Smith's poems are a dramatic projection of the mythical poet-naturalist yet made more human in telling journal poems. The style, content,and perspective are located in Thoreau's time and place yet timeless and universal here. It becomes a human and spiritual statement made through the great American Romanticist Thoreau.

Thoreau has spoken through author Smith in this incredible collection of poems. He speaks of nature, daily life, and relationships with sensitive heart. These are the words Thoreau wanted to speak and couldn't. Yet Smith manages to incorporate his own style and keen eye to the poems. Each one is a meditation. I highly recommend this book!

I found this book inspiring, poignant, sometimes funny, sometimes enthralling, always engaging. I've been toying around in the back of my mind with some kind of similar project; now I realize there's no need, because Larry Smith has already done it. In the process, he catches the feel of our lost brother Thoreau's life and times wonderfully.

Anton's Calculus textbook is the best I have ran across. It is a fantastic text, most of the proofs are worked out and for the most part easy to follow. His writing style is clear and extensive in which he avoids being dense which is a common pitfall in many math textbooks.. (Especially Calculus.) The problems are generally the right difficulty, and the examples are generally very good. He spends a lot of time concentrating on concepts over computational techniques. Paraphrasing, I completely agree with his preface in which its more important to understand the concepts. . . because every problem in the book has been computationally solved, understanding the concepts is the most important thing. This is especially true of the at times esoteric and difficult subject of vector calculus at the end of the text. Anton also integrates (no pun intended) the use of CAS and graphing calculators in his text.

The down side to the book is probably its price. It is a very expensive book!

As good as this book is, Calculus is a hard subject matter. the textbook alone is not enough. Supplement it with a great teacher and a lot of hard work and one should learn calculus very well.

I have taught Calculus at the University level for well over 20 years now. When I first arrived, the school had already adopted the 1st edition of Anton's Calculus, and the school (and myself) have liked it so much that we have stuck with Anton for 20 years, until 2000. For some reason, the Math Department has decided to change to Stewart's book. Let me tell you, Anton's book is most certainly the best. The examples actually explain the concept, the concepts are explained coherently in words before the mathematics is presented, graphs are abundant where necessary, and the book eases students into Calculus. I have found that deficiencies in trigonometry plague students through the calculus sequence. Mr. Anton provides a thorough review in Appendix 1, which clears up the problems. Also, Chapter 1 is a review of Algebra and Coordinate Geometry. This gets students into a mental framework necessary to learn Limits (Chap 2), Differentiation (Chaps 3-4), Integration (Chaps 5-6), Logs and Exponential Functions (Chap7), etc. My ONLY complaint about this book is the way Anton leaves logs and the number e out until Chap 7. Students are expected to learn it all at once, where I feel it would be better distributed throughout the exercise sets. But, again, that is my ONLY complaint. IF YOU WANT YOUR STUDENTS TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN CALCULUS, CHOOSE THIS TEXT. It truly beats the pants off Stewart's book!

I took my undergraduate calculus sequence from Salas & Hille's text and thought it was quite good at the time, but I think Anton's book is clearly the best I've ever seen for the beginning student who really desires a clear understanding of calculus. The mutivariable calculus is especially well presented, and it is crucial that the students understand this material for their future work in mathematics. Anton really makes a strong effort to help students understand calculus. Anton rules!

If you like old houses, (or at least early 20th Century houses) or you want to get a feel for some of the social history of the period, this is a wonderful book. I think it complements nicely the other house catalog reprints from Dover. While the illustrations and plans are smaller than those in some of the other books such as the Sears 1926 house catalog or the Aladdin built in a day catalog, it does show 500 houses. It also has some interesting articles concerning the state of domestic architecture circa 1925 or so.

Did you ever find yourself stopping your car to oggle and old brick or stucco bungalow, now a bit run down but free from "modernization"? Ever wonder how they were designed or what kind of floor plan they might have? For the amateur or the professional architect, Henry Atterbury Smith's compilation provides an accurate and intriguing reference to the historical developement of the modern suburban environment. For those of us who enjoy dreaming of one day designing and building our own bungalows, this book is pure delight. The house plans are displayed with the information which would have been available at the time of their initial distribution which can be quite amusing as well as historically informative. This book represents a set of ideals aspired to by the Arts and Crafts movement, ideals which should be appreciated and emulated by the architects and builders of the twenty-first century. Do plan on a long, leisurely perusal of this book if you enjoy history, architecture and craftsmanship as much as I do!

Casual readers should not be put off by the academic or esoteric treatment suggested by the title of this book. For _My Friend, My Friend_ serves as a good overall biography of both Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and describes in understandable terms the transcendental movement as well. The added focus is what each man thought of friendship in general and how it pertained to his relationship with the other. Newbies to the works and lives of these two men would do well to start their education with this volume. Ardent fans of either writer will find they disagree with some of the author's suppositions, though, especially in the discussion of how the men's real lives differed with the public personas they each created. Even so, it's an engaging read.

Harmon Smith has provided us with an engaging story of a friendship between two of America's leading thinkers and writers of the 19th century--Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Friendship was central to the Transcendental Movement, a platonic ideal that never quite materialized, so it is here as Smith puts their lives under the microscope. He captures their humanity in a way no other biographers have, because he is able to separate the mythic "Henry David Thoreau" from the human. The cautions come when Smith turns away from the microscope to record a narrative that often includes his own projections into the minds and hearts of his subjects. Worst of all is his use of the old Oedipal complex of Freud projected onto Henry and his mother Cynthia. There is little to no substantiation for such a supposition, and so one must realize where the book fails to use a wise discretion. It is, nevertheless, a wise and wonderful portrait of a friendship that lasted three decades.

Why are we so interested in the gory details of private lives? Does it really matter? In this case, I would say not at all. Why bother with such questions when you could be reading the juicy details of Thoreau and Emerson's sometimes rocky friendship? The warp and weft of their relationship formed such an intricate pattern over the years that one cannot help but be fascinated.

With this novel Mark Twain confidently changed the way Americans read as well as viewed literature. Through the careful construction of the two main characters Huck and Jim, Twain explores the questionable moral values and hypocrisy of society. Against all odds Huck and Jim form an honest relationship that rises above race, slavery, and southern society. Twain's story is told through the voice of boy who has not yet been "sivilized" by society, and is still able to live outside of convention. This novel combines the strong language that Twain has been remembered for, and a message that is as relevant today as it was in the early nineteen hundreds. As a college student who has read this book in middle scool, high school, and college, I can say that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was written for all ages and is an important and necessary educational tool.

I read this, since it was my school's outside reading assignment. The printing was so small, that I first thought it would be a boring read. But I soon figured that I was wrong. I found myself slowly slipping into the story as if it was all happening before my own eyes. The characters were very interesting. Especially Huck Finn seemed like a very likable person with a strong identity, wit, and a soft heart. He does not want to sit and let the world rule over him, but instead test his own ideas and proves to the world that he can be better than what the society expacts him to be. And although many say it is a racially biased book because of its frequent use of N word, nobody can deny that it was a commonly used word in the 1800 where the rogue institution called 'slavery' was considered healthy and inevitable. As a matter of fact, this is a book that actually tries to tell the world about the evilness of racial prejudice not promote it. One should read between the lines, in order to acknowledge Twain's subtle attempts. It was a thrilling experience and I recommend people to have for their own!!!!

Mark Twain's classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, tells the story of a teenaged misfit who finds himself floating on a raft down the Mississippi River with an escaping slave, Jim. In the course of their perilous journey, Huck and Jim meet adventure, danger, and a cast of characters who are sometimes menacing and often hilarious.

Though some of the situations in Huckleberry Finn are funny in themselves (the cockeyed Shakespeare production in Chapter 21 leaps instantly to mind), this book's humor is found mostly in Huck's unique worldview and his way of expressing himself. Describing his brief sojourn with the Widow Douglas after she adopts him, Huck says: "After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead people." Underlying Twain's good humor is a dark subcurrent of Antebellum cruelty and injustice that makes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a frequently funny book with a serious message.

The last completed novel by Henry James is, like preceding works of his later era ("The Wings of the Dove" comes up to mind first), very hard to read. That's the warning to every unwary reader who happens to think about starting to read Henry James anew.

The plot is simple: its about two couples of people -- Charlotte and Amerigo, and Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie Verver. Charlotte loves Amerigo, who, however, decides to marry Maggie. Soon after that, Charlotte marries Adam Verver, an American millionaire. Still, Amerigo and Charlotte maintain their former relations as lovers until their secret is discovered by Maggie unexpectedly with an advent of a golden bowl, which looks perfect outward, but deep inside cracked. Maggie, who greatly adores her deceived father, in turn, starts to move in order to mend the cracked relations, or secure the apparently happy family life without disturbing the present relations.

As this sketch of the story tells you, one of the favorite topics of the 19th century literature -- adultery -- is staged in the center of the book, but the way James handles it is very different from those of other American or British writers. The meaning is hidden in a web of complicated, even contorted sentences of James, and you have to read often repeatedly to grasp the syntax. The grammar is sometimes unclear, with his frequent use of pronouns and double negatives, and very often you just have to take time to understand to what person James' "he" or "she" really refers to. It is not a rare thing for you to find that a paragraph starts with those "he" and "she" without any hint about its identity, so you just read on until you hit the right meaning of these pronouns. And this is just one example of the hard-to-chew James prose. If you think it is pompous, you surely are excused.

But as you read on again, you find, behind this entangled sentences and a rather banal melodramatic story, something intelligent, something about humans that lurks in the dark part of our heart. I will not pretend that I can understand all of the book, but James clearly shows how we, with a limited ability of our perception, try to act as the characters of the book do, in the given atomosphere of society. To me, this book is about the way of the people's behavior luminously recorded; about the way of our expressing and perceiving ourselves without uttering them aloud.

Gore Vidal says about the book: "James's conversational style was endlessly complex, humourous, unexpected -- euphemistic where most people are direct, and suddenly precise where avoidance or ellipsis is usual (see his introduction of "The Golden Bowl" in Penguin Classics edition. This is exactly the nature of this book, which would either attract or repel you. Unfortunately, I admit, this is not my cup of tea, for I prefer more story-oriented novels. Still, if you really want to challenge reading something really substantial, I for one recommend this book.

There is a sumptuous film version of the book, starring Uma Thurman and Nick Nolte. It might be a good idea to watch it before you start reading the book.

I discovered James in college and read all his full-length novels before reaching age 30. The only one I had real trouble with was The Golden Bowl.

I recently reread the novel and reveled in its elegant complexity. (It would be nice to think that the passage of 20 years has brought wisdom and insight that made me a better reader, but the credit belongs to Dorothea Krook's illuminating discussion in The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James.)

The Golden Bowl is the last, the most demanding, and the most rewarding of James's major novels. Even its immediate predecessors, The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove, do not reach its deep examination of the mixed motives, the tangled good and evil, that drive human action and passion. Although he presents his characters' acts and much of what goes on in their heads, James manages in such a way that while Krook believes Adam and Maggie are on the side of the angels, Gore Vidal (who introduces the current Penguin edition) believes they are monsters of manipulation--and (as Krook acknowledges) both views are consistent with the evidence.

Much--too much--of these riches of doubt and ambiguity is lost in the Merchant/Ivory/Jhabvala translation to the screen (2001). The movie has some good things, but it could have had many more. Surprised by extraneous material (like the exotic dance), heavy-handed symbolism (the exterior darkness on the day Charlotte and Amerigo find the golden bowl), and needless oversimplifications (Amerigo's talk of "dishonor" to Charlotte, which exaggerates his virtue and his desire to be done with her), I got the sense that nobody involved in the production had read the novel with the care that it requires and rewards. Had they done so, their version could have been really fine--both as a movie and as an invitation to the novel.

It is certainly true that Henry James is a notoriously difficult writer. That's because he gives you very little to hold onto -- no clear statements of purpose, no overtly articulated themes, no ideas. Rather, he presents the very textures of his characters' minds as they try to make sense of what is happening to them. For James, such an act is the very essence of being human.

These difficulties are especially apparent in "The Golden Bowl," where virtually nothing happens. Yet in this dark masterpiece, James gives us a remarkably clear guide to what he is up to, namely, the golden bowl itself. On the one hand, it stands for all that is beautiful. But on the other, it suggests the fundamental brokenness of the characters in the novel, who view each other as mere objects to be collected, moved around, and manipulated. Maggie, Prince Amerigo, Adam, and, to a lesser extent, Charolotte, all suffer from this affliction.

The level of maninpulation by these characters is extraordinary. And the greatest manipulator of all is the novel's apparent victim, Maggie, who through insinuation persuades her father to return to America with Charlotte so Maggie can have Prince Amerigo to herself. This shatters all of their lives to pieces, just as the golden bowl is smashed to bits near the end of the novel.

This book is pure nonsense. I found it in our public library, a two-volume set from 1904. It consists of poorly-written hearsay masquerading as scholarship.

(Paperback edition)
In the 1890's, when F.W.H. Myers wrote Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, people didn't believe they necessarily had souls, much less that the soul would survive their death. After Myers experienced communication with his deceased wife, he set out to prove his contemporaries wrong.

Myers was a scholar who became a scientist when he began investigating paranormal phenomena. He conducted research and experiments in a variety of fields, including personality disintegration, genius, sleep, hypnosis, and trances. His goal was to "break down that artificial wall between science and superstition." He believed that questions of the soul should be subjected to the same open mind and critical analysis used in other scientific inquiries.

His landmark investigations set the standards for subsequent research into human consciousness. In his interpretive introduction to the book, Jeffrey Mishlove says that Myers's "classic synthesis of nineteenth century field research [is regarded] as the most important single work in the history of psychical research." He adds that it is still "fresh, vigorous, and contemporary."

Like many of the classic metaphysical texts, Myers's book has been out of print for years. Hampton Roads Publishing Company has begun to reissue the classical texts in their new series, Studies in Consciousness/Russell Targ Editions. Their current edition of Myers's book is an abridgement of the original, "prepared to make its major content more readily accessible to the modern reader."

Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death documents Myers's extensive experiments and conclusions that personality does, in fact, continue after death. Readers will discover that he achieved his goal of proving that the human personality is not limited to material life.

SIR.I HAVN,T READ THIS BOOK.I ONLY STUDIEDITS REFRENCE IN SOME BOOK.I WANT TO READ THIS BOOK.,I WANT THAT U MAY MAIL SOME HOT TOPICS OF THIS BOOKS IN MY MAIL BOX.I M VERY THANK FUL TO U.

I found this book enlightening. It's a small book with lots of information. It reviews forcasting call volumes using quantative and judgemental approaches. It discusses call center basics such as the nature of an incoming call and the Pooling Principle. It touches on staffing and getting the people where they need to be at the right time. For a call center veteran like me, it help to reinforce and improve my knowledge. For anyone new to a call center, it's a great book to learn the dynamics of call center operation.

Mary Leefe Laurence' childhood experiences on various military posts during the American Indian Wars, 1878-1890 was facinianting because it "fleshed out" the American soldier of the period and filled in the blanks of life on a remote Western post when the men were not fighting Indians. Ms. Laurence' Victorian politeness still left gaps that today's writers would have filled in. Mr. Smith's excellent editing and annotations caused me to read this book with two bookmarks to gather every bit of inforation available, much the same way I would read one of Dan Thrapp's books on this period.

I was saddened when I did not like Baloney, Henry P. I have come to expect so much from John Scieszka and Lane Smith. I hoped that a book about an alien student trying to explain what happened to his homework (especially when the story begins with the alien child being abducted by other aliens) would be a great platform to showcase the talents of this team. It sadly has not proved so.

Baloney, Henry P. suffers from both poor illustrations and a lack of humor. The plot line is forced rather than well laid out. These are aberrations in the work of Scieszka/Smith.

In the interests of not judging others too harshly (lest I, as a result, am left without excuse) I must point out that the sheer invention and novelty of this book makes it worth reading at least once. The basis for my extremely low rating is that this book is not even close to being up to par with the other work of Scieszka and Smith. It isn't even in the same league as works like The Stinky Cheese Man and The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs.

Unless you are a big fan of Scieszka and Smith, I recommend that you look somewhere else (the aforementioned books or Math Curse). Baloney, Henry P. is not their best.

Jon S. and Lane S. are the best children (adult?) authors/illustrators out there. As with their other books, this one has great pictures, and a great premise, BUT the story is not tight, and seems to be more about the pictures this time and less about the story. Again, great illustrations, but I actually left this book at the bookstore as the story didn't capture me.

Our bookstore had John Scieszka in for a signing last Friday, and he was as much fun for the adults as he was for the kids. He started writing stories in the 3rd grade and has continued ever since. "Baloney" is his latest creation. Henry P. Baloney is late for school- AGAIN- and has to come up with a pretty good reason that is both adventurous and believeable. It starts with losing his pencil and escalates into being abducted by enemies and the like, all of which has made him 7 minutes late and still sans pencil. Scieszka uses what he calls "alien lanugage" for words like "pencil", "school" and "desk"- all of which are included in a handy-dandy glossary in the back of the book. The illustrations are colorful and imaginative- Scieszka's humor is charming and witty. Be sure to check out his books "The Stinky Cheese Man", "The TRUE Story of the 3 Little Pigs", and his "Time Warp Trio" series. His new "TWT" series book "Sam Samauri" is planned to hit stores this fall.