It is hard for me to find a book that walks the fine line between being too academic, and too 'dumbed down'. Golden walks this line beautifully. He gets right to the point without being losing the reader, or losing the readers interest. This book is an excellent history of astronomy. It is also great look at the mysteries that still puzzle stargazers everywhere.

I have an original copy of this classic. Not a photo-copy. NOT much else of Americana as spectacular.

Vets should have this book, and quit guessing work on reptiles. It is very helpful for breeders and serious hobbyists. Take this book to vets and educate them.

Phenomenal photography of sacred sites from around the world. Not all the sites are considered sacred from a traditional standpoint but are sacred from the standpoint of moving the observed to a sense of reverence. From Ayer's Rock in Australia to Machu Picchu in Peru to Glastonbury Tor in England this is a collection of landscape photographs and paintings that are sure to leave a reader with a sense of awe. With each picture there is also a poem or appropriate prose. At another time and place they may have been inspirational words but here they only distract. The last dozen pages of the book contain a few articles about the earth and our responsibilities for the earth and they are excellent articles.
This is a book to purchase and keep out in the open where you can open it to a random page and enjoy the beauty that it portrays. Leave it on a coffee table or end table when entertaining and it is sure to open up conversations as someone pages through it. Read it in thirty minutes, enjoy it for a lifetime.

The sisters have plans for a weekend of fun and frivolity, but those dreams are quickly dashed when Sebastian has them in rehearsal for the Under The Sea Musical Gala, which is in two weeks. Owing to the tight schedule, there will be no free time, as it will be taken up with the rehearsals. Needless to say, there is great chafing between the sisters and tempers flare. Sebastian gets an invitation to the Dixieland Waters Jazz Festival, as is directed to go by King Triton. Aquata is ordered to lead the rehearsals, but she'd rather rehearse for a play instead, a play she wrote. However, Triton put the kibosh on that, wanting emphasis on the musical, so the sisters do double duty, learning both the music in the morning and the play at night. The double-duty schedule has them both tired and snappish, as now both artistic creations are suffering from the split efforts. Just when they are about to give up, Ariel hits on a plan to combine both the musical and the play as one. The book makes fun of itself, when the "Seven Sisters" all have names that start with "Z" and are not much different in character than the sisters themselves. Valuable lessons in working together and keeping an open mind come into play here, as well as the humor.

It might be out of print here, but they are giving it away as far as I can tell if you place an order for their magazine.

Ther are over 100 recipes dedicated to tasty meals. They have cut down the salt and stepped up on the fiber. There are recipes for cornmeal waffles and buckwheat pancakes.

If you need a recipe for corn-and-chedar-cheese chowder, then this is your type of coobook. They also have casseroles, roasts, and other meals which they claim are more healthy for you.

If you can't find it here, try contacting the magazine directly. They seem to be giving them away.

This is a very good, thorough, and informative text that covers all the basics of sedimentology and stratigraphy. It is frequently used as a textbook in such classes, including when I took it at Baylor University. It is easy to understand, well-organized, and very clear.

A superb book for the Jeep nut ! Great color reproductions of Willys advertising and a look behind the scenes of those very ads. A great way to spend a rainy (or sunny!) afternoon without having to wash-up afterwards ! I have read through my copy many times, and may even buy a second copy to cut up to frame my favorite ads.

Frederic Prokosch is the author I would most wish to save from what Gore Vidal has called "time's winged wastebasket." Born in 1908, his career extended from the early 1930's to the 1980's. He combines an extraordinary talent for description and a lush romantic prose style that never crosses the line into being purple with a modern -- nearly existential -- sensibility. One might think the two would conflict, but remarkably they don't. Prokosch invests scenes of near-total bleakness with stunning beauty, and describes scenes of the most intense beauty with a sometimes disturbing detachment. His gift for language surpasses any American of his era except Fitzgerald (and they are neck and neck), but the quality of his thought is clearer. Fitzgerald learned his style from Keats, but Prokosch seems by temperament much more capable of the negative capability Keats extolled. The influence of Prokosch, who was perhaps more widely read in Europe than in the U.S. (his home country), can be found in magical realism (Garcia-Marquez, Bowles) and in the current generation of European authors (Rushdie, Kundera, etc.).

_The Seven Who Fled_ is Prokosch's second novel, a follow-up to _The Asiatics_, whose debut had brought him considerable critical praise. Both novels are set in Asia, a continent Prokosch knew at that time only from maps and National Geographic surveys. Whereas _The Asiatics_ follows one young American from Trebizond (on the Black Sea) to Indochina, _The Seven Who Fled_ follows (naturally) seven characters with different backgrounds who start out together but are scattered by political upheaval and try to escape from central Asia. Following seven characters allows Prokosch to more fully explore the human condition -- the different ways people react to the unfamiliar and to danger, the different fates that result either from their decisions or simple bad luck -- than he could with one, though of course he sacrifices some dramatic unity in the process.

The seven characters are of different nationalities, genders, belief systems, etc. But rather than -- as with many books of that era and ours -- the characters becoming representative types, a thinly disguised way for the author to generalize about their respective categories, what comes through is a broader sense of the inadequacy of any one narrow viewpoint. We may like or dislike certain of the characters, but they hold our interest because of their common humanity -- and, at times, their inhumanity.

I have no desire to spoil the outcome of the novel for any who can find it, since it is currently out of print. But I would hold up certain scenes for comparison with any written in the 20th century. For example, one of the characters freezes to death, and the chapter which his progress slows and stops and his mind drifts to the home he will never see again is masterly, indeed quite superior to any similar scene written by Jack London.

Prokosch would turn to the far east again in his fiction -- _The Dark Dancer_, set in medieval India, is quite good -- but these first two novels are arguably his best until _The Missolonghi Manuscript_, a faux-memoir of Byron's last days in Greece. Perhaps it is the stoic aspects of eastern philosophy and religion that drew him, for the sensibility in his novels is very nearly Buddhist in its overall detachment while remaining Romantic in its particulars. Whatever it was, the world he has imagined will likely strike you so powerfully that you will choose to return more than once.

The best thing about this book is not only the fact that it has all of Simon and Garfunkel's songs and songs, including the first ones from late '50s early 60's, the book also has never seen huge photos of the duo, plus articles from the '60s, and notes by Simon showing how he wrote his songs... Amazing.