Anyone who would like to put a few animals in the backyard for eggs or meat or milk or everything altogether, will save hundreds of headaches, and probably hundreds of dollars, by buying this book and taking Steven Thomas's suggestions seriously. There are now dozens of these kinds of books out there, and I own a number of them (including "Barnyard In Your Backyard" which is nowhere near as good as this) but none of them comes close to "Backyard Livestock" for practicality of advice, conciseness of expression, and comprehensiveness. I have sheep, chicken, etc., and this has been far more reliable than any competing manuals that I own or know of. You can't not get it! It's indispensable.

To get information easily and quickly, this book is concise and informative. We bought this book when we first started our little farm and 10 years later are still referring to it! An excellent buy.

This book was very beneficial in all aspects of raising small-farm animals. Great reference manual for beginners. I certainly listed this book in the resources directory of my new title, Farm Animals: Your Guide to Raising Livestock, because I felt it would be an awesome addition to my own farm related books!

I suggest this book for anyone who has a love for the game of golf. It puts simple movements of martial arts into your swing and gives your great results! It's the best.

If you will spend 15-20 minutes a day doing the drills, eastern and western, you will really improve. The 123 drill was particularly helpful in reducing my last round by 8 strokes. His drills work they really do!

I got the opportunity to work for Ted Kiegiel at Carolina Country Club while I was in school at NC State University. I got to see him play golf and give lessons. You can really see his results in the game of the junior golfers. I have never seen so many junior golfers shooting so close to par. Everything he teaches is easily understood and easily reproduced in your golf game. Although, I never had the opportunity to get a lesson from Ted himself, I did have the opportunity to get one from one of the assistants. His teaching was similar to Ted's because all of the assistants listen to what Ted says and puts it into their own lessons. Ted Kiegiel has discovered a way to help the average golfer master the game and improve his score tremendously. If you read the book and do what it says, you will be playing balanced golf in no time.

Steven J. Dick is an historian with a broad academic background both in the humanities and in the sciences. The present book of nearly 600 pages will establish his reputation even more. Its sub-title, "the Twentieth Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science" reveals what is the book's focus, and also gives a hint of its broad philosophical scope. For though Dick's main theme is the astronomers' efforts to find out whether there is life on other heavenly bodies than our own earth, he is careful to relate it to the astronomical world-picture of the time. He sets forth in sufficient detail the arguments used to support or reject the idea of extra-terrestrial life. His presentation is clear and informative, with a minimum of technical jargon. Readers of this book will get a good grasp of the development of astronomical practice and theory after Copernicus and Newton, both in the scientific community and among the general public.

Of course the main meat of the book is the tremendous rise of interest in matters of outer space. On the unsophisticated popular level, this means mainly "little green men from Mars", fanciful accounts of Star Wars, eked lout by UFOs -- Flying Saucers. Dick's perspective includes these: he notes that many future scientists, including Carl Sagan and several future Nobel laureates, devoured science fiction of this kind in their early teens. As a serious historian, Dick tries to account for how popular culture and the scientific elite influenced each other. Positively, since public interest made it possible to raise money for building ever more sophisticated and expensive astronomical instruments and space probes, including the Hubble space telescope. Negatively, since the sensationalism of the popular press, radio and television (including Orson Welles's extraordinary radio broadcast in 1938, "War of the Worlds", and later TV dramas about space adventures such as "Star Trek", tended to hurt the reputation of scientists who participated in space projects. Dick consistently takes the view that scientific research cannot progress without the trial and error of creative hypotheses: the very essence of hypothesis testing.

True, we still do not have any proof of life or conscious intelligence on other planets than the earth, nor around other stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, nor in the billions upon billions of galaxies around us. But thanks to the adventurous research projects of the latter half of the 20th century, with radio telescopes and the Hubble space telescope, and also the landings on the Moon , Mars and Venus, and finally the grand, Government-supported project of SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence), where Carl Sagan was an important actor, we now know much more than we did around 1900. The quest will go on, strengthened by the arguments elaborated in the lively 20th century debates.

To complement Dick's historian's perspective, I strongly recommend "Our Cosmic Origin" by A. Delsemme, a prominent astronomer specializing on comets. His history starts with the BIg Bang, some fifteen billion years ago.

The Book is certainly one of a kind, in that it even when it was not the original goal of the author to follow a very detailed evolution in human thought processes throughout time..one can certainly take this aspect as a very interesting and outstanding one. By exposing the evolution of the formulation of the necessary premises upon which an extraterrestrial life was/is supposed to exist, it is showing the evolutionary steps taken by human logic until today's scientific method. Thus, starting from the "known" existing historical records of the discussions around the possibility of an exterrestrial intelligence, one can track this evolution as well as view the slow drift from a dictatorial role played by the Church and religion in philosophical/scientific debates to a totally religiously independent scientific debate held nowadays.

In recent years, science has given us a new worldview. The universe now seems much friendlier to life than it was in the old cosmology of lifeless rocks and stars. Steven Dick captures this new worldview in THE BIOLOGICAL UNIVERSE. It is easy to understand, breathtaking in its broad sweep of decades of debate and progress, and highly relevant for understanding today's science.

This is a wonderful book. It is a series of different women's narrations of experiences with their epilepsy. The women range in age and interest, as well as to the severety with which their epilepsy has affected their lives. It felt great to put my own difficulties with this illness into context through hearing of other epileptic women.
This is a great book to read if you are an epileptic woman, or the husband/ partner/ boyfriend/ girlfriend friend or relative of one.
So far my father has read it, and I think it has given him a better starting off point with which to talk about my epilepsy with me. (I already have a line of friends and family waiting to read this book.)
The book's author Dr. Krishnamurthy, also heads a comprehensive epilepsy center through Boston's Beth Isreal Hospital. More information about the center is in the book and it is definatly worth investigating.

As a 34 year old adult woman with epielpsy, I found this book to be a godsend. I was given this book by Dr. Schachter this year. In reading this book, I found that other women share my trials and triumphs with epilepsy. I recommend this book as well as the other "Brainstorms" books. This book should be read by all women with epilespy.

As a 50 year old woman recently diagnosed with Complex Partial Seizures, this book has been a godsend. I actually thought I was losing my mind; but reading this has helped me to understand that I am not alone. I will now pass this book on to my children and family to read along with my friends so they will also understand just what I am going through. At last, I can have some peace of mind knowing that others have felt the same as I have..... Great book, very easy to read. All women diagnosed with epilepsy should read this book.

Last night I planned to read this book for just a few minutes before going to sleep. Hours later, instead of sleeping I was transformed into the world of the Balkan Roma musicians and their incredible culture! I simply couldn't put this amazing book down. I love the stories and interviews with the old musicians, the informative history of the Roma people and their culture, the full-of-life photos, and the CD with soundscapes. All these pieces combine to give the reader a great view of a people and their heritage, and one that has been largely overlooked in the past. I found the work ethic of the musicians described in this book to be very inspirational. To be able to play all kinds of requests for days on end is really something to admire. Musicians of any genre could learn a whole lot from reading about the musicians in this book. Years ago, these authors turned me on to the subculture of polka in the USA (and made a polkaholic out of me) with their super "Polka Happiness" book. They have clearly done it again - informed the world about an incredibly rich culture that was largely hidden from view.

This book responds to my interest in the social context of folk music and dance. The focus was on the lives of the people who make the music, in this case the Roma of Jumaya (Iriklia) in Greek Macedonia. The writers give you quite a rounded view, describing how the music is performed, at what kinds of events, how people relate to the music and each other, how the musicians see themselves and their occupation and how making a living as a Roma musician fits into Greek society. There is also a strong sense of history and how things have changed over time in many ways - the history of Roma in Greece and other Balkan countries, the specific history of Roma in Jumaya, and the stories of individual musicians and their families. The consistently positive way that the writers approach their subject is also refreshing - they describe how Roma have used music to survive and, in some cases, prosper, and how in doing so they have contributed to the multi-layered fabric of Greek-Macedonian ethnic identities.

What is especially interesting to me is the authors' view of how multi-ethnic society works in Greek Macedonia as compared to Bulgaria or Former Yugoslavia, and how the strategy of Roma musicians is different in these different countries. In Greek Macedonia the musicians play the music of all ethnic groups in order to maximize their flexibility and income. During multi-ethnic celebrations the musicians follow a strict policy of playing everyone's requests in the order requested, so that no one feels that they have priority. There is a fascinating description of an ethnically mixed wedding where the families have to adjust their various wedding traditions to accommodate each other, making it up as they go along to some extent.

The authors compare and contrast this with the approach taken by Roma musicians in other areas of the Balkans. In Kosovo in the 1980s the Roma musicians are said to have purposely selected music from traditions from other than Serbian and Albanian in order to avoid conflicts. In Bulgaria the wedding band tradition is described as leading to a new pan-Balkan "fusion" style which borrows from many cultures but still feels Bulgarian. Ultimately the motivation behind each strategy is the need of musicians to make a living.

The book is interesting reading from a North American perspective as well. Keil contrasts the multi-ethnic consciousness of Greeks, where the same person may have several types of ethnic and national identities simultaneously, with the concept of "multiculturalism" which he describes as slices of a pizza in which there are lots of ethnicities but everyone is either one thing or another. This raise the question of what is really going on in such immigrant nations as Canada and the United States.

The accompanying CD is a potpourri of sounds, including music of various types, and there is a section of the book describing the contents of the CD. Some of the track titles are Market Day in Jumaya, Afternoon at a Mahala Café, At Home in the Mahala, New Year's Party in Serres, Taverna Party at Nikisiani. The combination of the text, the many high quality black and white photos and the soundscape are successful in putting you into the experience, as much as this is possible. There was also a nice balance between Angeliki Keil's straight-forward and very readable reporting of the lives of the musicians and Charles Keil's more theoretical musings about ethnicity, the music and the role of the musicians. My only complaint about the book is its weight - it's printed on very heavy, glossy stock, no doubt adding to the quality of photographic reproductions, but it is so big and heavy that you pretty well have to read it sitting up. An alternate title could be, "Your Big Fat Roma Music Book."

When you get Bright Balkan Morning you are likely to open it up and then leaf through it, looking at the photographs. After a few minutes of this you'll remove the CD from the inside back cover and put it on. Then you continue looking at the photos while listening to the sounds.

That in itself is a rich and satisfying experience. But don't stop there. Read the text!

It tells of Roma (aka Gypsy) musicians who have cornered the market on live music in polyglot Greek Macedonia. While they are at the bottom of the social order, anyone who wishes a proper wedding, festival, or party of any kind hires these musicians. The musicians generally perform in trios, one playing a bass drum while the other two play the zurna - a double-reed woodwind found throughout Eurasia and Africa. Their repertoire is drawn from the peoples who live in the area, or passed through at one time, and is sometimes more Oriental, sometimes more European - whatever the customer wants.

Keil and Keil give detailed accounts of several performances - a baptism, a wedding, and a saint's day festival - tell the life stories of a dozen or so musicians & family, and recount the broad history of the Roma in the Mediterranean as well as presenting a more focused account of their sojourn in Greek Macedonia. Blau's photographs range from intimate portraits, to dancers in full party whirl, through street scenes jumbled or measured, to serene landscapes. Some of his shots are so strikingly composed - the cover image, for example - that the effect is both subjective (Blau's aesthetic) and objective (we're looking at things, out there, in the world). Steven Feld's soundscapes give us the living flow of sound. Not only do we hear the twin zurnas flying through drum rhythms, but dancing feet, shouts of joy and exertion, motors churning, sheep braying, and Stevie Wonder piped in through a tinny sound system.

Bright Balkan Morning is a milestone. See it, hear it, read it. Take pleasure in it.

Eric A Kimmel cleverly retells the an story Anansi folk tale in his book Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock, which is illustrated by Janet Stevens. It is a clever story based on the folk tradition of West Africa with Anasi the spider as a trickster hero. Anansi is a true mischief maker and after finding a magic moss-covered rock decides to use it to his friends disadvantage. In the end it is Anasi who is taught a lesson, maybe.

Anasi books and tales are a wonderful way of exploring the rich traditions from West Africa. He is derived from the Ashante who are skilled weavers and story tellers. Anansi is associated with both the Ashante traditions of story telling and weaving. He is an intriguing character whether he is spinning a web with words or with thread.

For parents and teachers introducing this story to children it is important to consider your own beliefs and views on violence and teaching lessons through violence. The trick of the moss-covered rock is that it hits animals on the head and knocks them unconscious. While children frequently delight in this kind of slapstick humor and may not take the use of violence as condoning it, the adult should consider their own conscience in introducing this book.

Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock is a staple in my storytelling repetoire. Small children appreciate the repetition; older children appreciate the humor; adults enjoy the pure playfulness of the tale. In short, this is another example of folktales being excellent (or not surviving).

The book is well written and well illustrated - I hope it becomes a children's classic as it deserves to be

I find this book useful in teaching teachers about the folk lore of Africa. It also is useful in showing teachers an interesting way to introduce and discuss values with young children.

If you play the Dragonlance adventure game with SAGA, this book will tell you all you need to know to have any creature in your game! And even if you don't, it provides excellent background knowledge and stories about the creatures. It is great!!!

This is such a good role-playing aid. it is well-written, & visually superb. it is THE BEST MONSTER MANUAL that TSR has put out. The Bomb!

This book is well-written, lots of fun to read, and the illustrations are fantastic.

Fans of the novels will enjoy this as much as game players.

"Betting Thoroughbreds" is a good book. After you read it, you will be equipped with many "weapons" on horse racing. This books tells you that horse racing is more an art than purely mathematics. I highly recommend you to read this book.

This is one of the best handicapping books I have ever read and I have read just about every one...it's not full of get rich quick strategies...just solid handicapping education by someone who has the experience and it shows in the book. I'd recommend this one coupled with Tom Ainslie's book.

From Silky Sullivan to the making of speed figures, and on through "looking through the trainer's window," Steve-O's book has things to teach even when he isn't trying. But most of all, this book is sound on the fundamentals. Handicapping thoroughbreds, as a craft, contains elements of math, intuition, reason and insight all bound up in a chance proposition. Cut down the chance-factors, concentrate on what you understand, and you CAN do well. Davidowitz's book is the first step & easy to read on top of it all.

This book is one of the best books on the subject
of English Bible versions. It is concise, well-written,
and pleasant to read. One gets the impression that
the authors are in love with the subject matter.
Their enthusiasm for the Bible in English is
contagious. There are many books on the English
Bible, there are none better than this one. It works
well as an introduction to various translations
and I could see this book being used along with
Comfort's, _Essential Guide to Bible Versions_ in
a classroom setting in the church or a school.

Again, this is an excellent book and I highly
recommend it to all who are interested in the
study of the English Bible.

This book is incredibly user-friendly and provides a valuable look at the history, making, and various translations of the Bible. As a seminary student, I can assure you that this book is very helpful in explaining the pros and cons of each translation of the Bible. I constantly refer to this work for a quick reference guide to translations. Biblical student or not, everyone should check this book out. I also recommend Sheeley and Nash's "Choosing A Bible: A Guide to Modern English Translations and Editions", which is also an excellent resource.

I found that this book is a must for the person looking for the perfect bible. Sheeley/Nash's book provided a simple, yet thorough, explanations of an exhausted list of bibles. This book answers many questions including: what bible is best for my personal study, which translation is better for my church, why are there different translation anyways? Before beginning a personal or corprate study of the bible this book is well worth the short time it takes to read.

The Big Idea is a great view into the world of great business innovation. The Big Idea looks in detail at some of the great innovative products of our time such as: the remote control, Teflon, liquid paper, Velcro, Microwave oven, USA today, Silly Putty, post-it notes and many other innovative products.

The Big Idea is good at is getting to the story behind the story. I was amazed that many of these innovations where thought of in a flash of inspiration, but took many, many years to be realized as products (Xerox, Polaroid and Barbie). I was also reminded of the personal and financial hardship that many of the entrepreneurial innovators faced. Many innovators had several (many) failures among the way to reaching their success.

The Big Idea also impresses the need to copyright, patent and trademark your creation so that you can reap the rewards from the creation. There are also a couple of interesting examples of innovation within a corporate setting.

If you want to innovate you need the commitment and persistence to stay with it for the long term. The Big Idea closes with the following lessons from innovators The Big Idea covers.

1. Think of things that never were and ask, "why Not" - innovations is doing what others don't see
2. The Power of One - Behind every great innovation there is typically a single individual driving it forward
3. Keep It Simple, Stupid - complexity kills innovations
4. First is best - own the consumers mind by being first
5. Try, try again - when you fail... try again
6. Risk Business - to hit homeruns you have to swing for the fence
7. Synergy is necessary - know you strengths and weaknesses and let other's strengths offset your weaknesses

The Big Idea builds these lessons out with a good level of detail and it worth the purchase price.

This book is perfect for any entrepreneur who would like a dose of inspiration and a quick read. Strauss describes the design process and marketing of many of our favorite products (Palm Pilots, Barbie dolls, Tupperware, cell phones) along with the difficulties these entrepreneurs encountered. Although the word "visionary" is overused in today's business world, these men and women were truly visionaries who marched to the beat of a different drummer. Strauss focuses on different rules of innovation in each chapter, and the book becomes a cohesive (although certainly not exhaustive) lesson on building a business.

This is a different sort of business book. Most are boring or self-important. This book was neither. Rather, it was a very enjoyable read while still being very useful. The stories were informative and entertaining, and, I thought, drove home the salient points. As an entrepreneur, it was helpful to see how others created great companies.