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Book reviews for "Wood,_David" sorted by average review score:
The Senses of Walden
Published in Hardcover by North Point Press (1981)
Author: Stanley Cavell
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Cavell's reclaiming of Thoreau and Emerson as philosophers.
More than a discrete work of literary criticism, this work plays an important part in Cavell's ongoing philosophical project. If Cavell's earlier work had Wittgenstein and Austin as involving a modernist break with the dominant Anglo-American philosophical tradition of positivism, then this work exemplified how analytical philosophy might continue. Cavell finds in the word conscious text of 'Walden' a linguistic economy complimentary to the idea of a logic or necessity to ordinary language. The American Transcendentalists are recast as philosophers who anticipate the turn away from metaphysics to the ordinary and everyday to be found in Wittgenstein. At the same time, as newly recovered American philosophers, they rehearse an encounter between English (empiricist) and German (idealist) philosophy before the split between these strands became institutionalized. 'The Senses of Walden,' then, is a key philosophical text by Cavell as much as a work of literary criticism on Thoreau. It is the text of a philosopher unable to completely give up an analytical training, but equally unwilling to ignore the broader cultural issues that such training obscures. Paul Jenner, University of Nottingham.

Statistical Methods: The Geometric Approach (Springer Texts in Statistics)
Published in Hardcover by Springer Verlag (1997)
Authors: David J. Saville and Graham R. Wood
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very interesting book
This book reviews some of the core concepts of statistical science, through the angle of geometrical properties. This book will be very interesting for graduate or undergraduate students who want to broaden their understanding. Also for non specialists, this book presents the subject in a very easy to understand manner. It really helped me tremendously with statistical concepts.

Tiger Woods, Golfing Champion
Published in Hardcover by Pelican Pub Co (1999)
Authors: David R. Collins and Larry Nolte
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This is an easy and fun book to read about Tiger Woods.
Tiger Woods is one of the greatest athletes living today. Not only is he a great golfer, he is a great person. He shares his money with clinics that help young people learn to play golf.I liked the book because it told his life story and showed what a winner he is.

Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Modern Library Series)
Published in Hardcover by Modern Library (1992)
Authors: Henry David Thoreau and Brooks Atkinson
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A questioning of life
Thoreau masterfully analyzes his in its purest form, he does away his all superfluous details. He forces the read to question his own existence. He forces the reader to imagine life without technology, commotion and anything unnecessary. Besides his analysis in Walden, he takes a stand for the maverick, for the individual, for the non-conformist. Lastly his social commentary especially about slavery shows how wrong our coutry had been.

The Misanthrope and Other Plays (Penguin Classics)
Published in Paperback by Penguin USA (Paper) (05 September, 2000)
Authors: Moliere, John Wood, and David Coward
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Less than I expected
The Misanthrope is a play about the principled Alceste, a regular Don Quixote of honesty and speaking one's mind. Despite the advice of his "friend" Philinte (apparently the playwright's voice), he never pulls any punches in revealing the vanity and superficiality of the court and the nobles (the Misanthrope was written during the reign of Louis XIV). While exposing the shallow flatterers for what they are, the play also points out the vain-glorious and quite ridiculous aspects of pursuing an ideal at any cost. As is known, Moliere is considered one of the greatest playwrights and a master of comedy. Partly because of this elevated status, I was a little disappointed by the Misanthrope. It does not reach the comic heights of the Greek comedies or Shakespeare, and as a comment on principled people it is certainly inferior to Ibsen's Brand. It is quite possible that it is more engaging when performed on stage, but as a read it is less than I expected.

The Misanthrope is the ultimate in theatrical comedy
Moliere's "The Misanthrope" is the most humorous play written in any language. It centers around the character Alceste, who has a firm beleif in being brutally honest all the time. The habit of others to speak harshly behind other's backs and hypocritically praise them to their faces drives him to the brink of insanity. It irks him so much that his only wish would be to become a hermit in the mountains. If it weren't for his love of the beautiful Celimene. However, to make things more complicated, she happens to be the queen of duplicitous thought. Alceste hates himself for loving a woman who behaves in the manner that irritates him the most, but cannot bring himself to confront what troubles him. That, paired with the remarkably written exchanges between Alceste, his friend Philinte, the pompous Oronte, and the many social courtiers and French aristocracy make this the ideal story to bring you to tears with laughter. I highly recommend this book to all lovers of theater, humor, and excellent writing. It truly deserves all 5 stars.

Honesty
France in politically powerful and economically wealthy. King Louis XIV saw himself as ruling over an enlightened society. He was passionate about the arts and obsessive about theatre. Moliere wrote comedy. He contrasts what people are to what they think of themselves. Moliere's audience was spoiled, well educated, bourgeois, aristocratic and royal. The audience wanted to be entertained, to laugh and to be cheerful. The Misanthrope was controversial but a box office success. The play takes place in Celimene's house where she entertains a variety of visitors. Her visitors are relatives, friends and suitors who spend their time much as the upper society of the day. They dressed, penned and received letters wrote poems and libelous prose. They visited each other, hoped to be noticed by royalty and the litigious pursed lawsuits to uphold their reputations. Several suitors vie for Celimene's favour. Her malicious wit and her reluctance to pick one partner over the others cause her to end up alone. The play begins with Alceste and Philinte arguing about one of the social conventions of the day. Alceste declares that it is morally wrong to falsely flatter and Philinte says we must be tolerant of peoples behaviour. These two alternatives a-re frequently presented to the audience. There are two ways to approach the world and one is as good as the other. Throughout the play the characters axe thrown up against this dilemma with a variety of responses and outcomes. Each player presents as a contradiction with a hidden core. So that, depending on how one chooses to read the play, the characters can be interpreted in a variety of ways. This is were the fun begins, Alceste has been interpreted by many audiences as a noble, heroic idealist, a champion of honesty. He also can be seen as a rigid extremist, an absolutist whose maniacal criticism is quickly tiresome. He criticizes societies corruptions and acts like a conceited prig. Celimen is a chilly shrew or bewitchingly shrewd. She employs the conventions of the times in that she is a gossip, she has a malicious wit etc. but she is an admirable character. Philinte and Eliante are studiously tolerant of everyone and are consummate bores. Alceste's passionate assertion on the ideal of truth and honesty verses falsity comes across as absurdity. His absolutist stance is difficult to examine. He is a rigid extremist obsessed with his vision of right. He is in love with a person who embodies everything he abhors i.e. a coquette who falsely flatters, who is a witty gossip and although he professes tohe wants to change her and at the end of the play Celimene is abandoned to society and Alceste leaves her stranded even though he first wished she was helpless so that he could rescue her. His passion is out of proportion to events. i.e. Alceste advises Philante that hanging would be an appropriate response to falsely flattering. He is unable to apply anything he says to himself so that he thinks that he is reasonable and he is mostly unreasonable, bad tempered and brusque i.e. instead of an apology regarding his lawsuit he hopes he is guilty so that he can show the stupidity of society. The play is derisive of bourgeois behaviour but with Alceste as the messenger one wonders if Moliere is serious. Philinte and Eliante who are perhaps the Epicureans in the play stand for reasonable tolerance but they seem iust tedious i.e. Eliante's prescription for how love works. Celimene is the character who generates the most empathy. Even so, she ruthlessly rips everyone apart. She is quick and intelligent with the small talk. She is beautiful, rich, independent and her salon is the gathering place of the moment. She is the one who displays the most false behavior but perhaps she is the most honest. Truth and honesty, usually traits to strive for, in Alceste's character, seem somehow less than desirable. His passion and contradictory behaviour smack of insincerity, the very trait he claims to despise. This culture is obsessed with wealth and power and societal recognition. The currency is wit, youth, beauty. Celimene is aware that she has a very short time to establish herself before she will have the status of Arsinone, an older prude who is relegated to the ranks of visitor rather than someone who people want to visit. Even though Celimene plays by the rules she fails. Alceste and Celimene are totally unsuited to each other but perhaps they share obsession: he to distaste, she to taste. Alceste claims the more one loves the less one should forgive. Alceste courts isolation but at the end of the play Philinte and Eliante stick with him. Such a small book with such a rich context.

The Maine Woods (Penguin Nature Library)
Published in Paperback by Penguin USA (Paper) (1988)
Authors: Henry David Thoreau and Edward Hoagland
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A Naturalist, No Longer A Transcendentalist
This is a sad book for me. It marks the end of Thoreau's greatness as a writer. There are a thousand Naturalists, brilliant in their field of expertise, who could have have written works just as good as The Maine Woods and, in fact, have done so. But not one of them could have written a book like Walden. Where is the Thoreau who, as Emerson remarked at his funeral elegy, seemed to have had a sixth sense which the rest of us were deprived of? A sense that could feel and detect the mystical power in Nature trembling all aroung him at all times?...He is not in The Maine Woods in any case. Thoreau was essentially America's Wordsworth. In virtually all of Walden, particularly in chapters such as Higher Laws, there is that sense in his delicious prose and in his descriptions of his interactions with Nature, that there is an unseen power just beyond the veil of the visible, that we stand in the midst of some deep mystery which unadulterated Nature lifts aside from time to time; The same sense famously to be found in Wordsworth's best Nature poems....But you won't find much of this in The Maine Woods. Thoreau seems depressed and morose much of the time, and it is clear that he spends much of his time in his endless classifications of flora and fauna as an escape from the harsh conditions surrounding him through much of the journey. By harsh, I mean aesthetically harsh (as, for example, a previous reviewer has noted concerning the logging already felling trees apace.) Thoreau was a famously physically vigorous man until the end. Physically harsh conditions were nothing new to him. Also, I don't mean to belittle Thoreau as a Naturalist. All are agreed that he was a serious (what we would nowadays call a "professional" one), in no sense amateur. But there is none of the sheer wonder and joy that we find in Walden and which made it my favorite book and Thoreau my favorite writer for years....I keep thinking of a line by Yeats, "...Who could have foreseen that the heart grows old?"

Visit Maine in the mid-1800s

Henry David Thoreau :: _Walden_ :: _The Maine Woods_
John Muir :: _My First Summer in the Sierra_ :: _Travels in Alaska_

The analogy is almost perfect. Each of these writer-naturalists is most often identified geographically with the setting of his best-known work (i.e., Walden Pond or the Sierra Mountains). Each was intrigued by a vastly different habitat located north of his usual stomping ground -- and was so enticed by that wilderness region that he made multiple visits and took copious notes on everything he saw. For Thoreau, it was the forests and mountains of Maine, while Muir delighted in the glaciers of Alaska. Both made their trips by water with native guides but also with at least one old friend along for companionship. They later produced travelogue essays and / or lectures about their journeys, both describing miles and miles of terrain and the very few residents they encountered along the way. Both _The Maine Woods_ and _Travels in Alaska_ chronicle the discoveries made during three separate trips: Thoreau's adventures occurred in 1846, 1853, and 1857; and Muir's happened in 1879, 1880 and 1890. Both men died of a lung disease (tuberculosis, pneumonia) before making final edits on the third portion, the last journey, of each book. Both of the resulting books were put together by surviving relatives and were published posthumously. Eerie, isn't it?

That being said, my advice to the reader of Thoreau is the same as written in my review of Muir's _Travels in Alaska_: Don't read this one first if you haven't read anything else by him. Read _Walden_ and some of the shorter travel pieces before moving on to _The Maine Woods_. Here Thoreau is at once fascinated by the thickness of the forests and appalled by the devastation caused by the lumber industry. You'll follow him up Mount Katahdin and canoe along with him on lakes and down rivers. You'll learn about the kind of true camping that could be done only in the wilds of sparsely-inhabited country. You'll see lots of trees and plants and animals and hear some of Thoreau's opinions about nature and mankind. And you'll be pleased to know that everyone returns home safely in the end.

Thoreau was asked on his deathbed if he had made his peace with God. His retort was, "I did not know we had ever quarrelled." Even though he told a friend that he would die without regret, these kinds of last-minute questions must have forced him to take quiet mental stock of the events of his life in search of something that didn't quite fit with his philosophy. It is said that his final words were "moose" and "Indian." I believe that, with those utterances, he had finally realized his sole regret in life: that he had witnessed the killing of several Maine moose -- the last one, by his Indian guide -- and had done nothing to stop the slaughter. Whenever the hunters were thus engaged, Thoreau retreated to his botanizing and documenting the plant life in the area. He deliberately put blinders on at a time when he could have prevented the animals' deaths. And perhaps his own rationalizing behavior was not made clear to him until the end. For as he says here in the "Chesuncook" chapter, "Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine-trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it." That statement could be a personal chastisement, a reminder to himself. If that's the only wrong performed during your lifetime, Henry, then you did pretty well.

Travel wild rivers with Thoreau.
One day I took my children to Disneyland, found the quietest corner of the Material Kingdom, and read The Maine Woods. I read it later in the shadows of Ktaadn. In each case I found myself fading into damp, 19th century forests, cataloging with Thoreau the flora of central Maine.
Few could be the equal of Thoreau in making an account of wilderness travels: "The Jesuit missionaries used to say, that, in their journeys with the Indians in Canada, they lay on a bed which had never been shaken up since the creation, unless by earthquakes. It is surprising with what impunity and comfort one who has always lain in a warm bed in a close apartment ... can lie down on the ground without a shelter, roll himself in a blanket ... in a frosty, autumn night ... and even come soon to enjoy and value the fresh air."
The pace of the book is slow but rich in natural wonder: "Once, when we were listening for moose, we heard, come faintly echoing ... a dull, dry, rushing sound, with a solid core to it, yet as if half smothered under the grasp of the luxuriant and fungus-like forest, like the shutting of a door in some distant entry of the damp and shaggy wilderness. If we bad not been there, no mortal had heard it. When we asked Joe in a whisper what it was, he answered, 'Tree fall.' There is something singularly grand and impressive in the sound of a tree falling in a perfectly calm night..."

Edward Weston: The Last Years in Carmel
Published in Hardcover by Art Institute of Chicago Museum (15 June, 2001)
Authors: David Travis, James N. Wood, and Edward Weston
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Rich and dark food for thought
This is a catalog for a show currently at San Francisco MOMA, launched in Chicago last year. (Weston came from Illinois and did most of his work in California.) It is essentially a re-edition of Weston's My Camera On Point Lobos, published in 1951 and again in 1968. The major change is text by David Travis replacing excerpts from Weston's daybooks in the original.

The text is intended to humanize someone who is mostly mythical by describing and interpreting events in the last years of his life at Point Lobos. It presents the author's analysis of Weston's career, state of mind and the evolution of his late style. There is little or no new material here and the analysis is strained, but thoughtful.

There are some intelligent comparisons presented of Weston's late and early views of the same subject. As a collection this is not a good introduction to Weston. It is a good final chapter to the Daybooks and a beautiful collection of reproductions. It is also a good companion to Ansel Adams at 100, showing how these two friends viewed many of the same subjects so differently. It would be a good addition to reading Charis Wilson's Through Another Lens, showing many pictures of domestic life including Weston's children, cats, and many of Charis Wilson. There is a lot of "inside baseball" here, both explicit and implied.

There is at least one important image in the show that is not in the catalog and there are many important omissions from the show itself, which make this a poor place to start studying Weston's work. For the record, both Weston and Adams experimented with color in the late 40s, shooting the same images in color and black and white. The color images aren't good but they are a very good way to show why their respective monochrome images are so strong.

It is worth repeating that while the printed images are as good as any you'll see, they are not even close to the 8X10 contact prints in the show. This really matters in Weston's work. If you have a chance to see the San Francisco show, before it is put away for another 10 years, you will also see additional earlier prints from SFMOMA's outstanding permanent collection which put the theme of the show into context that is missing from the book.

This is Weston when he was only satisfying his own search for meaning, not making statements or presenting his vision to the world. These are his final meditations and he knew it. They are by far his richest and most abstract work and worthy of a lot of study.

A squirrelly, but talented photographer
Edward Weston was one of the most squirelly, yet most talented photographers in the history of the medium - he rarely smiled, wore women's clothes, never learned to drive, married a woman 30 years his junior, lived in a shack in Carmel and loved philandering with Tina Modotti and others. He died with $300 in the bank in 1958, yet his photograph of a Circus Tent went at auction a few years ago for $266,000. His influence on photography and photographers was immense. Two of his four sons, Brett and Cole, became accomplished image makers and his grandson now carries on that same tradition, even living in the same shack on Wildcat Hill in Carmel. This book covers roughly the last 10 years of his photographs 1938-1948. The images are superbly produced and well-chosen but the text was a bit overbearing and heavy on the theory that in the last years Weston was overly concerned with death which was represented in his images. Certainly his images of Point Lobos are a bit dark and morose with pictures of dead trees and pelicans, but that's Point Lobos! During this period he also made whimsical images of his wife wearing a gas mask in the nude and playing a flute while a cat looks on with a surprised glance. Weston was full of LIFE, not death. Thirty years before his death in 1958 he made an image of a corpse at a time when his relationship with his future wife was rosy and he was spending time with his beloved sons. His final work does not seem any more concerned with death than it was in his earlier years. But, forget the text! Photography books are similar to Playboy magazines anyway - we buy them to look at the pictures, not read the text!! This is a terrific book and I can't wait to view the actual images at The Art Institute of Chicago.

Edward Weston: The Last Years in Carmel
A finely printed book that features more than the regular images that every other book has. The essay is a very worthwhile read. It offers wonderful insites to the photogrpaher at the end of his working career.A real must to any Weston colection of books.

Babe, the Sheep-Pig
Published in Paperback by Samuel French Inc (1997)
Authors: Dick King-Smith and David Wood
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THE FABOULOUS PIG
babe is a faboulous story of a pig. It's very cute.The animals speak, so we can understood there.It's not difficult to read and not very long.Sometimes it's funny,so I enjoy this book.

Very good!
Babe the sheep-pig .He is very nice story . Like it's book because he is very funny .Babe big heart .He is don't stupid. This is beautiful story animals. It is good story. Beceause It's short and it is very funny. Very good!

The sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep - piiiig is
This book is very funny interesting and touching .(for the little kids).

Design of Wood Structures ¿ ASD
Published in Hardcover by McGraw-Hill Professional (01 August, 2003)
Authors: Donald E. Breyer, Kenneth J. Fridley, Kelly E. Cobeen, and David G. Pollock
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A good book....
If you buy this book, you should know what you are getting. The examples are good, the problems are solid and challenging, and the building code (the UBC) is integrated seamlessly into the course of the text. For timber design, this book is essential.

Good Book
This book was helpful once I went onto a design lab, but sometimes the examples were so involved that I got lost in all the numbers.

Design of Wood Structures - ASD
After studying the book for six months, I think the material in the book is very good. I am disappointed, and surprised, that the binding is coming apart.

Professional Active Server Pages 2.0
Published in Paperback by Wrox Press Inc (22 March, 1998)
Authors: Brian Francis, Richard Harrison, David Sussman, Shawn Murphy, Robert Smith, Alex Fedorov, Alex Homer, and Stephen Wood
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Well done, in Plain English
Want to learn to build your own amazon.com? It's in this book. You'll have to be proficient with ansi-SQL and/or ADO 2.0 in order to really take advantage of the information presented here. But overall it's a well presented book on ASP. If you plan to buy this and want to build true interactive sites with full database integration, pick up ADO 2.0 Programmer's Reference and Instant SQL Programming also from WROX Press, then you'll have a strong book base to build powerful web sites such as amazon.com. The only drawback is its concentration on VBScript rather than ECMAscript (aka JavaScript). Try and stay away from the VBScript presented in this book and use ECMAScript for the examples instead. The reason is because Microsoft and Netscape are finally agreeing on ECMAScript standards that will be much easier to translate into Client-side Cross-browser code if you use it for Server-side code now. As ECMAscript matures it will present a much more flexible environment to work in than VBScript will (much the same way that C compared to Visual Basic does now). I don't have a book recommendation for ECMAscript, I haven't found a good reference yet, the info on the web has been my resource. But if you're desparate for a reference, WROX Press also has a handbook called Instant JavaScript that isn't too bad, but has lots of room more improvement. Happy Building! Ciao -C

You won't out grow this book in couple of months.
I purchased this book with one goal: to incorporate a database into a web site. With this book, the example code available on the WROX web site, and the Microsoft Developers web site, I was able to exceed my own expectations.

I approached this task with solid HTML and Javascript skills but no background in ASP or VBscript and no other programmer to consult with. The answers are all there in concise, yet detailed explainations. If you would like to see what I was able to achieve, visit AccessDB.net.

There is no fluff in this book. I would not recommend this book to a novice or casual web site developer. It is packed with detail that will quickly swamp you in technology that you have no intention of using. However, if you are serious about implementing ASP, Microsoft database technology and more, on an NT4.0 server, this is an excellent book that will remain useful for a long time.

As good as ASP gets
If you have read the first edition of this book, this second edition may look familiar. However, the book has more pages - about 1000 (edition 1 had about 600). There are several additions, especially topics on MTS and Message Queue, which are very good in themselves. "A case study in compatibility" is excellent guide for all, to develop for a varied set of browsers. A whole chapter is dedicated to transactions, a prelude to the chapters on E-Commerce case study and MTS.

The best part is an extended reference at the end of the book, and this time JScript is also covered.

I have a few comments about this book
1. The book should have been thinner, with some chapters on CD-ROM
2. You must be at intermediate level to use this book, else you could get lost easily. Beginners, don't yet touch this unless you know VBScript

In short, without a doubt, the best book ever written on ASP.

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