I HIGHLY RECOMEND THE EPISODE 1 CLARANET SONG BOOK FOR 2 REASONS . 1 - IT HAS GREAT ,EASY-TO-READ MUSIC THAT IS FAIRLY SIMPLE TO PLAY, PLUS A CD THAT REALY HELPS ON THOSE TRICKY SONGS.2 - IT FIANALLY BRINGS THOSE SONGS WE KNOW AND LOVE TO LIFE. THIS BOOK IS SO GREAT, YOU'LL FIND YOURSELF HUMMING ALL DAY THOSE GREAT SONGS YOU NOW CAN PLAY ON YOUR CLARANET:] !

In an age of innovation, William Smith's unique devotion to fossils and understanding of geological structures allowed him to break the scientific mould and produce the first ever map of the rock layers beneath our feet. Two centuries on, the scientific world still owes a debt to the 'Father of Geology'. Yet Smith himself saw little recognition in his lifetime, earning his keep through canal engineering work where he could get it and scraping together the finance to publish his precious magnum opus.
Charting his travels across England, his changing employment and his personal misfortunes, this book shows how the sometimes penniless son of a blacksmith became a pioneer in the science of geology. John Morton, in combining Smith's personal history with the genesis of a new science, has created a fascinating history of an extraordinary man who was devoted to mapping the geology of England.
John Morton was a pilot until his retirement in 1990. After retirement he read for a degree with the Open University, studying, among other subjects, geology and the history of science where his interest in 'Strata' Smith was first awakened. This is his first book.

Anyone who wants to know a little bit more about Beatrix Potter, the person, will be pleased with this book. Through real-life annecdotes John Heelis conveys what should be obvious but isn't - Beatrix Potter was not a perfect human being, she had tiny flaws just like the rest of us. Sometimes she got cranky, occasionally she was absent-minded with her head in the clouds but mostly she was wonderful - although quite strong willed and opinionated.

Those who are fascinated by Beatrix Potter will find the little book a great addition to their library. However, be forewarned - those who are buying this book for a voyeristic look into the intimate details of Beatrix Potter's married life will be sorely disappointed. This very private woman's private life remains private.

William McBride's book is accurately titled, although it needs to be understood that this is a social history of naval technological change, not technological history (nor economic history) per se. However, the little he does say about technology is mostly well informed, at least up to 1945 -- he has avoided the technological know-nothingism of many of the others who write on such subjects. He served as a junior naval officer and this background seems to stand him in good stead in forming his judgements about people and events.

The principal theme is the rise and evolution of ideas about battleships and their rivals for naval dominance. There are no profound new insights here, but on the whole McBride does a good job with his subject. He elaborates the picture in important respects and has many thoughtful observations to offer.

McBride sometimes is rather quick to impute motives to individuals and groups without much substantiation or consideration of alternative hypotheses. No doubt he is correct in most of these judgements, and he is less summary than many authors on these subjects have been, but I personally would have preferred a somewhat more measured approach.

Unfortunately, his prose can be off-putting at some times, due to his fondness for clothing fundamentally common-sensical concepts in obscurantist academic jargon. Fortunately, there is not too much of this and most of the book is reasonably readable.

One regrettable distortion comes in his somewhat tortured discussion of the naval arms limitations treaties (the Five Power Treaty of 1921 and its 1930 and 1936 London Treaty sequels). Although it has little to do with his ostensible subject, McBride ventures into judgments regarding the effects of various U.S. actions on opinion in Japan and the Imperial Japanese Navy, apparently without having consulted some of the most important scholarship on the subject. For instance, I can find no citation of his to James Crowley's book, Japan's Quest for Autonomy, with its extended and authoritative treatment of the U.S. as well as Japanese side of the London Treaties. Nor does he cite David Evans' and Mark Peattie's essential study of the Japanese Navy, Kaigun. These sources, based in extensive Japanese-language primary research, paint quite a different picture than McBride favors regarding the impact of the U.S. naval expansion of the 1930s on Japanese Navy views, relative to other influences. This is a self-inflicted wound: if he was unable to conduct more thorough research in the issue, peripheral as it is to his main point, McBride could perfectly well have avoided forming judgements regarding it without loss to his main arguments.

I puzzled over McBride's bald assertion that "the [rigid] airship could have succeeded," citing its supposed high search rate. He does make one citation to a book that examines this question in some detail and comes to quite different conclusions (Richard Smith's The Airships Akron & Macon), but seems to have relied principally on other sources. Few who have studied the issue carefully would agree with him -- some years ago, two of the last of Goodyear's rigid airship engineers disagreed flatly with him in the course of an extended discussion I had with them regarding proposals for reviving the technology.

It is understandable that there is no reference to the recent study by Thomas Hone, Norman Friedman, and Mark Mandeles, American & British Aircraft Carrier Development, 1919-1941 -- no doubt McBride's book was already in press by the time it appeared. Nevertheless, this is unfortunate, as their insights and evidence would have enriched McBride's work significantly in some areas.

In his final chapter, McBride ranges far beyond the period he set for himself, attempting not only to draw sweeping conclusions but to provide policy recommendations. Regrettably, this is the weakest part of the book. He is too ready to pronounce conclusions without careful analysis and without having developed strong evidence or given adequate consideration to alternative hypotheses. His treatment of recent developments often seems quite ill-informed and many of his confidently-asserted predictions seem dubious or even silly in light of what has transpired since the book was written. And he indulges especially in dense academic jargon in this section. Most readers will want to skip this chapter, and will retain a better opinion of the book for having done so.

Notwithstanding some lacunae, however, on the whole this is a valuable study of the process by which the U.S. Navy adapted itself to changing technology and needs in the period between the Civil War and World War II.

Will O'Neil

"Ecosystems" is 500+ pages, and could easily be expanded to ten times that. This is the first book I found to discuss all major life-bearing periods from an ecological standpoint.

Minor nits: I wish at least a couple of periods had been treated in depth. The writing could be a bit crisper. And as a layman, I would have appreciated a glossary for some of the words that don't show up in my Webster's Unabridged.

I have truly enjoyed this book. I had hoped to locate more information about the author. When you have background information on the author one has the tendency to interpret the book in a different form. However, this was a very interesting and detailing book about rural and urban areas. It gives the reader a broader understanding of segregation, political views and disfranchisement legislation in Arkansas during the 1890s.

I wouldn't recommend this book to the beginning student of textual criticism, but it is a very well done work. Burgon died in the late 1800's, when people in general could read beyond a 5th-grade level, so the language and sentence structure used within do not yield an easy-to-read book for the modern reader. Not that that is a detriment, of course, but many readers might find reading it too much work. While not necessary, an ability to read Greek and even Latin would be helpful in getting maximimum benefit from this book.

That said, this work does an excellent job of discrediting the "revised text" that has in many circles replaced the Traditional Text of the New Testament (from whence came the King James Version of the Scriptures). The reader will also get a lesson in some of the methods scholars (and quasi-scholars) use to determine which of two variant readings is the one that the Holy Spirit insprired.

A very interesting read. This book focuses on the tragic end of Swilling's life and the events that resulted in his being jailed for a crime that he did not commit. The author carefully examines the evidence and goes to great length to exonerate Swilling, who may have been given a bad rap by other historians in the past. In this book we not only see Swilling as a significant individual in Arizona history, we also see him as all too human, with the frailties and personal problems that eventually lead to his downfall. A good book for anyone interested learning more about the history of Arizona and its pioneers.

Valor and Lace, edited by Mauriel Phillips Joslyn, is an anthology of eleven short histories of women that lived during the War Between the States and contributed to the side of the South during that conflict. Each of the anthologies is readable and most are well researched. As with any book containing material from several authors, there are some chapters that are better researched and written than others. However, in general the book is concise and presents various aspects of the Southern woman's life during the War. The title and subtitle (The Roles of Confederate Women 1861-1865) are somewhat misleading. The book does not present a comprehensive history of women in general during the war but rather presents the reader with eleven specific cases of extraordinary women who felt the need to commit themselves to the cause for which they believed, be it the Southern cause for independence or the moral cause to care for the wounded, regardless of their political affiliation. While it would be erroneous for the reader to assume this is a true picture of every Southern woman, it is an appropriate portrayal of certain aspects of life both at home and on or near the battlefield and the role that some women played during the Civil War. This reveiwer recommends the book to any student of the War as well as to those readers interested in the social roles of women during that period of American history.

Vertebrate Life would serve as an excellent upper-level college textbook to anyone interested in becoming informed about vertebrates. Professionally, I am a physicist, who after visiting the American Museum of Natural History's Hall of Vertebrates, wanted to learn more about the subject. Even after reading Vertebrate Life, I don't think that I could point out the squamate bone on a fossilized skull. On the other hand, with 733 pages, it is unfair to critize this book about a lack of coverage! The authors provide several pages of excellent references at the end of each chapter. So, if I really wanted to be able to identify a squamate bone, I'm sure that I could have found out from one of references. However, I was troubled by a number of typos, some of the them serious. Figure 15-3 appears to have the second half of the figure repeated as the first half. It would have been nice to see missing illustrations. Figure 3-6b identifies the Otic capsule as "Optic capsule" at one point. This confused me for a while. Even with all this, I was fascinated by what I read, and read the entire book, cover to cover, all 733 pages worth. For the serious student of our natural world, I would recommend spending full price for this book, and plan on spending more than a few hours with it.