The entire series is excellent!!! I have all four and I highly reccomend them. They teach science, literature, native american culture, and give children a respect for the natural world at the same time. (there is even the occasional bit of math thrown in). My son loves doing the activities with me! Excellent for unit studies!

We use this book as a homeschool social studies/ecology resource. Each section begins with a Native American story related to the topic of the chapter, then moves on to a discussion of the subject matter. Each section also has activities/experiments, questions for review and discussion, and recommendations for materials for further study. My kids really look forward to each lesson in this book, because the information is presented in a fun manner, and the activities are appropriate for a wide-range of ages!

just blindly flip the pages and put your finger down. there's your next climbing trip. great hike in and route info. the best ak climbing guide i have ever seen

This book is an outstanding guide to the marine life found along the shores of the Pacific Northwest. Before I go further, I should note that it is NOT a pocket guide. But if you slip it into a daypack, you will be amply rewarded. Dr. Niesen has written a book that in very clear language helps you identfy what you are looking at, learn about its life habits, and learn about its habitat. Its emphasis on habitats, and arrangement by type of organism within each habitat, is extremely helpful. The black and white photos are usually pretty good, although sometimes dark, but the section of color plates is really good. What are really outstanding are the line drawings--David Wood, the artist, really captures the organisms in a way that brings out details yet preserves the basic nature of the organism.

The book also gives a great (meaning clear yet not too simple) introduction to marine biology for the Pacific Northwest, explaining tides, currents, the origin of the coast , and the basic biology of the major groups (taxa) of organisms. Furthermore, he provides tips on beachcombing.

All in all, a very handy reference. I will consider it for my Marine Biology class for non-majors (I'd use it with a majors course, too, if I taught one!).

Michael Wood, the most elegant and enquiring literary critic of his generation, has also written widely on film. He is the author of books on Stendhal and Nabokov, and is currently writing a study of Proust. In other words, he is familiar and comfortable with Cultural Giants in a way most film critics and academics are not. This allows him to speculate and make seemingly random or wild connections on his subject with a confidence most film writers, slaves to theory and discipline, lack. This makes him the perfect interpreter of Bunuel, who needs such a suggestive approach, and whose critical star has fallen in the last two decades precisely because his work doesn't fit neat frameworks.

'Belle De Jour' - the story of frigid doctor's wife Severine, who loves her husband but can only find sexual fulfilment working by day in a brothel - inaugurates the period known as 'late Bunuel', when the old Surrealist had access to bigger budgets, big stars and glossy colour. Because these films lack the abrasive iconoclasm of his most characteristic work, they are usually described as 'serene', 'mellow', repentant; Pauline Kael suggests they attain the 'path to grace'. Wood argues 'both Severine and the film hide the world behind an image of the world. We only see what they see or show; but we know it's not all there is. There is a serenity in 'Belle De Jour' and in all of Bunuel's late films, but it is not his. It is the false and fragile serenity of the society he pictures'.

Wood suggests some of the ways Bunuel achieves this, in a gorgeously written study. He delineates the depth, subtleties and strategies of Bunuel's seemingly brusque and plain style. He discusses the brilliant actors - notably Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli and Genevieve Page - and the importance of their screen personae to their roles. He shows how literally faithful Bunuel is to his source, Joseph Kessel's novel of the same name, and how radically he departs from its assumptions and form, transforming a traditionally psychological novel into an anti-character anti-narrative. The most brilliant section analyses the status of dreams, fantasies and memories in the film, and whether they displace the 'reality' of the film's fictional world, showing how Bunuel could claim to despise psychology (as a way of explaining the apparently accidental processes of the mind) and yet be devoted to Freud (as discoverer of the unconscious, 'one of the favourite playgrounds of accident'). He suggests that Bunuel replaces the reductive closure of a definitive resolution with a simultaneity of possible or alternative endings.

Readers will get the most out of the monograph if they have the film handy. Wood looks at the major sequences in some depth (the opening landau fantasy; the shoes-on-staircase hesitation outside the bordello; the burly Asian with the humming box; the central sequence in the Duc's chateau; all of Husson's scenes; the enigmatic concluding five minutes). He focuses on pertinent, missable details, attending to nuance, repetition and variation. Not only do you get a more profound understanding of the film, but Bunuel's method, as stubbornly withheld as his heroine's inner life, opens bit by bit. You become so focused on each scene, you notice things Wood left out, or didn't underline. It's a rare director or critic that empowers his audience with the tools to answer back. Bunuel and Wood are less interested in interpreting a world, a film, a book or a character, than the very act of interpretation itself.

Sir John Appleby and his wife, Lady Judith accept an invitation to a house-party at Charne, the country estate of the Martineaus. Their friend, Grace Martineau is dying of cancer and she wants her friends about her one last time.

This particular Appleby is mostly dialogue. Almost all of the action (several deaths, drug dealing, statutory rape) takes place off stage. Innes paints very believable psychological portraits of his protagonists, a talent that may have been strengthened by the year he spent in Vienna, studying Freudian psychology. The characters' interactions tend to be both erudite and revealing, as in this mystery's opening scene when the guests have gathered in the loggia at dusk to hear a nightingale sing:

"'O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy Spray/ Warbl'st at eve, and when all the woods are still.'

"This was Bobby again, and it ought to have been harmless and agreeable. But it wasn't, Appleby thought--or not quite. Grace Martineau could be sensed as stiffening in displeasure as if she felt Bobby--her husband's nephew--to be guying this new poem, and so guying the bird. And it was quite possible--one suddenly perceived--that Grace didn't much like Bobby, anyway.

"And Diana Page, too, seemed not pleased, for she launched another attack on the young man.

"'Fancy spouting poetry about the nightingale,' she said, 'when one can sit still and listen to it!"

The deaths don't take place until the latter half of the mystery. Meanwhile the reader becomes well-acquainted with Grace Martineau and her machinations to have her husband remarry after she has died. Her guests, already on edge because they know this is the last time they will see their hostess, are shocked by her insistence that her husband should wed another after her passing. They are even more shocked when they learn Grace's choice of bride.

"The Bloody Wood" is a somber Appleby, almost more tragedy than mystery. Nevertheless it is a good mystery, where the reader is challenged to discover a killer, after the author has furnished revealing psychological portraits of the murder suspects.

I bought this book simply for the list of potential employers it contains and found it to be a great resource for browsing employers in different categories. It contains web addresses, street addresses, short descriptions of what the company does, and all the companies are divided into different categories such as "Accounting and Management Consulting" or "Real Estate".

The only part that I found to be a joke is at the very beginning, concerning how to conduct a job search. The instructions are so general that they are useless and the cover letter and resume examples are only mildly useful. More importantly, information like that is already readily available in better and more detailed format on the internet, so they could really have just saved some paper and left this part out.

The bottom line is that this book is a crucial reference guide for companies you could be applying to that you didn't even know existed until you got this book. Since it narrows things down to one metropolitan area instead of a region or the nation as a whole, it allows the author to list even more employers for this specific city and with even more detail.

A must have if you are doing a focused job search!

I stumbled across this book as I was perusing the European History shelf. As a high school French Teacher, I look for ways to introduce my students to French history. I also try to instill an awareness of the nature of language, and the etymology of English. In this process, I have become aware of the Latin, French, and German and Scandinavian roots of our own language. Until I read this book, I did not understand how the English that we speak evolved from so many seemingly disparate cultures. Michael Wood did a masterful job of clarifying this for me, while drawing me into a fascinating account of English history.

Wood opens with the purpose and content of the Domesday document, which in and of itself would be dry and dusty. Because the Norman Conquest was such a pivotal point in the history of England, many British historians have built on the premise that post-Conquest civilization was actually created and defined by the incoming French ruling class. Wood challenges this position, tracing the roots and institutions of English medieval society back to influences which pre-date the Norman Conquest by more than a thousand years.

As an anthropologist, Wood uses a number of tools to reconstruct the development of this social fabric. Any one of these tools - tax records, geographical analyses, lists of village names - if considered in isolation, would be as opaque as Domesday itself. But with the insight and skill of a master storyteller, Wood uses clues provided by their data to sketch the evolution of a people, and then to paint an engaging portrait of the common man in 1086. Along the way, he introduces us to the native, colonizing, mercenary, and migratory populations alike: Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Celts, Romans, Danes, French. We watch as the dynamics of domination, subjugation and assimilation characterize their interactions with one another. And we conclude with him that the Conquest was not the beginning of civilization, as some would have it, but the interruption and re-routing of the history of a very old, already well-defined society. Further, it is a testimony to the strength of that society that it survived and thrived in the wake of the devastation of the Conquest, maintaining the essential fabric of long-held beliefs and institutions.

I find that many of my students share my fascination with the historical background behind the etymology of our modern-day languages. While I do not use this book directly in the foreign language classroom (it is an expository text), I have found it very helpful to give me a solid foundation for understanding the curiosities I try to share with my students. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in the link between history and the development of language.

This may be the first "Six Sigma" friendly process improvement methodology HOW TO book on the market. The book walks you through a prescriptive STEP-BY-STEP approach for facilitating the discovery of measurable and mappable business process improvements.

You will never need to ask yourself, "What do I do next?"

Identifying defects, integrating real-time performance feedback functions, conducting cross-functional work sessions and more are all covered in this book. From Kick-Off to Completion, this book has it all. Everything you need to lead, manage and complete breakthrough BPI projects.

If you are using Six Sigma, or any other approach to Business Process Improvement, this book is a MUST READ! I recommend you start with the first book, The Helix Factor - The Key to Streamlining Your Business Processes, by the same author.

The editorial review basically says it all. I'm using the book quite a bit -- I'm trying to attract birds that will eat insect pests. Few other sources have such detailed information about feeding habits, and the information on houses is quite adequate, although you can find birdhouse designs which are much more visually appealing (to humans!) in other books. The one thing I really wish they had done is to put the pests in the index; finding what pests birds like particular to eat requires tedious entry-by-entry searching.

This book offers a previously undisclosed insight into one of the bloodiest yet least known battles of the Great War. A natural storyteller, Renshaw takes you from the hastily dug trenches of Death Valley, to the thick undergrowth of Mametz Wood, attack after attack until the Germans eventually concede their impenetrable position. A handy sized paperback, the last chapter of the book is full of suggested walks, all beautifully illustrated, that take in key positions and points of interest that determined 'life or death... success or failure' back in 1916. There's also a cleverly devised driving tour that takes in more of the surrounding area. Don't read this book at home - cross the channel and read it under the shadow of the Welsh Memorial with the dark mass of Mametz Wood in front of you - I did!

Superbly written - clearly explained.