I loved this book when I was twelve (the same age as Andrew). It is chock full of verisimilitude and I loved the style, which is conversational without being hackneyed.

When in my twenties, I read Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye." A few pages into it, I said "HEY!" Holden Caulfield's voice is almost exactly the same as Andrew Kellogg's. Barbara Brooks Wallace cannot convince me she was not inspired by Salinger.

Barbra Brooks Wallace has written a book for youth that brings home what it is like to grow up unappreciated and lonely in a new community. Andrew, the book's hero, moves with his family to Washington DC and immediately begins facing all of the troubles a boy in junior high must face: the fears that go along with being the "new kid," bullies, loneliness, a big brother with no time for him unless he is bossing him around, and a kid sister he finds himself having to take care of. Top it off with a mother who has to go away for a while, and it is a wonder Andrew doesn't go crazy! Blessed with smarts and a wry sense of humor, however, Andrew rises to the challenges (even when he doesn't want to) and truly becomes the "big deal."

This book brings back memories of my childhood. It's a story of a boy who moved with his family to Washington D.C. and tells about his struggles with childhood, and getting no respect. It is a very funny book for kids, and was the first book I remember laughing out loud while reading!

"Eva Padlyat lived in a village on Ungava Bay in northern Canada. She was Inuit, and ever since she could remember she had walked with her mother on the bottom of the sea. It was something the people of her village did in winter when they wanted mussels to eat. Today, something very special was going to happen. Today, for the very first time in her life, Eva would walk on the bottom of the sea alone..." So begins Jan Andrews' tale of a young girl's first trip alone through the thick winter ice. In painstaking and intriguing detail she describes Eva's adventure; cutting a hole in the ice at low tide, descending to the dark ocean floor below, lighting candles to illuminate the sea bed, collecting mussels, and exploring this beautiful hidden world..... Ms Andrews' engaging tale, filled with history, mystery, drama, and suspense captures the imagination, and is rich in imagery and magic. Illustrator, Ian Wallace's quiet, dreamy artwork, in soft, textured tones, pulls the reader beneath the ice and right into the story. Perfect for youngsters 5-9, Very Last First Time is a fascinating and evocative experience that shouldn't be missed, and works well as part of a unit introducing the Inuit culture and way of life, or as a stand-alone for story time.

The possibility of gathering mussels under the ice at low tide was absolutely amazing to me. I had never heard of such a thing or imagined it. What a wonderful world we live in! Andrews writes of young Eva's solo walk on the bottom of the sea and she does an intriguing job of it.

The illustrator,Wallace,enriches and expands the written story through his detailed pictures of the village and native life on Ungava Bay.

I hope Andrews & Wallace collaborate again and soon!

This is one of the best books for young girls that I have come across. A young Inuit girl is sent under the ice at low tide to collect muscles for the family.. this time by herself. She gets distracted, the candles burn out leaving her in darkness just as she starts to hear the water returning. What an adventure. I buy this book as a gift whenever I need a present for a beginner reader girl.

This excellent collection of Wallace's writings, interspersed with commentary and vignettes by the editor, is very well done and a welcome addition to the literature about/by Wallace. The relationship, or 'delicate arrangement', between Wallace and Darwin, and the triggering of Darwin's book by the Ternate paper, is one of the strange and scandalous mysteries of the evolution of science, and a tale seldom told straight, in a tradition too many wish to fix with their own agendas and unable to quite handle the unconforming Wallace (cf. Brackman's A Delicate Arrangement). The Darwinians simply don't get it. The text contains a selection of Wallace's spiritualist views, and while these are caught up in the confusions of the first discredited 'new age' and theosophical movements of the nineteenth century and helped to discredit him, they do register Wallace's deeper insight finally than Darwin's into the problems in evolutionary theory, taken as a thesis about natural selection. Noone seems to grasp that Wallace not only co-discovered selectionist evolution, but was able to see the catch in the resulting account of the descent of man, which is the emergence of potential, not explicable in terms of adaptation. Someday the world will catch up with Wallace.
This fine book is slightly marred with Gould's tendentious remarks about Wallace in a short preface. If Wallace's reputation suffers it is partly because the Darwinian establishment keeps him in a box, witness this preface with its polite sideswiping. I hope it will increase sales with Gould's name and that readers will skip the preface for the book. Gould was quietly nervous about this aspect of his Darwin obsessiveness.
It is a mystery if ever there was one.
Stand back and consider the remarkable set of facts involved in the duo, starting with Darwin's early paper, Wallace coming from behind, the unnecessary sending of the paper to Darwin (he could have had the credit, the overall constellation of events and the resulting dialectical spread of views, something quite different from one man producing a theory. Does it not strike one as quite odd? To the Darwinian reinventors of Plato's Cave, it won't seem odd at all, they are too far gone.
I hope this is the beginning of a new proper account of biological theory, Wallace to the fore. Darwin's delay, and the missing letters, and the rigging of the Linean Society papers, do not bode well for the always-propped-up reputation of the Great Founder beside the real one, depicted here. Excellent book.

Alfred Russel Wallace was one of the nineteenth century's most brilliant observers of man and nature. He is best known for his working out of the theory of natural selection, and the way his communication to Darwin on the subject propelled the latter into action resulting in his "On the Origin of Species." But Wallace was much more than this, and had interests a good deal more far-ranging than Darwin's. In addition to his natural selection connection, Wallace can reasonably be credited as the founder of the modern school of biogeographic thought, as history's foremost tropical naturalist and field biologist, and as one of the founders of the science of exobiology. So too, he was one of his period's most vocal supporters of spiritualism, a leader of the land nationalization movement, a prominent socialist, and an outspoken supporter of women's suffrage and opponent of mandatory vaccination.

With credentials like these, it is hardly credible that he is as little known today as he is. Certainly his "other man" status viz. Darwin hasn't helped, but neither did he during his own life attempt to draw attention to himself in all these connections. Add to this a perfectly clear and enquiring mind, a bit of naivety, and one of the most uncompromisingly pro-"little guy" understandings of the human condition, and you have a personality who is much overdue for re-examination.

Berry's anthology continues (but does not end) the recent Wallace renaissance. Berry has done a remarkable job of covering the range of Wallace's interests in just one volume, though to do so he has had to provide excerpts rather than whole works (with the exception of two or three of Wallace's most famous essays). He has also gotten the history right, and provided an editorial narrative that is mostly right on target, and pleasantly composed. If you are the kind of person who likes adventures in the realms of logical and sympathetic thinking, you'll love this collection!

This is the perfect gift for any fan of Texas history. "Big Foot" Wallace was one of a kind. Our family is related to him and would like to hear from anyone else who may be related to him.

this is my husbands great great great uncle it was something reading about pure american history

Simply the best work available on Indian Removal, in my opinion. It is highly regarded among academic historians. Wallace did a tremendous job of writing clearly and making the plight of the Indians understandable to anyone. It is short, it is lucid, it is interesting reading. Plus, it is balanced. This is not a work that treats Indians as childlike, passive victims, but it does convey the injustice and unnecessary hardships to which they were subjected. It also does not portray the government and non-Indian Americans simply as aggressors. It's an important work for understanding what happened to the tribes. It won't take a lot of your time, so do yourself a favor and read it.

An Indian activist or just an amature historian, everyone should read this book. Though short, it gives an excellent narrative of the removal of Indians and their trama from the East by the American government. This book is amazingly well written and is for both students (like myself who read it in a class) or for casual readers. Please concider this book to find out more about the emerging stories of what really happened to Native Americans.

Fisher's book details the successful and unsuccessful battle Wallace waged against Edward's army. He details the atrocities on both sides, each equally inhumane. In the end, the reader gets a more realistic view of this great Scottish hero. He or she should also begin to understand why Scotland and England are two separate countries, each with their own history, united by a common sovereign.

Andrew Fisher's book was first published in 1986, and is a well-researched account of the life of Wallace. Given that it was written 9 years before Braveheart was released, it cannot be put in the category of books (e.g. MacKay's book) that can be accused of trying to cash in on the movie. This book benefits from having been written objectively, and it is clear where Andrew Fisher is drawing conclusions from the limited information available. Highly recommended to anyone who is interested in this period of Scottish History and in the life of William Wallace. [MacBraveHeart - May, 1999]

There are many books published on Wallace and the Scottish Wars for Independence. Historians' interpretations of Wallace are almost fictional because there are few materials to study or they become wrapped up in the legend.

Andrew Fisher has done a great job in telling the story of Wallace and conducts thought provoking analysis of the man, e.g. Wallace's execution by King Edward I. Most books seem to interpret his execution as something extraordinary to the times, when in fact; his execution was common for traitors to the King. Also, Fisher's analysis of Wallace's military leadership and his battles are downright original.

People that understand Wallace only from the myth and legend will learn a lot by reading Fisher's book. It is an honest portrayal of Wallace and his place in Scottish history.

I was lucky to follow in most of Wallace's footsteps while visiting Scotland in 1996. I visited the execution site in London (see www.findagrave.com for pictures), the battle of Sterling Bridge and the Gothic looking Wallace monument built in the 1860's. It was in the monument that I climbed a narrow stone spiral staircase to a room, just below the top of the monument, where stands what is supposed to be Wallace's sword. It is a simple looking sword, nothing fancy, and nothing astonishing. But, when I gazed upon it, I thought of Wallace the man, not the myth. Fisher does just that; he strips the myths of Wallace and paints a picture of the real man.

Enjoy...

In this book, the author has given a quick taste of a very important subject, both in mathematics and in applications. Differential topology has found a niche in economics, physics, financial engineering, computer graphics, and computational biology, and it will no doubt find many more in years to come. It is also an area of mathematics that is still advancing, and there are many unsolved problems that can lead to interesting research programs. The author reviews elementary topology in the first chapter and then immediately introduces differentiable manifolds in the next. The presentation is very clear, and the author does not hesitate to use pictures to motivate and illustrate the main points. All of the discussion in these two chapters can be read easily by someone with a background in undergraduate calculus and some linear algebra. Special subsets of differentiable manifolds, the submanifolds, are considered in chapter 3, with the important embedding theorem proved. The theory of critical points follows in the next chapter. Although Morse theory is not mentioned, the author does define nondegenerate critical points, and shows, via a collection of exercises, the well-known result that a differentiable function in a neighborhood of such a point can be written as a quadratic form. A stronger embedding theorem is proven, namely one that allows an embedding of a compact manifold in such a way that the critical points are all nondegenerate. This discussion is generalized in the next chapter to critical and noncritical levels. The author motivates well the study of the neighborhood of a critical level by first discussing the properties of critical levels in the torus. The changing of the topology as one sweeps through the critical levels in this chapter is viewed as the process of spherical modification in the next one. The author does define what is meant by spherical modification, but does not use the usual terminology to discuss it, such as "cobordism" etc. he does however discuss the process of isotopy, and illustrates general position by means of intersections of curves. He illustrates these results in chapter 7 in the classification of two-dimensional manifolds. The usual proof is done in terms of simplicial complexes, but here the author proves it for differentiable 2-manifolds using critical point theory. The author ends the book by discussing how the subject could be pursued if the tools of algebraic topology were brought in. He discusses the killing of homotopy groups and motivates the theorem that an orientable compact 3-dimensional manifold can be obtained from a 3-sphere by cutting out a finite number of disjoint solid tori and filling the holes again with solid tori, with suitable identification of boundaries. He does not however prove when such constructions lead to the same 3-manifold, for this would lead to a resolution of the three-dimensional Poincare conjecture.....

This book was published by Princeton University Press and is apparently someone's thesis. It is strictly a scholarly effort and not for the casual reader. For instance, the author writes the following in the "houses and urban texture" chapter: "The strong correlation between house size and occurrence of atria and peristyles comes out clearly in their distribution across the size quartiles (Fig. 4.16). The little shops...typify the first and much of the second quartile, and most of the three-to-five room houses, do not have space for either an impluviate atrium or collonaded garden..." If you are seeking a cure for insomnia, purchase this book. Otherwise I recommend Pompeii (by Peter Connelly), and if you're interested in Athens and Rome, The Ancient City also by Connelly. Both excellent efforts to be enjoyed by all ages.

This book makes me think. What was it like to live in ancient Pompeii? What did people actually do with those dramatic and imposing, architectural masterpieces called houses?
Wallace-Hadrill attempts to find some answers to these questions from the physical evidence coupled with literary reference and historical facts.

Trained as a biochemist, I enjoy Mr. Wallace-Hadrill's attention to detail, propensity to stick to the facts and willingness to say so when his investigations lead into blind alleys. There are many things about life in ancient Pompeii, which there is no way to know at this time. But there are others, which can be discovered, and they paint a picture of a rich and vibrant society very different from our own, and yet as closely related as a grandfather to a grandson.

This book is not a fast read. It is not a novel. It is not emotional in the common sense of the word. But it is wonderful.