Beg, borrow, buy or steal a copy of this book, used orotherwise. I was lucky enough to find a stack of them ...s a few years ago. I bought them all and gave a copy to every one of my family and friends for Christmas that year. A cracking good read, one you will enjoy & read over and over...

I was also captivated, and now haunted by this book. Although I lack the character this woamn had, I identified with her in so many ways. The scene of her husband getting mauled by the bear is forever engraved in my head. I can't believe it is out of print; this book should be required reading for everyone.

This was one of the best books that I've ever read. I was devastated when I lost my copy and found that it went out of print -- but Amazon located another one for me and I just read it again. The step class was even better then 2nd time. I read a lot of books and this is the first time that I'd like to contact the author.

Compared to so many other dull-reading license manuals that one has for introducing newcomers to Amateur Radio,'Ride the Airwaves with Alfa & Zulu' is a one of kind book for becoming a ham- and it's an excellent learning tool for students of all ages. Every question in the FCC Technician License Pool is covered, and all the information is worded and portrayed in ways that make learning a lot of fun and very easy to comprehend. The best feature of this book are the hundreds of illustrations that explain what's going on. Without question, anyone who is interested in becoming a ham ought to read K6YB's excellent book-for the book is one of kind when it comes to showing one 'what ham radio is all about' - and helping them to earn their first ticket. Amateur Radio Instructor- N6MV, Dr. James R. La Frieda

Hi, again, John Abbott has again produced a "SUPER" book that will assist those non-technical types, kids, and (older) kids (chuckle) open the door to Amateur Radio. I have used each of his A&Z texts since they first came out. Each time, my students and adults use it new Hams result. Amateur Radio is a great activity for ALL! Others who publish manuals should take a lesson from John and realize everyone does not have to be a tech'y to enjoy the fruitful activities of Amateur Radio. School starts in late August, 2000 for me. Alpha &Zulu will be on my desk and at the radio table. It will shown to my grade-6 class. It will become dog earred, written in, and studied by several of those eager minds. There will be more smiles at test time. There will be more Hams as a result. This book opens the door for future Hams. The more the better!

Conrad Ekstrom WB1GXM/KB1CCA(GEARS) ADVISOR GOSHEN-LEMPSTER EDUCATIONAL AMATEUR RADIO SOCIETY EST 1989

This is an excellent book to either teach or learn enough about amateur radio to get your license. It breaks complex concepts down into ideas presented in a cartoon format. I used it as a teacher with great success. There is an updated version called "Ride the Airwaves with Alpha and Zulu" (as opposed to this older version "Riding the Airwaves with Alpha and Zulu")that is both current and readily available from amazon.com This version does not have the latest changes for F.C.C. tests.

First Lady Of The Senate: A Life Of Margaret Chase Smith is an outstanding biographical introduction to a truly remarkable woman whose wit, wisdom, compassion, practicality and idealism made a lasting impression on her contemporaries in Maine and in Washington. Alberta Gould's exceptional and informative text is enhanced with period photos and a bibliography. First Lady Of The Senate is highly recommended reading for students of American history, political science, and women's history.

Banchoff and Smith present readers with an edited volume that distinguishes itself on two counts: its chapters integrate theoretical concepts and empirical research in case studies that are original and timely; and the scholars' contributions to the volume provide a balance of European and American viewpoints in a dialogue that leads to fruitful inquiry.

The book analyzes legitimacy through the conceptual lenses of three approaches: policies; institutional changes; and identities. As an ensemble, the chapters in this volume strengthen our understanding of the European Union as a polity unprecedented in world affairs whose decision making is characterized by multi-level governance. By assessing critical analyses made in selected chapters utilizing each approach, the reader appreciates the volume's method and scope of inquiry.

Feldman's chapter explores the relationship between reconciliation and legitimacy on two levels: the internal dynamics of the Community/Union for which reconciliation and institutionalized cooperation from the Schuman Plan through crises in the 1980s/1990s provides a source of stability and legitimacy; and external relations by which "some of the character of the EU as a system of reconciliation and a peace community" offer a basis for the EU's role as a "civilian power." This is the only chapter that focuses on enlargement as a contested policy for the Union. Clearly a second edition would benefit from increased attention to the interplay between contestation and legitimacy in an enlarged Union.

Feldman's analysis confirms that member states recognize the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) as "a framework for contestation." Her conclusion that this framework exists in a polity which is hybrid challenges scholars not to limit their research to analyses that contrast neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism. Instead we may inquire about the ways in which reconciliation could be a resource in the quest for increased legitimacy as the Union seeks definition as a polity and as an "international actor" in global politics.

Wessels and Diedrichs' analysis of legitimacy focuses on the European Parliament and the need to reconceptualize its role as an institution that cannot fit into either federalist or realist frameworks. This chapter displays the empirical excellence that distinguishes Wessels as one of the foremost theorists of integration. His articulation of a "fusion thesis" suggests that the European Parliament must legislate within a system characterized by competition for powers and differentiation of decision making procedures. This institutional context, which engages national and European actors in an expanding spectrum of interactions, renders citizens' understanding of the Parliament less transparent.

The authors touch on the relative lack of citizen interaction with the European Parliament, the challenges it faces to acquire internal discipline to enhance its use of the leverage acquired via the Maastricht and Amsterdam reforms and the fact that Parliament must compete with other institutions to be a focus of legitimacy in the Union. Each of these points is important to consider in light of the future accession of countries from central and eastern Europe. In these countries, citizen identification with national parliaments is particularly sensitive in the aftermath of decades of "rule from above." The ways in which these national parliaments interact with the European institutions may well determine, along with the economic benefits that can be perceived by average citizens, a degree of popular acceptance of the Union and its policies in associate member states.

Banchoff's analysis of legitimacy from the perspective of identity explores the challenges the European institutions pose to sovereignty in the French and German cases. This chapter utilizes a diachronic comparison or a comparison across time. Its focus on cases of treaty-making in the early 1950s and early 1990s offers the reader insights into two crucial periods in the history of European integration. The comparison is an informative one, although as Delors points out fruitful parallels could also be drawn between the negotiations and ratifications of the Treaty of Paris creating the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and those that led to the Single European Act (SEA) which relaunched integration in the mid-1980s. (Interview, Delors, June 22, 1999). This is primarily because of the impact of the Community method on both sets of negotiations and their impact on cooperation between the member states and European institutions.

Banchoff's assessment that French national identity is inextricably linked with popular sovereignty suggests that the changes introduced by European integration must be embedded in the life of national political institutions. This assessment is all the more relevant in the aftermath of German unification and the ruling of the German Constitutional Court on the Maastricht Treaty. In the post-1989 context, it is important to understand the meaning of sovereignty in Germany, which differs markedly from that in France, and to grasp the necessity to construct a European polity that is viewed as a "legitimate framework for politics" by the populations of the member states.

In the book's closing chapter, Banchoff and Smith explain that the conflict surrounding the Maastricht ratification brought the centrality of European politics in national decision making to light. The search for legitimacy, however contested in a multi-level polity, may lead state leaders to take decisions that reconstruct national identities in ways to promote compatibility with the integration project. The conclusions drawn by the editors illustrate the extent to which this volume is essential reading for those interested in the European Union. Its chapters contribute significant insights to our understanding of Europe's impact within national polities, thereby enhancing our knowledge of legitimacy in the Union as its complex system of decision making evolves in the 21st century.

This is simply a beautiful book about the illustrator Jessie Wilcox Smith. Eugene Mitchell (Gene Mitchell on the book cover) has captured the charm of this special artist. It includes not only a biography, but an autobiography in Smith's own words about her experiances painting children. The full color illustrations are beautiful enough to frame. Since it is out of print, and if you can find a used one, grab it, this is a book that Jessie Wilcox Smith admirers don't want to miss. My only regret is that the Mitchell didn't do further books as promised in this one.

I read this book a few years ago and it really stuck with me. Very powerful and moving story of a destroyed life due to one too many martinis. Later I read Cheever's Falconer and noticed a couple of the details of prison life were very similar (okay, exactly the same - assume there is a source in common). By the same token one of the characters in HBO's OZ got put away for the exact same reason the professor in Stone City. Drunk driving and a little girl on a bicycle. Small world. Tribute I think to the power of this novel.

I, too, read this book a number of years ago and have never forgotten it. I have heard it described as one of the best, if not THE best, book on prison culture (at least in fiction) ever written. It is fascinating from start to finish and you cannot help but wonder "how in the world did the author discover this stuff"??? A real insider's look at prison life.

I read this several years ago and it's always stuck with me. A brutal book about life inside the "joint" where double-crosses rule the day, predators thrive and the innocent die violent deaths. You will find it impossible to wash the ending of this book out of your mind. Better than the HBO series "Oz" and that's meant as a huge compliment.

I have mixed feelings about this novel. On one hand, it has a pretty neat premise: The impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy with Jupiter in 1994 perturbed that planet's orbit imperceptibly, yet just enough to cause gradual climatic change on Earth, and hundreds of years later we are in the grip of a new Ice Age. Cool idea! Yet I'm troubled by the fact that such climate change would necessarily result in the catastrophic setback of science and culture depicted in this book. If the climate change had been accompanied by, for instance, a few good meteor impacts, the tribal existence of the book's protagonists would have been far more plausible. Too many questions are left unanswered here, and "Snowfall" is left begging for a sequel.

That having been said, I still found this novel quite entertaining. I've always been a sucker for post-apocalyptic sci-fi, although there is precious little sci-fi here. Instead Mitchell Smith has painted a rich picture of a tribal community that calls itself the Trappers, living a tooth-and-nail existence just below the Wall Of Ice that engulfed Canada and the northern half of the United States. Having been forced off their land by tribes that have in turn been forced off THEIR land, the remnants of the Trappers must move south to warmer climes and strange human cultures. There are some memorable, well-drawn characters in this tale, most notably Catania, the tribe's doctor and preserver of ancient medical knowledge. Tribal warfare, sickness and death are portrayed unflinchingly here. The book is divided into short, easily digested chapters, each beginning with an excerpt from Catania's journal. Definitely worth a look if you like books of this genre.

Thanks to Amazon.com I found yet another author that I never heard of but writes a novel that sounded very interesting to me. If you like novels in the grand tradition of William Sarabande's FIRST AMERICANS series, or like post-holocaust adventure stories - then this one's for you!
Mitchell Smith's SNOWFALL is a well told tale of an Earth that has gone through another ice age and has taken civilization away, leaving cities such as Chicago, with snowdrifts as high as the tallest skyscrapers. It is never told what exactly happened to the earth, but it is told and hinted to a long, long, time ago as the story is taking place.
The story opens with a band known as the Trappers, a small collection of families that united and hunt the frozen tundra of what once was Colorado,I think. Their only link to the past is old journals and books that have been re-copied over and over thru time and they call copybooks.
The first chapter starts right off with the hunters of the band getting food for their camp when they are attacked by Cree. The Cree are the modern-day equivalent of indians, but most of their bloodline are white, they have just taken to the old indian ways of survival. As the story goes on, the trappers are being forced out of their hunting grounds and being pushed south, along with all the other tribes from the north, like a dominoe effect. Fighting to keep their land, the trapper's, along with an outcast that comes back named Jack, a losing fight ensues and most of the trappers are decimated and Jack finds himself a leader of a band on the run. The band's head doctor of the tribe is a clorful woman named Catania. Catania is much more than a doctor as the reader finds out as the story unfolds. I thought that this book would not have much action and adventure that I'm partial too, but it had it plenty enough along with lots of interesting characters to keep you glued to each page.
The adventures and tragedies that befall the running band of trappers as they flee ever southward is an enjoyable read as the reader see's the changes in the land and it's peoples as the trappers go deeper south. The ending is not what I expected, but it was good nonetheless. It read like an epic movie. I recommend this book to anyone.

The next Ice Age is upon us: imagine the mile-high cliff of ice at your back, with the Rocky Mountains another impenetrable wall of ice to the west, & people from the east, who once occasionally hunted peaceably on the periphery of your territory, are now intent on taking over your traplines & your caves. Where do you go? Into the great, green forest to the South where the snow ends & monsters dwell?

Mitchell Smith has created a whole new future, with particular attention to the anthropological aspects of how we might have made it, what things & thoughts might have survived from the Warm Time.

I particularly enjoyed the fully realized heroines & heroes, those who die & those who survive. They have keen insights & eyesights that we, today in our citified lethargy, have long since discarded. Each person could have walked in today's world & felt a glimmer of recognition for us modern folks & our modern nation, except...

SNOWFALL is a marvelous, richly-textured adventure that allows us a glimpse of what really might happen when our descendants have to grapple with the inevitable change in the Earth's climate. What will happen to Chicago, for instance, when thousands of feet of snow bury the city? What will happen to our store of knowledge, once electricity is no more? What will happen to our society? Who then will be the readers of what books? What will the doctors know? Who will be our leaders? What kinds of relationships will we have?

If you read only one science-fiction/anthropology book this year, read SNOWFALL! Mitchell Smith has written a superb survivalist saga, that lingers in your mind everafter, wondering. It certainly deserves a sequel, for I would dearly love to know how Catania makes it to the Sierras & the snow-bound warrior/hunters who live there.

Centuries after a sudden ice age crushed our civilization, North America is divided into several kingdoms. New England, with strange mental powers and genetic engineering keeping alive amidst the great glacier, the Southern empire in Mexico, the Khanate in the Southwest, and a powerful but stagnant Middle Kingdom surrounding the enormous River that was once Mississippi. The small, fractious country in the North Mexico has little chance between the warring giants, except for their tradition of independence, and their leader, the reluctant general Sam Monroe.

The story of Sam, and his attempts to block the all-conquering, mongol-like Khanate from running over the continent, is entertaining, full of battles and human interest stories. The language seems a bit burdened at times, with constant references to Warm-times, and the topic familiar. However, the major characters are interesting, Sam himself sympathetic, and the battles, and the politics exciting and tense.

--inotherworlds.com

In the distant future a curtain of ice stretches from sea to once shining sea. To survive one must head south of the great wall of ice that has devastated what were once much of the United States and all of Canada. To endure, clans and kingdoms formed as people battles for control of the livable land left on the North America.

Years have passed since Monroe and Olsen led the Colorado Trappers south where they join forces with the Garden tree-dwellers (see SNOWFALL). Jack and Catania's son Sam now leads the army of North-Map Mexico, but knows that his people are on the easement and that the Khanate nomads led by Toghrul Khan will ravage the land on their way to war with Kingdom River ruled by Queen Joan. Sam knows his relatively small country has no chance though the never defeated army would risk their lives to prove otherwise. He needs an alliance with Joan, but worries that her much larger nation will gobble up his small country. To have some say in the confederacy, Sam marries the Kingdom's Princess Rachel. War remains inevitable as Khan and his barbarians sweep over all in their path.

The second tale in Mitchell Smith's apocalyptic future world, KINGDOM RIVER, is a very exciting look at people struggling to survive a harsh time, but in this novel (as opposed to the ice of SNOWFALL) it is from enemy forces. The story line escorts the reader to a changed realm where civilization almost totally collapsed. The audience will picture this frozen wasteland as a distinct possibility because Mr. Smith goes to extreme lengths through his strong characters and vivid universe to make everything believable.

Harriet Klausner

My family and I recently had a 10 day visit to Orlando and I ran out and bought "Walt Disney World with Kids 2000", "The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2000", and Birnbaum's. I read them all from cover to cover, made lots of calls and now consider myself to be an expert on the subject of how to cram the best stuff into the best days for your florida trip. After reading "The Unnoficial Guide", Birnbaum's book was a big dissapointment. His book did not give half of the information that "The Unofficial Guide" gave. About the only good thing I can say is it does make a nice souvineer book, but If you are like me and want as much info on every subject you can think of smashed into your brain, get "The Unofficial Guide". We are going back again next February and I won't waste my time or money on anything but.

My fiance and I went to Walt Disney World last year for the first time together (it was also the first time for him). We found the Birnbaum book to be the best, we also bought The Unofficial Guide but the Birnbaum book was the book we brought with us to Florida. The phone numbers, rates and the "Great meals and good times" sections are invaluable! We are going to Walt Disney World for our honeymoon next year and I can't wait to buy the 2001 edition!

In terms of sheer facts, this book has them all. What is missing is any sense of what attractions are best for what age kid or any tips on how to manage your times in the park. Since the guide is official, the idea is that everything is perfect. I love Disney World - and agree it's a great family vacation place - but I could have used more guidance and fewer factoids.

While book browsing I picked this one up and could not place it back on the shelf. I read Day Dreams five years ago and have recommend it to every avid who-done-it thriller reader I could. From the very first page you are hooked and transformed into a constant page turning automaton. The caracters seemed so real in your mind. I would read this one again