"Couch Potato Kids" is a good start for parents who want to take a more active role in their children's lives. It, however, does not go into enough depth on resources for parents such as Turn Off the TV dot-com, home school/parenting assocations and other resources for parents trying to find alternatives to the influence of television.

I personally have just finsihed a course in college with the author Craig Mishler. I also completed a project by going to an Athapaskan Fiddling festival and that is when I read the Crooked Stovepipe. This book goes in great detail about Athapaskan fiddlers and dancers and there orgin. The author went to every village mentioned in the book and took notes and made observations. The author is a white man and has no realtion to the alaska natives which is intersting to recieve the observations from a white man. Mishler focused on the Upper river style of Athapaskan music and just slighty touched upn the down river music. This book is a great read and very interseting. It is intersting because it shows us that fiddling is not only down in Nashville on the Grand Ole Opry but it is done in many different cultures and parts of the world. For each culture there is there own style of music.

I bought this book after it was reviewed in "The New Scientist" and I certainly wasn't dissapointed. It's very well organised and even though quite thin, it covers everything in requisite depth. For e.g. he does a great job on explaining the origin of the currently used scales etc.

The book has a nice variety of fiddle tunes with notation and introductory material specific to the mandolin. The recording features only a handful of the tunes and, although the guitar and mandolin tracks are panned so that you could mute the mandolin and play along, the samples are so short that you wouldn't really want to do that. I also have been frustrated by several errors in the transcription -- often the tab and sheet music will differ. That said, it's a good set of tunes and a useful, if imperfect, package.

Cute book, commemorating Bug's 50th anniversary.

I just purchased this book and the Braden book. I felt that the theory portion of this book was outstanding: it even compared the Weber systems to SU carbs in one area - the object was to reinforce there are multiple ways of achieving the same objective. I felt that the section on disassembly/assembly was not quite as strong as the Braden book - but if I ever tune my car for more serious racing - this is the one I'd come back to. Overall - well worth buying.

This book is well laid out and is easy to follow. I would recommend thisbook to any one who want's to squeeze more power out of the small bore a series engine.

Like to know the # 1 song the day you were born? The day you were wed? Or the day JFK was assassinated? Or the day Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon? How about December 7, 1941?

Well, if you were born anywhere from 1930 to 1980, this great book will tell you what the top song was on each of your birthdays, including your first, or your weddding day, as culled from Variety Magazine for the years 1930 to mid-1935, from Your Hit Parade from mid-1935 to 1959, and from there to 1980, Billboard's Easy Listening charts.

Author Brooks also provides, prior to each year, a thumbnail account of the year in question, including films, Broadway hits, sporting events, and political news.

If there's one fault it's the omission of the names of any artists - understandable, perhaps, since in the early days it wasn't uncommon for one song to be covered by multiple artists. Still, it would have been nice to have the names of the those with the TOP version.

For that reason alone I deducted one star. But that's from MY perspective and it certainly shouldn't prevent you from obtaining a copy if you can. The ensuing hours of enjoyment and trivia treasure-troves will delight you for hours on end.

This is a fun collection of intricate tunes for the mandolin. The format is older, but the teaching is pretty sound. Goes through each song really fast, then slows down to take apart the sections individually. Finally the disk takes you through the song at as speed that is a bit less demanding than the initial speed. Accompaniment is somewhat lacking, but this shouldn't affect learning. This should be a fun challenge for a beginner like myself.

Perhaps I'm being unduly snobbish, but I'm astonished that such a hip collection of celtic tunes is published by Mel Bay. Not only does it have a generous helping of standards, but it also has a number of "latest hit" songs that may be well known by more experienced musicians but are just now reaching my ear. I also like the fact that it's spiral bound.

However, I do have two complaints which knock off a star. First, no chords are shown. Secondly, and far more serious, the notation includes ornamentation. This is highly distracting to me as a flute player when I'm trying to learn the "bones" of a piece.

This is a good book for musicians like myself who are still early in the game, but don't read the notes too literally or you may get lost. If you can find the same song in a different, simpler collection such as O'Neill's, you may be better off learning that version. However, as a source of "hot" songs, I have yet to find a rival to this book.