This book, as far as I know, is the first to focus on the anonymous warriors of feudal Japan. Turnbull does an excellent job of shedding light on the class of warriors that bore the brunt of fighting during sengoku jidai. He covers everything from arms and armor, how the farmer/soldiers were mobilized in time of war, to life on campaign and medical treatment for wounded soldiers. He also shows how ashigaru went from being despised underlings to finally being granted the social status of samurai under Hideyoshi, who himself started his military career as an ashigaru. All of this in 64 pages. Well worth the money.

If yoy like the thunder bolts the MoE and the avengers you will love this!

This book is visually great, with wonderful, detailed photographs and simple word concepts. It opens up lots of opportunities for discussing shapes, colors and other ways of sorting, as well as counting. I originally received this book as a hand-me-down from my sister for my daughter, and it's become so worn out, I'm going to order a new one!

What a shame this is out of print! Our family used this book extensively as a guide to our sightseeing of Japan this past summer as it offers not only historical background, portraits of great samurai personalities, and dramatic stories of the battles, but also information on visiting the battlefield sites today. Unable to obtain maps or directions to Sekigahara and Nagashino battlefields from the Japanese Tourist Organization (they told us "nobody goes there - there is nothing to see!") we relied on directions and photos in this book to discover for ourselves that samurai battlefields (Kamakura, Sekigahara) can be toured with relative ease and offer much for the modern tourist. Of course, it was the book's excellent coverage of the battles that first made us want to walk in the footsteps of Tokugawa, Mitsunari, Yoshisada, etc. A valuable resource!

along the lines of the Cross and the Switchblade, without a gang. This man went from a pretended conversion to an actual one. Trying to get in good with the brass to make an escape from prison to actually having an awakening of his dormant Catholic upbringing. He then grows in the faith to become an inspiration along the lines of David Pelzer (child called it) coming back from his own destructive behavior to become a model for other folks to wish to attain. If you appreciate this book you must follow up with a couple more or even a video or 2. Very Catholic, and very traditional, great for new converts or just for people looking to understand the Catholic point of view. Plus being just a plain ole great human interest story.....

As investigative writer and author of The Professional Paranoid (available through Amazon.com), I must state that this book reshaped my life. I was an ordinary man content with my Brokaw and my Jennings, but no more. My eyes opened wide to the truth behind many of the stories of our time, I have joined with the authors of Big Brother in a crusade against that very Big Brother.

This book is also a valuable insight to anyone who has followed the Friendly Fire debate in Flight 800. As I demonstrate fraud by NTSB and FBI in my work (proparanoid.com), Big Brother and The Holding Company takes you back to the 'Nixon murders' of Watergate time, includinge the deliberate crash of Flight 553 caused by covert action of the intelligence community - CIA even planted an agent on board who was equiped with cyanide injections. Five persons on the plane, and the crew (and only those people) died of cyanide poisoning! Anyone who thinks their government would not shoot down one of their own airliners and cover it up should start with this book before saying so.

If you actually want to know how World War II machine cipher systems were made -- and broken -- this book is indispensable. Kelley covers the "big three" systems: Germany's Enigma; the Japanese diplomatic cipher machine known by its codename, PURPLE; and the U.S. Army-Navy ECM/SIGABA. He tells us how each was developed and by whom, how it worked and how it was used, and how and why it was (or, in the case of SIGABA, never was) broken. Without elaborate mathematics he makes the principles of these machines and their solutions clear and also evaluates their strengths and weaknesses.

As the author shows, each of these machines had the potential to be unbreakable with the resources available to cryptologists at that time. But those who implemented the German and Japanese systems and set and checked their operating procedures left holes that codebreakers could drive solutions through, and did. In the U.S., however, some of the world's best cryptanalysts were given the freedom not only to design the SIGABA machine but to develop and control all the details of its use. As a result it was never broken even though it was very widely used for almost two decades and generated vast amounts of ciphertext.

I was particularly interested in the description of how the U.S. Army and Navy cryptologists devised SIGABA and broke PURPLE. They were less colorful and romantic than many of their British counterparts -- civil servants and military officers who worked in the shadows -- but they were giants. Some authors have slighted their accomplishments on the grounds that the PURPLE system was not very strong and the German and Japanese cryptologists given the task of breaking SIGABA were not as good as the Poles and British who broke Enigma. But Kelley shows how great the challenges of PURPLE truly were, and how really unbreakable SIGABA was. While PURPLE was less strong than Enigma in some respects, the playing field was leveled because the Poles and British had a lot inside knowledge about Enigma that was totally denied to the Americans attacking PURPLE. PURPLE was a pure cryptanalytical solution with no prior knowledge of the machine's mechanism -- the first of its kind and an amazing feat. Nor did it really matter how good or bad the Axis cryptologists were -- the way the U.S. used SIGABA, it was never going to be broken.

The book's writing is lively and clear and its illustrations, although sparse, are well chosen. It is fairly expensive, not at all grandly produced, and relatively brief. But if you really want to know how World War cipher systems worked and didn't, you cannot pass this book up.

Will O'Neil

Aristophanes is considered the finest comic playwrite of the Classical Era. This is certainly born out through the selection in this volume. Birds is a comedy about an Athenian who decides to incite the birds to take over the world and replace the classical deities as its rulers. Both Lysistrata and Assembly-Women are about what would happen if the women took over the government. In the former, the women of Greece band together in a sex-strike, to end the Pelopennesian Wars. In the later, the Athenian women use trickery to be elected the the leaders of the democracy, and they institute economic and sexual communism. In the last selection, Wealth, the deity of Wealth, Ploutos, is captured and made to distribute wealth only to the good. However, as Poverty points out, that might not be a good thing. These plays are full of topical comedy, but much of the humor still is funny 2400 years later. The translation is very uncensored, as Greek comedy itself was, so that very little is lost in metaphor. The imagery in some of them is highly amusing. Although this is a great example of the way life was in Classic Athens, these plays are not for the squeamish!!

Lyrically written and gorgeously illustrated, Box Turtle at Silver Pond Land is a winner. Read this one to all the young naturalists in your family or classroom and nurture an appreciation for the miracles to be found in our own backyards.

Books likes this hardly to get overhere.the only way to get this kind of books is asking somebody to buy it in the USA or via AMAZON and that's a pity.I was very impressed by this book and good reading and good pictures!