author does this to really open up the flow of knowledge about a subject that could put readers to sleep. We need to know and understand what happened in the past to face the challenges of the future.

This book was was very good in my search for information about women rights. In school I am writing a 5 page (typed) research paper and this helped a lot! It was a great source of information.

Behind David Lean's directorial masterpiece 'Lawrence of Arabia' (1962) lay a series of attempts to film T. E. Lawrence's life, most of them centred around the abridged version of 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom', known as 'Revolt in the Desert.' Chief amongst the filmmakers eager to produce this epic was the great Alexander Korda, who bought the rights to both books and also to several biographies that contained their material. Korda was asked by Lawrence himself not to make the film while he was alive. Five months later, Lawrence was killed in a motorbike accident and Korda began his preparations. Locations were scouted, scripts were drafted, and several actors were tested to play the lead. Walter Hudd (who had played the Lawrence-based character Private Meek in 'Too True to be Good') and Leslie Howard were the favourites, although Cary Grant and Laurence Olivier were also considered. The Foreign Office thwarted Korda at every turn, protesting that it would be ill advised to show the Turks in an unfavourable light with the ongoing political unrest in the East. After a dozen attempts to make the film, Korda let it slide. This book is tripartite: part one sketches a brief history of the attempts to film 'Lawrence of Arabia' and includes pictures of all the key players. The second part is an interview given by Leslie Howard on how he would play Lawrence; and thirdly, the final script (1938) of the Korda epic is reproduced. While it is a laudable piece of work, the book fails to hang together and emerges as two articles and a film script that are linked by the same subject, but have no cohesion. Part One is far too brief for the reader to gain an understanding of the forces arrayed against Korda and his project, and it would benefit from more research and more expansion on the views of the various directors and actors engaged for the film in its different stages. Part Two is simply the Howard interview with no editorial comment offered. Part Three, the script, also has no analysis. This is surprising, as it is rich in allusion and with peculiar sequences that (to modern eyes) detract from the overall pacing of the film. It relies heavily on 'Seven Pillars' for dialogue and description, with little or no modification. To those who are acquainted with the Robert Bolt script of the Lean film, the Korda Lawrence is but a pale shadow: eloquent passivity rather than "nothing is written" man of action; cold detachment rather than anger and angst in crucial scenes (Tafileh, the Turkish hospital); the smug imperialist rather than the tortured anti-imperialist. Korda's Lawrence was intended to be heroic, a ( ) puff-piece with a serious bite, but looking at the script today, he seems shallow, self-important and obnoxious. The real Lawrence evaded any attempt to capture him by constant shifts in personality, presenting a different face to each person he met. It would appear that the celluloid Lawrence of Korda's vision was the same; and, as such, defeated him wholly.

Leather tramp is a slang expression for people who like to hike; this was an interesting book about just such a person and the journal he kept while on the trail. I was looking for an account of hiking and seeking God and this is what I got with Leather Tramp Journal: A 12-Mile Mountain Retreat. The way the book fashioned historical events and actions mixed in with the natural surroundings of the Adirondack Mountains, brought an interesting perspective to the reader.

Throughout this book the reader is brought onto the trail with the author and we see what a hiker's day is like as he ponders some of life's most important questions. I looked forward in each chapter to see what the hiker was going to eat for the evening meal and what the "Points to Ponder" were for the day. The "Points to Ponder" provide an action list to be focused on once the hiker returns to civilization.

The book helps the reader to reflect on life as well as view nature through the eyes of an experienced "Leather Tramp". It also allows the reader to see the Appalachian area and possibly plant a desire to hike in the same footsteps as the author. Although not the book I thought it was going to be, the story unfolded into an interesting tale.

Although my daughter loves Barbie, and I have no problem with that, I was shocked to read this book to her. The girl in the story waits until the parents go to bed and gets onto the Internet so she and her friend can communicate with and ultimately visit Barbie. I had to tell my daughter as we were reading the book that it wasn't okay to go onto the Internet at night when there aren't any parents around, so that they could ask an adult's advice online, without the parents finding out. It is a pretty strange mix of fantasy and reality. As much as I think girls should be encouraged to use technology, I found this book inappropriate for my seven year old daughter.