"What I Believe: A Young Person's Guide to the Religions of the World," by Alan Brown and Andrew Langley, is overall a well written book. The book includes several chapters, each of which is dedicated to a major religious tradition: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Shinto. There is also a "catch-all" chapter which gives limited information on other traditions: the Jain faith, the Baha'i faith, Rastafarianism, etc.

The various chapters describe certain aspects of these religions: the founding figure, customs, festivals, rites of passage, holy books, etc. The articles also describe some of the diversity in each tradition. The book also has a helpful glossary at the end.

The book is not without flaws and inconsistencies. For example, the authors mention "new cults" without really explaining the term. Also, they seem to leave out any real acknowledgment of secular humanism, atheism, or religious liberalism.

Overall, the book presents a rather sanitized look at world religions. The authors write, "As long as we respect each other's beliefs and allow people to practice their religion freely, the world should be a happier place. Religion can help us to live like brothers and sisters." A nice sentiment, but often far from harsh reality. Despite its flaws, however, "What I Believe" is an admirable achievement overall.

What I Believe is a brightly illustrated "first-person" introduction to various world religions, including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Shinto, and Taoism. Each major belief system is told through the eyes of a cheerfully drawn child who compare and contrast the major tenets of their faiths. Color photographs are interspersed with drawings of the children describing what it means to be of their faith, traditions, festivals, and practices around the world. This is a simple introduction to comparative religion, and it would be nearly impossible to try to describe all of the variants of each religion, so it comes as no surprise that there are a few details that have been left out. For instance, no mention is made that while Jews remember the near-sacrifice of Abraham's son Isaac, Muslims believe that the story is told about his son Ishmael - a minor differenc to some, but obviously not to Jews and Muslims. Much of the section on Christianity focuses on Catholic and Anglican worship, describing special garments that priests wear, saints, candles, and other trappings not traditionally found in many Protestant services. Finally, there are a few editing mistakes that obscure meaning: is the Buddhist meditative cloth a thanka or a tharka? Other than those glitches, this is a nice addition to any library for children, as it seems to be written from an ecumenical point of view, encouraging children to learn about and respect one another's faith systems. From a non-expert point of view, it does not seem to contain offensive or questionable information, and the fun illustrations are an easy way to introduce children to a variety of cultural and religious practices.

I love Bary Longyear and this book did not disappoint. Suppose the dinosaurs did not become extinct, they just left, and now they have returned and they want their world back. My son absolutely adored this book from the time he was ten or eleven and, years later, he remembers it still. Both of us recommend it highly.

This book was a very good help in algebra for me. It had great descrition and was clear and easy to understand.

Mirrorstone is a good book that my son & I enjoyed reading. The illustrations are really superb. The story line is good and gripping at times. My son (7 yrs old) liked the book, but I thought that while the story was good, it could've been improved upon and little more thought through.
The storyline is about a modern boy who was brought into the past to retrieve the mirrorstone (magical mirror). Without giving too much of the plot, I think that given the basic storyline and the characters created to fullfill that story line, there could've been much more room for character development.
But even said all that, I thing that this book is one of the better "non chapter" books for young children. The illustrations are breath-taking (even as adult I enjoyed looking through the book), the holograms are really well done, and the story line, while not very complex, still point certain things out to the children.

I have this book and use it at school. It is great for teaching students about different kinds of rocks. You will need a set of rocks to do the activities in this book. Once you get you set of rocks you have lots of fun and exciting activities to do with your children.

It was a bit difficult for me to understand the book bacause English is not my native language, but I think the book will be really great if you understand this kind of low-class colloquial English. It is very philosophical and makes you think about the moral question of what is right or wrong and also about honesty and cheating. The race that Smith loses on purpose at the end is very interesting, I always thought he would change his mind and win the race, when he was thinking about his father's death and the possibility to have a wife and children and a "honest" work. Sometimes I wished he would change his mind because he is an intelligent guy but most of time I think it's good that he goes his own way and doesn't do what other people want him to do.

This book is worth reading!!
It was the first time I read a book by Alan Sillitoe
and I enjoyed it. Sillitoe describes well how poor people
become criminal and how hard it is to get out of the vicious
circle of poverty ... if you want to get out of it.
Sometimes the book is a little bit tedious but all in all I recommend
reading the book.

Up to 1945 the working class in Great Britain was expected to kow-tow to the 'educated' ruling classes. After 1945 social change blurred the divisions between the classes and one of the people who gained most from this change was Alan Sillitoe. He came from a working class background but was allowed to fulfil his ambitions to be a writer that up to WW2 was the province of the wealthy. Sillitoe wrote about what he knew i.e. the working class in a Midlands town in a period of social change from the end of WW2 up to (in this particular collection of short stories) the mid to late 1950's. He does not attempt to moralise and , I believe, does not attempt to romanticise what it was really like to live in Britain in the aftermath of WW2. He does attempt to paint a picture of a class of people that may appear to be alien to people who have been influenced the Pathe News Reels of the 1940's and 1950's. This book describes better than most academic text books what life was really like for the majority of the British people after WW2.

I'm a US History teacher and use this book for all of my DBQ questions in my class. I stump them everytime. This book is decent questions to review with and a teachers best friend if you want to see students do poorly or really try and pass miserably.

This AP Book presents and organizes historical DBQ's previously unavailable to teachers and students alike. It is intended as a teacher's supplement, a book whose questions can be duplicated and shared with students. The questions are carefully (and expensively) researched document collections that are unrivaled for their breadth and depth. As students use these collections in their study of primary sources across the history curriculum, they also learn about the format of the DBQ on the AP exam. The book aims to help teachers help students learn to grapple with historical evidence and develop generalizations from the time period rather than a textbook. It is an invaluable teaching tool available at a very low cost with a very high benefit. The College Board has done us all a service by making these archival questions available for classroom usage.

The notes to teachers and students, written by an Ivy League professor and the only high school teacher to chair the AP Test Development Committee, entertain and educate as well as offer penetrating insights in to the construction of the largest AP examination itself.

Thank you, College Board.

I must say I was disappointed with this book. I really enjoyed the Anniversary Party along with the character development in the film. Perhaps I gave too much credit to Alan Cumming and not enough to Jennifer Jason Leigh, but I thought Cumming would make a good novelist. Guess I was wrong.

The story itself wasn't all that bad, and I'm fairly certain it'd make an interesting film (The film would take elements of 'Sweet November', 'Trainspotting', 'Groove', and 'Tales of the City'). Tommy's a 29 year old guy who simply isn't willing to let go of his youth and is pretty [darn] irresponsible for somebody entering his thirties. Thankfully he can rely on his cool and intelligent roomates and on his boyfriend, Charlie. That basically resumes the story. Obviously Tommy goes through a bunch of crises and keeps [messing] things up. Personally I prefered Ethan Hawke's first novel way better. Here, the character development was [poor]... it truly felt like this should have been a screenplay. Oh well, I still admire Cumming's films and acting. Can't be good at everything.

Tommy's Tale is described on its jacket cover as "rollicking". And it is. Written by Alan Cumming, this book is sharp, smart, laugh-out-loud funny, and surprisingly poignant. Tommy, the narrator of the story, is a 29-year-old adolescent. He has made a choice not to grow up and he revels in his decadent lifestyle. Living in London with his friends and roommates Sadie and Bobbie, he lives a self-indulgent life of drugs, sex, and parties.

As he approaches his thirtieth birthday however, Tommy suddenly finds himself faced with the very emotions and feelings he's been trying so hard to avoid. It seems like everyone is telling him to grow up, including his sort-of boyfriend Charlie, who is ready for more of a commitment. Even Charlie's charming eight-year-old son wants Tommy to be more responsible and be his "second daddy". Most demanding, though, is Tommy's own desire to have a true family of his own.

Tommy's bad decisions continue to pile up, and he resorts to more and more drug use in an effort to stem the rising tide of depression. Will he be able to overcome his excesses and be the man his friends and family need him to be?

This is Alan Cumming's first novel, but I'm hoping it won't be his last. Cumming is better known for his Tony Award-winning turn as the emcee in Cabaret. He has also starred in quite a few recent movies, including his critically acclaimed cowritten, coproduced, codirected and costarred The Anniversary Party. Cumming writes in a very personal style. It feels as if you are having a conversation with an old friend in your favorite bar. He has a knack for capturing the small things in life that make his story feel all the more real. This isn't for the moralistic or squeamish. He tends to glamorize drug use, although he doesn't pull any punches when it comes to their effects, and the sex is graphic and abundant. My biggest reservation about this book was the predictable and somewhat flat ending. It leaves you with warm fuzzies and wraps everything up neatly (perhaps too neatly), but it doesn't quite live up to the rest of the story. You can't help but get the feeling that perhaps Cumming is already thinking about the screenplay for his first novel and wrote the perfect, feel-good, Hollywood ending. Still, Tommy's Tale is one of my favorite books I've read in a while.

For Alan Cumming's first attempt at a novel, I thought this was very engaging and a very easy read, due to the style of the writing with the first person narrative that constantly addresses the reader as if you were in a conversation with the author. I certainly enjoyed the insight this gave me into his head. I found the tangential observations to be entertaining and made the storytelling more personal. I am mystified by the reviewer who criticized the numbered outlines about Tommy's depression "repeated again and again throughout the book", when the rules of depression actually only appear once and then are just referred to one other time. Regardless, I loved reading about Tommy's exploits, sexual and drug-related. I am not a big fan of drugs myself, but that didn't stop me from enjoying "Trainspotting" or this book (in fact, he makes a reference to the film that surprised me so much I laughed out loud, after making comparisons in my head all along). That is why we read books and watch movies, for a glimpse of experiences outside our own. Cumming's language is delightfully colloquial, giving the narrative an English flavor without so much slang as to make it unreadable to Americans (as "Trainspotting" did). One of the first rules of writing is to "find your voice"; Alan Cumming has definitely found his, and I hope he uses it to write again.

I remember reading this book for one of my courses back in college. It's pretty decent but, the section explaining convolution is atrocious. It's only 3-4 pages long and there are only two-in the entire book- examples given. The first, which is trivial, is worked out in detail. The second more realistic example is not. The reverse would have been more a more illuminating situation. This text does a very good job on the other topics covered. Be warned however that the constant shifting between discrete and continuous signals in the book probably will not be how those subjects are taught in a course. Consider using "Circuits, Signals, and Systems" as a supplement.

Having had this book for 2 semesters in a Signals and Systems course, I can say that it has done its job in presenting an in-depth and clear introduction to the topic. It is well-written, structured, comprehensive and has lots of challenging (and not so) exercises and examples.

A few comments on the latter: it seemed to me that the first 20 basic exercises at the end of each chapter were very basic, of the type "plug-in the formula from the table on the previous page", while the subsequent problems, especially the advanced ones, are way above the level of the former. Working out through those was meticulous, hard and very lengthy as compared to the basic stuff (the solutions provided by our instructor were of the order 1-2 typed pages per problem). Providing answers or at least general strategies would have been tremendously helpful. I am aware that there is a solutions manual, however the textbook itself is expensive enough.

The information was presented clearly, but I liked our professor's introduction to convolution more that the book's coverage. The sampling chapter was, at least to me and some of my fellows, a bit confusing and we had to, again, rely more on class notes.

Overall this is a good book, albeit very-very expensive (I was lucky enough to get a cheap Indian reprint).

I used several books while studying this subject.
The oppenheim wilsky (O/W) is a very good at explaining the basic ideas of signal processing, classification et al. I found the math part of it (chps 3- 6 : concerning various fourier representations) a tad inadequate.
I also liked the Haykin's (Signals and Systems by Simon Haykin and Barry Van Veen) approach to fourier,laplace representations better organized. (all four transforms are deal with simultaneously.. this helps in retaining clarity)
on the whole, the book is useful as long as you can supplement the math in it with a more problem oriented book like the schuam series book (By Hsu).
There is a solutions manual available for end of chapter problems. But working it out on your own or in a study group is far more effective.

A very good book, covering all the basics of medical genetics and the rapid development in this field, The book is somehow complicated and not easy to understand , and has some mistakes, anyway it is a good book and deserves reading although I prefer other books dealing with the same subject and explaining the concepts of genetics in a better clearer way.