James Cook's "Fifty Years on the Old Frontier" is an autobiographical narrative of his life experiences in the American West. Cook's endeavors during the latter part of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century encompassed a whole host of occupations: cattle drover, tour guide, hunter, rancher, and military scout. Cook eventually married into money and retired to a ranch near Agate, Nebraska where he consorted with Red Cloud and other old Sioux warriors. He also collaborated with several university professors on fossil digs located around his ranch, eventually becoming an amateur scientist in his own right. Cook's accounts of his adventures in the Old West provide a compelling insight about the realities and myths of America's movement across the North American continent. James Cook died in 1942.

The beginning chapters of the book outline the author's work as a cattle popper and drover along the old cattle trails through Texas and Kansas. The dangers that threatened the well being of these tough as nails trail hands constitutes the bulk of Cook's narrative. What quickly becomes apparent is that these guys were not the dapper dandies we see in films and fiction; they worked hard everyday to get those longhorns up to Kansas and to the railroad. Cook recounts the disagreements amongst drovers, an experience with hail and a tornado, stampedes, the threat of wild animals, and the dangers posed by Indians. A separate chapter discusses the fate of the wild mustangs, yet another sad chapter in the annals of the conquest of the West. Once the businessmen moved in and discovered a market for horses, they rounded up the mustangs by the thousands through crude trapping techniques and by depriving Indians of their stocks. Horses injured in the process were ruthlessly shot by the trappers. The picture that emerges from the author's narrative about trail life is one of greedy exploitation leading to environmental damage.

Relations with Indians are a central theme of the book. The movie image of tremendous battles between natives and American military forces does not find expression in this story. Instead, Cook portrays Indians as just another obstacle to the settlement of the West. Cattle drivers had to pay attention to Indian raiders who sought to steal horses and cattle, but it was more important to worry about weather and stampedes. In the last section of the book, Indians play a bigger role in the story. The author outlines in detail his relationship with the Sioux after they had been confined to the reservation. Another chapter deals with the Geronimo uprising in New Mexico, an incident Cook experienced first hand during his tenure as a ranch manager in the area. He takes the opportunity of the uprising to tell the truth about the Indians and the military forces during the campaign. According to the author, Geronimo and his Apache warriors did not fight the military head on, but relied on hit and run tactics with strategic retreats to Mexico to stay one step ahead of the law. The military relied heavily on scouts, often mixed blood Indians, in order to track down the rogue Indians. Geronimo eventually surrendered when an army officer talked him into giving himself up.

Cook's interest in the West is not a broad picture of western history, but rather groupings of anecdotes about his individual experiences in the area. The reader often has to read between the lines of these engaging stories in order to ascertain the reality of the situation on the frontier. For example, Cook discusses in depth the time the Sioux on the reservation asked him to be their government appointed agent. The author provides several letters of endorsement written on his behalf by politicians and bankers in Nebraska and Wyoming. The letters praise Cook as a man of the West on excellent terms with the local Indian population. A cynic can see the larger dynamic tensions between East and West in these letters. The locals want one of their own in the job because up to this point the position was always held by someone from back east. Moreover, a western agent could deliver lucrative supply contracts to western businesses and perform favors for western politicians. Why else would bankers take the time to write a recommendation letter to the government? It certainly had little to do with goodwill towards the Sioux Indians, especially since this wheedling went on at roughly the same time as the Ghost Dance fiasco.

I am astonished that no one else has reviewed this book. This is a great text for the Old West history buff or those interested in Indian/White relations during the late 19th century. James Cook's "Fifty Years on the Old Frontier" is an entertaining, yet at some times sad, account of the realities of our frontier days.

This has quite a number of examples for both private(or personal) letters as well as business ones, grouped according to the various purposes and occasions. There is even a section on spelling which is indeed helpful. The number of practices or exercises accompanying these example letters are helpful, not to mention the vocabulary list that accompanies each sample letter and a list of useful words towards the end of the book. That which would have completed the book even more is an answer key to the exercises in the book.

As far as I could tell the only other book that competes with this book is "World Woods in Color". I had the chance to compare the two side by side and here is my take:

The two books are very similar in many ways. They both include about the same number of woods (around 280) and they both have roughly the same sort of information about the woods. Of course 280 is a tiny number compared to the number of woods in the world, but as far as I can tell these books seem to be about the best there is in print on the subject, and these books do probably cover most the woods one can get on the retail market here in the US.

In any case, the small distinctions I noticed between theset two books were:

"Useful Woods" is organized by scientific name, which means that for most of us to find a particular wood we have to start at the index. "World Woods" is alphabetical by common name, which is easier unless you know the wood by a name other than what the authors considered to be the most common name.

"Useful Woods" is published by the International Wood Collectors Society and this orientation is apparent in the text. There is information such as the origins of the scientific names, and the sources for small samples, which most woodworkers are not likely to care much about, although it is interesting on occasion to read this information.

The color pictures of the woods in "World Woods" are larger but the pictures in "Useful Woods" are plenty large enough for me (2" x 3"). "Useful Woods" includes black and white end-grain pictures, which are useful for identification of an unknown sample. Single pictures are always hard when one is trying to capture something as variable as wood and so it's not surprising that some pictures are better than others. For example, the pictures of Lacewood in both books completely fail to capture the amazing grain of that wood, however, I thought that most of the pictures where pretty good in both books overall.

On average "World Woods" probably includes just a little bit more information on the working qualities of most woods but both books are somewhat thin in this area, at least from a woodworker's perspective.

"Useful Woods" was written in the US where "World Woods" was written in England. This shows in a number of areas, the most important of which are the woods included and the availability information about the woods. This was the final deciding point for me. I figured that everything else being about equal, which I judged it to be, it made more sense for me to get a book that focused on the woods I can get here in the US and that gives me availability information that is focused on the US Market.

So, I went ahead and bought "A Guide to Useful Woods of the World" and so far I'm happy with my choice.

"It is as important to talk about marriages as to talk about the national election."

This quotation from Phyllis Rose, referred to in one of the eleven articles of volume six of the journal Spring, devoted to marriage, resonates through the entire issue in an astonishing variety of ways.

From publisher James Hillman's own reflections on "Marriage, Intimacy, Freedom" to Ginette Paris' "If You Invite the Gods Into Your Marriage" to C.L. Sebrell's "Marry the Gardener!" the importance of marriage to the individual soul, the immediate community and society as a whole is exhaustively but entertainingly discussed.

Perhaps the best, and certainly the most delightful, piece in this collection is Sebrell's, which not only re-visions our understanding of the Greek god Priapos, bringing our attention back to the Greek view of him as a careful and talented lover and not just as a glorified satyr, but also uses this examination of Priapos, also the god of gardens, to drive home the point that the best and happiest marriages occur when two people who are already whole come together, seeking in marriage not salvation or completeness, but a life of shared tenderness and esthetic and erotic pleasure.

Helen Henley's "What Can We Ask of Marriage?" reiterates this point: "A conscious relationship must always presuppose two individuals able to make a committment to a meaningful life together," and "Its achievement is both an art and a discipline."

Full disclosure time: I, your humble reviewer, have never been married. But I arose from a marriage, one whose partners are still joined, and I live in a society that still in some sense values marriage, still sees it as a subject worth examining in film and song and dry political debate. Much of these examinations have proven pointless, dull, fruitless, seeking only to point a finger of blame for what is wrong about marriage.

In 1996, the editors of Spring chose to point out what is still right, still possible, and also to ask why marriage still matters, still obsesses us, still happens in the 20th century and beyond.

And in the process, they have made even unmarried free agents like myself take a look at this most basic of institutions and say to it "Yes, it is important to talk about."

While I own the 2nd Edition of this same book, the 3rd Edition is even better to prepare the MCP candidate for the real exam, 70-073. The MCSE: Study Guides from Sybex/Network Press have been the best to prepare for the MCSE exam. However, I don't just rely on the study guides to pass the exam. The study guide is a good beginning to orient yourself with the material for the exam. Using Transcenders or some other MCSE-approved testing simulation software will be the key to passing the exam. Several IT friends of mine have used Transcenders after reading one of these Sybex textbooks for MCSE study guide material and they went took the real exam and pass it on the first try. In final, I believe that the MCSE: NT Workstation 4 Study Guide, 3rd Edition, is one of the best study guides to prepare for the NT Workstation exam now with adaptive testing engine software to make the real exam experience worthwhile. MCSE NT4 Candidates have less than 7 months to finish the NT4 exams before their retirement this year in Dec. 31, 2000.

This book was very helpful for board review and preparation. I believe it does live up to its name as a baby book of "Aunt Minnie's". The diagnoses are classic and discussions succinct. The bibliography is also excellent.

One could use this book as a primary learning tool while learning pediatric radiology,but I wouldn't recommend this to anyone but a radiologist or a radiology resident. It wouldn't be very helpful for a pediatrician, because the way it is set-up is radiology "boards" style.

I find "Redgauntlet" one of the less satisfactory novels in the Waverley series. Certainly, it has the local flavor, the dialect, the imaginative description of evocative landscapes all his novels have, but it is not a blast as some of the others are. The plot involves a fictitious third Jacobite rebellion, and it is interesting to see how Scott (especially in the notes from the Magnum edition, included in this edition) argues this time not for the historicity but for the historical probability of the events described. While Scott is often hailed as the inventor of the historical novel, "Redgauntlet" also shows him to be a forerunner in the historically probable novel--a genre practiced to great effect by our present-day history buff, Umberto Eco.

But probability alone does not a great novel make. Darsie Latimer's character is even less probable than his semi-historical counterparts, such as Edmund Waverley and Henry Morton. And this is strange, since moving further into fictionality, one could argue, a writer might allow themselves more latitude to make a character interesting, even if certain circumstances remain historical. Is this a conscious effort on Scott's part to show, after the fictionality of history, the fictionality of fiction?

Scott disturbs narrative conventions even further when the conspiracy against the Hanoverian King George III completely fails to materialize--ironically, for what seems to be the silliest of reasons: the Pretender (or the Chevalier if you're a Jacobite), Charles Stuart, refuses to give up his mistress. Thus, the main plot of the novel sizzles out and really not much happens in these 400 pages. Mind you, I personally don't need much to happen, but the 19th century novel did. Scott as a postmodern writer? That is pushing it too far, but this novel awaits a postmodern critique enlightened by a reading of Eco and Bakhtin.

That said, there are some really interesting things going on. Apart from the "regular" set of characters of Scott's Scottish novels, this one features an orthodox Quaker who is the epitome of anti-militant mercantilism. The form is also quite new for Scott--the novel is an epistolary, a set of letters between Darsie Latimer and his friend Alan Fairford. Thus, the novel's first-person point of view is split, and this provides for interesting contrasts.

For me, Scott sort of shot himself in the foot with this novel. His earlier novels ("Redgauntlet" is the last of the Scottish novels, written eight years before his death) lead one to expect a major action to happen before the denouement, and this one avoids that a bit too artificially. It seems that Scott was at pains to stick to history, and his own political convictions, a bit too much: a fictitious Jacobite rebellion is OK as a narrative vehicle, but it shouldn't interfere with the peaceful Great Britain (in which Scotland was in many respects subsidiary to England) that Scott himself inhabited and advocated. And so narrative excitement has to give way to Scott's pacifist politics--an honest choice, which Scott consistently maintains in all the Waverley novels--and character development and politics take precedent.

A final note: Scott has always proven himself a masterful and honest critic of royalty and nobility, especially of those characters he seems to love. "Waverley"'s Mac-Ivor is chastised for his political obstinacy, in "The Fortunes of Nigel" King James I (a Scot) is rebuked for his fickleness and corruption, and in "Redgauntlet" the formerly charismatic Stuart proves effeminate and tragic (dying an impoverished alcoholic, in the footnotes). And often enough, these tragic characters are of more interest than the somewhat ineffectual and sometimes foolish main characters: something for readers of literature to sink their teeth into.

This book is very helpful for ecologist, forest managers, and policy makers with little knowledge of riparian systems. Riparian experts would not find this book helpful. The book reviews riparian ecology and effects of forest management on riparian systems through a series of chapters on water quality, riparian habitat, and different species groups. Each chapter ends with a bulleted summary including management suggestions which makes the text an value primer. This also makes it possible for a practioneer to identify the ecological values of concern and develop ones own apporach to maintaining any subset of ecological values. The organization makes it easy to locate relevant information. Summary chapters synthesize the results into suggestiond for BMPs to maintain water quality, riparian habitat, and riparian species. The organization makes it fairly easy to work backwards from these suggestions and evaluate the reasoning of each BMP. The completeness of the literature review was above average. As a research ecologist, I only wished that the reviews were more complete though many relevant studies are cited.

Well how is that, according to the data provided the fourth edition appeared in 1920!

Whitaker has been chief royal-watcher for several British tabloids, and is well-known to the royals. This dissection of Prince Charles's love life, before and including Diana, is packed with photos and insider info you won't find elsewhere. It has the most thorough coverage of Charles's relationship with Anna Wallace, the one just before Diana, that I've run across. Hard to find now, but an essential item for Di or Charles collectors.