This book does an excellent job of exploring the many contradictions of the life and career of an artist who was both his own biggest fan/promoter and his own harshest critic. The book presents the many talents (artist,etcher,interior designer to name a few) and his many flaws (vain, arrogant, bitter and self serving attitude) while still showing the human side of the artist . The illustrations are complete and a glorious showing of both his popular works as well as his less known pieces. The triad of this book, "Diabolical Designs" and "Beyond the Myth" reveal an artist who deserves much more critical and popular attention.

I've been a linguist/translator for over 20 years (English is my native language). I've used literally hundreds of reference books in my life, and for the average user (H.S. and college students, parents helping kids with homework, people proofreading their own or colleaques' work...) I would rank this as one of the two best English grammar books I have ever encountered. It is well organized, so it is easy to find the right section. It is clearly written, so you don't have to decipher the text. It indicates whether particular items are required by grammar rules, or merely prefered, so you don't have to wonder if something could be phrased differently if you want to. I give it my highest recommendation!

This is a beautiful book! The color plates are very nice and are good representations of the actual paintings. Brief histories are also presented. I bought it after my first visit to the National Gallery of Art and before my second visit. I enjoyed the second visit much more because I felt that I really knew what was going on with the artists and paintings. Get the book and then go to the National Gallery of Art!

This book is one of my favorites, and has been for many years. Its beautiful color illustrations are grouped by the period and country in which they were created. The book presents works (mostly paintings) from many countries (mostly Western) beginning in the Byzantine era, extending up until the early twentieth century. Many of the works are accompanied by art historical abstracts which offer insight for both the inexperienced and learned art enthusiast. This is a great book to have around as an extensive survey of Western painting.

R.B. Cunninghame Graham's books are the sort of non-fiction that can almost be passed off as fiction. Desolate but fascinating wastelands, journeys over the silent terrain of the Americas, encounters with the bare edges of existence -- all make his works so engaging that I can't think of any writers to compare with him except his friends Joseph Conrad and W.H. Hudson.

Culled from his thirty or more books, Graham's "North American Sketches" were written between 1880 and 1925. They form the companion volume to his stunning South American and Scottish sketches also edited by John Walker. Here, we travel with the eccentric Scottish gaucho and radical MP for Menteith to the Mexican frontier and the Texas borderlands.

It is a savage world oscillating between barbarity and loneliness Graham describes for us. Time is punctuated with bloodshed, pointless cruelty, man's inhumanity to man, but also with hope and awe of this still wild land. "A Hegira," perhaps the most powerful sketch, depicts Graham's repeated encounters with six fugitive Mexican Apaches escaping from "the law" as he and his wife head north from Mexico City to their San Antonio ranch. "Silent and stoical the warriors sat," he describes them in the first encounter, before their flight, "not speaking once in a whole day, communicating but by signs; naked except the breech-clout; their eyes apparently opaque, and looking at you without sight, but seeing everything." These figures from two worlds meet up again. "Days followed days as in a ship at sea; the waggons rolling on across the plains" as Graham's party continually spies traces of the Apaches fleeing to their homes in the north, pursued by Mexican Indian hunters who, over a week, track down and kill them all. Nothing during his journey inspires in him so much fascination as those "stoical," silent "indios bravos": "I wondered what they thought, how they looked upon the world."

There is in these sketches a profound sense of disenchantment with civilization as practised, with "progress" as conceived. The American and Mexican public, he writes, doubtless believe in the problematical "Uncle Sam's Justice [sic]," the "poetical justice" of slaughtering Indians. Nevertheless, Graham does not completely scorn "civilization"; far from it. "We might have taught [the Indians] something, they might have taught us much, but soon they will all be forgotten, and the lying telegrams will speak of 'glorious victories by our troops.' " Some sketches, in fact, exhibit Graham's great admiration for the Anglo and Mexican societies he in other places condemns. "A Chihuahueño" is a wonderful portrait of Miguel Sáenz, a mestizo from Chihuahua. Full of Sáenz's witty proverbs, the sketch shows Graham's fascination with folk sayings. "Trust not a mule nor a wench", Sáenz quips; and "Among soldiers and prostitutes all compliments stand excused."

Graham's portraits of Mexico and Texas are every bit as fascinating as his awesome South American Sketches. If you like W.H. Hudson and Joseph Conrad, you'll love R.B. Cunninghame Graham.

The authors, Economics professors at Portland State University, have traced American economic policy and development from the Great Depression to persuasively argue that public expectations and irrevocable budgetary dynamics will mandate large government for the foreseeable future.
Clearly written (for economics), this work will prove useful to the general reader with little background in the subject.
(The numerical rating above is an unwelcome default setting within Amazon's format. This reviewer does not employ numerical ratings.)

Awsome pictures of Alaska's brown bears at the McNeil River. This book is essential for anyone going or planning a trip to photograph the bears on the McNeil river.

R.B. Cunninghame Graham (1852-1936) is one of the great neglected literary geniuses of the last hundred years. Scottish folklorist Hamish Henderson summed up his fate perfectly in the title of a 1952 book review: "Who Remembers R.B. Cunninghame Graham?" Even today, Graham -- writer, socialist, South American traveler, anti-imperialist, horse-trader -- is far less appreciated in Scotland, his own home, than in Argentina, a land celebrated in many of his writings and where he died in February, 1936. Yet the aura of Scottishness that hangs about him is impressive. A direct descendant of the Scottish king Robert II, he would have been king of Scotland himself if the Stuarts and England hadn't barged in. As an MP in the House of Commons (1886-1892), he was such a vocal supporter of progressive ideas like universal suffrage and the 8-hour work-day that he was often reprimanded and once, after the Bloody Sunday demonstrations in 1887, spent six weeks in prison. Finally, as first president of both the Scottish Labor Party (1886) and the Scottish National Party (1928 [aged 76]), he pushed for Scottish Home Rule.

Yet the most interesting thing about him, his writing, is even less well-known than his political career. As John Walker, the editor of several Graham anthologies, points out, he "is one of those writers [some] people claim to have heard of, but have never read." Compared to Graham's usually lively South American sketches, his descriptions of Scottish life and landscape are more densely written and "mellow". Yet the quiet scenes of the Highlands and Islands he conjures up won't fail to viscerally grip you.

The lyric sketches at the beginning of the book are some of Graham's best. "Inch Cailleach" (1927) describes the wooded Island of the Nuns, a place "stranded like a whale upon the waters" of Loch Lomond, near Graham's home at Menteith, in Dumbartonshire, just north of Glasgow. Graham muses on its monastic past: "The voices of the sisters singing in the choir must have been scarce distinguishable from the lapping of the wavelets on the beach, or, blending with them, made up a harmony, as if nature and men were joining in a pantheistic hymn. Nuns may have lived upon the island with, or without, vocation, have eaten out their hearts with longing for their lost world ... but the dim sisterhood has left no record of its passage upon earth except the name Inch Cailleach [Island of the Nuns], beautiful in its liquid likeness to the sound of the murmuring waves, and the wind sighing in the brackens and the bents."

Later, he describes a grey chapel, burial place of the McFarlane and McGregor clans. "Quietly they lie, they who knew never a quiet hour in life ... Bitterly they paid for the slaughter of Glenfruin, with two hundred years of outlawry, and with the hand of every man against them. Well did they deserve the title of the 'Clan Na Cheò' [Clan of the Mist], for the mist rolling through the corries was their best hiding-place..."

While the passing of time is palpable here, the nuns, McGregors, and McFarlanes "have left an aura that still pervades the leafy isle. Nothing is left of them but the vaguest memory, and yet they seem to live in every thicket, every copse." Graham exhorts at the end of the sketch, "Let them sleep on. They have had their foray, they have chased the roe and followed the red-deer. The very mists upon the mountains are far more tangible than they are now..." Yet in a dramatic swoop, Graham conjures up a heroic Last Day, when all this island's dead shall gather again: "Under their rude tombstones men whose feet, shod in their deerskin brogues, were once as light as fawns, are waiting till the shrill skirl of the Piob Mor [the great Highland bagpipe] shall call them to the great gathering of the clans."

An immensely impressive book. 5 stars.

This book provides excellent insight into the reasons why we do the things that we do. The thing that scared me was that I saw a little bit of myself in each category. But who knows, maybe that means I'm normal. The stories are good and very insightful. Dr. Berecz relates his case histories well, and he provides analysis that can be easily understood. You can find out not only about yourself, but you can start to understand how other people (boss, friend, co-worker) work. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of themself.

Charlotte Walker, a professor of English at the State University of New York at Oneonta, has assembled the first anthology of critical essays on the naturalist, literary critic, poet, and philosopher John Burroughs (1837-1921). This is an extraordinary collection. Walker includes a wide array of voices, many of them (including my own) from outside academia. All have important things to say about Burroughs, who once towered above the American literary landscape but whose reputation has been eroded by time. A renewal of interest in the work of the Catskill-born Burroughs is underway, and this book is both a product of that movement and a light to lead the way. As the author of a concise biography and appreciation of John Burroughs ("The World of John Burroughs," published by Sierra Club Books), I congratulate Walker on a job brilliantly done.

I'm not from Louisiana originally. I've had the opportunity to browse through Cajun cookbooks while living here. This particular book, "Something Old, Something New", is quite interesting. It has a combination of great recipes-ones for those who like to use the "good old stuff" and ones for those who like to use lighter low-fat replacements. It has great stories and photgraphs of people and food. It definitely is not your typical cookbook. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I have this year. Bon appetite.