this books detail and consice managing is good but laks interesting experiments/inventions.for kids it may be fun and get a few laughs but when it comes down to work and when it comes down to "does it work" it fails the test.yet this book is still two stars!

If ever someone needs to be cheered up, or if you're just in the mood for some high-time bragging rights, this book is the one you should buy! With some really great tricks and good information, I believe practically anyone could enjoy it! And if you're in need for a present for your favorite future chemist or scientist, this book will definitely kick them off! :) A great book!:)

Mesoamerican archaeology is a little world by itself - I know, because I used to live in it. It has a very cosy relationship with museums and the "art" collectors who buy the objects that are looted from archaeological sites, which lie destroyed, torn into shreds under the forests all over Central America and Mexico. But it has almost no touch with reality any more. The things they say about the ancient Olmec are almost fantasy, because in truth we know so little about these people. Almost all the objects in this book were stolen from Mexico, ripped from the archaeological context that might tell us something about their real meaning. These are probably religious articles - we may never know. But imagine trying to reconstruct the rich life of rennaisance Italy by looking at reliquaries in Catholic churches! If you are still persuaded by the "mysterious Olmec" propaganda spouted by Coe and his looter buddies, go read Flannery & Marcus in the first 2000 issue of the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, and think it over.

The Olmec World is an amazing resource for those who study or have an appreciation of early Mesoamerican Art. At its most basic level The Olmec World is the catalogue of the 1996 Olmec Exhibition at the Art Museum at Princeton University the first comprehensive show of Olmec art in America. Drawing upon nearly all of the major Olmec museum collections in North America from Dunbarton Oaks to Princeton's own expansive holdings, the exhibition also drew heavily from many private collections never before shown to the general public. For instance, John Stokes' amazing collection of ceramic babies and jade masks are showcased in this catalogue. However, almost as impressive as the pictures are the essays in this collection. Michael Coe has done a marvelous job of soliticing and editing a myriad of papers on the mysterious Olmec.

This was Peter Taylor's last novel and it begins with a mystery: "In the Tennessee country of my forebears it was not uncommon for a man of good character suddenly to disappear. He might be a very young man or a middle-aged man or even sometimes a very old man. Whatever the case, few questions were ever asked. Rather, it was generally assumed that such a man had very likely felt the urging of some inner compulsion and so could not do otherwise than gather up his chattels and move on to resettle himself elsewhere."

The narrator, Nathan Longfort, first sees his older "cousin" Aubrey in 1916 on a funeral train headed from ?Washington, D.C., back to Knoxville for the burial of Longfort's grandfather, an accomplished senator. A ward of the senator, Aubrey is also the illegitimate son of a mountain woman and the senator's brother.

The novels follows Longfort's preoccupation with, and attempts to explain, Aubrey's appearances and disappearances over the years. Longfort flashes back to his parents, his schooling, and teaching career, and his own wife and son, but he always returns to Aubrey.

For the family the death of the senator represents the fading away of an era. Aubrey takes on mythic stature. To some degree, he becomes emblematic of the modern, rootless man, created in his own image, running away from the old mouth and dispensation. Without the senator, Aubrey must make his own way in the world.

The narrative reflects this sense of dissipation. "Time is nothing," Longfort quotes a Chinese philosopher and painter. "Character and experience and precious memory is all."

A retired art professor who wanted to be an artists, Longfort shuttles between past and present, attempting to buttress piecemeal discoveries against his own motives and discontents.

In this sense the story is thoroughly modern. Where the given and fixed have been abandoned, characters become increasingly self-conscious and wayward, having become mysteries to themselves. "Gone to Texas" reads a sign on one lonely homestead. That Longfort was raised without a father merely worsens the ambiguity.

At the same time, Taylor shows that the rest of the Long fort family does little better than Aubrey in sustaining a legacy of order. The manners they claim to cherish, but abuse, confine more than they provide. To them Aubrey is simply an outsider from ignoble birth and a target for easy jokes.

An unobtrusive author, Taylor develops these conflicts and tensions, often leaving the reader, like the main characters, very much on his own. Here are two lives, each falling short in some way but each eliciting sympathy. This complexity makes them more real is a measure of Taylor's talent. With its quiet prose and nudging toward sometimes discomfiting revelation, In the Tennessee Country is a solid work.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that in order to be disenchanted, one must first have been enchanted. One way to approach Peter Taylor's stories is to see them as a series of enchantments and disenchantments, one disappearing into the other.

"The Witch of Owl Mountain Springs" tells the story of Lizzy Pettigru, a well mannered woman of means whom the narrator idealizes with all his youthful notions of beauty and perfection. Her life takes a radical turn when she becomes a jilted lover, then gradually a spinster and recluse. The mountain people believe she is a witch seeking revenge on her enemies. But the story is as much about the narrator, who has unusual, well-timed periods of amnesia.

A native of Tennessee, Taylor has much in common with other Southern writers. Memory and manners form the backdrop of the many of these stories. Here are characters attempting to come to terms with their own histories and narrators who plod back and forth through psychological time. Taylor is a spelunker of the inner life who carefully leads his reader into the twisting caverns of human motivation. His is the avuncular voice behind the lantern.

As stories of manners, these revel in paradox. Style and politeness can disguise or hinder true human feeling, become a crutch, or even a kind of denial. The surface is that of the gentry: wealth senators, summer resorts, formal dances. But the characters in essence are sometimes shallow, sometimes deeply confused. They have become mysteries to themselves, perhaps due to the very veneer of manners that keeps them from self-knowledge and distances them from others.

The polished prose demands and rewards close reading and re-reading, so subtle and compressed with meaning are Taylor's sentences. Psychological details evolve from Taylor's knack for finding a character-revealing words and gestures.

The influence of the past, memory and manners, a sense of family and social relationship, the supernatural, life awash in mystery, recognition of limitation -- these are Taylor's concerns. His stories are finely wrought with conflict, irony, and paradox. He is, in short, a master storyteller.

Polygon Wood was a major battle area for several of the Ypres phases, but the book only deals with the third phase (1917). In particular, the fighting in Second Ypres (1915) and the early use of gas is completely ignored. This is disappointing and is not identified as such in the advertising. The coverage for the third phase is very good however.

I have read the book for school, when I had classes in geopolitics. An zich an amazingly interesting field of study. I only dont seem to understand why we got this in the geography faculty and not in the history one. Since this subject is one 100 % history if you ask me. If you like to learn something about nationalism, imperialism and nations, the working, the history and that sort of related subjects, this is your book. But I warn you Taylor surely is everything else than a plesant writer. He begins to explain things and goes on pages later, creating interuptions that are to large, so that sometimes the book was a bit to chaotic to me. The level of English was to scientific, although that Im not a native speaker, so most poeople would not find this a problem. I learned alot from Taylor that I can use in my field of history, but I had to take the course twice, and read the book maybe about 6 or 7 times before I began to understand what this was all about. And still then there is so much information in there you like to remember, that its impossible to do so.

If you ask me and you like to learn about geopolitics there were other writers that were more my cup of tea. Such as Machiavelli, Fukuyama and last but not least Samuel Huntington, all these books are easier to read and will privide you with alot beter insight in how certain things are working. I had my first class in geopolitics on the 11th od september. We talked all morning about power and how this was devided in the world, when I came home walked into the living room and saw the second plain crasing into the WTC. So quite an interesting way to begin.

There are numerous reference books in this field and all must be better than this. I learned more from reading today's newspaper.