There are some really beautiful pictures above and below deck. The facts that are mentioned through out the book keep you interested the whole time the book is open. I find myself going back to the book over and over again. I definatly recomend this book to anyone how loves boats & wood work.

I really enjoyed this book. Recommend it to all. Pretty pictures. BUY IT FOR YOURSELF!

This book was filled with great photos and lively text. Highly recomended. Got it for Christmas. Like it a LOT!!

This is a fantastic book by 2 very dedicated professional educators. It is very worthwhile both for its 'fun' interactive activities with your children, and as an extremely valuable educational tool for 'stealth teaching'! (Your child thinks they are just playing, while they are secretly being educated!) We have also found it very useful in helping your child with any learning 'issues', (reading, math, etc.) using enjoyable, interactive activities.

We VERY HIGHLY RECOMMEND this book

My daughter just started second grade. I am very uncreative, and have a hard time thinking much beyond flash cards. When my daughter's teacher told me last year that she had to work on phonics, I had no idea what to do. (The Hooked on Phonics program costs almost $300!) This book addresses phonics, math, and more, for a lot less money. The ideas really are fun - this is as painless as it gets. A good investment. I'm going to buy the 1st grade book for my son.

As a second grade teacher, I am extremely excited about A+ Activities for Second Grade. FINALLY, a developmentally aprropriate resource for parents that is "user friendly," and FUN! Miller and Singer have developed a sequence of activites that allow learners to celebrate active learning at home. I will be utilizing this book in my own classroom to compliment my existing curriculum with hands-on learning experiences. I will be recommending this book, HIGHLY, to the families of my 2nd graders, as well as my colleagues.

I read this book in this time of Christmas, 2001-2002. The content was incredibly interesting and changed my mind about the narratives of Jesus infancy. The two initial chapters of Matthew and Luke now say different things than I understood just a month ago. Recommendable only for people with a very well cemented faith. Short and very interesting and clear reading. That is the reason why I am a father Brown's fan.

This booklet contains an excellent summary of some of the important conclusions reached in Father Brown's comprehensive and scholarly work, "The Birth of the Messiah." Father Brown's concern in the booklet is the theological message of the evangelists--he views this as the most important aspect of the message, and something that can get lost amid modern searches to either prove or disprove each item of the stories as historical events.

As usual, the late great Father Brown did an excellent job. He explores the Old Testament roots of Mathew's and Luke's Birth Stories and analyzes broad and beautiful topics such as "the Meaning of the Magi" (the Good News is for all who will believe, including Gentiles) and the "Importance of the Shepherds" (they symbolize an Israel that comes to recognize and glorify its Lord Jesus, the Davidic Messiah foretold in the Jewish Scriptures).

Father Brown said he hopes the regognition that there is an adult Christ in the message of Christmas--i.e., that the theological meaning of God's gift of Jesus is included in these beautiful opening verses--will lead believers to proclaim that revelation to others, and that they will respond in faith. It was a wonderful thing to have this brilliant and intellectually honest scholar also put his faith on display.

This book is short (50 pages) and well written. It can form the basis of an lay class on Christmas or Advent, either led by clergy or laity. Excellent resource.
This book is an exacting and thoughtful set of essays by the most eminent bibical scholar of our time, the late Fr. Raymond Brown. It is a summation of much of what he wrote elsewhere in his volumnious work (for example, his epic "The Birth of the Messiah"). In this 50-page book he explains why the gospel writers wrote the birth stories the way they did, with differing plot twists. Brown reaches profound insights with major implications for the spirituality and theology of the Christian Church. His insights about the centrality of Mary is particularly interesting, especially for a Roman Catholic. He sees the miracle of Mary not so much as the "virgin" birth or as the theotokos (mother of God) of the early Church, but rather as the first and most loyal disciple of Jesus. And that should have implications about the role of women in the Church and priesthood.
Brown, as ever, does his homework. His scholarship is solid -- even the footnotes are worth reading.

Matthew Zapruder's American Linden is a sometimes surreal, often funny, always genuinely expressed book of linguistic constellations. He mentions Spanish and Greek and logic, Tagalog and tunes and melody, birdsong and currencies, and he writes "I am guilty of secret constellations." Yet these constellations are not altogether secret, but rather playfully at play, put into motion like a wonderful mobile alternately inducing delight, clash, harmony, distracted thoughtfulness, etc. The pieces of the mobile, dangling as if from thin metal ligatures, are clouds and golems, farms and days, foreign currency and flowers and breasts and noon, and they assemble and reassemble in shifting clustered galaxies that I thoroughly enjoyed gazing at, stumbling across, chuckling over.

It is a book made of inventive and continuous, quirky and comedic, unrolling threads of metaphor, many surprising but sensible as the cat whose "mother was a sofa, a whole/ neighborhood of comfort, support,/ understanding..." In this, and in many creative reversals and convergences, he causes elements to flow into one another, creating an odd, complex, (but not dissonant or off-putting) amalgam of yet almost intuitive experience-"when that ten AM birdfeeder skylight/ perfectly lifted/ from morning hour/ halted a moment beyond my fingertips/ to perch half still/ and three quarters in motion/ a sketch of a hummingbird..." He understands the magician's and the comedian's craft of the set up, the teasing of expectation, the timing of delivery, the slip into an unforeseen magnificence of surprise. But here it is without the magician's grandiloquent drama- this is a book and a craft and a language not caught up with or in itself but rather generous, comic, and sometimes, idiosyncratically resplendent.

Writing about poetry is ludicrous, especially when the poems are written by Matthew Zapruder. The poems in AMERICAN LINDEN are intensely personal, not only in style of placing words on paper, but also in the spectum of ideas that flow through his brain. Many of these gems are about the actual attempt to write poems - aborted starts, frustrated beginnings. But when this poet sets foot outside and allows his kaleidoscopic gaze to pause on barns, birds, memories, imaginings, then his mastery of form and communication sets sail and the results are fresh and scintillating.
It is ludicrous to write about poetry....this poet distills beyond essence ideas that only tap at our imagination. "I try to be a good hillside/my eyesight salty and clear,/and hold still all night. /..../ All the next hours will be empty shelves./ Until I'm a storm,/ and only a flower knows me." I suppose one has to say something in a review: Read these please.

By turns titian and upward, American Linden is a book of pirrouettes, lilts and fanny packs packed with snack packs of wisdom unpackaged. I don't say any of those three things lightly, for titian is yellow in a world of browns, upward is mobile in a world of static, pirrouettes turn in a world of straight lines, lilts lilt in a world of gilded lilly livered non lilters, and wisdom is so often lost in the sound byte (chomp!). And, of course, a book is good to read in a world of non-reading books. To wit: Brevity is the soul of America, and its Linden is brief by turns fabulous and in the voice of James Urbanaiek. What Matthew Zapruder asks again and again in a kind of falsetto of the mind is: How deep is your love? While this may seem funny to those of you unaccostomed to the high seriousness of the fabular and the urbane, it is decidedly as rich and wise a question as it was when it was first asked on that day so long ago. Who better to tell the tale of latent causes, sterile gauzes and the bedside morale than this poet? Who better to sing a song of this slow century than one who is just a man we see how he am, he binds with his hooks and opens the books. Dirty black car. Buy American Linden today. Read it. Become the man you am.

This book will take your breath away. If you're a Bakelite aficionado, you'll want this book to show others why you are. If you're a novice collector, as I am, you'll see how wrong you were if you thought Bakelite consisted of jewelry, radios, napkin rings and salt and pepper shakers (though those are here, too, and probably as you've never seen them). And if you (perhaps most enviously of all) have no idea what Bakelite is, this book is the best possible introduction. Color photographs spaciously and copiously displayed throughout tell the story, with just enough text to supplement without being invasive.

Much of the book's power derives from the ways in which different collectors display and combine their Bakelite. Sometimes it's the sheer volume that makes the impact, and sometimes it's the unexpected and witty use of Bakelite where you'd expect to see real fruit or flowers. And sometimes, when a piece is just extraordinary, it'll be shown on a jacket lapel or on a wrist -- and that's all you'd want.

Categories include things like "Patriotic," "Carved," "Reverse Carved," "Nautical," "School Days," "European," "Tropicale," "The Bakelite Table," but these are merely organizational devices that don't in any way make the presentation monotonous or predictable. The colors of Bakelite are as varied as the pieces in which they're found. With this much variety, there's nothing monotonous about the Bakelite on display.

I bought this book on a whim and without benefit of being able to page through it; seldom have I had a whim so handsomely and expensively rewarded. I say "expensively," because the book sends me to ebay, where I'll begin adding to those napkin rings and s/p shakers immediately.

Beautifully photograped bakelite jewelry and objects. A must for any beginning or advanced collector. Great guide for a "wish list". Highly reccommended.

The pictures are excellent. There are more pictures in this book than in any other Bakelite book I bought. The book has a tremendous variety of bakelite that I have ever seen (pins, bracelets, crib toys). I rate it an A++++.

Beware, Dawn is one of the best mysteries I have ever read! It's about a girl named Dawn, who starts to get weird phone calls and creepy letters during a contest for the Best Baby-Sitter, so she doesn't want to tell anyone one about it. Soon, she figures out that every other Baby-Sitter is getting the same creepy calls & letters, except for Kristy, but the ending is still a great surprise. You really should read this book at night because it sends chills down your spine and makes you afraid that someone might be at your door!

The book is about a person who threads Dawn but should she tell the other members or not?

At Stoneybrook Elementary there is a Sitter-of-the-Month contest. Dawn wants to be the best sitter of course and soon she gets threatening notes from a mysterious Mr.X Then all kinds of freaky stuff starts happening to all the Baby-sitters. What will happen next? Read it to find out.

This isn't a how-to guide. This is, however, a book proposing a theory, legends and myths of the beyond according to Celtic traditions. It is fluent and very well put and I believe in can fit young readers and old as one. Although it is fairly leveled and can be used as more than just bedtime reading, it draws one into the wonderful, lost world of the Celts.

To those who practice witchcraft - it is a beautiful guide to the Celtic afterlife, and with it arrives an inspiring deck of Tarot cards, especially designed to read after-life journeys. The concept and the practice are a thing of beauty. I would recommend you practiced this specific reading thoroughly before applying it on others.

On the personal note - I bought this book shortly after a family member who was a dear friend had died. While pondering the meaning of death and what it suggests, I started a deep research on cultures and the way they have related to death, sorting out my beliefs in order to face fears and worries. This book was a lifesaver.

As always, Caitlin Matthews has managed to express in an outward and manifested object the deep strata of perennial truths of the Celtic soul. The premise upon which she approaches her subject is a fascinating one. . . that, indeed, like the Tibetans and Egyptians, that the Celtic tradition has its own particular expressions of a 'Book of the Dead': a compendium of stories or tales believed to be of Otherworld origin that speak to the soul of the living about the passage after death. The particular mythopoetic and shamanic root story that Caitlin approaches is that of Immram Curaig Maelduin Inso, or The Voyage of Maelduin's Boat.

Indeed, a fascinating account of a mystical voyage to thirty-three islands, each of which holds a particular adventure or lesson to the voyagers. Undoubtedly a strand of the many sea-faring tales of the Irish (such as St. Brendan the Navigator), the Immrama of Maelduin in THE CELTIC BOOK OF THE DEAD, proves to be an invaluable contribution to Celtic studies, visionary tradition, and the modern need to reincorporate the tools and sacred orientations of the psychopompic process (conscious death journey, or soul-leading). ...

A thought provoking journey into our own souls. Well written and researched. The cards are illustrated beautifully. I can't say enough for it. Those seeking to learn more about ourselves this set is a must.

This book is a humorous way of explaining the eeks, creaks, squeaks, taps, raps, snaps, bumps, thumps, and clumps you here in the night. The three bears in this story are frightened by sounds of mice, spiders, and bugs getting ready for bed. Little do they know however that the noises they make frighten the little mice, spiders, and bugs just as much.

I've had this book since I was 4 years old and from that age, up until I was around 8, my mother read me this book every night before going to bed. I enjoyed it so much because it was such an amusing book and I loved the way the author emphasized the noises. Being 14 years old now, I treasure this book. I strongly suggest buying this for the young children in your life. They'll love it! I don't know of any kid who wouldn't.

After first being introduced to this book by Captain Kangaroo, this story became a favorite bedtime read for our children. Puts a new and delightful spin on "things that go bump in the night!" Have been trying to locate a copy for years and years to read to a new generation! Thanks, Amazon.com!

In Karen's Witch she thinks that her neighbor is a witch. She thinks up wierd things that she thinks her neighbor does.She tries to get in her neighbor's house.She gets in trouble for going in her neighbor's house.

Since the beginning of The Baby-sitters Club series, six-year-old Karen Brewer has always been afraid of her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Porter, who she calls Morbidda Destiny. She believes the old woman is an evil witch who flies around on her broom at night and casts spells on everyone. During her weekend stay with her father, Karen vows to expose the witch, even though she's forbidden to spy on the neighbors, especially Morbidda. Of course, Karen doesn't obey rules, which consequently allows her to overhear Morbidda discussing an upcoming witch meeting with her black cat, Midnight. With the help of her best friend (Hannie Papadakis), Karen sets out to sabotage the meeting and save Stoneybrook from a coven of witches.

"Karen's Witch" is the first book in the Baby-sitters Little Sister series, a spin-off of The Baby-sitters Club series. These books are geared more for younger readers (age 7 - 9) and follows one imaginative little girl, Karen Brewer, Kristy Thomas's younger stepsister.

Karen gets carried away sometimes. In this book, Karen thinks that her next door neighbor is a witch. If you read it, you will feel the same way. I would give it five stars.

Barbarian Virtues is in many ways a brilliant text; it offers a strikingly complete, coherent, and well-written history of U.S. imperialism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Regrettably, this fascinating treatment of American nationalism leaves questions of race only partially examined. Although Jacobson's work highlights the role that the racialization of those bodies making up export and labor markets played in constructions of Americanness, he fails to show how this racialization may have depended on a racial paradigm centered around the devaluation of blackness that already existed by the post-Reconstruction era. Barbarian Virtues covers a period of time in which stereotypes of black savageness formed the basis for white supremacist terrorism, the failure of Reconstruction, and the disenfranchisement of blacks. Can turn-of-the-century elite and popular ideas about immigrants, evolutionary development, and civilization can be read outside of a racial paradigm in which whiteness (and indeed Americanness) came to define itself in opposition to black identity? Can a discussion of racial ideology and U.S. imperialism be complete without any reference to the nation's history of both actual and methaphoric (i.e. political, rhetorical) violence against its African-descended population, especially given that hundreds of thousands of blacks immigrated to the U.S. during the years that Jacobson writes about? If Jacobson succeeds in his goal "to redress two striking failures in our national memory-one regarding immigration; the other, imperialism," he also succeeds in reinforcing a third failure of American collective memory (263). This failure is the inability to conceive of the complex ways in which race--specifically, constructions of black identity--has been central to American imperialist ideology in particular and Western imperial reason in general.

I'm proud to be an American. Over the last month and a half, these six words have echoed through our radios and televisions more times than the latest Brittney Spear's sexy single. Stores are selling out of stars and stripes and CNN's ratings have gone through the roof. The United States was attacked and its' people can do nothing but wave the flag and propagate blame on foreign people.
American citizens have been taught to recognize their culture, their government, and their people as the epitome of what an advanced society can achieve. The ethnocentrism found in America overwhelms its' people and creates the drive to dominate what they perceive to be foreign. The attempt towards domination has been a societal precedent since the beginning of time. As America industrialized around the beginning of the 19th century, the U.S. fought this battle for power with imperialistic vision, expanding global markets and immigration labor. Their power was achieved through the profits of capitalism, at the expense of global human equality.
The strength of the U.S. is rarely questioned by its' citizens. The American people try to ignore the selfish actions that U.S. government and businesses have used to gain and maintain themselves as the world's super power. It's hard to find material that looks deeply into this matter, searching for truth under layers of patriotic dust. Matthew Frye Jacobson disregards the notion of America's rightful warrant of power and exposes the truth that lays beneath the blanket of American ideals in his book Barbarian Virtues: The United States encounters foreign peoples at home and abroad 1876-1917.
Jacobson recognizes this time period as an important era of the establishment of American foreign policy and the domestic thoughts surrounding these events. America's intense industrialization during these years created the need to open the doors of commerce to people around the world, and to open our domestic doors with invitations of immigration. The opportunity for immigrant advancement and the betterment of foreign societies because of U.S. involvement, are the notions that have been written down as facts in American children's history books. The story that Jacobson tells holds harsh truths that have been conveniently overlooked in the writing, or rewriting, of American history. He explores "foreign peoples as imported workers for American factories and as overseas consumers of American products" (4) and recognizes the illiberal nature of American actions.
America was forced to turn to foreign participation in their industrialized world of commerce because "this "nation of customers" did not have the spending power to support its shopkeepers"(16). The shift towards foreign markets and workers created a "deep American dependence upon these foreign peoples (which)seems to have fueled the animus against them"(13).
Foreigners were met with fear when they got off the boats and were manipulated in their own homelands to support the American economy. Their cultures were thought of as inferior and barbaric in comparison to the society of the United States. Immigrants would be bettered as they adapted to the American way of life and foreigners would be aided in their advancement towards civilization by having American goods available.
Exporters reduced the history and cultures of foreign peoples to "a series of wants whose particulars were as easily discerned by the Western eye as they were fulfilled by the Western industry" (26). The government slyly "aided" counties in ways that would establish markets for American goods. All actions were motivated by profit; human exploitation was a common cost and of little concern. Americans convinced themselves that these foreign people were inferior as a mechanism to avoid the guilt that would ensue from their actions in these lands. The inferiority of foreign cultures "provided justification for whatever action or interventionthe United States deemed necessary to exert its will outside its own borders"(49).
The United States not only used foreigners as explanations for their ill actions in world activity, they used them to explain the economic state of people within the U.S. American economists of the time made claims to "immigration intensifying the fatal cycle of "booms" and "depressions"" and declared it the responsible factor for the lowering "standard of living for all American workers" (74). Foreign workers and their homeland markets were completely being taken advantage of, while the American need for them was being ignored. Jacobson recognizes the extreme hypocrisy with which America dealt with foreigners and acknowledges the mistakes that were made and the lasting impact that these mistakes hold.
The exploration of the "white man" developed ways in which the people of the U.S. thought about other parts of the world.
"Entire continents were defined by their presumed emptiness, cultures by their lacks and absences, and peoples by their exemption from the flow of history". The Other, found in these barren spaces, was often sexualized and given an "erotic charge". The "feminized natives" were depicted as naturally and eagerly awaiting the "masculine West's" possession (112). Juxtaposing the idea of a feminine nature against a masculine culture further demonstrates the American tendency to look at these foreign people as uncivilized and barbaric. These erotic images of "otherness" were not too deeply developed by Jacobson and background knowledge of orientalism (Edward Said) would help to further digest these ideas.
I am impressed with Matthew Frye Jacobson's attempt to look past the instilled idea of American History to recognize America's place in world history. Americans must be informed of the past; they must be proud of the accomplishments and made aware of the mistakes. During the years between 1876 and 1917, America's intentions were to "reform a population to suit U.S. needs" (38). They did this in the name of world advancement, but the results were no doubt profitable to the United States and harmful to many foreign people. There is no doubt that both accomplishments and mistakes were made during this era and after reflecting upon Jacobson's revisions to Americas place in history, it's a bit harder to say I'm proud to be an American.

This is an extraordinary book. It traces the intersecting lines of
the American imperial drive for markets during this period, with the
push for immigration as a source of cheap labor. Interwoven with both
policies was an unremitting ethnocentrism and racism. This book
explains the relationship between these factors, and how they helped
shaped American nationalism and consciousness during the period. One
can also recognize the roots of recent American history in this
earlier period.... The book is brimming with startling and
thought-provoking information. Even one familiar with this period of
American history will find much that is new. The quotations in the
book are worth the price alone: almost every page contains a quotation
to make the jaw drop! This book is exceptionally well written, and
extremely fascinating. It's one of the rare books that had me
grabbing my friends and urging them to read it!