"Confessions" is a "must read" for anyone who is planing on visiting Key West, or has in the past. I lent my copy to a co-worker who was about to go to that so-called Island Paradise. She said it was very helpful to her because it gave he a better understanding of the island than she would have had going in cold, so to speak! Michael Suib's columns in general give the reader valuable insight of the world of "the tourist industry;" not an easy industry in which to be employed. My impression of Michael Suib's columns is that they are windows into our American culture, using typical and not-so-typical tourists as barometers. "Key West Cabbie" celebrates the islands' spectacular beauty, but doesn't try to deny the squalor and ugliness. It's as if Key West is a metaphore for Americans at play: fun and carefree but w/ a dark underbelly.

First of all... I think I learned more about the POD from the introduction of this book than I did from reading the manual that came with the POD. I got better results in the studio after reading info in this book than I had since owning the POD. I'm not much for playing other people's music and trying to sound "just-like-them"... however, in the studio, I get clients that say... "I would like my guitar sound like this song or that song." Well, this book gives you the ingredients to get a big variety of sounds. From what you plug the POD into, to the needed adjustments to get a particular sound. Then just tweak it from there. At the price on amazon.com, you won't regret having this book.

Who are the seminal figures in twentieth-century art history that have changed the way we think about the relationship between art and history? Most lists would surely include social historians of art such as T. J. Clark and Griselda Pollock, but how many would include the American art historian Michael Fried? The exclusion of Fried would be a grave mistake, if an understandable one. It is understandable because there is still a tendency in art history to divide the discipline into two camps: those who connect art to its historical circumstances as symptom, expression, or reflection of the times (Arnold Hauser et al. ) and those who see art as an autonomous realm (Heinrich Wölfflin, Clement Greenberg, etc.). Fried is usually aligned with the latter group, characterised as formalists in opposition to the historians.

No doubt this misalignment accounts for the fact that there has been no major study of his work or its contribution to the discipline of art history. Art historians routinely read Fried's work through his seminal essay on minimalism of 1967 "Art and Objecthood" as if this essay holds the key to his particular brand of Greenbergian formalism. When this essay is used to disparage Fried's project, the argument goes something like this: the anti-theatrical tendency in art he praises there (the denial of the spectator, as against art that stages or theatricalises spectatorship) is simply a formal connivance, akin to Greenberg's will to flatness, which he imposes on earlier art in order to justify his taste in modern art. His historical trilogy, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Courbet's Realism, and Manet's Modernism, or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s, is then read against the grain as unhistorical speculation rather than a careful tracing of the fate of the anti-theatrical project in French painting. The historical grounding of his interrogation of spectatorship is thereby missed.

But academic times have changed; with the so called 'visual turn' in the humanities, and the concomitant interest in theories and histories of vision, Fried's project is ripe for reevaluation. This challenge is taken up by Refracting Vision, the first in depth analysis of his work by three Australian scholars: Jill Beaulieu, Mary Roberts and Toni Ross.

This anthology of essays complicates the polarisation of the art historical field into two camps. For that reason alone, it is essential reading for all art historians who are interested in the theoretical and methodological basis of their discipline. And shouldn't that mean everyone in any case? The collection also does much more than this: it contextualises Fried's practice, draws out some of his more recondite terms and themes, and takes his work into areas that he could never have anticipated. Very highly recommended!

This book has information about rolypolies, which are my son's favorite bugs. It also has many activities you can do with rolypolies, such as making a rolypoly hotel, a rolypoly playground, racing rolled up rolypolies down a ramp, and much more.

These activities seem pretty silly to me as a parent, but the kids loved them. The book also encourages the kids to observe many different things about the bugs and their behaviors. Heightening the kids awareness of small details is a good skill the kids can apply to other activities.

One of the premiere sex researchers, Michael Ross, takes his expertise into the underbelly of Gay life by looking at the dance party circuit scene. this is one of the only objective empirical glimpses into this important social phenomenon. It stands out as an important insight into a wide range of social behaviors surrounding the dance/rave/party drug scene and inroads into health promotion and damage control.

This is an excellent case study of the failure of conservation policies. It describes the destruction of the forests of the Philippines, Malaysia (specifically Sabah and Sarawak), and Indonesia. Each has gone from largely forested to almost totally deforested in 40 years; SCIENCE magazine in May called for desperate last-ditch attempts to saving the last lowland forests of Indonesia, where only the national parks are left and even they are now being illegally logged. Yet all these countries--especially the Phils and Malaysia--once had excellent forestry policies and departments. There are very few good case studies of the breakdown of conservation and resource management; this is one of them. In fact, it is one of the very best I have seen on forest destruction in the Third World. The author introduces the concept of "rent seizure": Seizure by government personnel of the power to allocate resources and/or income streams therefrom. This is, to some degree, just a values-neutral word for "corruption," but it applies to some cases that are not so much corrupt as simply foolish and expedient. He shows that insecure bosses are more apt to rent-seize than secure ones; they need the support, NOW, of backers that they can pay off with logging rights. He does not apply his concept to the US or Canada, but one can easily substitute "Idaho" or "British Columbia" for "Philippines" or "Malaysia" in the conclusions of this book. There are some problems with the book. Ross minimizes the role of other nations, explicitly letting Japan off the hook. Yet Japan not only provided a vast and unregulated market, but pressured these countries to export round logs, discouraging their processing industries--and thus the value-added that would have made it more worth while to manage sustainably. Also minimally mentioned is the role of the World Bank and IMF. Yet these entities played their part. They continued to give loans to the countries in question, even after they knew that the loan money would be misappropriated and the loan paid back by running down the country's resource base as well as its education and health care institutions; this was particularly notorious in the case of Marcos' Philippines, where World Bank loans went into Imelda's shoe collection. Ross is also rather less hard on the national government of Malaysia than he might have been; he blames local politicians in Sabah and Sarawak, but much blame should be attached to the national government as well. On the other hand, emphasizing the local scene is a useful corrective to the excessive emphasis on "globalization" that has distorted so much recent literature. If the human race survives the 21st century, the destruction of the world's tropical forests will be seen as one of the worst crimes in history. Not only were the forests and their resident people destroyed; the benefits were almost nil. Southeast Asia's forests went into disposable chopsticks, temporary siding for concrete-pouring, and other throwaway trash of the consumer society. The orang-utan, the Indonesian rhinoceri, and thousands of other animals are extinct or will soon be, all so that rich people did not have to wash a few dishes. The indigenous peoples of these countries are driven from their homes and livelihoods, all to produce some trash. Ross shows us how this could happen--how governments and firms could wind up systematically and calmly working for two generations on such an insane project.

Mere Creation is an excellent collection of current thoughts on the weaknesses of evolutionary theory. This book has been put together with the specific objective of addressing just one question, "Is nature a result of design or not?" What a breath of fresh air to not have to wade through all the theological assumptions of an author to get to the meat of their argument. The fact that a group of scientists and thinkers like those in this book, coming from divergent philosophical and religious traditions can still look at the data and logically reason to the conclusion that design was involved in the origin of life is remarkable. That they could do it without invoking their theology is amazing. No, this book will not make the most conservative creationists happy and the most extreme evolutionists will smart at the conclusions. The people who will be made happy reading a book like this are those who appreciate logic, value data and want to understand the thinking on both sides of the creation evolution debate.

This book is a blasting cannon in the face of the evolutionist. The scholars who contribute are very respectable and qualified to write on such matters. The contributors in the book include: William Dembski, William Lane Craig, Michael Behe, Hugh Ross, Phillip Johnson, J.P. Moreland, Henry F. Schaefer III, Robert Kaita, Jeffery Schloss, etc. The book is organized into five parts, each part covering a specific area of study. Part one deals with Naturalism, part two deals with Design Theory, part three deals with Biological Design, part four deals with Philosophy & Design, and part five deals with Design in the Universe. Many of the articles are very advanced and sometimes difficult to follow. Therefore, at times a background in the information at hand is needed. This book systematically tears down the misconceptions about Creationism and simply ruins any hope for an evolutionary position. Some of the stronger chapters were Dembski's titled "Redesigning Science," Bradley's titled "Nature: Design or Designoid," Meyer's titled "The Explanatory Power of Design," Schloss's titled "Evolutionary Accounts of Altruism & the Problem of Goodness by Design," and Moreland's titled, "The Explanatory Relevance of Libertarian Agency as a Model of Theistic Design." It is nice to see works like this available and it is even better to see the results that works like this have made in the scientific community (since this single volume received a great deal of response in the scientific community). If you want a solid text that deals with the falsities of evolution and does so in a very scholarly fashion then this is the best book available.

_Mere Creation_ (MC) is an advanced-level volume that should only be approached by serious readers who have previously been introduced to Intelligent Design (ID); one should at least read _Darwin's Black Box_ (DBB) before tackling MC. I think that the best way to explain what this book is about is to explain what it is not about, and I therefore think it is necessary to first correct misrepresentations created by some other reviewers. (So read the other reviews first to make more sense of mine.)

Most of the contributors are Old Earth (OE) or Progressive creationists, but none of the contributors are deists (i.e., they don't reject the notion that God might break the laws governing the universe). This does not mean that it is assumed in the book that evolution and intelligent design are mutually exclusive concepts. Ratzsch's contribution, "Design, Chance & Theistic Evolution," is a study of whether chance could be a method of design. He concludes, "Theistic evolutionists can even take specific features of the cosmos, of organisms, as empirical evidence of design - design built into the founding of the cosmos" (p.309). This does not mean that any of the contributors (not even Ratzsch) believe in theistic evolution. Rather, he concludes, "although the gap between design theory and theistic evolution is thus not as broad as generally believed, ... design theory has available to it resources beyond the reach of theistic evolution" (p.309) (i.e., ID involves arguments of postcreation design and intervention).

At first glance, once might come away with the impression that ID is essentially the same as the OE view. But in reality, at least four of the contributors do believe in the Young Earth (YE) view - so if one enjoys this book, one should be made aware that some contributors might be offended by labeling YE, "irrational" or "untenable." In particular, I speak of philosophers Nelson and Reynolds, who defend the YE view in _Three Views on Creation and Evolution_, edited by Reynolds and Moreland. Nelson and Reynolds list two other contributors to MC in the YE camp: anthropologist Hartwig-Scherer and her biologist husband, Scherer. (It should also be noted that at least two contributors to another ID book, _The Creation Hypothesis_, edited by Moreland, are also YE theorists: paleontologist Wise and linguist Oller.) Why can't one tell which contributors believe in what? Because it has always been held by YE creationists that Darwinism can be destroyed apart from age questions - so why not concede billions of years? As Dembski says in the Introduction, ID is "a theory of creation that puts Christians in the strongest possible position to defeat the common enemy of creation, to wit, naturalism. Throughout history common enemies have been invaluable for suspending in-house squabbles and uniting people" (pp.13-14). OE and YE are specified subdivisions of ID.

The two essays concerning the Big Bang should not discourage YE theorists. Craig concludes, in "Design & the Cosmological Argument," "the cause of the universe must be a transcendent Personal Agent" as opposed to being caused by abstract objects (p.354). I think all ID theorists can agree with that. Ross's essay, "Big Bang Model Refined by Fire," does give a brief defense of the big bang model, but is mostly about the fine-tuning of the universe, with three tables of evidence, including an estimate of the probability for attaining the necessary parameters for life support. Strangely, Ross starts his chapter with what seems to be an advertisement for his books. More surprisingly, he claims in Table 15.2, without empirical support, that "intelligent physical life is [only] possible" in a universe that is 10 to 24 billion years old. This claim appears impossible to prove, especially since an Intelligent Designer could bypass any rules that Ross imposes on creation. If there is to be a truce between OE and YE creationists, then both sides will have to give up making vague, unsubstantiated assertions, and rather concentrate on the unity that Dembski described.

You don't need to know much about this book or its contributors to know that the mutation/ natural selection mechanism has been rejected. For example, Johnson doesn't hold natural selection in high regard in chapter 2 of his _Darwin on Trial_. Or take Behe, whose DBB sought to be a formal disproof of the idea that mutation and natural selection can create molecular machines.

Contrary to what one reviewer wrote, ID is not an assumption; it's a deduction from the evidence - an inference to the best explanation. Design can only be inferred when law and chance have been eliminated. The authors certainly have no plans of following "in Charles Darwin's footsteps." Darwin's mission was to explain how to get designed products without invoking a Designer. To follow in Darwin's footsteps would mean to set up and destroy straw men and to hold to materialistic philosophy no matter what the evidence reveals. (Read Pearcey's contribution for more on this point - it's the lightest of the 18 chapters.) Of course, many of the authors have dedicated over two decades individually to the meticulous study of the physical evidence; and combined, the authors have dedicated over two centuries.

It has been over three years since the Mere Creation Conference, and participants are making great strides. ID theorists are continuing their research and will continue to get their books published by university presses: Dembski's _The Design Inference_ (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Nelson's _On Common Descent_ (University of Chicago Press, 1999) are just the beginning. Also, look for future works by Meyer and Wells. And although the future looks bright, I'm not so sure I'm as optimistic as Johnson is in the Afterword: he foresees a celebration marking "the demise of the Darwinist ideology," perhaps as early as 10 or 20 years from now (p.448). If Darwinism were just a scientific theory, then perhaps Johnson's dream could come true. But as the foundation of a philosophy - materialism - defeating Darwinism might be difficult. Evidence by itself cannot change hearts or open minds.

When a book is entitled "Wheatgrass: Natures Finest Medicine" you expect the author to be enthusiastic about wheatgrass, but this book goes beyond enthusiasm and into cultishness. Other than a few tables of nutritional information, there is little factual information about wheatgrass. Nutrition isn't even discussed until the fifth chapter - after chapters extolling the great leaders of the wheatgrass movement and promoting the spiritual value of consuming wheatgrass, including comments about revitalizing your cosmic cell consciousness, and how Jesus (as recorded in secret gospels) encouraged his disciples to chew grass. Then there are the many true life stories of miraculous healings from cancer and spiritual awakenings obtained by eating wheatgrass, not to mention a lengthy promotion of various health and spiritual renewal sanctuaries and resorts. It may well be true that wheatgrass is a wonderful health food, but this book contains so much hype that even what substance there is becomes suspect.

It's hard to know what to say about this book. It includes research abstracts and practical advice about incorporating wheat grass juice into your diet, but it comes close to attributing mystical properties to wheat grass, which seems to me to be a little over the top. If you are thinking of buying this book, it is probably because you or someone close to you has cancer or some other serious health problem. If you want to add wheat grass juice to a good nutrition plan and good medical care, this book will be helpful. If you are looking for a magic bullet or a miracle cure, this book might convince you that you've found it.

Dear Steve, Thank you for writing this wonderfully informative and well researched book. The title is inspirational and the content educational. We were fascinated by the history section. My husband and I have both benefited so much from taking our precious "green gold" that we are committed to telling others about wheat grass and your book. We are sharing the information by loaning copies of your book to people who are part of our lives(we bought 40 copies). Your keen interest, knowledge and enthusiasm for the use of wheat grass to maintain health and prevent disease as well as it's therapeutic benefits is evident to the reader. Would you consider a sequel?

i want to view the list of midi command

as a self-styled "expert" on multiracial people, i quickly snapped this book up, mostly because of its title (and because i'm trying to acquire a library on the subject). i should have read the flap and hesitated. Spenser has valid problems with the politics involved when the parents of multiracial people try to change, or even dispose of, our way of seeing race in America; i shared many of his complaints. but he then goes on to propose that creating a "mixed-race" category would divide the Black community (no mention of other races here) and serve to help white supremacy. his evidence? mostly anecdotal comments made about the creation of a mixed-race class in Apartheid South Africa. in an amazing leap of academic faith, he predicts the problems created by South Africa's "Coloured People" will repeat themselves in the slightly (?) different racial climate of the United States. his other sources include African-American, but perhaps ashamed of being multiracial, commentator Lisa Jones and many outdated books on race relations (I had trouble finding a reference to any book written after 1980). simply put, this isn't convincing or particularly interesting. i also found it rather insulting that he would attack the "mixed-race movement" without bothering to consider the people most involved in the process--mixed-race people themselves. our diversity can't be represented by a small, but vocal group of bourgeois Black folk and their white spouses. the vast majority of mixed-race people i know aren't pushing for "racelessness" or assimilation, but Spenser found an easy target in some people who do. i suspect he found a hot topic and saw his opportunity to get published. don't get duped like i did.

Jon Michael Spencer's perspective on mixed identity is behind the times, to say the least. He makes false analogies to South Africa's Coloured population when critiquing the problematic aspects of multiracial people and their quest for a social identity in the U.S. While America has a long way to go when it comes to racial inequality, the nature and context of racial inequality has undergone major transformations. (His analogies don't work so simply and compactly). I have to say, while I do disagree with Spencer on most accounts, what I appreciate about his work is that he expresses a viewpoint and perspective shared by many --especially our brothers and sisters of color. I think it's a counterpoint perspective we should acknowledge. Certainly, we have seen political conservatives like John Sununu, Newt Gingrich, Ward Connerly, etc. latch onto the "multiracial cause," using mixed-race people as ploy to dismantle the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. I don't blame those like Spencer for being weary. However, te "new multiracial consciousness" is more complex than Spencer's simplistic Black-versus-White analysis. Race in America, while important to examine from the Black-versus-White lens, has become more and more complex (interstructured) w/ a whole array of other issues like gender, sexuality, class, immigrant status/generation complicating matters. (READ Paul Spickard's chapter in Rethinking Mixed-Race, edited by David Parker & Miri Song for a critique on Spencer's work).