The Franconia, New Hampshire, farm of the American poet Robert Frost was turned into a museum and center for poetry and the arts in 1976. From that time, "The Frost Place" has been annual event wherein an emerging poet has been invited to spend the summer living in the house where Frost once lived and wrote some of his greatest poetry. The Breath Of Parted Lips: Voices From The Robert Frost Place, Volume One is a remarkable anthology of twenty-four poets, each of whom won that honor of a summer's residency and document the success of the original concept as a means of generating outstanding poetry while nurturing the poet's muse in the rooms and views that were once the inspiration of the great Robert Frost. Poem At 40: Windwashed--as if standing next to the highway,/a truck long as the century sweeping by,/all things at last bent in the same direction./An opening, as if all/the clothes my ancestors ever wore/dry on lines in my body:/wind-whipped, parallel with the ground,/some sleeves sharing a single clothespin/so that they seem to clasp hands,/seem to hold on.//And now that I can see/up the old women's dresses,/there's nothing but a filtered light./And now that their men's smoky breath/has traversed the earth,/it has nothing to do with them./And now that awkward, fat tears of rain/slap the window screen,/now that I'm naked too,/cupping my genitals, tracing with a pencil/the blue vein between my collar bone and breast,/I'll go to sleep when I'm told.

The case studies provide an excellent flavor of the mental side of sports for all you "armchair" athletes and sports psychologists to savor. As a psychologist and self-proclaimed athlete, I was entertained and enlightened by the multitude of case studies that Thompson and Vernacchia chose to explore. I found myself relating my own sports-related challenges to those offered in the book. The funnest part was formulating my own hypotheses about the various issues that were presented in each case. This is a must read for anyone who has been frustrated by the challenges of competitive athletics. You're not alone! However, you might find that you're #1 competitor resides in the barriers that you have built in your own mind. Learn how to knock down, or atleast, get around those self-imposed barriers.

I believe many people heard of the Nuremberg Trial, but I doubt many people know much of the details of the Trial. Nor the debate about the Trial ensued for decades after the Trial. Frankly I have to admit that I myself did not have any idea of it until recently when this book happened to cross me. I wish people read this book with an open-mind. And I wish this still be a country where free speech still prevails. I highly recommend this important book which should not escape the sight of any history-lover and professional historians. The power and merit of this book rest on the brave challenge, the sharp criticism on the sensitive subject--the Nuremberg Trial--that have made by those four hundred leading personalities in the military, law, arts, diplomacy, philosophy, history and religion all around the world (on Allied side) who were armed with richly embroidered knowledge of international law and equipped with the historical truth according to their own experience in the Second World War.

The main points of their challenge and criticism lay in the followings:

First, the Trial was a gross travesty on justice and illegal as far as international law concerned, because, in the first place, 'according to the principles of international law universally recognized up to 1945 and explicitly admitted by the Allied and Associated Powers after the First World War, the Allies had no jurisdiction over the citizens of anther sovereign state for acts done in the service of that state'. In the second place, the law on the Trial was based on ex post facto law. They argued that that the definition of the crime and its punishment were fixed only after commission of the acts imputed alone radically has contravened the ancient principle of jurisprudence: 'Nulla poena sine lege, nullum crimen sine lege.'('No punishment without a law, no crime without a law.'); that the Resolution On Human Rights of the League of Nations was founded on this basic principle, which Article 11 of this resolution states: 'No one may be punished for an act if at the time of this act a punishment for it was not pre-established in international law or in the laws of the county concerned.' In the third place, the trial violated one of the basic principles of law that 'he who judges in his own case is not only a suspect and therefore a challengeable judge; he is simply not a judge. If he sits as judge, the illegality of the process and the nullity of the sentence are absolute and incurable'. In the forth place, the Charter of the Tribunal abolished the rules of evidence which in every civilized country have been introduced for the protection of accused persons against prejudiced and unreliable assertions.

Second, the Trial was unfair in the sense of fairness, because if it was really for trial war criminals, it should put all the war criminals of both sides before justice not only Germans. They even argued that as for crimes against humanity, those governments which ordered the destruction of German cities, thereby destroying irreplaceable cultural values and making burning torches out of women and children should also have stood before the bar of justice. Some opinions are even so bold and so sharp as it is stated that there is no doubt that in ordering the destruction of large enemy cities, which represented an important part of the very basis of European culture and civilization, the Allied political leaders have incurred a dire responsibility before the bar of history.

Third, the Trial was dangerous in military sense, because putting military personals on trial and death just because of obedience destroyed the basic principles of discipline and made any national defense impossible and in chaos. They argued how in the name of common sense a military officer could wage any kind of war except an aggressive one without being a traitor to his country, that everyone took an oath when he entered the U.S. Navy to defend the United States against all enemies---and there was not anything said about doing it in a non-aggressive manner, that after Nuremberg Trial practice, maybe we should add a proviso to the oath saying, 'Before carrying out the orders of my superior officers, I will check to insure that they are compatible with our international commitments, the Charter of the United Nations, etc.'

In short, according to their opinion, the Trial is illegal and unjust, the Trial is just a revenge, a lynch like ancient time, merely victors revenging their vanquished.

Another contents of the book is the deep sympathy and touching apology towards Germans including those dead sentenced by the Trial expressed by those leading personals. For instance, Royal Naval Admiral Sir Barry Domvile states: 'Anybody who was a victim of the iniquitous Nuremberg Trials has my deep sympathy.' Once US Army Colonel and President Judge of Pennsylvania Honorable Edward Leroy von Roden wrote: 'This country owes to Grand Admiral Doenitz and to many other men at the least a humble apology for what we have caused them to suffer...Let us hope that Admiral Doenitz and other enemy patriots will be aware of the fact that there are great numbers of loyal Americans who are ashamed of the behavior of those in our government who were responsible for what was done.'

My family really enjoyed playing the math games and doing the activities in this book. We had to put on our thinking caps and discover different math strategies. My kids loved the art in this book. There was also a lot of useful information on how much math my kids need to get into college.

Our company is in the sign business. After reading this book, I quickly ordered 10 more copies and made it mandatory reading for all of our customer service reps and production department heads. Easy to read and very unique in its perspective. A "must have" for any printing, sign or graphics production company. Improve your company's operations, morale and customer satisfaction all at once! Wow...

This book is the last book in a series of books issued by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. It is a highly useful and interesting book for any Wisconsin history nut.

I chose to read this book for a university history class where we had to find a book and make a presentation on HOW the book was written and presented rather than the history that was in the book. Thompason did a marverlous job at letting the public know what exactly happened during the uprising of Bloody Sunday 1916. I recommend this book to everyone and anyone interested in the politics of the time.

Islands Out of Time is an engaging, compelling novel. The drama of the end of Atlantis is created through interesting characters and a complex scenario. The esoteric references are well woven through this well written novel. Thompson is a poet and an historian = he brings all his skills into the writing of this book. I wish he'd write more novels.

When I looked at the cover of this book, I knew it was going to be contrarian. It shows volatility moving in the opposite direction to growth. Looking inside the book, I found the cover figure in Chapter 9 where it was described as volatility versus growth for 75 years of the Ibbotson Index starting in 1926. I looked at the Ibbotson table, and, indeed with the authors' eleven outlier years eliminated, the correlation is still negative (-.142). (With all 75 years included, I found the correlation to be (-.317).) At any rate, the Markowitzian notion of finding how large you can stand for volatility to be and then finding the portolio which maximizes growth is stood on its head.

The authors come up with an alternative to the Markowitz approach for portfolio selection based on something they call a simugram, which looks to be computer intensive.

Much of the book is spent on fundamental analysis, and indeed the authors do not seem favorably disposed to technical analysis. They dump on Black-Scholes and blame its use for the collapse of LTCM and Enron.

Some finance professionals will find much of this book annoying, since it attacks many standard concepts, such as the Efficient Market Hypothesis. And it seems to attack some of the basic tools in the finance tool kit, such as "risk neutral" evaluation.

One of the troubling things I found is that though the authors attack the canon of modern finance, they have only limited alternatives to recommend. They seem to recommend either doing deep fundamental analysis, using their complex simugram portfolio analysis, or putting one's money into an index fund. Most of us don't have the time to do the first or the software to do the second. To do the third really gives up on mathematical finance.

David Spangler and William Irwin Thompson "reimagine" the New-Age in this clear, sometimes shocking discussion. Based around the forums of two major New-Age conventions in 1988 and 1989, their visons and interpretations of countless aspects of what is commonly referred to as the "New Age" are the kind of candid, honest appeal to humanity that is so rare in this oftentimes overly-metaphysical genre. While the numinous aspects of reality are not spared (they fully discuss astral projection, channelling, and the like of modern "crystal worshippers"), what is refreshing is the humor and human-ness which accompany their insight. Being a reader who was raised with the concepts of past-life regression and karma as a moral and spiritual guidepost, I have often struggled with the paradoxical nature of the new-age movement. Seeming inacessible, lofty, and pretentious, this emotionally indulgent attempt at enlightmennt sent me searching Christianity for answers. Needless to say, I arrived at the discovery that both crystals and Christ can be limiting. Thus, my finding Spangler's and Thompson's exegesis on their comprehensive experience as both founders and dissentors of the new-age movement was fortunate; their ideas will engender a synthesis of thought both full of enlightenment and common sense - a combination rare in the often-megalomaniacal realm of spirituality and religion.