We are in the process of adopting a 15 year old boy from Russia. While we are learning Russian, I doubt we will know enough to converse with him those first few months. This book is awesome! It has pictures for just about anything you could think of!! And, next to the pictures are both the English and Cyrillic words. For example, there is a page that shows a daily routine of getting up, taking a shower, brushing your teeth, etc. It has pictures for every object in your house. It has food items. Grocery store items. Sports. School activities. It is absolutely wonderful!! I feel very confident that we will be able to communicate with our new son.

This book offers a range of readings from James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son to Gloria Steinem's Unlearning Romance, plus readings by Woody Allen, Henry David Thoreau and Bharati Mukherjee. It's an inspiring collection for aspiring writers, who would like to master the art of the personal essay. I have used this book, both for my own writing and also for the university courses that I have taught. It also contains helpful chapters on writing beliefs, writing about relationships and writing about texts. My students have truly enjoyed this book for its variety, and its inspiring philosophies on writing by Joan Didion, Scott Sanders, Nancy Mairs and Annie Dillard. A thoughtful choice.

I must say that Mr. Vivian was onto something here when he decided to write "Writing With Authority". This book is clearly a good read for any freshman college student exploring the mysteries of rhetoric & composition. I was a student of Mr. Vivian's my freshman year at college, and I must say that "WWA" helped me out alot. It gives very helpful exercises and tries to make the student explore and write about what he knows. Thanks Mr. V.!

Mr. Lewis has an uncanny ability to mix humor and poignancy in describing life's lessons and the role of being a dad. Perhaps it is because I recently became a fist-time father, but this book made me weep with joy, wonder and appreciation.

Stories of the masters can be both inspiring and lead to sloth, sloth you say ? How is this ? The inspiration part is easy the stories of their lives are often so hard and troublesome that it is easy to consider them remarkable men which they of course were, but on the other hand two things stand in your way one is the praise of remarkable men, the other is the recognition of some of their qualities inside yourself, both of these delusions interfere with proper practice. In fact the non-reading of just about anything is the best way to go because truth is present everywhere at all times and it is nowhere apart from here where you stand right now. Given these comments this book can be a useful ally for practice as long as it is read and forgotten ie the important aspects will be used when needed and that is all. It sounds good but can a person do such things easily, well not so easily. Try ? Why not ?

I already had the CD-ROM version of the TNG Technical Manual, so I also had to have this one.

And as I expected from Herman Zimmerman and his colleages, this book is very very detailed. Almost every aspect of the space station is being explained in clear Star Trek technobable.

In the first chapter, every system of the space station Deep Space Nine is explained with full-color drawings and photos.

In chapter two, the other ships of Deep Space Nine are being looked upon. Vessels such as the Defiant are completely described. Also the details of a number of alien vessels are in this chapter.

The best thing in this book is the fold-out overviews of the station and the Defiant. On the other side, the pictures in the books could use some more descriptions.

Hint for the authors: make a CD-ROM version with 3D views of the DS9 sets just like the TNG Technical Manual.

With detailed information on Deep Space Nine along with many starships within the Star Trek universe, Star Trek: Deep Space 9 Technical Manual contains anything a fan would want to know about DS9 and the Star Trek series. And I cant forget the wonderful pictures in this book.

This book is amazing. I read it from cover to cover and ended up satisfied with all the details the authors placed in them. The book carries details ranging from the subspace communications system to the weapons and even the environmental system of the station. The information on it is not contained only to details about the station but everything connected to it including the Runabouts, and the Defiant. It gives off an effect that there is really a station named Deep Space Nine. The paper used was high quality glossy paper which doesn't crumple easily and the numerous images in them were in color. Although it could have been better with a hard cover, it's excellent the way it is.

Throughout my work week I will occasionally hear David Byrne singing in my ear "...you may ask yourself, how did I get here?". When do we make choices that take us away from our hearts desire? How do we begin to move towards being authentic without giving in to Dr. Phil and Oprah's self-improvementitise?

The War of Art is a work of serious regard by Steven Pressfield. If Jung and Joseph Campbell had a child and that offspring had a baby with the progeny of Steve Martin and Dennis Miller then you'd get close to the tone of The War of Art. In one moment your reading about greek myths or Blake then a qoute by the less than mystical Goldie Hawn.

I have read this book twice over the weekend and feel challenged to battle my resitance and start putting pen to paper. "How did I get Here" Who cares --- What am I doing right now?

This is a self-help book but a self-help book for people who think.

Reading this was a personal experience for me and I'm generally a pretty private soul and typically don't do things like review books on Amazon. Like Pressfield's propellant desire to write it, the book sucked me in, demanded I put down one of the dozen or so other books waiting on the nightstand and doggedly plow through.

My diligence was rewarded with an opportunity to look at the [junk] I put in between me and my work, writing, and relationships. There's no process here. No 12 steps. No journal-ing. No techniques to learn and recall.

There are a lot of ways to say what Pressfield's asserted and others have written those books, too (the Artist's Way is still in that pile on my nightstand). I could refer to it as Self-help lite, but I'm not going down a path to pigeon-hole and denirate it.

On my wrist I wear a bracelet that has written on it: "It's never to be what you might have been." Should you read this book. Yeah, you should. Right now I'm going to buy it for my children and then I'm going to get back to work.

Steven Pressfield's Book the "War of Art" is hands down, absolutely the best book of its kind in the self-improvement genre.

This first class book should be required reading for everyone in Hollywood and any body who has to follow there own path.

Mr. Pressfield has the uncanny and brilliant ability to simplify and comprehend a complex subject and distill it down to its finer points.

The Subject? Combating the resistance of others and continuing on your own journey successfully, regardless of the obstacle. In other words he explains how to stay on your own heroes journey and live the life we need to live. Mr. Pressfield asks the reader what would you do if you knew you could not fail.

From the mirrors on the cover to its last page you will find the book funny, insightful, deep, griping, forthright, and kind; just fantastic and outstanding in every way.

This is an important book and you will not be disappointed.

Did you know that the pit of a Peach is deadly?? Did you know that lovely foxglove growing in your garden is poisonous?

Deadly Doses has been my favorite book from the Howdunit Series. This book gives a writer the information that is needed to write a believable poisoning in their story line. The variety of poisons and their forms, lethal dose toxicity levels, reaction times, effects, symptoms, and treatments are all covered in Deadly Doses. A writer will gain a wealth of knowledge by reading this book cover to cover. It is simply the best specific-topic writer's resource book I have ever read.

Deadly Doses: A Writer's Guide to Poisons also gives historical cases where the method of poisoning was used in a homicidal or suicidal death. The types of poisons used are amazing. They include plants, household, medical, and even street drugs.

Even if you are not a writer, read this book! It will get you thinking twice about the 'common' products that you use now. I find myself being really careful about the products I use at home and at work. I've even been reading the labels!

This book is a super reference book for writers. Gives you a short history of poisons,then moves in the classic aka Agatha Christie style poisons. Next we get into the what's on hand style of poisons i.e. household stuff. Plant poisons, the dead mushrooms etc. They cover movie poisons such as spiders and snakes, medical oops-es, what's in the garden pesticides. Even Street Drugs and a few hints on do-it-yourself-versions. They covered the methods, the forms, the symptoms, and even the time that is takes and just how successful (toxicity rating)....anything a writer needs to know....no no no don't touch that mushroom!

Super reference work and highly recommended

Deadly Doses is an excellent beginning resource for the writer interested in using poison as an element within a story. It gives a brief history of poisoning, clearly divided chapters (plant based poisons, industrial, medical, etc.), and an easy to read format for each entry. Each poison is listed with a toxicity rating (6 being the highest), form, effects and symptoms, reaction time, antidotes and treatment, case histories, and notes of interest. Because the book has to cover so much, each entry is necessarilly brief and many less toxic forms of poison are glossed over or omitted. The author is quite open about this from the start.

In addition to the known poisons, the author provides a chapter on how to create an imaginary poison for the sake of your story. You may not find exactly what you need to kill your main victim with, but you will certainly come out of this book with a much stronger sense of how to do it and where to look, thanks to a very infomative biliography. As an unlooked for benefit, you may find yourself far more knowledgeable of dangerous substances in your own life, and, while one hopes such knowledge will never be necessary, knowing the syptoms and treatment of a common household poison may be useful (especially if you have children!)

When there are so many self serving design books out there full of thrown together pop-culture imagery, it stops you in your tracks to see something of such quality and substance. This is a firm with a long history of influential work, and this book is much more than a collection. It's insight into the design process and thorough execution goes far beyond the standard fare. I'll be going back to it again and again. The style may not be for everyone, but I'm a sucker for the aesthetics of science, and the cratsmanship and depth cannot be denied. When I do finally wear out this copy, it'll make a nice stout doorstop too.

I was a bit concerned about buying this book after reading complaints about type size, but after some debating I decided to just buy this book and decide for myself... and I'm glad that I did. Sure the type is small and a bit hard to read. But there are only significant ammounts of type on the first twenty pages. The majority of the remaining 268 pages contain mostly images. Some pages contain no type at all, other than page numbers.

This one gets 5 well deserved stars. Forget the type complaints and pick up a copy of this valuable addition to any designer's book collection.

When there are so many self serving design books out there full of thrown together pop-culture imagery, it stops you in your tracks to see something of such substance and thorough execution. It must have taken thousands of hours to put this together (2089 to be exact, as well as 43200 fl. oz. of coffee - as noted on the last page.) This is a studio with a long history of influential work, and well deserving of a monograph. It goes beyond that, as the text is worth the price alone. I'm not kidding when I say seeing work like this either makes me want to be a better, more disciplined designer, or just give it up altogether. The style may not be for everyone, but I'm a sucker for the aesthetics of science. This is the kind of book I'll keep looking at over and over again - impressed by the absolute quality, thought and craftsmanship. When this copy is all worn out, it will make a nice stout doorstop too.

Pinker's Words and Rules is, in short, an awesome book worthy of the highest praise (at least, I think so). Although I do not feel I can do it justice here, hopefully I can give you enough of a hint of the book's thesis to get you interested.

Pinker establishes from the start that the presence of regular and irregular verbs in all languages can tell us far more than one would immediately think. I must admit that, after reading Pinker's first chapter, I was rather skeptical as to how illuminating this apparently simple phenomenon could be. How can such a commonplace principle reveal some of the most integral components of human mind and language? It was a real pleasure, however, to watch my objections to Pinker's argument fall apart as I read the rest of the book.

Briefly, Pinker traces the development of language in children and touches on many original experiments with a wide range of subjects to suggest that there is a discernible structure in our brains that accommodates the regulars and irregulars. Some (the regulars) need only be stored in root form (e.g., to talk) in our memory; our mind can inflect them appropriately (person, tense, etc.) using built-in rules of language (e.g., just add -ed to get the past tense). Other verbs (the irregulars), however, do not follow the rules; all of their forms must be stored in our lexical memory (e.g., am, are, is, was, were; although related irregulars can lead to mini-patterns that help us inflect new verbs that "seem" irregular). These principles are a shadow of the underlying structure of our minds.

This is, of course, only a minuscule fraction of the information Pinker covers in Words and Rules. Best of all, he has a great sense of humor and a gift for writing that makes all of his ideas perfectly clear. The "knickknacks" of language he relates are all familiar, and yet he uses them brilliantly to make a strong case for the structure of our mind (not so familiar) that he believes is reflected by the principal of verb regularity and irregularity. Admittedly, Pinker becomes somewhat repetitive at times in this book, but I didn't find these lapses particularly troubling (I got the feeling that he could sense the skepticism that some of his readers would have and tried a little too hard to be convincing).

If you have read and enjoyed How the Mind Works and/or The Language Instinct, you will certainly enjoy this book as well (if you have read The Language Instinct, then some of the ideas in Words and Rules will already be familiar to you). If you have not read Pinker yet, this is as good a place to start as any.

For winter break I wanted something fun to read...I intended to get Harry Potter books but got this by chance off the new books table. I have a degree in linguistics but haven't kept up with what is happening in the area. I have throughly enjoyed reading this book. The author provided plenty of background information and wonderful illustrations (and cartoons too!) to explain the points of the text. I haven't finished the book but it is going fast.

I highly recommend it for teachers of literacy and language. There are terrific ways to explain the irregular, and for that matter regular, verbs in English. The glossary is a great, quick guide to terms in the field as well as terms in the text. This my first book by this author and I plan to read others.

Whoever would think that an entire book could be written on the subject of verbs: regular and irregular. But Pinker does a dynamic job of making language sing. He recognizes the liquidity of language, its morphing and morphosis of rules, and its complete fascination. This is the third Pinker book I have read - and can't wait for the next one. I jumped into this one expecting repetition from his other books, but he continues to surprise us with completely new slants about language, completely new examples. Only his expertise and broad sense of humor remain familiar. I have to read slowly so I can absorb all the nuances suggested. Still, I hate to lay the book down. Major entertainment and fascinating information.