This is a rather easy book to read. As it is writtten in a freindly formate not sticking to bare stone cold facts. Although it can be difficult at times if you dont already have a base understanding of the subject. It makes many referances to other volumes that were used in the createing of the book throught it. But in a few sections in the early pert of the book use different languages such as germanic and actient greek style and text. So if you do not know how to read these parts there are some parts you will miss. But these are very minor points and does not take away form the read as a whole.

Our language delayed 3 year old loves the handtalk series. In this birthday story with a magical touch, the photos tell the story (there is text) and the characters sign along with the action portrayed. It's easiest to sign if you already know the signs as the photos don't always capture the exact motions.

Handtalk School by Mary Beth Miller and George Ancona, takes the reader on a fun and informative tour of a day in the life of children at a residential school for the deaf. From the moment the students wake up in the morning they are caught up in the excitement of preparing for the school play. From creating the props and costumes in art class, to learning their lines in history, to calling home on a TTY, the day circles around the preparation and the performance of the Thanksgiving day show.

Handtalk School is full of colorful photographs and a narration provided in sign language. In addition to being a fun story, the book also provides the nonsigning reader with some beginning signs and an insight into Deaf culture. ASL users will notice that despite the books claim of being in ASL, the story is actually told in a hybrid of ASL and Signed English. Despite this, the signs are easy to follow and the book can be enjoyed even by those with little to no English reading ability. Parents of deaf children may also appreciate the list of residential schools for the deaf listed in the back of the book.

Dr. Miller has, by and large, pulled in readings from "everyday" places--popular magazines, newspapers, &c. Because of this, the Prentice Hall Reader has a fresh, current feel. Organized by "modes" of writing with supporting how-to essays and a glossary.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "House of the Seven Gables" is an enjoyable read for anyone interested in classic American literature. Some readers consider Hawthorne's meticulous style of describing settings and characters frustrating, but they fail to realize that the story "The House of the Seven Gables" is in fact, settings and characters. The reader must realize that this book was written in 1851, so it lacks the showmanship of explosions and flying poltergeists, but if properly embraced, "The House of the Seven Gables" is a very enjoyable read. As I read this book, I felt that Hepzibah and Clifford were not the only characters attempting to rid themselves of a family curse. I felt that Hawthorne himself was attempting to exorcise the guilt brought on by his ancestor, John Hawthorne, who had presided over the Salem Witch Trials, hundred of years prior.

Many complain that Hawthorne's style is too turgid, too stilted and dense to be enjoyable. Admittedly, I was not that fond of The Scarlet Letter, though its merits probably rest beyond the attention spans of most people committed to reading it in lit class. As anyone will tell you, it takes supreme effort and time to wend through any Hawthorne book.

I found The House of the Seven Gables much more enjoyable, a novel more accessible to the casual reader than the Scarlet Letter, but still imposing and impressive and just a bit pompous, as anyone can say of the little Hawthorne they have read. The characterization is marvelous. The adumbration of Hepzibah's insular misery and Clifford's simple minded pariah-hood, and the reforming agent of Phoebe's love and rustic vivacity, as well as multiple other character sketches and glorious descriptive passages, are what carried me through this novel. Unlike in the Scarlet Letter, it seems as though the tedium (what little there is here) is always at some point made up for, as though Hawthorne was attempting to counterbalance certain dry passages with heavenly description and character revelations.

Those who detested the Scarlet Letter will likely find little but soporific tedium here; for those whose initiation into Hawthorne's craft was not overly harrowing, keep this one in mind for a rainy day.

It's very obvious from reading all of these reader reviews that The House of the Seven Gables is not for everyone. But, I urge you to determine if it is for you. If it is, you certainly don't want to miss it. This novel was not written with today's readers in mind. You cannot call it quick-paced, by any stretch of the imagination. The novel is however, a wonderful work of art. Every sentence, every word is carefully crafted, carefully chosen. This novel is meant to be read slowly, to be savored. The novel tells a fairly simple story--the story of the house, and its perhaps doomed family of inhabitants. Many years after a curse by a supposed warlock--there are only 4 members of the doomed family surviving. Is the house haunted? Maybe. Hawthorne is so clever--every time he tells us about a supposed ghost or haunting, he gives us a more "reasonable" explanation. Were they ghosts swirling around the house one evening, or was it just the wind. Is the family doomed? Maybe, but then there is young Pheobe who seems anything but. The House of Seven Gables is far superior to any contemporary gothic you can read. It is novel writing at its best. The characters have depth, the story is engaging, and even, at times, funny. But, you have to be ready for a novel written well over a hundred years ago. If you are, you are in for a treat.

Henry Miller kind of arrived late to the whole expatriate game of the 1920's in which writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald blazed their way across the literary firmament. By the time Miller had gotten there, America was in the throws of the Great Depression and the shadow of Hitler was beginning to move across Europe. Miller moved to Paris at the instigation, or more likely, manipulation of his wife June. Soon after he met and began a long affair with Anais Nin. In 1935, Miller went to New York, his former home, in pursuit of Nin and produced Aller Retour New York, about his adventures in his old home city.

This book is actually a 77 page letter to his friend Alfred Perles back in Paris. On the surface it seems a letter of hate about the United States. Miller had found his place in France and after that, no other country could come close to him. They were all inferior. He resents the fact that America is new and has no real history. Miller feels more at home with decadence and rot and ruins, decay. He says that "nothing vital was ever begun here....nothing of value." He offers up critiques of the artistic types in Greewich Village by showing up the literary salon hags who vampire off of writers and artists. Miller hates technology and prophecizes about the time when skyscrapers will rule the horizons. I'm sure if he had lived to our day, he would have hated the internet and computers. Most of his hate seems artifical, maybe a defense mechanism that allows him to escape his past, for instance, the first wife and child that he abandoned. Or to do away with what he considers the past, he has to insult it. He has some nice descriptive passages and even though he wrote one thing, you can sense that underneath it, he enjoys writing about New York.

Aller Retour is very instructive in showing the underside of literature, in the sense that for every famous writer around back then, there was a Henry Miller type scumming around in the gutters looking for bare subsistence. It also offers nice vignettes of the artistic life of the time and a glimpse into the philosophy that he lived his life by.

Aller Retour New York.. This book was written between the time of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. If you are unknown to Henry Miller, I highly recommend that you read Tropic of Cancer first. In this short but good book, Miller reflects on the gay time he has while he is home visiting New York and getting ready to travel back to Paris. His writting style is more like a journal than a novel. He speeks of the I. State building.. the travel back on board a ship over the Atlantic... About the complete emptiness the sea cause a person to have.. about the mindnumbing boredom of life.. The entire novel is just one long letter which he continues over an extended period of time. I am an avid fan of millers way of writting because I connect so much to it, I hope you do too.

It is often said contemporary French philosophy mistakes obscurity for profundity. There is more than a kernel of truth to that statement when applied to Jean-Luc Nancy's writing on Hegel. As far writing goes, Nancy's musings on Hegel are not altogether displeasing when taken as poetry but, philosophically, Nancy has not given us much. This is a shame because Nancy's work on Lacan, _The Title of the Letter_, (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe) is a rather ingenious interpretation. This should not surprise us, however, considering the body of Nancy's work, taken as a whole, is not very philosophical but rather really an exercise in aesthetics. (Perhaps this is why American literature departments rave about various French posties while most actual philosophers view French "play" much like Bismark viewed Napolean III's statesmanship: erratic, ill-conceived, and ultimately without the substance necessary to sustain itself.)

Hegel of course was (and still is) considered quite obscure by many, but taken to be philosophically formidable and rigorous. The French philosopher that initiated contemporary interest of Hegel in France, Kojeve, managed to put together a few positive concepts on Hegel's philosophy of negativity. Nancy does not. He is content to remain, despite his own best deconstructive efforts, in the world of Nietzsche's last man--endlessly searching in vain for an answer to the demise of the Enlightenment and taking the search itself to now be the best option available. Such nihilistic gamesmanship is appealing to disaffected lefties because they, like Nancy, will not move beyond the liberal naivetes no longer tenable in a post-Nietzschean world. They wish to promote a Kantian style ethical practice by invoking an unstated catergorical imperative of unconditional equality and toleration. The fact that there is no ground or reason for their political project is taken to be somehow supportive of "radical" equality; their hope being that by supporting epistemic skepticism they can institute a paralysis of the bildung that make the hierarchies of social systems possible. Of course what they have actually done is given themselves a way to advance an extreme version of the Enlightenment project of political emancipation while rhetorically denying the other positive claims of the Enlightenment. Hegel himself did his best to put a good face on the aporias exposed by Kant's reaction to Hume's skepticism but was not, in the end, successful. Herein lies the problem for Nancy and his ilk. They would be better served to strike a more truly Hegelian pose rather than languish in the death throws of a long since faded Enlightenment. Such political tactics are philosophically transparent. If you are looking for an actual philosophic treatment and explanation of Hegel's thought I would suggest Stanley Rosen's book on Hegel.

After the death of both Deleuze and Levinas in 1995, the mantle of "greatest living philosopher" presumably went to Jacques Derrida for a while. But Derrida has always refused to be a philosopher other than in the sense of not being a philosopher (which is also being a philosopher). So his cohort and quasi-follower Jean-Luc Nancy had to take the real philosophy from Derrida back to the question underlying all post-modern thought, namely how to deal with the empty space left behind by Heidegger's deconstruction of the tradition. With this little book, Nancy himself has become "the greatest living philosopher" - that is to say he has done to Hegel what Heidegger did to Nietzsche in the 1930s and 1940s: presented him as the key thinker of the break of modernity, and, unnoticeably perhaps, stepped beyond him. This book is indeed a marvel - one gets slightly dizzy reading it. Its intensity is at times (no: always) well-nigh unbearable. Nancy, like Heidegger with Nietzsche, takes a drill to the concepts of Hegel and allows them to shine in ways hitherto unthought(see the editorial review above, no need to repeat the details). In the end, this is the overturning of the boring old French Hegel of Kojeve and Hyppolite and the most exciting discovery in philosophical reading of another in sixty some years. I had always thought of Hegel as the great synthesizer. But Nancy's Hegel "returns" Hegel to pre-Socratic instability and shaky difference, where the restless thought-in-process constitutes the sense of the world, and philosophy is as alive as it ever was. A friend of mine says that Nancy reminds him of the color of the LED on alarm clocks: well, he's right, 'cause Jean-Luc Nancy is very much a phenomenon of a new morning. The owl is disoriented but it is all a marvel. Yes, I guess that is what you could say.

This book is a good start, but it does not even come close to preparing you for all the material you will see on the TOEFL.

For example, the grammar review is TOO short for most of my students; I must use other books to supplement this book.

The book is pretty long, but most of the book consists of practice tests--Princeton Review puts one question on each page (trying to simulate what the computer will look like). For example, the last 150 pages of the book are ONE test.

Finally, the CD-ROM is NOT a Computer Test. You will get only some listening practice.

Get the Longman book instead!

I want to thank you for the help and confidence I received from your book "Cracking The Toefl CBT". I have taken the TOEFL test and did well, thanks to your book. I hope you will keep up your great work and keep on helping other students in their TOEFL exam.

The book is great, and it does come with two Cd-roms indeed. The problem is that one is kind of "hidden" behind the other, at the same plastic envelope. All the hints are there for anyone that wants to succeed in the exam. I strongly recommend this book.

Few literary textbooks equal "An Anthology of American Literature" in length and dryness. While the book is a collection of mediocre stories who are now only seeing the light of day due to the baneful effects of political correctness, the editor of this work delves deeper to not include a single illustration that may have shed some light of this terrible experience of reading this collection of pointless stories,

I, on the other hand, think its a great collection of American literature, but maybe just a bit too pricey for what it offers. I would suggest it more as something to use as a reference than as something that should be read cover to cover, I mean, geeze, its 2060 pages long.

This huge textbook is a steal: hundreds of major works from the last century and a half, printed on quality paper, bound with a strong but flexible gum binding. If this were a hardcover, you'd pay twice the price for what it includes. It's thorough and scholarly, a tome that defines the Big League of anthologies. It's not for the shallow reader, though, who's accustomed to the sensuous audio-visuals of TV and the Internet. This is TEXT. Time to resuscitate the thinking mind, the patient intellect, the autonomous imagination.