We purchased the book a few weeks ago and since using the program my daughter is a new person. After learning the basic skills in each of the three categories: speed, agility and quickness, she has increased both her performance and attitude. She is working on her volleyball skills and is improving her reflexes. She really enjoys the drills. She has been practicing some of the rolls and moves even when she is not working out.

The guidance is what she really needed and has really helped her athleticism.

No need to spend valuable time searching your files for various drills any longer.These coaches have placed drills into separate categories for our convenience. The combination of old and new drills will make your conditioning sessions more enjoyable for the athletes, and will certainly meet the training objectives of any coaching staff. There is a section which has sample programs that will give athletes, parents, and coaches solid advice on how to develop and organize a SAQ program that can be tailored specifically to fit individual needs.

Get fast or be last!

This book is translated all the way through, so the non-Spanish speaker can find some special passage in its words that can be dear to their own heart. Then they can recite it repeatedly in Spanish. It's great.

I enjoyed this book emmensly and cannot wait to own it

Una de las mejores obras de la literatura española contemporánea.
Últimas Tardes con Teresa narra las correrías de "El Pijoaparte", un ladronzuelo de motocicletas en la Barcelona de los años cincuenta, quien ingresa subrepticiamente a una fiesta del jet-set de la ciudad y conoce a Teresa, una atractiva chica de clase acomodada que cultiva las ideas marxistas y revolucionarias desde la cafetería del campus junto con sus compañeros de facultad. A partir de ese momento, nuestro amigo el Pijoaparte intentará introducirse al mundo de Teresa para eludir la miseria, mientras que Teresa buscará recíprocamente procurarse de la compañía de El Pijoaparte para huir por sí misma de la burguesía que pretende hipócritamente detestar, pero que al final, es su única forma de vida.
Un relato fascinante que resulta en una ácida crítica de la contrapuesta lucha de clases y las ilusiones que cada bando en dicha lucha adopta, tema que por lo demás, sigue vigente en nuestro mundo moderno.

Me lo he leido mas de tres veces y sigo creyendo que es el mejor libro que me he leido en el mundo. Describe una epoca, una situacion politica y la vida de diferentes clases sociales en Espana en los anos 50. La lectura es entretenida y uno se involucra mucho con los personajes. Lo recomiendo.

"Unthinkable Tenderness: Selected Poems" is an important volume by Juan Gelman of Argentina. This collection has been edited and translated into English by Joan Lindgren, and features a foreword by Eduardo Galeano.

Gelman spent time in exile during a period of Argentine military dictatorship; his son and daughter-in-law disappeared under the dictatorship. Much of this book deals with these painful realities. The book includes a helpful chronology of the Argentine turmoil from 1966-95. Unfortunately, this is an English-only edition; I would have preferred a bilingual edition.

Many of Gelman's poems are dark and mournful. This is understandable, since many of them deal with such subjects as exile, torture, and assassination. There are also poems about love, and about poetry itself. I was especially moved by his series of prose poems that explore the psychological landscape of the exile. He writes, "I am a monstrous plant. My roots are thousands of miles from me and no stem connects us" (from "Under Foreign Rain" XVI).

This is a haunting and powerful volume. I highly recommend this book to those interested in Latin American poetry, literature of exile, and human rights.

Even in translation (although I wish this were a dual language book) a very distinctive use of repetition and very tight construction shines through. I would call the work less "political poetry" than "poetry of human relationships that have a political context". Even poems of anguish regarding the Argentine "disappeared", have a universality rather than a stridentcy. The poems include exquisite turns of phrase that make reading it a pleasure of waiting for the next magnificant phrase.

Count 'em up, and you probably remember 15 or maybe 20 great Olympic moments. Bud Greenspan does readers, atheletes, and the Olympic Games by providing a moment-by-moment history of the games. There's Olga and Mark Spitz, but there's also moments from pre-televised Olympiads, and snapshots of people like Agnes Keleti, who missed the 1940 Olympics (cancelled due to war), was expelled from the Hungarian gymnastics club because she was Jewish, made the Hungarian team for the 1948 Olympics but spent it on crutches due to a torn ligament, and finally won gymnastics gold, silver and bronze in 1952 at Helsinki. There's the Japanese track teammates who, winning silver and bronze respectively, had their medals cut in half and resoldered to share the silver and bronze. There's the yachter who dropped out of second place to rescue a capsized competitor...this is a book of heroism, spirit and fascinating history. Sure, some great moments could be added...Torville & Dean's comeback, Kerry Stug's landing on a fractured foot, and where is Janet Linn? But reading about Joan Benoit breaking the women's marathon gender barrrier, and Wilma Rudolph breaking the color barrier...this is a great book for adults and kids.

All I can say is that the credibility and proffesionalism of Benitez have made him the best......

Part picaresque novel, part moving romance, part historical document, this extraordinary reconstruction of fifteenth-century Spain, by one of Mexico's leading literary figures, has been acclaimed throughout Europe and Latin America. This was the century that changed the face of Spain, and of the world-the century of the wars with the Moors, which led to the end of Moorish Spain; the voyages of discovery, which culminated in Columbus's enterprise; and, perhaps above all, the century of the Inquisition, which financed both the wars and the voyages by seizing the fortunes of condemned Jews, and which led inexorably to the Expulsion. Here these events are seen through the eyes of one Juan Cabezon, a descendant of converted Jews, who is orphaned at an early age by a series of bizarre accidents and taken in hand by Pero Menique, a clever blind man, who uses him as a guide through the rich street life of Castil. It is Menique who brings him beautiful young Isabel de la Vega, sentenced to death by the Inquisition, and begs him to hide her in his house Juan and Isabel fall in love, but as time passes, Isabel is driven close to madness by her forced seclusion in Juan's house and her constant fear of death. One day she vanishes, and Juan sets off on a desperate search for her which takes him across Spain, into the heart of the Jewish communities, and constantly into the path of the Inquisition's autos-da-fea journey that stamps itself indelibly on the reader's mind.

About the Author: Homero Aridjis is one of Mexico's foremost poets and novelists. He has published more than twenty books of poetry and prose and won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize for best book of the year in 1964 and the 1988 Diana. Novedades Literary Prize for the outstanding novel in Spanish for the sequel to 1492, Alemorias del fluevo mundo. Two volumes of his poetry have been published in English, Blue Spaces and Exaltation of Light, as well as a novel, Persephon. Twice the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has taught at Columbia University, New York University, and the University of Indiana. He has been Mexican Ambassador to the Netherlands and Switzerland and is the president of the Group of 100, Mexico's leading environmental organization. He lives in Mexico City.

Betty Pratt Johnston is a fantastic writer and gives you that edge on new dive sites. Her comprehensive style allows experienced and new divers alike to learn something new about every dive site listed. Betty covers items important to all levels of divers, including specialty divers like naturalists, UW Photographers, wreck etc...

A must have.

My four-year-old grandson and I read this book together and he absolutely loved it. This is a wholesome story that inspires the imagination of young children. I found that reading the Adventures of Dalbert Juan allowed my grandson to ask very real questions about his own life and to make comparisons with events that happen to him in preschool and in life with other children. We have gone on to read all the other books by Laurie Bury. I definately recommend it to families and feel that this set of books should be in every kindergarten and preschool.

Presently, the Philippines has the distinction of being one of the most impoverished countries in the region with Filipinos ranking among the most malnourished in the world (even though it is a leading producer of food and other important exports). To compensate for a sagging economy and unrelenting immiseration, over eight million (ten percent of the population) Filipinos find themselves scattered throughout the world as "overseas contract workers" (OCWs) employed in low-paying, labor intensive jobs. Although 1946 marks the "official" end of U.S. colonization, U.S. hegemonic rule continues to be the most salient feature of contemporary Philippine life. Of course, not everyone sees it this way. A substantial amount of scholarship exists, devoted to understanding the alleged "special relations" between the Philippines and the United States. However, the bulk of this work (produced primarily by U.S. academics), has ignored the role U.S. intervention has played in the development and evolution of Philippine society. Instead, these apologists for U.S. empire, blame the failures and problems currently plaguing the country on Filipino 'culture' and their inability to fully absorb the lessons of their colonial master. After Postcolonialism: Remapping Philippines-United States Confrontations by E. San Juan Jr. is a radical departure from the aforementioned apologists texts. In one of the most thorough, hard-hitting, perspicacious analyses on the subject, San Juan dismantles the myths surrounding U.S.-Philippine relations and lays bare the harsh realities U.S. imperialism has wrought on its former "showcase of democracy".

What differentiates After Postcolonialism from other commentaries is San Juan's emphasis on understanding Philippine history from a nationalist perspective. After being colonized for 400 years by Spain and another 50 years by the United States, Filipino society is best understood as a "historical-political construction. It is a product of mercantile capitalism that happened to be inserted into the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth century and later into the domain of imperialism, a phase of finance or monopoly capitalism" (2). Thus, while Filipinos share some similarities with other Asians they are distinguished by the fact that their "country of origin was the object of violent colonization and unmitigated subjugation by U.S. monopoly capital" (13).

The centerpiece of this work is Chapter 3 "Spectres of United States Imperialism". Here San Juan delivers one of the most thorough critiques of U.S. ideology and its attendant knowledge production industry. As I alluded to earlier, there has been an immense amount of scholarship produced on the subject of U.S. intervention in the Philippines. Stanley Karnow's In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines (1989) is one of the most celebrated and popular among the revisionist texts. Like others before him, Karnow argues that Filipinos "'submitted voluntarily to their own exploitation'" (72). In an attempt to account for the underdevelopment and corruption plaguing the Philippines, Karnow resorts to blaming the cultural values and "tribal texture" of Filipino life. Rejecting Karnow's flimsy thesis, San Juan exposes In Our Image for what it really is: a mainstream apologist text. Taking his critique one step further, San Juan indicts Karnow for being a "shrewd popularizer, a bricoleur of hackneyed notions and received doxa culled from the researches of mainstream scholars such as David Joel Steinberg, Peter Stanley, Theodore Friend, Glenn May, and other 'gatekeepers' who guard the parameters of acceptable, safe thinking on the problematic of U.S.-Philippine encounters" (73). To be fair, San Juan explains that Karnow's analysis (one that purports to "objectively" describe the "Filipino") has its roots in a firmly entrenched tradition of U.S. colonial discourse dating back to 1914 with the publication of Dean C. Worcester's The Philippines Past and Present. For San Juan, this body of knowledge has been severely compromised by the "reality of seemingly ineradicable social injustice, unmitigated poverty of millions, rampant atrocities by the military, exploitation of women and children, and widespread violation of human rights by business and government" (73). Again, the importance of 1898 cannot be stressed enough when assessing the current realities faced by Filipinos.

Although I have discussed at length the subjugation of the Philippines by the United States, it would be irresponsible for me to ignore the resistance and revolutionary movements that colonialism has generated. Such movements constitute the durable tradition of anti-imperialism embedded in the popular culture of everyday life. San Juan devotes a chapter to examining the possibilities of revolutionary transformation in the country by focusing on the prospects and problems of the New People's Army (NPA). As the only Communist-led resilient insurgency in the world, the NPA has certainly suffered a number of setbacks throughout its history. These inadequacies have led to wide divisions on the Left, leading some to openly denounce Marxism-Leninism. According to San Juan, the critique of Marxism being issued from a few renegade Filipino "leftists" could be largely attributed to their current fascination with postmodernist thought. He writes that "Foucauldian deconstruction substitutes for historical specification and totalizing hypothesis, individualist cultural politics for mass political struggle (169). While I will not dwell on the vacuity of postmodernist thought and its constant critique of Marxism, I agree with San Juan when he convincingly argues that postmodernism is a "pretext for celebrating the virtues of market liberalism and such formal freedoms that have inflicted so much violence, torture, protracted misery, and painful death to millions of Filipinos and other people of color" (170).

Embracing Marxism does not translate into a crude economic reductionism (as so many suggest), but allows us to confront the massive social injustices brought about by the rule of capital. In our present era of global economic restructuring, a historical-materialist method of inquiry is absolutely necessary if we are to understand the profound iniquitous relations between countries in the North and those in the South. What we are witnessing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, under the guise of "globalization," is literally a phase of capitalist accumulation gone berserk. Everyday, millions of the world's poor are sacrificed by transnational corporations, their instruments for regulating trade (NAFTA, APEC, WTO, MAI), and international money lending institutions (International Monetary Fund and the World Bank). Despite this, numerous scholars have chosen to substitute a politics of revolution and transformation for a discursive analysis of free floating signifiers. Their obsession with the "post-this and that" obscures central relations of power necessary to understanding our current globalized order. After Postcolonialism reminds us that there is nothing "post" about colonialism. Countries like the Philippines have been transformed into neocolonial appendages supplying the First World with the bulk of cheap labor. Confronting this stark reality head-on and understanding that what the United States did to the Philippines in 1898 - what many consider the first Vietnam - has a lasting legacy that continues to shape and inform the lives of Filipinos as well as other people of color. The strength of After Postcolonialism lies in San Juan's passion and commitment to ending the neocolonial subjugation of Filipino people as well as others suffering under the dictates of U.S. hegemonic rule.

Anne E. Lacsamana, Ph.D., Troy, NY