Once finished with the second semester French (or the latest, fourth semester, if you wait until you learn more about the subjunctive), one should primarily use this dictionary to find the meaning and etymology of the French vocabulary. One can still have a translational dictionary standing by, but by using le Petit Robert, one is forced to read the definition also in the same language, thus enforcing one's comprehension of the written language. As a companion to this dictionary, Le Petit Robert Des Noms Propres helps a lot once one starts to delve into the French literature, politic, and culture.

The Larousse version is better illustrated, if one prefers such.

For conjugation, I would recommend Bescherelle 1: La Conjugaison pour Tous, instead of the "501 French verbs." The former is logically arranged (and thinner and easier to carry!) by presenting one way of conjugating and then listing the rest of the words that fall into this category at the end-pages.

A wonderful book with ample examples and food for thought for new and ongoing managers. This text was initially referred to me by a business school professor and I've since passed it on to freinds and managers alike.

This was a very enlightning book about the Lees history. Some very fascinating stories about the lees and their roots

i want to know the different kind of warm-up for the said game w/c is basketball.

This is the only Washington biography written by a contemporary who knew him and served with him in the Army. Certainly the longest Presidential biography I know of written by a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. According to Senator Beveridge's later biography of John Marshall, Marshall wrote it in installments, and sold it through the U.S. Post Offic distribution network, to make enough money to pay off his massive Virginia land purchsse which in turn enabled Marshall's children to live out their lives free of the need to write books or make land deals. And it worked that way. But that's not all this is.

The first entire volume says little about Washington, because Marshall felt he needed to set the stage with a condensed history of the colonies prior to Washington. Few of Washington's later biographers went to such subsequent introductory lengths, but then Marshall's law practice ended up acquainting him with the early pre-history of the deeds and conveyances of Virginia, the further elaboration of which can be interpreted as enveloping the rest of the colonies.

This is also a history of the U.S. Army, and how it fought and starved in successive cycles which are described in minute detail exceeding most other accounts. Some of this covers organized military campaigns preceding the declaration of independence, the scope of which I had not heretofore realized by undergoing annual waves of pilgrim-study in "My Early Education."

Leading and embodying this story of land and armies, and ideas, Marshall gives us Washington, illuminated most clearly by excerpts from Washington's own letters. Marshall also gives us Marshall, distilling out of military examples and instances of weak government preceding 1789, potent arguments for increased federal power to do the things our federal government has since done quite well: raise armies, raise taxes, subdue the Indians, kick out the European powers, build a strong navy, and take no back talk from smallish tyrants resentful of centralized governmental power directly and simultaneously exercised on each citizen, and on each state.

When Hamilton wrote that we need "energy in the Executive" he had to have been thinking of Washington, and Marshall catalogs this energy with meticulous documentation of each British officer leading campaigns against us, each subordinate officer on our side under Washinton's command, and how the constant maneuver of armies up and down the length of our seaboard was accomplished--usually without many shoes and without much dry powder.

So Marshall knowing Washington probably insulated him from too much disconnected iconography, and his writing is free of modern fixations on negative or unseemly personal or pychographic tidbits of trivia. Modern readers are left to cling to factual reporting of how Washington handled this British Lord or that recalcitrant congress.

There's a lot here in all five volumes, and the flow of the over-written parts isn't that bad once you get used to it. When one man had such a central role in all of the key events of our country's founding, and rode out the formation into its institutional phase, thereafter to die in bed at home, Marshall may not have been able to write it any other way than to go over all of the events, to catch the essence of the man.

Neat discovery: LaFayette was only 24 years old while commanding the French at the battle of Yorktown. Marshall quotes from the letters of Cornwallis (or maybe it was Sir Henry Clinton) who refers to LaFayette as "the boy." This is the same boy who later presented Washington with the key to the Bastille, which today hangs on the wall of the stairway of Mount Vernon going up to the second floor.

This book offers a great perspective on how Robert McNamara's decisions affected the lives of five ordinary people who consequently find themselves in unordinary situations. I think these stories, in conjunction with other historical texts, masterfully articulate some of the features of the clouded tapestry that we call Vietnam.

Robert Lowell has always seemed to me to be just out of reach. I was too young to witness his poetry readings to the Washington crowds protesting the war in Vietnam. By the time I was set "Skunk Hour" in my final year of secondary schooling, Lowell had been dead for a half dozen years. Based on Lowell's letters, poetry and critism and of those who knew him; this work is an exhaustive and comprehensive account of the poet's priveliged and frequently turbulent life. His three marriages are discussed, as are his spell in jail,( as a Conscientious Objector)and his numerous admissions to psychiatric hospital due to manic depression. From his aristocratic but dysfunctional childhood to his last years, the reader is made aware of Lowell's progression and prowess as a poet. Of fascination too is his interactions with other great poets, most notably Frost, Pound and Eliot; the latter described as 'The Master', a mantle passed to Lowell on Eliot's death. "Lost Puritan" is illuminating and revealing, it will bring Lowell into reach for anyone who is an afficianado of his poetry. A scholarly salute to the greatest poet of the second half of the twentieth century.

Amazing detective work!
Bob Cornuke has found the physical evidence that confirms Luke's account of Paul's shipwreck..... right down to the depth of the water! Incredible! A "must read" for anyone interested in discovering historical truth.

An intriguing, highly plausible theory of how Christianity was created by Jews, but only succeeded outside the Jewish faith. The teachings of Jesus were not embraced by the community in which he was born. To be a Jewish Christian you had to keep ALL the laws, including the restrictive dietary ones, and be circumcised. Tough requirements. To be a Gentile (Pauline) Christian you only needed to have faith. This ultimately made for a winning marketing strategy. This superbly researched, thoughtful book will rattle traditionalists -- though not scholar's -- cages. Clear on the impossibility of ever knowing if a man named Jesus even existed, the author elects to write with the working assumption that he did. He then traces the struggle between James, the brother of Jesus, and Paul, the newcomer from the north in their fight to create a new religion, something that Jesus himself never even considered. There were compromises, but Paul gradually began to win the day. First James ceded interest in Gentiles, the largest market, to Paul. Paul had the energy and drive to grow the numbers of people embracing his religious ideas. He made conversion easy for men by dropping circumcision, replacing it with the far easier to take baptism. As an outsider he was not hung up on the issue of Jerusalem. He had no notion of exclusivity and embraced all peoples -- Jew, Gentile, Greek or Roman -- who could be reached from within the Roman Empire. And then the roof fell in on the Jewish Christians directed from Jerusalem. The city was destroyed during the first Jewish revolt, and no Second Coming occurred to save them. James's hope for "his" religion, and James himself, died as a result of the revolt. Paul's Gentile Christians thrived in the wake of their adversary's destruction. The religion Paul invented would rise to become the most powerful monotheistic religion in the world. If you share the author's fascination with this topic, buy the book. His scholarship is excellent, and it's a darn good read.

From the rape of Ganymede to Michelangelo's loves, from the relationship of Batman and Robin to the letters between Freud and
Jung, this voyage speaks eloquently about the complex relationships between men.