My mother bought me this book at a Barnes&Noble sale many, many, years ago. I have loved it ever since. The drawings and photographs included in the book give it a homey feel. The writting and style of the book, along with the author's own child-hood experiences, help to create a welcoming atmosphere. A great book, I like how the author chose a mildew-speckled paper print for the inside covers, he is poking a little fun at himself.

If you've ever wondered how your grandmother or greatgrandmother functioned without Walmart, or perhaps wondered how to manage a household if you leave civilization behind, or are a history buff, this is an indispensible book. Filled with colored pencil drawings,and clear concise text, it shows how women supplied the needs of their households. The main categories are: Kitchen Crafts, Dairy Crafts, Laundry Crafts, Around the Home, Textile Crafts, and Decorative Crafts. Each of these holds a true wealth of information that is lost to us today. As a longtime seeker for women's historic lifstyles, I have seen no book better, complete yet simple to understand, that addresses how our elders lived. If you find it grab it! This is abook that should be passed down. The frontspiece says another of Seymour's books, The Forgotten Crafts is a companion volume to this book.

A very favorable review of this book can be found on page 57 of the May 14 issue of the highly acclaimed Asian current affairs magazine, the Far Eastern Economic Review. I am surprised that amazon.com does not yet have this review listed.

Julian Schwinger was one of the greatest minds of our century. He learned, as I heard at one of his semminars, quantum mechanics by himself as he was about fourteen from the horse's mouth, that is, the great book of Dirac, "Principles of Quantum Mechanics". One could consider this book as built around Dirac's. It starts by introducing a pre-Dirac notation, symbols which represent measurements. These symbols "factor out" into Dirac's bras and kets when the system is in a pure state. The mathematical properties of these symbols, therefore, follow from the way quantum mechanics describes experiments. The dynamics is introduced through the use of an action principle, soon explicited in terms of continuous transformation groups whose infinitesimal generators include the observables. This action principle turns out to be a differential version of the now popular Feynman action principle, which introduced the concept of path integrals. Schwinger's book is a! barely explored mine of gold. Most of his ideas are there, waiting for you! I think this is the second most beautiful physics book I ever met. The first, of course, is Dirac's. I think Schwinger would agree with me.

James Seymour and friends compilates a wide array of chinese viewpoints of Tibets status. While only few of the writers acknowledges the Chinese occupation and argues for a independent Tibet, there are certainly interesting essays.

Books like this should be read be ignorant western and chinese readers alike.