This was an excellent book. It is definitely one I will keep on the shelf for further reference. Anyone who is in HA & P should be taught with this book. Very well put together.

This book is a good source for learnig Human Anatomy and Physiology. However, more illustrations and photographs could have been more helpful. I haven't used the computer program that is assciated with the text. If any one has insight to it please Email me about it. END

In the main, Waddell's account follows a military brigade into the sacred and forbidden precincts of Lhasa, capital of Tibet. He enthusiastically remarks, with much of the pompous pedagogy of a Brit, about details of daily life for commoners and high priests alike, with comparisons between the mannerisms and culture of the Tibetans, Chinese and Nepalese.

He reveals, among many other and various tidbits, the history of Mt Everest, the indispensable qualities of yak dung (for fuel), the ignorance and widespread illiteracy of the supposedly learned monks, and the military difficulties of the expedition.

Only 1/4 of the book involves Lhasa. Of 448 pages of text, the expedition does not reach the capital city until page 326, where Waddell's observations continue on the "boasted divinity" of the Dalai Lama, whose face shows ravages of smallpox. The expedition had also been warned previously against visiting Lhasa, as the "Grand Lama might die from the shock to his religious feelings." Waddell also details the ways of life for Tibetans in the capital, who, like most Orientals of the period, "appreciate kindness, but worship strength."

Waddell appears too much in his writing. His focus is on the grand adventure, as felt by himself, rather than on the images he hopes to convey to his reader. His book is full of wonderful and interesting details, but these are sprinkled like pepper on a military and political expedition, and though intriguing from time to time, the book overall, without being tedious, is as dry a read as they come.

L.A. Waddell was a man of his times. His interest in the subject of "Lamaism"--Tibetan Buddhism--was groundbreaking, original and a precise description of the religion that avoids the spiritual tourism of the likes of Richard Gere and Steven Segal that is so often annoying today.

In "Lhasa and its Mysteries" we explore the spiritual and equally-important political landscape of the "hidden kingdom" of the Himalayas and find not a shangri-la but a complex feudal outpost.

Still Wadell utilizes his considerable sociological and historical knowledge to good effect, giving the reader an exact and in-depth account that is both a sociological treatise on the lifestyle of the peasants, the philosophy of the different lamaist lineages, and the flora and fauna then so foreign to outsiders. Anyone wishing to plumb the profound spiritual depths of the richness of Tibetan Buddhism decades prior to the Red Chinese holocaust of this important place is remiss to avoid reading "Lhasa and its Mysteries" and giving it an important place in his or her personal library.

This book is riveting and provided fascinating new information about Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Moore Dunbar. At the same time, it scratches the surface in too many places, relying on feminist cliches instead of substantive analysis. This is clearly a dissertation that was published with out the skilled editing that allows the author to reach new conclusions. Too many times, I feel that a window had been opened for me to get a glimpse into lives, then swung shut before insights had been fully explored.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was a magnificent poet who is not known as well as he should be today. Alice Moore is a fascinating woman who deserves to be remembered in her own right. Together they would have seemed to be the perfect couple, living charmed lives. Sadly, their relationship was far from perfect. This book enables us to understand the forces that made these two talented people what they were, that drew them together, and that pulled them apart. Too often, African-American history deals only with slavery in the past and urban poverty in the present. This book shows the "ebony elite" that is too little known, in both its proudest and most difficult aspects. It is a fascinating story of individuals and of the culture that impacted their lives in many unfortunate ways. A compelling story, well-written.

I was pleasantly surprised by the charm of this book. The factthat it is based on one of my favorite Chinese folktales made meskeptical, but Yep is such an excellent writer that characters in this magical fantasy charmed me. The ending gets a little schmaltzy, but it works.

Award-winning Yep has proven again why he is a master of storytelling. In this treasure of a short novel, Yep offers fantasy, mystery, and family magic. Particularly strong is the characterization of the grandfather-grandson relationship. This is a perfect book for readers just taking hold of the novel. Highly recommended, especially for those with a love of intergenerational and Asian American literature.

I have no doubt this is a well-written book (I read it in its entirety). Unfortunately, the examples weren't compelling to me at all. While the lambda calculus interpreter was interesting, the time spent on the theorem prover was not very interesting (I wonder if it was added as an homage to ML's legacy??).

Overall, I suppose this book is a little dated.

If you want to know something about ML, but learn it through good examples and interesting problems. This is the book! Also has some neat chapters on automated theorem proving, logic and interpreters.

Laurence Thomas and Michael Levin pose a stark contrast, not because they disagree but because their methods and approach are so different. There's a real irony in how they approach the issue. Laurence Thomas is an orthodox Jew who places much stake in the religious arguments, while Levin has little interest in anything religious. Because of this, Thomas seems more conservative, while Levin seems quite secular. However, it is Levin who is against "homosexual liberation" and Thomas who officially defends it, though his actual position is not very liberal. It is quite nuanced and unusual but would be considered more moderate in standard U.S. political categories.

Thomas argues that gay people should not be treated differently from any other group of people if the different treatment is simply because they are gay. He thinks the government should recognize lover-unions between gay people as much as it should recognize them between straight people. However, he argues that this should not be confused with marriage, which he says should be regulated by religious organizations not under the jurisdiction of the government, where married couples are formed explicitly (though not exclusively) for the purpose of raising a family. This is quite a conservative view, one that accords with the recent interest in covenant marriages.

Thomas is concerned to show that Biblical texts, even if they clearly condemn homosexual behavior, do not give any grounds for the hateful venom directed by religious people against the homosexual community. In this he agrees with many highly conservative religious-right-type people, though many of the public ones seem to disagree at least in their behavior, at least the ones vocal on this issue. I think he goes a bit too far when he suggests that someone who finds homosexual behavior appalling should nevertheless be happy about the union. That seems unrealistic to expect.

Levin, on the other hand, refuses to rely on religious arguments for the view that what is often called "hate speech" or "hate behavior" should be tolerated (excluding physical harm, of course). He argues that those who are made uncomfortable by homosexuals should be able to avoid them, even in public circumstances and in roles of hiring and renting. I find his arguments to be fairly bad in most cases, something unusual for such a well-trained philosopher, whose work in the philosophy of mind is quite respected. These are the sort of arguments I teach my undergraduate students not to use. He makes a few nice points, but his arguments on the whole seem just unmotivated, and his criticisms of Thomas seem to miss the point in many cases. It's unfortunate that someone else couldn't have been selected for the "conservative" view, but Thomas seems to have done a good enough job satisifying this conservative.

This short book pits a gay activist, Laurence Thomas against the iconoclastic Michael Levin. Thomas argues mainly from anecdotal data from the bible, that homosexuals were never that singled out by Christianity or Judaism for condemnation. In fact very little is even said about homosexuality. He then goes on to make some arguments in favor of civil rights for gays, and to me the arguments were weak but sincere.

But Levin as always, one of the most articulate political philosophers, argues some very good points against the liberationists, that is the radical left that wants to force society to accept gays. I am probably fairly unbiased, I am married, I have been around lesbians and gays a lot when I lived in San Francisco, and they just do not bother me one way or the other. Upbringing or genes--I don't know. But I fall in that small majority that doesn't want special rights for anyone, but at the same time cannot sympathize emotionally with homophobes. Christians and Communists alike offend me far more.

Having said that, Levin makes some brilliant observations against the liberationists. First, he points out that these new totalitarians are out to "force" society to accept all gays openly, and if they must they are willing, like the Bolsheviks, to kill those who cannot accept gays. That is, they are hell bent on brainwashing society to think the way they think. Levin brilliantly points out that, just like the liberationists arguments that gays are genetically born gay, likewise homophobia may also be as equally genetic. So how can it be any worse to be a homophobe than a gay? Levin states "Societies respecting the diversity of individual tastes, as ours professes to, let people shun what they find repulsive. Tolerance includes tolerating fences. Forcing people to put up with what they loathe is tyranny." He also comments that as genetic testing progresses, couples may choose to abort children that test for homosexual tendencies. And he also notes that where as the left denies that genes have any impact on the differences between blacks and whites with regards to intelligence, they then turn around and insist that genes cause homosexuality. All and all, this is a very readable book looks at more than just homosexual human rights.

Since I was a child in the 1960s I am intrigued by the political processes of that decade; by the civil rights movement, Viet Nam, and the three presidents of that decade. I have read a number of books and was looking forward to reading The Sixties. I was disappointed. Mr. Anderson tilts his approach and inevitable editorial comments too far to the left and leaves the reader with the sense that the book had a political agenda rather than the book being an effort to provide an objective rendition of one of the more critical decades experienced by the United States. He writes very well; but there were times that the bias in favor of hippies, campus protestors, etc., was just too much to take. I have the benefit of sitting in "judgment" of the sixties (the decade, not the book) with total objectivity since I was only a kid at the time and based on all of my reading this book is simply too biased to the left to be taken seriously. I would certainly not have high school or college students read it if the purpose is to give an accurate historical perspective on the sixties.

When I first had to read this book for class I thought that it would be bad. After I read it I saw that it is a great book. The author looks at the 1960's in stages and covers virtualy every bit of that time period. He makes it fun to read about this time and it is a very scholaly look too. All in all I give it 5 stars and wish I could give it more.

I don't know if I should call myself lucky or not by actually having the author (Behren) of this book as my Writing 2 teacher. All I can say is that this book is okay (just okay.. no better and no worse), but Mr. Behren is certainly not a good teacher. Anyway, this review is about the book not the author. All I can say is that I'm reselling this book back to the bookstore!! I certainly don't want to keep this one!

This cut down by more than half the time it has taken my students to learn to write summaries, integrate sources, understand argument, and write syntheses.

Many of the readings are also interesting and productive, especially those on Folklore and Obedience to Authority. I'd teach it in combination with a course reader, though, since there's almost no attention to the process of helping students find their voice and write more beautiful prose.

But no one book can do everything, and I plan to keep teaching this one. My students like it too -- with its focus on arguable ideas and the wonderful step-by-step breakdown of the writing process.

This book showed me a lot of outstanding magic tricks, I wanted to learn as much as I could on magic after I had read the awsome Harry Potter books.

I just received the pristine copy of this scholarly book that chronicles the life and artistic works of A. Henry Nordhausen from Amazon.com. Inasmuch as Henry was my uncle (by marriage to Miriam Bernstein Nordhausen (1901-1978)) I have an intimate knowledge of the man both as an artist and as a relative. Growing up in New York City, I was privileged to know Henry and to know his wonderful and historic studio at the Hotel Des Artistes. Although childless, he extended to me a measure of familial warmth and interest as though a close relative would do. This was evident in the high output of the thoughtful quality artwork for which he was known. I am in possession of 6 of his works, 2 that are described by the author as being destroyed in a fire (#'s75 & 76)and can attest to their high quality. Professor Schmeckebier has provided art students with an intimate and inciteful description of Henry's life and abilities, not only in the art world, but to the American community's diverse origins that makes this country the wonderful experiment that it is. He is able to convey the importance to the art community the need to immerse oneself into all the available education in order to ply one's trade. This he has done successfully. Regretfully, little of Miriam Nordhausen's influence is evident beyond a few paragraphs, but as his partner for 50 years of marriage, she was able to pursue a successful business, allowing Henry to pursue his extraordinary career. This book should be required reading for art students everywhere as to the man and his approach to his art.