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This book was a wold of help for me i had no idea about the world of chins(or how to take care of them. it will help the first time chin owner and give alot of great info to help you on your way to becoming a happy chinchilla owner.

This is a great book for first time Chinchilla owners. Itcovers important topics such as feeding and diet, and how to detectpotential health problems. It also provides a brief background on Chinchilla history.

I love this book. It is deep, raw and completely captivating from the first page to the last. The subtitle "A Sportswoman's Notebook" is a bit misleading. Although the author does write about her relationship with the natural world she also addresses several other profound and provocative topics such as suicide and sexual orientation. I am not sporty but I am intense and introspective and this book speaks to me in unnumerable ways. (A special note to literary lesbians and their friends - read this book!)

I'm not sure why I bought this book, because I don't consider myself a "sportswoman" and I can't imagine how or why anyone could kill an animal. But after the first chapter I was hooked. What a lovely book and touching stories. This is not a book about hunting, its about a woman's experiences with life. Very few books remain on my bookshelves as "keepers." This one will stay.

I purchased this book last year for an essay course I taught at a Korean university. It's an incredible book and I wish the authors would make this a series. The stories deal with many topics and they're never dull. The book also provides excellent material for teaching grammar, which is essential for good writing.

The authors divide the stories into chapters that deal with certain themes. For example, the first chapter is named "A Life Lesson." All of the stories in that chapter have protagonists that learn something significant in the story.

Each story is presented with the same format:

Think Before You Read
Literary Term
Idioms and Expressions
Comprehension
Vocabulary
Grammar
Sharing Ideas
Writing

The grammar lessons are excellent, I found it very easy to cover the topics. Unlike other ESL materials, I rarely had to supplement the book with outside material. There is a wealth of material in each chapter and it makes a reading and writing course informative yet fun for the students.

I was impressed with their selection of writers. They chose stories from heavyweights like Ernest Hemingway and Langston Hughes, but they also have excellent stories from lesser known writers. They also show the diversity of the American experience by including stories by ethnic writers.

I would highly recommend this book as a text for a reading and writing course for ESL students at the university level or advanced high school students.

I am an ESL/HS English teacher and have used America Writes for two years now. The choices of stories is excellent, introducing English language students to classic authors such as, Hemingway, Langston Hughes,Hawthorne, and O. Henry (to name just a few). The prereading questions and vocabulary along with idioms and expressions help tremendously to prepare the reader for the selection. It's great being able to have my students read at the higher level of content that they are ready for emotionally and intellectually and still have their language needs addressed. I would love to see this be made into a series with more than the one edition!! I highly recommend it for teachers as well as students working on their own to broaden their reading in English!!!

This gem provides me the complete guidance to the correct sounds that Americans speak and the practical and easy steps to follow. I improve not only my speaking, but my listening also.

Gradually, I notice myself having more fun and more confidence when facing Americans. Hardly hear their embarrassing "I-beg-your-pardon?" responses anymore.

Supun Tiptipakorn
Ph.D. student (Electrical Engineering)
The University of Texas, Arlington

I am from Brazil. I come to the USA twice a year in order to practice my English and visit my dear friends as well. They live in Pennysylvania. I really like the eastern USA accent. Anyway, everytime I come here I buy a book which is on American Accent.
I was really fortunate this year because I got The American Accent Guide 2nd Edition which is just awesome.
I'm enjoying soooo much studying it and using the CDs,which the sound quality is superb and totally understandable.
The more I study it , the more I like it. I have improved my pronunciation and intelligibility of my English using this new 2nd Edition by Beverly A. Lujan.
The American Accent Guide 2nd Edition is a great tool for anyone who wants to learn the REAL AMERICAN ACCENT. It is very well written and hard to put down once you start studying
it.

I can highly recommend this SUPERB 2nd Edition to anyone who wants to improve their american accent.

Jorge Alves Nunes
Brazil

This book is no ordinary pronunciation book. It's "the" Book. It goes beyond teaching vowel and consonant sounds. It's about the way americans speak. For the first time I've been working with sound transitions and blendings. It feels great to notice the changes in my pronunciation.At the same time, I improve my vocabulary and learn great idiomatic expressions, up-to-date ones. As the author points out the main problems each native speaker might have, it is easier for us, students, to identify our weak points and this way, dedicate more time and effort to improve them.

It's an excellent book for ESL teachers, students and speakers who want to improve their speech abilities, working with reduction of English accent. The section with useful expressions is really helpful. You practice the consonants and vowels and learn idiomatic expressions at the same time. Also, the author has an idea of the weak points that students from different languages may present. Knowing the sounds that are most difficult for Portuguese speakers helps a lot in my teaching and in my self-improvement.

Having been fortunate enough to have had Ed Swick as an instructor over 15 years ago, I knew this book would be excellent. American Idioms and Some Phrases Just for Fun is more than just fun, it is essential for those who desire a true understanding of the English language. Due to it's lighthearted approach it is addtionally an excellent gift for foreign friends.

As an experienced ESL instructor I am always looking for new and innovative materials for my students. American Idioms and Some Phrases Just for Fun is a harmless, though practical, and recreational book. It's style is sensitive to the all-too-often fear of learning English, not only for the ESL student but the native speaker as well! In addition, the activities in the book are easily adapted to any ESL/ESOL/Bilingual Ed teacher inservice components, specifically applied linguistics. Once the native or non-native participant finishes, he or she will probably want to forge on to more advanced materials without hesitation.

If, like me, you enjoy photography books more for the photos than for the accompanying text then you will find American Photographs 1900-2000 a joy. Of the 400 pages that make up this volume, only 6 pages have text. The rest are devoted to a wide and wonderful range of photographs. It is simply and stylishly laid out. Each left had page lists the photographer, the title, the date, size and type of the photograph. On the opposing right-hand page the accompanying photograph is beautifully reproduced. The plates are not 'cramped', as they can be in other books commemorating a century's worth of photography. Photojournalism, fashion photography, scientific photography, 'art' photography and Hollywood glamour photography are all covered. It is a pleasure to own.

The photography contained in this book is masterful! The black and white and color photos capture the essence of a country on the move. The captions help the reader to connect events and people to American history.

Melanie Mitchell's analogy-making as perception is a remarkably original book. It documents an artificial intelligence project known as copycat, which was implemented as the author's PhD project under Douglas Hofstadter.

Copycat is unlike anything in artificial intelligence. It is not a symbolic system, neither a connectionist one. The major goal of the project is to study the nature of concepts. Concepts, as we all know, are flexible, context-sensitive creatures. For instance, DNA has nothing to do with a computer program, but there is a sense on which we can see DNA as a computer program that guides embrionary development. DNA can also be seen as a zipper, as it "zips down" in two parts (for cell reproduction). Still another view would be DNA as a will, for it carries valuable hereditary "property". Now, DNA is in truth just a molecule, and nothing else. The question is, how can we see the same thing (such as DNA) as so many different things? Moreover, how can these fluid context-sensitive concepts be implemented in rigid, rule-obeying computers?

To which the answer is: what we view is the abstract roles that DNA plays in embrionary development, cell division, and in individual reproduction. And this is the very idea of "Analogy-making as perception".

Well, not so fast. The copycat project is not designed to grasp such extremely complex subjects as DNA, but, on the other hand, it presents a computational architecture that suggests what the nature of concepts is like, and how flexible concepts may emerge from inflexible mechanisms.

Copycat can solve analogy problems such as abc->abd:ijk-> ?. But it is not restricted to trivial ones. Consider the following analogy: abc ->abd:xyz->?. How would you solve it? How do you think that copycat solves it?

Obviously, this project doesn't fit in very easily in classical artificial intelligence, as it attacks some of the most pervasive ideas of the field, such as the separation of perception and cognition. In fact, I think this book redefines the major questions of artificial intelligence (and although Mitchell does not state it, I think the copycat model does not fall prey to either the frame problem or to the symbol grounding problem).

It is very unfortunate that this is not one of the best-selling books in AI. But I believe that it will ultimately make its mark on the History of the field, if for no other reason than it simply is the right approach to genuine intelligence and authentic understanding.

Should one day Amazon.com let me give a 6-star to a book, but charge me a dollar for giving it, this is one that would definitely deserve to be such a 6-star.

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PS. I would also recommend Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies; and Robert French's Subtlety of Sameness.

Since AI researchers are generally engineers, they historically did what engineers do: they broke up the mind in very clear-cut divisions, one for the perception of the things out there in the world, and another, symbolically, to do "abstract cogitation".

For deep reasons, this was an invalid move, but only a few could see it. Melanie surely could, for her highly original copycat project exhibits some of the best insights in Artificial Intelligence ever.

AI is still so much pervaded with the wrong ideas that this book will need to take some time to make its definitive mark on the history of the field.

If genuine understanding is ever to be built into a machine, understanding of the kind that Searle's gang will be forever denying, then it will come from an architecture similar to that proposed in this book.

Then again, I could turn out to be wrong. But let us let History decide on this issue.

Carolin Young takes you on a joyous visit back stage at twelve legenday dinner parties. The depth of historical research is astounding. No dull history here. Ms Young's exquisite style will have you wishing for another helping of this 'food for the soul'.

A magical melding of the worlds of dining, cooking, entertaining and history. This is a fascinating book, beautifully written, carefully researched, and with gorgeous photos. I'm buying it for all my friends who cook and enjoy having parties.

Retired Marine Corps Col. Chenoweth (a combat artist in Korea and Vietnam) has created a phenomenal large-format collection of 200 years of American combat art. More than a so-called coffee table book, Col. Chenoweth tells the fascinating backgrounds and field experiences of the combat artists and the battles they both participated in and interpreted with their talent. After a century of relying on battlefield photographic realism, it is amazing to see how "less accurate" drawings and paintings provide an emotional realism almost never captured in photographs. It's also refreshing to see so much coverage devoted to post-WWII conflicts and the extremely high quality art representing Korea, Vietnam, 1980s Lebanon, the Gulf War and Somalia. Military history students and buffs will want to refer to this book for a unique perspective on the conflicts they study. This work is particularly heavy with the work or Navy and Marine Corps artists. Well reproduced art, well written and HIGHLY recommended! Bravo Zulu and Semper Fi, Col. Chenoweth.

THIS IS AN AWESOME COLLECTION OF IMAGES OF THE WARS OF THE PAST TWO HUNDRED YEARS. PAINTINGS, PENCIL SKETCHES, WATERCOLORS OF BATTLES, SOLDIERS,TANKS, AIRCRAFT,SHIPS,ETC. GREAT PORTRAITS OF WHAT THE ARTISTS SAW BRING THEIR EXPERIENCES TO LIFE. I SPENT HOURS LOOKING THROUGH THIS BOOK AND I JUST GOT IT. MANY THOUGHT-PROVOKING IMAGES OF WORLD WAR I, WWII, VIETNAM, THE CIVIL WAR, EVEN BOSNIA, SOMALIA, AND THE GULF WAR. THERE IS AN ESPECIALLY GRUESOME PAINTING FROM WWII CALLED "THE PRICE" THAT REALLY BRINGS HOME THE HORROR OF WAR. AN AWESOME COFFEE-TABLE BOOK. IF YOU ARE AT ALL INTO ART AND/OR WAR THIS IS A BOOK FOR YOU. SOME VERY COOL STUFF IN HERE. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.