This is a very concise book and one that both I and my kids can read and understand. It doesn't go into a lot of long-term survival detail like some of the books do. I wasn't interested in trapping animals or how to dam a creek. I just wanted some good solid information for short-term emergency situations - how best to prepare for them and how to best avoid them in the first place.

Shor snippets of tales that only Moorcock can dream of and write of. Entertaining examples of a master's art in both story telling and thinking.

What else can one say... a distinct Moorcock... in more ways then one

Crafting Tradition succeeds in giving a thorough look at the economics, history and marketing of Oaxacan wood carvings. Be forewarned, however, that there are only 16 pages of color reproductions in the book. Those pieces that are shown in color are not necesarily the most exciting Oaxacan carvings I've ever seen so in the "art book" category this book fails to give the reader much to look at. But if you are interesting in learning about how the carving market developed, how the artists and sellers fit into the overall scheme, and how Oaxacan carvings are sold to buyers and collectors, this is an interesting read. It's written in a dry, scholarly tone, and feels like an economics text book. But the "behind-the-scenes" information is something that isn't addressed too often. So while I like the information, I wished the style of writing were livlier and would have liked many more examples (in color) of Oaxacan art. Recommended for those with a deep interest in Oaxacan wood carving tradition, not recommended for those looking for a catalog of Oaxacan art to look at.

Anyone interested in Mexican folk art will have noticed the brightly-painted animals, people, and alebrijes (fantastic imaginary critters) featured in many Mexican-oriented gift shops. Michael Chibnik's book is an excellent introduction to the socioeconomics of the craft. These figures are produced in only four villages, all in central Oaxaca. The people who make them have varying degrees of Zapotec heritage, but are mostly Spanish-speaking. They are now used to dealing with international buyers; this is a global age, and the sight of a rich, sophisticated buyer in an adobe-and-pole home in a remote Oaxaca village occasions no surprise. Chibnik follows items on their odyssey from such homes to the elite art stores of Oaxaca and the United States.
Chibnik stresses the newness of the craft. True, but Oaxaca has a very old tradition of superb and imaginative woodcarving, previously applied to shrines, masks, and local utility goods. It not only produced the skills, it provided an existing market structure. This Chibnik fails to address.
Some points in the book deserve expansion. First, aid and development workers interested in small enterprise development should very definitely read it. It chronicles, very thoroughly, a spectacularly successful bit of local initiative and creativity. The villagers not only invented this craft; they have kept improving it steadily. Woodworking expands, diversifies, and gets more creative; meanwhile, the people themselves get rapidly more sophisticated in business. Chibnik provides very detailed accounts of the economics of the craft, from the price of wood (fortunately, a common sort of tree is used) to the markups in Tucson and Los Angeles art galleries.
This sort of value-added bootstrapping is rare in Mexico (and elsewhere). It should be encouraged. Thousands of well-meant development initiatives, pushed by outsiders, have failed; here we have an excellent study of one that was strictly local initiative and that succeeded. Chibnik does not explicitly target small enterprise development experts, but they are the people who really should be reading this book with great care.
Second, this is good art. Chibnik quotes, without much comment, some sadly snobbish statements to the effect that this stuff is "commercial" and thus automatically low. As if Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Monet weren't commercial artists! Come on, scholars--good art is usually made with at least one eye toward an audience willing to pay for it. Chibnik is generally silent on the quality of pieces and why it matters, though he does make some judgements. Yet, discussion of quality--why people really like some pieces and find others dull--should be a natural part of an economic study. Anthropologists and economists tend to be skeptical (or downright cynical) about quality judgements, but such judgements are a fact of life, and do structure the market. They should be directly addressed.

As noted by an earlier reviewer, this book is rather underillustrated. Given that there is only one other book about the craft (and it rather short), one would hope that, some day, a full art-critical study of the carvings will be produced.
The same earlier reviewer found the style dry. I disagree. Maybe I'm just used to academia, but I find this a very well-written and readable book. It is mercifully free from the jargon usual in economic studies and art criticism. I found it engaging and hard to put down. Highly recommended to anyone with a serious interest in the socioeconomic side of folk art.

I have to admit I read this book with great expectations. I thoroughly enjoy reading about ancient history. I was to be greatly disappointed. The only reason I give this book a "3" rating is because of the interesting commentary on the terrain Mr. Wood & co. went over to retrace Alexander's steps and the wonderful photographs. The author seems to have a decidedly "Persian" or "non-Greek" view. He accepts without hesitation the views of the indigenous peoples from the regions Alexander conquered and any greek accounts of Alexander that are negative, while being 'a priori' suspicious of any pro-Alexander view given. Mr. Wood calls these first-hand reports propaganda, dismissing them outright. I would recommend anyone wanting a balanced view of the great general Alexander to read "Alexander the Great and His Time" by Agnes Savill. I would also suggest that Mr. Wood read it as well.

I'll keep this as brief as possible. The book is a well conceived mixture of the history Alexander the Great's Asian conquests and the story of author Michael Wood's quest to follow Alexander's voyage throughout Asia and film it all for a BBC miniseries. He not only draws on the traditional sources such as Arrian and Plutarch, but also on local legends in the areas Alexander captured. The photographs are beautiful, and the maps help give a geographical perspective to the reader. An easy, interesting read, the book can be read in one evening by devoting full attention to the book.
The only criticism I have is one that is unavoidable by Wood. There are parts that tend to drag a bit, by giving casualty estimates and exact military strategies that would most likely not appeal to the average reader. The best aspect, however, is how Michael Wood gives insight to a brutal, raging alcoholic treated all too kindly by Arrian. It is worth the money to someone genuinely interested in history, but don't waste your time if you're not willing to give the attention this book deserves.

Michael Woods and his team have done an outstanding job at presenting the conquests of Alexander the Great and his impact on his short-lived empire. Obviously, a lot of effort has gone into researching the intricate details of Alexander's life, and the areas which he visited (then and now) and the reader is the one who ultimately benefits from this.

Granted that the team had to rely on ancient Greek sources and local lore in piecing together Alexander's story,I wonder if the work could have been made more complete with more information on the Greek High Command eg. Craterus, Parmenio etc as well as the logistics planning that was required for the creation of empire. Also, information on Greece in Alexander's absence would have been useful in giving the reader understanding of the domestic situation.

The book is commendable for its photographs and great attempts at historical accuracy. Strongly recommended for anyone interested in Greek history.

It's very sad that vital books have to be "updated" and "revised" to accomodate the writing careers of persons unable to create vital books themselves. See if you can get hold of the original Clement Woods instead.

Recommended: PENTATONIC SCALES FOR THE JAZZ-ROCK KEYBOARDIST by Jeff Burns.

This is pretty easy to use, just sometimes it takes a while to be able to actually find the right words. And I think it works a lot better when writing poetry to either not use the word if you can't think of anythin that rhymes because most of the time when you add one of the words from the dictionary, it sounds artificial and out of place.

As a beginner at writing poems I have found this book provides a simple, straight forward, fast way to find a rhyming word. It's compact size is convent to carry with you. The title doesn't do the book justice as it is much more than a rhyming dictionary. It provides a guideline for effective rhymes, history, warnings and different types of rhymes.

I bought this book to provide me with some background information on bentwood furniture and it seems to me that it performs this task quite adequately. There are plenty of high quality color photographs of surviving furniture; these are combined with historic black&white photographs. The accompanying text describes basic principles clearly and provides a fair bit of history.

I am not a Thonet buff, so I dare not compare it with other literature on the topic, but viewed in isolation it seems nice enough. At good coffee table book, or better.

I really feel that the first review I wrote was not specific enough, and for that I do apologize. As a long time rereader of Nabokov, the thing that MOST glaringly turned me off about Mr. Wood's book was his propensity to incorrectly refer to the original Nabokov text. (Example: On page 208 Wood writes, "...and the word [incest] hovers in the children's Scrabble games (insect, scient, incest)..." The incest, scient, nicest word play is on page 85 of the Vintage editon. Ada is playing anagrams with her governess on pencil and paper. The Scrabble game enters the novel on page 223 and the ensuing game makes no reference to incest. I know it seems a nitpicky criticism, but the detail is all.) I opened with his chapter on Ada, as that was the book I was most involved in, and was immediately turned off by his lack of precision. I skimmed some of his critique of the short stories, but then gave up on the whole thing. When writing the previous review, I believed that any attentive Nabokovian would agree with me, but it appears I have erred, and possibly offended. I must admit that even Mr. Boyd gave Mr. Wood a certain amount of credit as a scholar in the opening of his most recent book. So...so I've reread the Ada chapter and looked at a few other chapters and I still can't bring my self to think that's this book is good for much more than helping me solidify my opinions of VN's work by refuting about 95% of Wood's arguements. Apologies for my too strong condemnation, it was ridiculous, but I still do not like this book.

Please don't support Wood's little Dabble-Fest. He didn't read any Nabokov more than once. You are a thousands times better of if you go with Brian Boyd's biographies.

I've been reading Nabokov for about 27 years, and re-reading it just as long, including almost every novel, short story, essay, and criticism I could find, as well as the Boyd two-volume biography, to which the previous customer referred. While Boyd's work is thorough and might be called "definitive," Wood's book is purposefully limited in scope. However, I certainly found in-depth analyses of the points and themes Wood chose. The subtitle of this book should also inform the prospective reader, i.e., "Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction." The book is made up of relatively short (the entire paperback is only about 250 pages), somewhat overlapping critical analyses regarding a specific point in six of VN's novels, two short stories, and his translation of EUGENE ONEGIN. Perhaps a few examples from the table of contents will help clarify: 3. The Cruelty of Chance: BEND SINISTER, 'Signs and Symbols', 'The Vane Sisters'; 4. The World Without Us: SPEAK MEMORY; 5. The Language of LOLITA; 8. The Demons of our Pity: PALE FIRE; 9. Happy Families: ADA. I have underlined so much of Wood's text and written so much in the margins that it is difficult to pick out a single example that might illuminate Wood's approach. But here's a try: In "The Language of LOLITA" Wood approaches the novel from Nabokov's games and play with language, and uses them to go into the many oppositions, ironies, and mysteries that abound in the book. For example, Wood cites the passage, "No matter, even if those eyes of hers would swell to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack...even then I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous voice, my Lolita." Wood notes the apposition of "wan" and "raucous"; and then goes on with his analysis (within the context of this and other previous essays), "[these] are the notations of desperate love, and Humbert writes here the purest, most precise Nabokovian prose. What we question is not [Humbert's] passion but his supposed new respectability. The whole of [LOLITA] has been asking us to trust Humbert's obsession, even as we are repelled by it. We can't leave off trusting it now...[when the obsession] is so lyrically mourning what it claims it won't miss." Wood goes on to say that it may not be necessary for us to believe what Humbert believes at the end. "Indeed we may understand his crime more fully if we are sceptical about his repentence and altered love...It is easy to confess...and it may actually be to Humbert's credit that he is not entirely convincing in this line, in spite of his ambitions." These critical essays clearly are not meant to go into deep and thorough dissertations of a given work by Nabokov. Rather, I feel Wood is trying to give an overview of Nabokov by examining these particular works, each with a different, purposefully limited thesis. Wood may offend some Nabokov lovers perhaps because he does point out specific places in which he finds VN's prose and/or approach lacking or perhaps too gamesy for its own good. On the whole, however, I found Wood's book an excellent example of literary criticism "dedicated to the appreciation and interpretation of a single author, addressed to the general reader," to quote David Lodge from THE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF BOOKS. I am also in agreement with John Banville of THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, who writes, "[Wood's book] offers us an entirely new set of insights into the work of a modern master." I feel this book is a MUST for the reader who is, say, on his/her second or third book by Nabokov. Yet I would also recommend MAGICIAN'S DOUBTS to anyone who is thoroughly familiar with Nabokov's life, his work, and its criticism for a fresh, cogent look at some of VN's work. I found it an especially good book for aspiring writers, as Wood dissects many of Nabokov's techniques, such as the way VN uses inversion, the use of connected references to accrue power, surface detail to reveal the object's depth, and how VN maintains the mystery in his work without losing its narrative drive. For myself, I most enjoyed reading THE MAGICIAN'S DOUBTS with the subject of each chapter (i.e., the particular Nabokov work) alongside, re-examining with delight the points and overall themes Wood expresses so elegantly in this compact but dense-with-insight book.

The cover page is very attractive but in reality the content is not so useful. First of all, there is only one example in each page. I think this is wastage of empty places. Secondly, there are very little examples for each topic. In short, I was waiting different sentences for every situation for example In Order Topic - Ordering: example sentences for introduction, development and conclusion; Order Confirmation: example sentences for introduction, development and conclusion.... But I couldn't find this in this book.

I mistakenly assumed all business reference guides provided, above all else, a professional format. Unfortunately, that is not the case with Muckian & Woods' Business Letter Handbook. Particularly, I was disappointed in the model letters, to say the least. I would be embarrassed to have written the letter in the complaint section. Honestly, who would begin a letter, "Am I wrong or isn't it your responsibility..."? (Mind you, I've already returned the book for credit and this quote is taken from memory, so I apologize for any miswording.) And since when is it professional to interject cute phrases like, "But seriously..." or "Just kidding..." in a congratulatory letter? What business person would write like this in a real situation? Were Muckian & Woods bored with formal business writing and wanted to loosen up all of us stuffed shirts? Maybe next time I need guidance on business letter writing, I'll call Jerry Seinfeld. He's not doing much these days.

Do NOT buy this book if you care about your rats. This author has no idea what she's talking about. Debbie's books are much more informative.

This book made me very unhappy. The author must not have any pet rats, or her rats would be dead and she would now know NEVER to use wood shavings in their cages. The only wood shavings suitable for rats is aspen, but CareFresh or products made of recylved and sterlized newspapers are best. This along with a lot of other misinformation can kill your pet rat. To learn the truth about pet rats and how to care for them click on Debbie Ducommen's book at the top of the page.