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Love and Peace
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Your child is LOVE this creepy book!
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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.