I wasn't sure about this book when I first picked it up. Was it going to be blasphemous about our Lord's life and works? I found the book to be a funny look at how silly, and stupid being "politically correct" is. It is somewhat irrevent about sacred things of God, but I think unless you are a extreme Christian Fundamentalist you will find the book well within the boundaries of not taking sacred things too lightly.

Just the sort of book to give to someone who is annoyed with all things "politically correct" (whatever that means).

Parables is fun for old and young. Walker's incisive witmakes parables a quick read. I found it impossible toput down. The remake of historical parables in today'slanguage is apropos to the state of the world we live in.I heartily recommend this book to anyone looking to lighten the drudgery of daily existence

Robert Ruby's Unknown Shore is a little misleading in its subtitle (The Lost History of England's Arctic Colony) in as much as the history was not quite lost nor was there actually a colony, only the briefest of attempts at a colony in a farcical plan to mine the soil for gold. That said, the book is quite entertaining as it pieces together the story of Martin Frobisher and his ill-fated Elizabethean Arctic adventures and the always fascinating Charles Francis Hall's discovery of the location of Frobisher's Meta Incognita in the nineteenth century. (For a wonderful and full account of Hall, see the very fine Weird and Tragic Shores by C. Chauncey Loomis). The two stories blend fairly well and the author keeps the narrative sparkling along at an entertaining clip. This was a good Arctic read for those addicted to these books and a good place to begin for someone who wants to learn what the addiction to these Arctic books is all about from a book that shows men whose addiction to that cold world ran so much deeper than merely reading about it.

An unfortunately rare example of an eminently readable work of history. Ruby does an outstanding job of setting his story in the context of the times with a modern historian's insight into social and cultural history. This is far more than just another in a series of the latest vogue in Arctic exploration narratives. Through skillful use of his sources, the author brings both his European and Inuit protagonists to life. The reader is left with the haunting image of fragments of a remote Arctic island studding the landscape of a prosaic London suburb as testimony to both the folly and awe-inspiring tenacity of the sixteenth-century explorers. This is fascinating complementary reading for students of the colonization of other areas of the world.

This is a tale about an English pirate-turned-explorer who few people have ever heard of, and the establishment of British colony on an Arctic island that is perhaps even less known...but that's short-changing this elaborate true adventure. Bought this one because I liked the author's last book, "Jericho," which was a history of a place, but also of archaeology itself and of wave after wave of quirky scientists who came to study the ruins of the famous city. This new book has an even broader sweep, from pre-naval power London where morality always took a back seat to fortune-seeking, to the coast of West Africa where a ship's crew was worth less to investors than a few tons of pepper, to the Czar's palace in Moscow, the roiling North Atlantic and the confusing, ice-packed passages above North America. This is a tale festooned with accurately-drawn characters. The scholarship is so clearly reliable that you know that you're not getting the pop-magazine caricatures of, say, Sebastian Junger's "The Perfect Storm." Also, with Ruby's style of examining a place through the eyes of multiple adventurers from several eras, you're getting a deeply-textured tale that makes Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" seem one-dimensional. And you also get a fun - and often funny - yarn featuring modern reporters in polar bear pants, privateers who seize all shipping - even that of their countrymen - a pompous alchemist, mutual puzzlement as white man meets Inuit, horrific storms at sea, and discussions of the how Queen Elizabeth's sex life affected exploration. By the end, I had not only enjoyed myself but absorbed an extraordinary amount of the FEEL of an era - or two - and a place. In this sense it's also comparable to Patrick O'Brien's seafaring Maturin and Aubrey series.

Simply the best collection of readings for introductory American Government courses I have used in over twenty years of college and university teaching. These readings have never failed to spark thoughtful discussions among my students.

"American Political Rhetoric" is an excellent collection of American-governing documents, judicial decisions, and speeches given by such charismatic leader as martin luther king jr, franklin delano roosevelt, william jefferson clinton, frederick douglas, abraham lincoln, and many others. The articles are partitioned into chapters concerning civil rights, foreign policy, gender rights, founding principles, judicial powers, bicameralism and the separation of powers, etc... this text is an excellent edition for any motivated citizen and should be required reading for any potential voter.

After picking this book up at a Sam's club out of curiosity I found that I couldn't put it down and ended up putting it in the cart. My companion is a begining Astronomy buff and he couldn't get enough eighther. We were reading it to each other and trying to read it at the same time. We have learned alot from this book and have put it to good use with his new telescope. I highly remommed this book to the person who has always wanted to get started in astronomy!

This beautifully produced book is a superb addition to the library of any backyard astronomer or anyone from eight to eighty. It's a best buy for several reasons.
The first is its outstanding quality. The second is the BEWARE!.
This book is actually a softcover, otherwise identical reprint of "Advanced Skywatching", ISBN: 0783549415, published in 1997, also by Time-Life.
Perhaps Time-Life used this subterfuge to catch unwary on-line shoppers that already own "Advanced Skywatching" (as I do), since you can't view the contents on-line to discover you already own the same book under a different name.

The complaint on the star charts about this book (or its twin) not covering the entire sky is not critical.
There isn't room on anyone's bookshelf for all the possible fun sky-hops, of which this book and its twin present abundant excellent examples. There are more and different, also challenging and instructive ones in another fine volume, "Turn Left at Orion", and many others.

Not to worry if you get sucked in. This one makes a fine gift for your favorite grandchild as mine will.
Add this to your "must have" list if you don't already own its twin. If you do, buy it anyhow and give it to someone special.
The price is astonishingly low for the fine content.

There is hardly any significant fact about viruses that missed-out in this edition of "Fields Virology". Page after page, this sound all-inclusive reference doles out authoritative information on both viruses and viral syndromes. From taxonomy to etiology, metamorphosis to replication; the analyses of this text is grand. The same applies to its attached CD-ROM. Its practical outlook was intended to benefit both microbiologists and pathologists. Bernard Fields and his colleagues made their mark with this book. It is a great effort.
However, most botanist may not be pleased to know that little attention was paid to plant viruses. Again, many potential buyers may be demoralized by the rather high price that this virology-set demands.

It covers all fields of virology. Perfect and wonderful ! Easy to understand. I really recommend this book to who is involved in biology

"From Neuron to brain" is a very good thorough text book, with a level that I would rate as a good MA or PhD class. Altough it is not as detailed as for example Candells book, it has two great advantages: It is concise, and quite readable. It definetely rates as a TEXT book that you can actually read, unlike some other books whose use in the end is often a REFERENCE guide, not a text to learn from.

Comprehensive introduction to the field of neurobiology. Good descriptions of molecular level experiments are provided. As well, a full chapter is devoted to an overview of the nervous systems of the leech and Aplysia.

This is a good collection of ghost stories, many by authors who are known for other genres of literature, such as Edith Wharton, Graham Greene, Charles Dickens, Joyce Carol Oates. I recently have been told that this collection is going out of print. I wish it weren't! I've been using this collection in a class I teach, with good results. It's so hard to find a good collection of shorter horror fiction.....

I used this in an English course and my students loved it. It is one of the most accessible ghost-story collections ever. Many other anthologies focus on just Victorian era (langauge too difficlut for many) or modern (subject matter too visceral or abstract). This had a beautiful blend of everthing from artistic use of langauge to psychological and visceral themes. It did not bore anyone in the class. I wanted to use it again and discovered it was out of print. HISS-BOO! PUBLISHER TAKE NOTE: If this book isn't revived, it will come back to "haunt" you!

"Old Devil Wind" will get very young children in the mood for Halloween night by telling them what happened "One dark and stormy night" when a Ghost began to wail. One by one other things in the house, from the stool and the broom to the door and the floor, as well as the owl and the witch outside, begin to add their own spooky sounds to the dark and stormy night. You can think of this story by Bill Martin, Jr. (author of "Brown, Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" and "Happy Hippopotami") as sort of a creepy Halloween version of "Old MacDonald." Barry Root ("Pumpkins") provides the suitably eerie illustrations chronicling the growling cacophony of eerie sounds that builds to the arrival of the Old Devil Wind at the climax. "Old Devil Wind" should work well for youngsters who can still count the number of times they have gone trick or treated on the fingers of one hand (without using the thumb).

Wonderful book for story time. Easy to involve children in the excitement of the book. Lots of opportunities to involve sounds while reading at a Halloween party.

Sachs is a hospice social worker who has counseled many people faced with death. The book comments on several cases he faced, the most moving account being that of his father's death. In Sachs's long story of his client "Michael"'s dying process, he provides guidelines for approaching death that are worth personal investigation. He gives a good sense of what it must be like at the end. Sachs talks about rituals in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (chanting, breathing, focus) that ease the passage into the final moment on earth. I have thought very little about death, refused to be present at my parents' deaths, and generally avoided it all. This book has motivated me to find out more about dying and to plan how I will meet my own death if I am granted the privilege of knowing I will die within a certain period of time. It has also made me an advocate of death and dying education for all of us.

With lucidity & compassion we are shown how the death experience is an expansion into a wider dimension of our being. As we move through our dying process, all the strength & wisdom we've gained in our lifetime is called forth. In a series of stories that give us glimpses into the inner workings of how we die, Robert Sachs, who works as a professional hospice counsellor, offers us a bouquet of transforming moments that led each person to their interior landscape. We are gifted the journeying in tandem with these souls & given different solutions to the task of letting go of life. Very helpful when our Poppa was passing on to his next Great Adventure.

This book contains a number of very useful columns from the recently deceased C++ report. I found particularly useful the articles on implementation of assignment operators, exception safety, and the inner workings of the standard library containers (Gillan, Austern, Sutter). Actually, they are all really about exception safety - clues on how to write robust code that I needed to learn.

The introduction to Lakos' Large Scale Programming tome was also a useful tipoff about physical architecture: I've been using Rational Rose for about 18 months, and now have a better overall picture about what the component diagrams are trying to do apart from represent the receptables my classes get put in.

A rule one might apply is: if the cost of the book is less than your time spent to remove the errors you'd make if you didn't read it, then buy it. This one passes the test with ease.

If you are an experienced C++ programmer, its the book for you.

You can read the State Pattern in the famous "Design Patterns" book, but the article in this book, "Finite State Machines: A Model of Behavior in C++" by Immo Huneke, explains why the State Pattern is the way it is. That explanation was missing from the "Patterns" book. Also, Robert Martin's intro to this article was helpful. Mr. Martin mentioned he has a freeware "State Machine Compiler". I downloaded it, and it works! Really cool. This one article alone was worth the price of the book.