The practical exercises in the Christian traditions are useful, and cause growth. (Romans 12:2) This book is useful for any spiritual formation group and increases awareness of need to grow in Discipleship. Have used exercises in my Walk to Emmaus(spiritual formation/accountability) reunion group--leads to Christian action.

This book will help you discover where you need more balance in your Christian walk. As you learn to practice the 6 different traditions; social, contemplative, holiness, charismatic, evangelical, and incarnational, your walk with the Lord will become more balanced. This has been a life-changing study for me!

This is a very good book for starting a Bible study that is labor intensive versus study intensive. I do recommended this for all people to lead after they have to a personal study with Celebration of Discipline materials. To my knowledge, this version is out of print because it has been revised and replaces by ISBN 0062516264. This new book includes the sixth tradition of incarnationalism. Also recommended.

Dr. Smith has a wonderful overview of the Pentateuch. It has the right blend of practical application for the reader without sacrificing in-depth exegesis and theology for the serious Bible student.

This book is extremely informative and easy to read. Dr. Smith is a very learned man and presents the material very well. I would recommend this book to anyone that wants to learn more about the first five books of the Bible.

Dr. Smith's writing style is simple and understandable yet the coverage is at an academic level. He provides access to difficult passages to Bible scholars as well as the average person. The Pentateuch gives a verse by verse commentary on the first five books of the Bible

I saw this book shop worn in a book store and found it in mint condition on Amazon where I purchased it for my son who is 4 yrs old. He really enjoys this book and wants to know about everything on the page. A really neat book that should be put back in print again. I don't remember such neat pop-out books as a kid and this one takes top prize for me. If you can find it used your child will enjoy it.

My child and I spent many nights and days discovering new and exciting things in this COLORFUL book!

Your child is LOVE this creepy book!

This is an incredibly informative book. My 5 year old son loves it so much that we are ordering it again. Our first one is very dog-eared. The illustrations are superb and the pop-ups really bring the world of insects up close and make it easy to understand. We have spent many wonderful hours reading this book together and, as a result, my son now knows a great deal about bugs and their habits. It is a very hands on book and shows children amazing facts. The cricket noise, scratch and sniff stink bug page, and the huge pop-up moth are our favorites. I would recommend this book to anyone who has a child who is interested in learning about bugs. It is sure to bring them many happy memories.

I wasn't sure what to expect with this anthology, but I found myself enthralled from beginning to end. Nnedi Okorafor's "Crossroads", Seth Lindberg's "Atropos", and James Dorr's "Madness" were special delights.

A great mix of chilling, horrifying, and otherwise entertaining stories.

This is a great compilation of magic, madness, culture and creativity. All of the stories were pretty satisfying, some of them terrifying! There are some writers here that are going to go places. Watch for the authors of the two longest pieces, Nnedi Okorafor (her story is called Crossroads) and James S. Dorr (he wrote a story called Madness).

"Your Affectionate Daughter, Isabella" is a very entertaining book - the kind of book I always slow down on reading, towards the end, because I don't want it to be over - but also a fascinating look into the world of the Antebellum South. Most of us have a picture of plantation owners as Clark Gables and Scarlett O'Haras in silks and brocades; the Torrances' plantation in North Carolina is a reasonably prosperous but serious working plantation, whose owners do care about their slaves - apparently the only information we now have about them comes from annual summaries James Torrance writes up - and who would probably free their slaves, except that "Then, where would we get workers for the Plantation?" A good summary of much of the prewar Southern situation.
The basis of the book is an extensive collection of letters written by Isabella and various other family members, all interwoven with just enough history and background so that it all makes an absorbing story. The Torrance plantation - in western North Carolina - prospers and exemplifies the good life, sure enough; various sons and daughters, including Isabella, go off elsewhere to find their fortunes, mostly with indifferent success, and often as not drift back to the old homestead. This is life as it was lived by a group of attractive but fairly ordinary people, in a world in which the vagaries of the weather, the agonizingly high rate of infant and adult mortality and the price of cotton, year by year, were far more important than far-off Abolitionists and Fire-eaters.
As a part-time Civil-War buff, I found this a fascinating insight into the people on the Other Side, who are of course now Us. It's part of the magic of Your Affectionate Daughter that you really want to know how they all came out - the book tells us all the letters know, but I found myself wanting more. And, if making you really care about the characters isn't a measure of a book's narrative power, what is?

p.s. Well, yes, I am a brother-in-law of the Author. But it's still a really good book.

"Your Affectionate Daughter, Isabella" is particularly noteworthy as Ms. Williams has avoided the trap that most authors who base their work on a collection of letters fall into... her narrative carries the story, using the letters only to support the text.. rather than the reverse.

She accomplishes this with an impressive working knowledge of the post 1800 south and plantation lifestyles, presented to us with both a flair for writing and a skillful turn of phrase that, when combined, turn this work into a charming story that will find favor with anyone who enjoys well written and educational history. I hope we'll see more of Ms. William's work.

What a wonderful book! A good read, a touching story, and accurate history. Isabella Torrance was a strong woman who suffered much, and accomplished much, growing up in North Carolina and Mississippi in the early part of the 19th Century.

This story is set in the early 1800s in the American South and is totally based on existing letters from the period. The Torrance family of North Carolina must have kept every piece of paper they ever got. It follows Isabella from the age of 7 when she was sent off to boarding school (Salem College, North Carolina), to coming home at the age of nine to a new mother and growing up on a large farm which was turning into a plantation. She married early and pioneered with her husband and baby in Mississippi - the edge of the wilderness at that time. After much suffering on the frontier, and the death of her husband, she returned to North Carolina to more adventures and a full life.

The story is told through family letters, using the actual letters and other family records, plus enough imagined dialog to keep the story moving along. Ms. Williams seems to have done her research well and all of the details, from the largest to the most minute, ring true. I really enjoyed reading the book as a story, plus the added value of finding out what life was really like in the American South and on the frontier in the period just before the Civil War.

"The Case of the Buried Treasure" is definitely one of the best books in the Jigsaw Jones series by James Preller. My six-year-old son was spellbound as I read it to him. I have to admit that I enjoyed the story as much as he did. The book has a generous mix of humor, suspense, clever phrases and good values. What more could a parent ask for in a book? (I really want the author to know how much I appreciate the good values - particularly the way the book portrays telling a lie as wrong and not something funny to do whenever convenient which I've seen in other children's books.) The story has many twists and turns and is so well-written! The character development is excellent, and we feel like we know each of the kids in Room 201. We have read most of the books in this series, and hope the author will continue writing many more Jigsaw Jones books for us to read.

Of all of the Jigsaw Jones books that I have read - I haven't read them all as of yet, but between my two boys, we're fast approaching that goal - I like this one the best. My boys both loved it, too.
I coordinate a book club for the 2nd grade at our local school. The kids love Jigsaw Jones and have been requesting one on our reading list. I've assigned it as our next book club reading book. I think that this one is special.

This books contains it all: who, why, what and how to make effective, efficient, creative and committed change. Changes that last and last. Very practical, down to earth, yet based on a powerful and imaginative model. Don't read it, use it!

were afraid to know. McWinney shows in this "fieldbook" how any change process can be tackled. He convinced me how working with myself, the groups and the resources at hand can create better and longer lasting solutions. Not only to problems but also to the issues of problems that were very hard to solve. The book is a practicle guide to his "Paths of change" and should belong to every bookshelf that contains literature on change and social issues. One warning: this book is not about quick fixes and will only work for you when you are not afraid to venture where you thought you wouldn't dare to go.

I recently purchased this text along with Janson's History of Art (5th ed.). Although this handbook was written with Janson's 6th edition in mind, it has not taken away from my cross-referenced learning experience. Throughout the text, there are references to examples (illustrations) in History of Art (or other popular art history texts) which help in applying the "theory" (if you can call it that) with the "application."

The text has a wide range of art terms key to the study and analysis of art history. The section on Christian subjects, signs and symbols has helped me decipher the icons depicted in Christian-themed pieces of the Renaissance.

My copy of the text is bound somewhat backwards towards the end. The Index and Artist Chronology pages, for example, are divided and unordered ... but it does not take away from the text's usablity!

All in all, I believe this text has been a great investment.

In Abacus to Zeus, you will find a wonderful, concise, approachable 'quick and dirty' reference for those new to studying the visual arts. James Pierce brings together many of the pesky, essential--and formerly, ellusive--details in an accessible reference. Deffinitions with illustrations, terms and stories of mythology, religious art,and a chronology of artists and architects (complete with pronunciation guide--indespensible for those of us who remain unilingual) work well together to make this book a find!

This is a fine book on Special Relativity. All one needs is a grasp of algebra to follow the text. There are quite a few exercises at the end of each chapter. I specially like the fact that the author discusses the non-relativistic approach to a concept followed by the relativistic view. The chapters on Momentum and Energy and Particles of Zero Mass are plain excellent.

Since no calculus to speak of is used some of the "derivations" are quite awkard. But that is a minor cavil. If you are still in school and algebra is fresh on your mind, this book will be a breeze. If your algebra is rusty, journey on, albeit slowly. The reward at the end of the road is worth it!

If You want to have the worked out solutions to all the exercises in this book, get the french translation of this book at Amazon.fr.

I used this textbook in my first undergraduate relativity course, and it is still one of the best introductions to the subject that I have ever read.

While the book is aimed at second or third semester physics students, the math is confined to straightforward algebra. Although this makes the formalism a little less "neat" than in other treatments, it makes the subject much more understandable, especially for readers with less experience in higher mathematics.

The writing style is easy to read, and there are many good explanations and worked-out examples. The "Twin Paradox", for example, is not only solved in its entirety, but cross-checked using three different approaches, all of which use special relativity alone. The exercises in each chapter are well chosen, and prompt the reader to understand the significance of the answers.

I consider this to be one of the best undergraduate introductory textbooks in relativity, and also recommend it to anyone with at least a high-school algebra background who wishes to learn more about this fascinating subject.