Checkov was a master of composing life's largest problems into beautiful language and ordinary situations which the entire world could understand. Granted he wrote them a long time ago but the underlying situation exists everywhere today. Here are three sisters completely unable to move on with their lives. They are unhappy, they are desperate for a change of scene, they are forced to give up anyone they love to someone else but yet they remain glued to the exact place where all of this occurs. Olga has passed her prime, Masha loves someone other than her husband, and Irina has no idea what could possibly make her happy and all they do is talk about change, but never do anything active. And in the end it all comes full circle and we as an audience, a reader, need to decide how to not fall into such a life rut, to learn by their actions as we do from Aesop's fables. This play is just written a great deal better, with a little more comedy and tugging at the heartstrings.

From the title, one would think this a type of travel journal, a panorama of episodes along the way, a sequence of stations between the starting off point and the destination. Instead, the overall weight of the book is given to glaciers, their descriptions, their influence on the landscape, their geological record, the discovery of new glaciers, and other characteristics of these moving rivers of ice. While Muir offers descriptive powers unequaled among authors on nature, never repeating himself though constantly repeating his subject, the sheer repetition tends to bog the work down. Two whole pages might contribute to our view of a particular glacier, and suddenly Muir reports that he's finished a 200-mile leg of his journey on foot. He tells us when he's climbed a glacier, and along the way we've missed an entire week. Time and space almost have no medium in this publication, utterly lost when gazing upon a glacier. For nature lovers who will never go to Alaska, the descriptions in this book make the ranges and glaciers come alive in print, but as a dramatic journey, a travelogue, or a field manual for the Alaskan bush, this book forms only a vague shadow.

Nature is a beautiful and highly complicated phenomena of this world. Many have sought to understand it and capture its essence in writing. The nature writings of John Muir succeed in capturing the beauty of nature as well as the scientific aspect. I have to be honest, I wasn't that enthused about reading a book about science. I expected Muir's book to be identical to a science textbook, definitely not my idea of enjoyment. However, his book was actually full of detailed descriptions and creative uses of similes, metaphors, and analogies. In fact, it completely changed my perception of a scientific novel.

In his book, "Travels in Alaska", Muir brings alive the magnificence of the vast expanses of unexplored Alaskan territory. His prose reveals his enthusiasm for nature, and he weaves clear and distinct pictures through his words. Muir's writing is very personal. His favorable feelings toward the land are very apparent, and reading the book is like reading his diary or journal. He avoids using scientific jargon that would confuse and frustrate the average reader; his words are easily understood.

Muir also uses very detailed descriptions throughout "Travels in Alaska". Although at times his painstaking description is a plus, at others, he seems to take it a little too far. Numerous times throughout the book, Muir spent a paragraph or two talking about something slightly insignificant. He would go off on a tangent of enthusiasm for something as simple as a sunrise or the rain. While his careful observances make the book enjoyable, the sometimes excessive detail tends to detract from the point he was trying to make. The description also reveals that his heart and soul was in his research; this became very evident upon reading the long and thoughtful descriptions.

"Travels in Alaska" can be appreciated by a wide audience. Muir shines light upon the Alaskan territory, and he is detailed in his account of the many people he meets. Anyone could read the book and find enjoyment learning about Alaska when it was for the most part unsettled. Muir shares with the readers his keen insight upon the various Indian tribes that lived in Alaska. At one point in the book, he gives a very detailed description of one tribe's feasting and dancing. His observances capture exactly what he saw and the feelings these observances evoked in him.

John Muir's writing is of high quality. He incorporates beautiful and creative similes, metaphors, and analogies. His prose is very poetic, which makes it an enjoyable read. For example, Muir says that "when we contemplate the world as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty." His work is also very organized. The book is divided into 3 sections, or parts of his trip, as well as separate chapters devoted to specific subjects. Muir spends one chapter describing his trip to Puget Sound, another on Wrangell Island, etc. The book follows a specific format that ensures that everything is easily followed and understood.

Truthfully, I was impressed with the writing, and the fact that it was nothing like a textbook. It incorporated the literary aspect so well, that the book held my interest whereas a textbook would not have. I had the wrong impression of a scientific novel, and I urge anyone unfamiliar with the genre, to give "Travels in Alaska" a fair try. It may just change your mind about scientific writing.

I confess up front, it's been a few years since I read Muir's Travels in Alaska. Yet significant aspects I remember well. Given Muir's exuberance for life and almost everything he encounters in his travels, one almost looses view of Muir the botanist and geologist. But not quite. Here we find the author contemplating the activity of glaciers and documenting the flora of southeast Alaska. Muir (who tended strongly toward vegetarianism) gleefully entertaining himself by foiling duck hunters. Baffling the locals by happily wandering out into major storms.
The book is a journal of Muir's 1879, 1880, and 1890 trips (he wouldn't mind if we called them adventures) to SE Alaska's glaciers, rivers, and temperate rain forests. He died while preparing this volume for publication.
I remind myself, and anyone reading this, that Muir isn't for every reader. And, as other reviewers have stated, this may not be the volume in which to introduce oneself to the one-of-a-kind John Muir. One reviewer doesn't think that Muir is entirely credible in these accounts. I won't say whether or not this is wrong, but I tend to a different view. For some of us -- and certainly for Muir -- wilderness is a medicine, a spiritual tonic, so to speak. For the individual effected in this way, physical impediments and frailties rather dissolve away when he is alone in wildness. I once heard Graham Mackintosh (author of Into a Desert Place) speak of this. In all of his travels alone in the desert, he doesn't recall having ever been sick. This may not sound credible to some, but I strongly suspect it is true.
If you like Muir's writings, read this book. If you like the stuff of Best Sellers, perhaps you should look elsewhere.

Being a teen who has been close to suicide many a time, I know from experience that reasons for suicide are plentiful, but finance is a main problem. Why sell a book on how to prevent suicide? To me thats a little bit of a tease. Also... I don't think parents would buy this book, as the symptoms of a suicidal teen are not in great supply. We hide our feelings. Well, thats just my opinion.... An online 'How to prevent suicide' would be much more effective

Unlike many other books on adolescent psychology, this book takes more initiative in teaching teenagers to help each other during tough times. The tips included can be used immediately after reading them, and the authors stress certain important points repeatedly so that, although they may seem redundant to those who already know them by heart, no one can finish the book without having them permanently inscribed in their minds. The first person point-of-view style taken by the authors when explaining suicide helps, but not completes, a teenager's understanding of why his or her peers may consider suicide. There were a few detractions though. More fundamental information on depression as well as the increasing necessity to consider sexuality and ethnicity as aggravating factors in suicidal teens may have helped. A few sections were over-generalized, but the most important info (such as the "fact or fiction" of suicidal behavior) were well-covered. Combined with a book on teenage affected (i.e. emotional) disorders, alcohol/narcotics addiction, and/or risky environments (e.g. abusive families, violent neighborhoods, homogenous communities), whichever is helpful to the reader, this book can go a long way in reducing the heart-breaking statistics on suicide among young people. A newly revised edition with updated information is eagerly awaited.

Nelson & Galas have put together an excellent book packed full of information such as the myths, facts, risk factors and warning signs as well as how to prevent suicide from happening. This powerful book is geared towards teenagers to help each other but it is also an excellent resource as well for parents, teachers and para-professionals. As a graduate student in elementary education, I found this book easy to digest and relative to the issues facing todays teens. As a parent of four girls, my concern in the prevention of the skyrocketing suicide rate is of utmost importance. As I read, I was able to recall what life was like as a teenager and the high importance of some issues to teens of things that I now would think of as minor or temporary. I recommend this book highly for parents, teachers, school nurses as well as any teen (contemplating suicide or not). It is a MUST resource, and should be easily available for all who would benefit. Maybe if more people can understand why teenage suicide happens, we can recognize the distinguishable warning signs and be more successful in preventing it.

With this work Woodman is trying to fill the gap in history on the various British naval officers whose courage and ingenuity and seamanship were all that held revolutionary France at bay for years until the British army got its act together. It's not only a valiant effort, it is -- as Woodman points out -- long overdue.

I'm not sure if the chronological aspect of the telling doesn't do the stories an injustice. It lends a hit-skip atmosphere to the book, as we read about the heroics of one captain, only to find more about him several chapters down the line. After finishing the book I went to the index and collected all the pages on various captains and went back and read them together and I truly think most of the information about their battles would have been better grouped together.

Two HUGE problems with this book from my point of view though. One, the index needs some work. I hate being referred to pages where there is absolutely no mention of the topic/ship/person I am seeking. And two -- who the devil proofed this book? Because I don't think it was anyone accustomed to reading English! The typos and grammatical errors are overwhelming in number. I found this a serious distraction, and frankly, it is inexcusable. Woodman's work deserves better, because even though I would never count this book as one of the great histories of the Age of Sail, it is rather a one-of-a-kind book.

As for the detail content of the book, I've long wanted to read more details of some of the famous sea battles, detail such as how the ships were maneuvered in some of those one-on-one battles, and Woodman does supply this. I still want more, but I confess to some greed on my part there.

Oh, one other thing, the author does need to provide a bit more argument on some of the characterizations he draws of these captains. For example, he repeatedly refers to Edward Pellew's cupidity, but except for one incident committed by Pellew's son, Woodman never gives any examples where Pellew allowed this attribute to interfere with his duty. Sir Sidney Smith is drawn as boastful and vainglorious -- which he WAS -- but no real argument is made as to how Woodman arrived at this conclusion; a couple of brief examples would have helped make some of his statements look more fact than opinion.

I'll keep this book on my shelf, and will hope Woodman may someday consider a revised edition.

The book is more or less a recounting of the successes of British naval captains of the late 1700s and early 1800s. A period when Britain and France polarized Europe in war. While the ultimate outcome of the conflict bears out the fact that Britain's naval forces were superior, it is hard to believe that there were as few French naval successes as Woodman relates.

But that's a small complaint when taken in context with the overall quality of the content in the book. Woodman's descriptive talent focuses on the telling of the smaller battles. There are ample books relating the events of Trefalgar, this is not one of them, Woodman's narratives are of the frigate battles and smaller ship of the line battles, the cutting outs and ship to ship running fights. The tales of Captains Pellew, Cochrane, Willoughby and such. Stories no less entertaining than those of Forester's Horatio Hornblower. His terminology is accurate, and his research is excellent.

I purchased this book with the appetite of a shark after a seal. It is a very good book, but it has a couple of things that could have improved it beyound measure. 1. There are so many remarkable men in all navies and battles that the reader needs something to distinquish them after the years of war. 2. I wanted more details on the battles, perhaps some diagrams. 3. I would have liked to have known more about what happened to these men after the wars. Cochrane, as an example, died the year the american civil war started. But not to quibble, this is a good book that puts it all together. You just stay hungry.

Before commenting on this book, let me note that versions of this have appeared in past editions of What Color Is Your Parachute? So, if you have a copy of that book, check it out to see if an appendix on setting your life mission exists there. Then, you can evaluate the book's content for yourself.

In this gift edition, the author has added many woodcuts and blank pages to what is an essay with elaborations about finding your mission in life.

In the essay, Mr. Bolles answers a question posed to him about the diagram in The Three Boxes of Life in terms of what a personal mission looks like.

Mr. Bolles explains that to him mission is a religious concept that cannot be discussed without considering an individual's relationship to God. With apologies and respect to other religions, Mr. Bolles points out that he is a Christian and can only effectively describe a mission from the Christian perspective. Those who are not religious, or not Christians, will probably not find this approach to a mission to be as valuable as a more secular approach.

Mr. Bolles also focuses his thinking more on a job-oriented mission than most people would consider. If you want something broader, you might find this approach a little too narrow. Mr. Bolles points out that there are many processes for arriving at a mission. He is merely describing the one he knows best, not proclaiming it to be the best.

This book will be most helpful to someone who is a Christian, and is spiritually troubled because of discomfort with her or his job or life role. If you know someone like that, you may have found an ideal Christmas or birthday present.

Mr. Bolles describes your mission has having three components, which you need to develop sequentially.

The first is simply being conscious of God. The second is to do good works. Both of these mission components are shared by all Christians.

The third component is unique to you. Combine your talent and what you love to do in order to serve God's purpose.

To pursue these three components, you are warned that you will have to unlearn some common ideas. For example, you should feel gratitude towards God, rather than pride in yourself. When choices come up, be sure to consider the alternatives and pick the one that will add to love and goodness. Your mission will not be dictated by God, rather you will use your free will to select one with Him "where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."

The book ends with a brief list of suggested reading, and lots of ads for Mr. Bolles's other books. I found the ads to be in appropriate for such a book, and graded it down one star accordingly.

Overall, I found the book to be simple, moving, and consoling. I think most Christians would feel greater access to Divine guidance through the experience of reading and reflecting on these simple, but powerful, suggestions. Although the book will not take you a long time to read, it may take you a lifetime to live.

Where does your work lack deep gladness in meeting the world's deep hunger

If you aren't "into" God, you may not find this book useful. On the other hand if you at least have an open mind, you will find that this God-centered book respects all forms of religion and draws on universal religious beliefs to give direction. The writer just happens to be Christian.

The premise of the book is that nothing can be sorted out in life until you have your spiritual life in order. Then the rest will follow.

As someone who has a strong belief in God, I found this book to be an honest guide to finding a focus in life. It isn't the only way, but it ring true for me.

It isn't cut and dry and interpretation by the individual reader will give this book value.

I purchased this book two years ago and read it through, but it didn't impact me very much. I just pulled it out again to reread and was deeply moved by the author's conviction about the spiritual nature of life. Even if one has strong spiritual convictions, it is all too easy to compartmentalize work, family, friends, and spiritual life. Bolles reminded me of the "integrity" of integrated life and work. Although it is very short, this book should not be a quick read, rather, it is something to meditate on.

If you have never been in credit card business, and you have to start career there, the orientation of this book fits well. Of course, if you are already in the industry for at least 2 years, there is little in the book that can interest you much.

But, at least the copy I bought, is loaded with grammar errors. Many sentences are not properly ended without a period. I felt somehow difficult to believe that this text can be used for group training.

Before we spent the money on purchasing books I had to research this author and his book through our contacts at the OCC, FDIC, and Federal Reserve. My manager is very "frugal." These agencies also provided me with contacts at financial institutions that know about the author's work. The feedback was really interesting. They all credited the author, in one way or another, as being a big influence on pioneering the current technologies and analytical methods used in credit risk management. One person said, "Rich is tough and tenacious but his loan portfolio's were of the highest quality, so it was well worth the battle."

After actually buying copies of the book, I found it to be insightful about the myriad of issues affecting credit risk management. The book isn't written for those with 6th grade reading level skills, so that could be a problem for some people. I agree with one other posting - it would have been great to get SAS programming code for the scorecard monitoring, performance reporting and the analysis as a part of this book.

Based on what I've learned, there really is no silver bullet to solving the mounting losses in today's economic environment. This book helped me to look more broadly at the credit cycle at controlling exposure along the continuum. Using the book for its methodology and as backup to know my judgment is right, I'm making a difference in improving our loan quality.

I bought this book after hiring too many people who misrepresented their risk analysis skills and I had to figure out how to get them properly trained. This book did help educate some of those "experts" but I could really use the help of an expanded version.

Overall, I found the book is as described by the author and the publisher.

The book is written in such a way as to make you think about managing credit risk rather than as a "how to" manual. Too many analysts needed their hand held and spent their time looking for the answer rather than trying to solve the problem. Analyzing the problem requires an understanding of all the risk components and figuring out how to improve upon them - regulations, credit policy, pre-approval processes, credit scoring, fraud, production reports, data mining, etc.

What would really help is to see the book updated to expand on each of the topics (incorporate some how-to) and include some analytical programming examples, such as SAS. They could fix the grammatical errors too, not that I really care about that though (as you can tell from my review).

Western 'Orientalists' have a rather poor grasp of certain aspects of Asian history and culture. These mainly pertain to the descriptions of the nature of Asiatic religions and their role in history. This is particularly true of the scholars from reputed institutions such as the Harvard University. This book also suffers from the same problem. The ARYAN invasion is of critical importance to the origin of the principle Asiatic cultures and Indo-European linguistics in general. It has been very poorly treated. The later parts on the Achaemenid and Islamic periods have been better dealt with. The kushans while poorly understood have not been particularly well described in this text.

With the publication of Dr. Richard Frye's The Heritage of Central Asia from Antiquity to the Turkish Expansion (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1996, hardcover (ISBN 1558761101 ) and softcover (ISBN 155876111X), 264 pages) at last we have for Central Asia an overview book worth reading by novice and veteran alike. As the title implies, topics in the book include geography, pre-history, Zoroastrianism and Achaemenid Persians, Alexander the Great and the Greeks, the Parthians, nomads, Kushans, Silk Road trade, Buddhism, Sogdians, Muslims, Turks and much more. There are several (somewhat small) maps and a fair number of illustrations and photographs. Appendix topics include sources, geographical names (always a challenge in Central Asia), rulers in Bukhara and Samarkand, Sogdian deities, languages and coinage. The book is fully-indexed. Professor Frye of Harvard University is one of the deans of the field, especially in the area of Persia and author of numerous books including the recently re-published Bukhara. The very real accomplishment of this book is its comprehensive form which for once does not concentrate solely on a single time or place, but instead successfully communicates a feel for what was happening in all the regions throughout these historical periods. Much is to be learned and many questions will be answered. In some areas of research, of course, due to insufficient sources, the jury is still out and Frye does what one wants him to: he sets up the parameters of the question and the possibilities such that when someday new finds are made, the reader can judge them in the proper context. When he speculates, he informs the reader that that is what he is doing and refrains from offering theories without evidence as if they were fact. The conjectures too, as well as the facts, are always interesting coming as they do from a researcher of this stature and experience. Dr. Frye, who met the famous Sir Aurel Stein, first of the Foreign Devils of the Silk Road, and by extension his work, is a link back to the earliest Silk Road research and forward to what may be revealed by future excavations of mummies in Xinjiang and in the newly-independent republics of Central Asia. This book will be a valuable and often-consulted volume in the library of anyone with a passion for the Silk Road.

Having visited Bukhara personally in 1999, I hoped to find a nice description of the grandeur of the city through the ages. What I found was a book full of details, with names dropping without going into much detail about the people mentioned. And the author takes far too many side steps (going into details which are not or less relevant for the main story) which make it hard to follow the main line. I am under the impression that the author wanted to create a scientific work with a documentation of every detail he has found during his studies, rather than thinking as an author about the history he wants to tell.

I read this book nearly 25 years ago and the longer I live, the more impressed I am with it. It gave me a deep appreciation for the Arab-Persian-Turkic fusion that took place in Central Asia in the years 900-1100 (approx). This Islam was the one that came to the Indian subcontinent, even if the Arabs landed there a couple centuries earlier. I thought of this book any number of times as I taught Indian studies over the years and feel that it was one of the influential books in molding how I think about India (& Pakistan). It can only be even more useful today, now that Uzbekistan and the whole Central Asian region have regained independence and will be making their cultural impact on the world and more specifically, on South Asia. If you are interested in Islam, in Central and South Asia, in Iran or Turkish history, read this book !

This book does present scholarship that uses and (sometimes) defines a variety of themes and approaches to art criticism, but most of the writings are highly esoteric, randomly selected, and not always focused on the visual arts. If you don't already have a solid understanding of concepts like "Post Modernism" and "Commodity" don't expect any clear answers here. This is less of an explanatory textbook-type work, and more of a compilation of modern critical writing. Pre-requisite: PhD.

If you interested in reading about particular themes in contemporary art. This book covers a whole slew of art crit terms.

Each individual term is explored by its own essay. Each essay is written by a different author (mostly in the 80s and 90s). These essays are around 14 pages long, so these terms are explored rather in depth. The writing is so thick in this book it takes a good chainsaw to hack through 'em. But the effort is well worth it.

Here's the terms explored: Representation, Sign, Simulacrum, Word and Image, Narrative, Context, Meaning/Interpretation, Originality, Appropriation, Art History, Modernism, Avant-Garde, Primitive, Ritual, Fetish, Gaze, Gender, Modes of Production, Commodity, Collecting/Museums, Value, Postmodernism/Postcolonialism, and Figuration

My favorite essay so far is the one on Simulacrum.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in art criticism. It provides some interesing viewpoints.

Having the large Nelson is much better. Too large for pocket