Doing Drugs; Patterns of African American Addiction is a text that comes right out of the battle fields of drug treatment.

The authors, a preacher and a college professor seem familar with their subject. My favorite chapters are on the history of African American addiction. A loty of times we think addiction just happened in the sixities and miss that their is a history of addiction that is mixed up with racial opression as well as the urbanization of African American people.

New information for me was the African American drinking rituals that happened in slavery as well as the use of alcohol as awards for crop picking by slave masters durning slavery.

I also was intersted in the African section of the book that recorded drug use (Quat) in North Africa as long as 500 years ago.

The chapter on cocaine treament and the approaches to treating it in African American males is especially helpful. I liked the discusiion and questioning of compliance in therapy. I had never examined that most drug treatment for black males is forced treatment.

Dreamcatcher: The Shooting Script is a unique book that presents the William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan collaborative film script of the movie "Dreamcatcher", along with an extensive commentary describing how Stephen King's popular horror novel was successfully adapted to the silver screen. A superb resource that teaches by example the tips, tricks, and techniques of professional screen writers, Dreamcatcher: The Shooting Script is a welcome addition to personal, professional, and film school resource collections and reference archives.

Booth's 1969 "Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets" is an important and highly useful precursor to his 1977 edition of the sonnets. In it, he examines the various kinds of organization at work in the sonnets: not merely the obvious formal pattern imposed by the rhyme scheme, but additionally the syntactic pattern, patterns of imagery, phonetic structures, and others. In so doing he reveals an inner drama taking place on Shakespeare's sonnets, patterns either consonant with one another or dissonant, the whole working together, moment by moment, to give the reader an experience analogous to what the sonnet itself describes -- conflict, comfort, confusion, and so on.

It is unfortunate that this highly useful book is out of print, for its approach is not only an insightful exploration of the poems it describes, it is an approach one can use with other poets' sonnets, and, indeed, with other forms than the sonnet. One can only hope that Yale UP will resurrect Booth's "Essay" so that teachers and students alike can benefit from its dynamic methods. Meanwhile, anyone able to dig up a used copy will have found a true treasure.

It's a wonderful book for those looking to explore North America sea creatures.

This book explains how to assign a value to options in understandable terms. Some knowledge of calculus is helpful but not necessary to grasp the concepts. Equations are given for those interested.

A number of example portfolios consisting of calls and/or puts are given. Each portfolio is described in terms of aggressive or conservative, sensitivity to volatility, and performance relative to movements in the underlying stock. Graphs show the current and expiration date values of the portfolio versus the price of the underlying stock.

Baxter's book, "Financial Calculus: An Introduction to Derivative Pricing", concentrates on the math. This book puts its emphasis on trading strategies.

I first discovered this book when one of my history professors recommended it. Now, I always keep it nearby when I write. It gives directions for writing great papers and contains the latest citation information for the Chicago, MLA, and APA styles (different teachers often prefer different styles). Also, Slade gives the information in a concise manner (only 297 full size pages). Because of this, I highly recommend it for those who write research papers frequently, especially college students. Here is a chapter summary:

1) Writing a Research Paper: This section explains the basics of writing a research paper and is very useful to the novice. It deals with choosing a topic, preparing a bibliography, library research techniques, organizing the paper, writing drafts, and proofreading. This chapter also includes sample research pages.

2) Elements of Theses and Dissertations: Slade tells how to write abstracts, make title pages, organize chapters, and arrange reference materials. This section also includes sample pages.

3) Quotations: This part teaches the reader how to use direct and indirect quotations, as well as proper punctuation and capitalization. She also gives examples from the 3 major styles.

4) Style and Mechanics: Slade explains in detail the style (e.g. diction, tense, unbiased language) and mechanics (e.g. spelling, italics, hyphenation) of a good paper.

5) Tables, Figures, and Computer Materials: This chapter demonstrates proper usage and placement of figures and tables (including those generated by computer). Sample figures are provided.

6) The Finished Copy: Slade recaps previous chapters, explains about equipment and supplies (e.g. paper quality) and gives typing and printing instructions.

7) Chicago Manual Style: This section explains how to do endnotes, footnotes, and bibliographies in this style. There are examples from all types of sources (books, periodicals, etc.). She even includes electronic and web sources.

8) MLA Style: Slade explains how to cite works in the text and properly create a bibliography in the MLA style. As with the Chicago, she gives examples from many types of sources, including the internet.

9) American Psychological Association Style: This section demonstrates how to cite sources in the text and the bibliography according to the APA guidelines. It too explains how to cite many types of sources, including internet and electronic.

There is an appendix that includes legal citations and state abbreviations, a glossary of terms, and an index.

Right now, Amazon and competitors are only able to get this book through used channels, but it is worth it. This book got me through college and every department wanting a different citation style. It is spiral bound, lays flat and includes the three major styles: MLA, APA and Chicago (aka Turabian). If you need a reference guide for writing papers, this is the best i've seen.

i nthink it is the best book this yea

The Horn Book review states this is no match for contemporary Christmas stories, but our family would very much disagree. This story transports one into a magical, old fashioned world that circumscribes todays commercialism. The verse is beautiful and leaves one with an emotional glow. We love The Polar Express, but The Good Little Christmas Tree is our family favorite!

THE INDIANA COMPANION TO TRADITIONAL CHINESE LITERATURE. Second Revised Edition. Edited by William H. Nienhauser, Charles O. Hartman, Y. W. Ma, and Stephen H. West. 1050 pp. Indiana Univ Press, 1985. ISBN: 0253329833 (hbk.)

This is a monumental reference work on the pre-1911 literature of China and was over seven years in preparation. It involved the work of almost two hundred international contributors and provides the basic background, analysis, and bibliography needed by both scholars and students to find their way around the huge corpus of Chinese literature, poetry, drama, and related commentary and scholarship.

Unfortunately 'literature' has been interpreted in the restricted sense of 'imaginative literature' (i.e., fiction, drama, poetry) and although some mention of China's philosophic literature was unavoidable, no entries exist for the major philosophers or philosophic texts. This, to some, may considerably reduce the value of the book. Major features of the book include :

Analytic survey essays of about 10,000 words each on Buddhist Literature, drama, fiction, literary criticism, poetry, prose, popular literature, rhetoric, Taoist (religious, not philosophic) literature, and women's literature.

Over 500 entries of approximately 1500 words each on famous writers, works, genres, styles, groups, movements, etc.

Each entry has a bilingual bibliography that lists editions, translations, and studies, and the major primary and secondary sources in Chinese, Japanese, English, French, and German.

Separate indexes of subjects, names, and titles.

Chinese names and titles have also been given in Chinese ideograms (sinographs) along with Wade-Giles transcriptions throughout. But one irritating defect of the book is that the pages lack headwords in the upper margins and finding a particular entry can involve a lot of riffling back and forth.

The book is a large heavy volume of full quarto size, well-printed in double columns on over one thousand pages of strong paper, stitched, and bound in full cloth for durability.

All in all it is an extremely interesting and useful 'Companion to Traditional Chinese _Imaginative_ Literature.' But what a pity the editors chose to exclude what for most people is the most interesting and significant Chinese literature of all, the philosophic literature of Ancient China.