This book helps to easily identify the various species of trees and shrubs that occur in the Virginia area. The descriptions are short, to the point and easily understood. Any one can enjoy this book and it is small enough to take on nature walks with the kids, or grandkids. In a very short time it makes even a notice seem like an expert in tree identification.

Coates gives the reader the essentials in this "uncovered" edition. While I would have preferred an index, this collection serves as a wonderful primary source for the student of gay history, and a great read for anyone interested in Oscar Wilde or one of the earliest modern legal defenses of homosexuality. Despite surprising claims that the "love that dare not speak its name" defense is *not* a defense of homosexuality, even the most cursory read will show it is a brilliant defense of homosexual love in the classical (age-differentiated) sense, which was the very type of romantic/sexual relationship Oscar Wilde and Bosie Douglas had formed.

We have been looking for this book for at least 5 years. We have a jewelry shop that specializes in Navajo, Zuni and Hopi Indian jewelry. This book is the best in showing where different turquoise comes from and how to identify it. We use this reference book as a means to identify turquoise and give our customers information. It is especially important now that turquoise is a very sought after commidity. I highly reccomend this book for it's usefullness at The Biggest Little Shop in Helen.

One of the stories that I will always cherish, that I remember being told in my youth, is this one. I've heard it many times : at home from my mother (saturday morning, in a low soft voice, in the kitchen, drinking soup), in the classroom from my teacher English Literature, at the university, and from my wife. So often we tell to each other, quiet but sad, with a dark smile : 'I have read all the wise men have written and all the secrets of philosophy are mine, yet for the lack of a red rose my life is made wretched' (I don't know if it's quoted without mistakes). Everything we have is nothing compared to the love we lack, and even if we sacrifice a lot for it, it doesn't change but for a moment. The Nightingale, thinking she could solve it all by sacrificing herself, is pure tragic, and that gripped me most in the tale. I'm afraid I can't remember being told the Selfish Giant. I first heard it in the recent film 'Wilde'. Written for children, I think these tales are suitable for everyone who loves to laugh and cry without having too much troubles on their minds, and by learning a great deal about live through the eyes of Oscar Wilde. But are the eyes of Oscar Wilde those of the Selfish Giant or of the Nightingale ? One of the few questions that deserves no answer !

"An Ideal Husband" and "A Woman of No Importance" are two of Oscar Wilde's best plays. Both plays take place in the 1890's but their characters and commentaries about society are timeless. Extremely well-written, the characters seem to come alive as you read, as though you're actually seeing the play performed in front of you. These plays are comedies that will leaving you laughing for days, yet they are also filled with drama and will leave you on the edge of your seat.

I consider this compilation of essays and historical documents an essential addition to the library of persons interested in US-Mexico borderlands history. The strength is, in my opinion, in its collection of historical writings, which include the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the Plan of San Diego, and Juan Cortina's Proclamations. The reader is able to consider events and thoughts that occurred during the period between 1848 and 1915, rather than rely on commentary. However, the well-written essays compliment the documents (and I believe the text was designed with this in mind.) All together, a very nice collection.

This very readable book is very useful corrective to what's become the "standard" view of Wilde. It's especially good at exposing the weaknesses of Richard Ellman's now-standard biography of Wilde. For example, the claim that Wilde contracted (and later died of) syphillis is pretty much taken apart by Pearce.

Pearce has also very closely read Wilde's works, so he offers some very valuable readings of Wilde's writing in order to better understand Wilde's inner life--a life, according to Pearce, that was marked by inner loathing and a self-rebuffed desire to embrace the Church.

Ellman's book remains the standard biography in terms of prose quality (Ellman wrote with uncommon beauty and grace, and Ellman's enthusiasm for Wilde's work and personality is truly infectious). However, Pearce's book really should be must reading for all fans of Wilde's work. It doesn't merely trot out all the old information and anecdotes, but actually offers a fresh view of Wilde.

If you want to feel what your ancestors felt after they landed, this is the book for you.
I have read many, many books of this type, and Handlin's is still the best.
He looks at the Great Migration from the point of the impact on the immigrants and their children, rather than the impact on Canadian and United States cultures.
This book goes into areas that the documentaries that we've all seen, do not. This should be the primer for anyone who is going to read about conditions in the countries that their ancestors came to the US and Canada from. Without this piece, what went before won't make as much sense.
Dispells the theory that we were taught in the 60s and 70s, that the immigrants came because they wanted to, and this was to them, the land of rags to riches. Handlin points out that if their very lives had nott been at stake, the vast majority would never have made the move.

Born in eastern Poland, Oscar Pinkus and his family survived the Nazi invasion by hiding in a farm pit from August 1942 to July 1944, when they were liberated by the Soviet Army. In "Victor" Pinkus writes a semi-autobiographical novel based on his own sponsorship to America, and the efforts of protagonist Victor Baden to publish a book that exposes the fate of Russian prisoners of war. The captives were killed by the Germans or if they survived and returned, imprisoned by a Stalin who considered them traitors to the Soviet Motherland. Baden cites between 3.5 and four million Russian POWs who died under the Nazis, a lesser-known genocide second only to the extermination of six million Jews.
Baden, half-Jewish,is drafted into the Soviet army and captured by the Germans in the action around Kiev. Escaping a POW camp, he survives the war by hiding in forests and remote villages. In 1945 he finds his village destroyed, his family dead, and a government that would send him to a labor camp as a traitor. Finding his way to Italy (as Pinkus did), Baden is befriended by army surgeon Jeffrey Claridge, who sponsors him to the United States. By nature a poet, Baden nevertheless becomes a successful engineer (like Pinkus), all the while trying to interest Soviet, German, Polish and American publishers in his manuscript about the plight of the POWs. All reject it as too hot for Cold War reading.
Baden meets a socialite named Romy; they marry on the condition they have no children. A single chance encounter with a Moroccan leaves Romy pregnant. In despair after the child is born, Romy takes her life, leaving the unwanted child with Baden, who sees both as doomed to walk what he considers as yet another of life's vicious overlapping circles, from which there is no escape.
Pinkus writes parts of "Victor" with stunning beauty and sensitivity, such as his descriptions of Baden's idyllic pre-war life along the Pripet River. Others graphically portray the unimaginable horror of the Kiev action, where waves of unarmed peasant soldiers are slaughtered to make the invader use up ammunition. The North African scenes, detailed in both Claridge's diaries and Victor's and Romy's trip, expertly evoke the starkness of the desert landscape and alien exoticism of its cities.
Albert Noyer, author, "The Saint's Day Deaths."

I picked up this book in Spanish at a public library, because I was researching for a work of fiction I am involved in. This book was a very realistic depiction of Puerto Ricans and "the culture of poverty" that sometimes seems so unsurmountable for anyone living in the lower strata of society. Their experience in the fifties and sixties --described here-- is now being lived by other groups of people who have migrated to the US and live in extreme poverty. I could identify with it, and I am not Puerto Rican.