I found it hard to put this book down. The characters are well developed, the plot quite believable. Trauma surgeons rule!

Howard Simon gets it right the first time! He captivates the reader with this ultra-realistic account of animal rights activists gone mad. The characters are well defined and the action keeps you turning the pages hour after hour. I've read this book several times and it got better every time I read it.

The author's scientific/medical background is apparent in this exciting thriller. Simon does an excellent job in painting a complete picture of his characters. Even the antagonists were people whose motives, if not methods, could be appreciated. A great first novel!

A real read! Highly recommended to those interested in oceans, and tracking the career of one of the most interesting scientists around. Opportunities like this could only come during this middle part of our century, and it takes a tremendous individual to take advantage and "ride the wave."

The book is well written, easy and entertaining to read, and remarkably understated. Recommended.

Oceanography grew up after World War II, and its growth is the story of Willard Bascom's career. Over a span of 40 years we find him studying waves and beaches, exploring for diamonds, measuring atomic blasts, advising the U.S. Navy on amphibious operations, salvaging ships, inventing deep-sea drilling and wet suits, fighting bureaucracies, and suing the CIA. Those of us growing up reading Scientific American in the 1950's and 1960's recall him mainly as an occasional author of articles on physical oceanography and ocean technology. Bascom's technical articles were flavored them with anecdotes, characters, and impressions of the sea. Bascom's book, The Crest of the Wave {Harper and Row) approaches oceanography from the opposite direction. It is an anecdotal account of ocean exploration and science with a little hint of technical material added. The result is a science adventure complete with heros, villians, entrepeneurship, and daring do. The heros, of course, are oceanographers, who take to the hostile sea in tiny, sometimes inadequate ships fitted with ingenious, sometimes recalcitrant devices. They are "can do guys," who fight storms and sea, finagle budgets, and finesse machinery. They mortgage their houses to start businesses and make stock deals. These are 80s-style heros living in the 1950s and 60s. The villians are drawn from the usual suspects. There is Lyndon Johnson interfering with project Mohole in the interest of Brown and Root, or the CIA stealing patents, or the Government of Bahamas trying to renege on a lease, or friends and associates corrupted by the find of a treasure galleon, or a recalcitrant bureaucracy intent on protecting its prerogatives. Daring do? What sort of daring do is found in an oceanography book? There is the usual stuff. Rescuing survivors of air crashes, scientists being swept overboard and lost, the loss of the tug Collinstar with all hands in a storm on the Skeleton Coast. There is the first deep sea drilling. Bascom was commissioned by NSF to design and prove a drill ship that could drill in water 100 times deeper than any previous holes. Using only 60% of a skimpy $2.5 million budget, Bascom managed to build CUSS I, the first ship to use dynamic positioning; and a ship John Steinbeck described as having "...the clean lines of an outhouse standing on a garbage scow." Not only did dynamic positioning work perfectly in its first deep water test, it did so in 14 foot waves, force 7 winds, and strong currents. Like the early space program, it was science working in the glare of publicity. CUSS I was the forerunner of the Glomar Challenger, which by now has drilled a hundred miles of hole in every ocean and provided us with nearly all we know about history of the ocean basins. The chapter on ocean pollution is especially appropriate in view of recent renewed concern over dumping in the ocean. It provides a highly readable account on long research into the dumping of sewage and waste in the ocean. The resulting picture is very different from that portrayed by environmentalists and the media, and shows how reasonable and worthwhile goals become captive to politics and superstition. Some material is taken from his earlier books; Waves and Beaches (1964), Deep Water, Ancient Ships (1976) and A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea (1961). However, these earlier books presented but small slices of Bascom's long and varied career: Crest of the Wave provides a panorama. Even the repeated material has additional detail added. Crest of the Wave shows, in anecdotal form, what modern science is. It is very little research and solving technical problems-- very much fighting ignorance, using diplomacy, and watching one's back side.

This book does a wonderfull job of depicting the struggles involved in raising a family & building a farm on the great plains. Just 3 or 4 generations ago many of our own families were living the same life as the Ise's.

You can get so lost in this story that you will laugh and cry with the family as they go through the years.through birth and death rain and shine you will enjoy every line of this book.I got a real feeling of what it must have been like to settle the country, and the early years of this century. now that we are leaving the 1900's in the space age learn what it started out like.

Ever wonder why you're still not happy with your life even though it seems like you have it all?

Do you feel uncomfortable when someone asks you what your future holds?

Can't figure out why seemingly little things mushroom into huge problems?

Many of us live our lives behaving how we think others would want us to or doing things a certain way because that's how our parents did it. Values Clarification is a series of self tests that will help you identify and understand, maybe for the first time in your life, what it is that is truly important to you and how to integrate those things into your life.

Each of the excercises is easy to understand and complete regardless of your education level. Another fantastic feature is that many of the excercises also have revised versions for you to use with children and what better gift for a child than a strong and grounded belief in their own values and morals?.

This book is a MUST READ for EVERYONE, so do yourself a great favor and get a copy, then share it with those you love and even (especially?)those you don't!

Values Clarification is an excellent source for junior high and high school counselors. The information and activities lend themselves perfectly for use in large class settings, smaller support group settings, and individual counseling sessions. The activities are eye-opening, interesting and very easy to facilitate. It is well worth the cost of the book.

The best selling Good to many prevailing beliefs about how business should be conducted studied large publicly held companies that were able to at least triple the value of their stock in comparison to their peer group and maintain this advantage for at least 15 years. There is nothing 'from the gut' in this well researched book.

This biography of George Kaufman is excellent and that's just for openers. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of this brilliant playwright, satirist, ladies' man, genius, comic wit, husband, father and friend. He led an incredibly full and fascinating life. The company he kept was unparalleled. The book reveals his earliest days as a child growing up in Pennsylvania,to his marriage to Beatrice, along with his many collaborations with the top writers of the period; many who joined him at the Algonquin Round Table. The book discusses the many women in his life, of which there were many. Not surprising. One chapter is devoted to his relationship with his daughter, Anne. The entire book is excellent; a real page turner! George S. Kaufman was incredibly talented and complex. I love this book! I've read it probably thirty time easily. Obviously this forum wasn't expecting this book to be reviewed or it would have given the option to rank a book 10 stars, which is what I rate it. I can't say enough good things about George S. Kaufman. The book also reveals the meaning behind his middle initial. BRAVO!

It's a mystery why Claude Simon is not more widely read in the U.S. A recent visit to the largest bookstore in San Francisco revealed not one copy of any of his books, and he is hardly an unknown or obscure author (Nobel Prize winner in 1985). It would certainly not be an eccentric view, and one I would not be the first to suggest, that he could easily be ranked close to the "big four" of 20th Century literature (Beckett, Faulkner, Joyce, Proust) and based on the four Simon novels I have read, I would agree. "The Grass" is a great place to start with Simon. It is his fourth novel, but the second translated into English. ("The Wind", translated a year earlier, is also a good starting point) It is helpful to read this novelist in chronological order, as it is with most important authors, but even more here as Simon's style has considerably evolved over the course of his career. Also, as this novel is part of a five-book cycle (the "Reixach Cycle") in which some of the characters reappear in other books, it is best to read them in order. His reputation as a "difficult" writer is somewhat undeserved, and no more than ordinary alertness will allow the reader to enjoy an incredibly supple and rich experience. The translations are excellent, as far as I can tell, judging from my limited reading of him in French, and are mostly by the poet Richard Howard, as is "The Grass." This novel tells of a post-World War II family in France, largely three women, and the narrative is loosely constructed around their memories and experiences, particularly those of a young woman who describes the journey towards death of her husband's aunt. The book, as other Simon novels, is very death-haunted and are filled with a sense of melancholy and dread. The descriptions of nature and the countryside are amazingly lyrical. Simon's heroic experiences as a volunteer on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and as a prisoner of war in WW2 and a member of the French resistance also show up in his fiction, especially "The Palace" and "The Flanders Road" which I also highly enjoyed. This was the first Simon novel I read, and I definately intend to read the others.

The World Eskimo Indian Olympics (WEIO) are competitions and demonstrations of Alaska Native music, dances, and games that have been held annually for over thirty years. In this unique festival, six Alaska Native groups are represented as they demonstrate and compete in traditional activities such as seal skinning, the blanket toss, the high kick, kayak races, and dances.

This is a truly lovely book: beautifully produced in paper-back with quality materials (so a joy to handle), interesting and insightful commentaries written in styles that aren't bound up by artistic jargon, and a wonderful, comprehensive collection of images in colour, put in meaningful order. I highly recommend it.

This is the sort of experimental novel that you can recommend to others only at your own peril. By way of illustrating my point, I will now quote one of the shorter sentences from "The Wind" (tr. Richard Howard): "I remember how the wind blew almost continuously for three months, so that when it did stop (a few hours or a few days--but never more than two or three) you thought you could still hear it, wild and wailing, not outdoors but somehow inside your own head: voices emptied of meaning, nothing but noise and, so it seemed, dust--the dust that penetrated everywhere, insinuated itself under your burning eyelids, in your mouth, communicating its taste to the things you ate, interposing between the skin of your fingertips and what they took hold of (papers left on the desk the day before, plates, napkins) that haunting, imperceptible, granular film." Still with me? "The Wind" is a lovely 254 page prose-poem, a long, sad sigh of a book. There is a story here--it deals with the pitful, tragic life of one Antoine Montes--but narrative is secondary to Simon's lyrical stream-of-consciousness prose, which at its best achieves an elemental beauty you seldom find in fiction. The appeal of this book is sensuous, not intellectual; you need not even have to follow the serpentine storyline to appreciate this novel. Parts of it can be frustratingly mystifying, but it isn't terribly difficult to read once you have become accustomed to Simon's lush prose. It really is a beautiful book. For those who keep track of these things, Claude Simon won the 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature.