BEACON

Edith Durham was a remarkable British woman which after an illness that caused her depression. Her doctor recommended that she changes the place where she lives and she did. She sailed to Balkans and it was then when her lifelong involvement with the people of Balkans began.

"As I knew there was no case on record of a stranger being "held"
in North Albania, and moreover, The Albanian is an old friend of mine" - she writes and there she was in Albania even though they were under occupation by Turks at the time.

Even though it is more like a armchair travel book, Edith gave us a lot of historical facts about Albanians. She writes a lot about Illyrians and Skenderbeg. She talks about times when Slavs with an enormous number came to Balkans for the first time.
But what makes this book so pleasant is when she writes about her time spent with various Albanian tribes. There are so many "tales" such as those with Witches. There is a "tale" about an Albanian woman who killed her husband who sold her brother's life to the turks for a bag of gold.
There is a lot of everything and this book is just wonderful by all means. Even though I am an Albanian there were lots of things I learned that I didn't know before.

So if you really need to learn more about Albanians, their traditions and their history - one must chose Edith Durham's book
"High Albania"

Highly Recommended

A good book is capable of opening your eyes to a whole new reality, Ms. Durham does that here. An Italian historian once wrote that the Albanian territories were across the Adriatic Sea yet less known than darkest Africa, this is a valiant effort to remedy that. Ms. Durham ventures, illegaly, into northern "High" Albania with an intrepid curiosity and through Western eyes proceeds to open up the vast horizons of Albanian culture. Imagine a society so isolated by the Alps and suspiscion of outsiders that they still have a ready grasp on pre-Christian traditions and myth. Read this and learn of the highland clans, the "besa", the rights of blood and honour that decimated entire generations of males and oh so much more.

Ms. Durham managed to earn the love and respect of those that trusted no one and had been maltreated by all. She lobbied tirelessly, if vainly, for her adopted people for her entire life and in the end was embraced as the "Queen of the Mountain People." This truly is an exceptional book. Read it.

Edith Durham is the undisputed "Queen of the Northern Albanian Alps". She takes you along her tour in Victorian/British-English fashion through the Northern Albanian Alps just after the turn of the century and you feel as if you were just whisked away to ford the streams and climb the mountains with her.

Remarkable as it was to have traversed this landscape in 1909, it was nothing short of a miracle for a woman to have done it. She gained the respect of those she met, showing respect for the great traditional law of the Gheg Albanians--the Kanun of Leke Dukagjini. She was offered "bread and salt" at every table and never doubted the Albanian people's ability to show mikpritje (hospitality) towards an outsider as herself.

Furthermore, I loved the stories she relates about her visits to the specific tribes. She peppers them occasionally with Albanian parables that she was told along the way. For me, this book was amazing and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

As a relationship author I'm always in search of great reference books to find quotations and generate new ideas. This book is without doubt the very best of its kind. After acquiring this one you'll see how trivial most other quotations books are...in fact most are simply gift books. But this one has a ton and a wide variety of wise, colorful, poetic, literary, self-help, and motivational quotations. I can overemphasize how much this book has been a help for me with writing. It's simply the best. All authors should own this!

How refreshing to open this book and not have to search for a quote by a female! They're ALL by women! Reading through Bartlett's you'd think there were only a few quotable women on the earth. The book is divided by subject and highly readable. I recommend this book to all word lovers. It's a treasure full of previously hidden gems. . . I love this quote by Alice Walker, "Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the day before."

On my office bookshelves I have perhaps 150 books of quotations, which as a writer I refer to constantly. This book of quotations stands heads and shoulders above the rest of them, not because it's women but because it's full of superb, thoughtful, wise, witty, useful quotations and because it's so well-documented (you know who actually said what, on what occasion). There's more genuine scholarship behind this than in a dozen Bartletts'. I'll buy any book Rosalie Maggio puts her name on because she does her homework and has good taste.

One of the best adventures in the classic "I" series, Baltron's Beacon is unfortunately one of the rarest as well. This near-perfect module will take your PCs from the home of the great sage Demetrios into the wilds of the marshes, then to the ruins of the glowing tower itself, into the dungeons, seeking the legendary Black Flame! A wonderful adventure you'll never forget.

I just finished playing this quest today. I enjoy this campain becuse of the large and strange variety of creatures and treasure. It has lots of puzzles and riddles that are actually quite hard. It will be hard for beginners but towards the end it is very easy. This quest will be a snap for verterans. Plus you get lots of experience. HE HE HE HE

This smart and vibrant collection represents so much that is fresh, interesting, and deeply humane in American letters. You can read it a little at a time, or all at once. Edwidge Danticat has done a fantastic editorial job.

The contributors are of various cultures and ages. They all write in English, and also live in the U.S. Many are teachers of writing, too. Whether originally from Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, or Africa, each writer has a sensibility of inevitable "otherness," and a challenging sense of differentness - and, sometimes, of belonging to a mother culture that is ultimately - and often after difficulties - rich and giving. Gay culture, too.

Conflict abounds. The stories are not predictable, and the points of view are varied. These pieces each have palpable tension - and satisfying, non-formulaic resolution. Chang-Rae Lee writes of a harrowing set of events in "The Volunteers," for example. Larry McMurtry's "Death of the Cowboy" is somber and sad personal essay. Lois-Ann Yamanaka's "Ten Thousand in the Round" is strange and arresting. Poets are included, with great success.

Contributors' notes provide additional good information. The list of small-press and mainstream publications - where these pieces originally appeared - at the collection's end includes descriptive and subscription information and is sufficient to keep one happily reading for weeks - or throughout the year. A great value and thoroughly worthwhile. I only wish I'd had this book with me the last time I was stuck at an airport for an extra few hours.

Deserves more than five Amazon stars.

The Columbia University Aitm website considers this to be one of the finest anthology of writings of our experience. We agree with Oprah Winfrey, Barnard alumnus Edwidge Danticat is ahead of her time.

I had to purchase this book when I was in college. I thought it odd when I picked it up. The book is a wonderful resource. I had Dr. Perrin as a professor and he is as down to earth and easy to understand as this book. Now that I am a teacher I use the book all the time. It is especially great when you need to find something quickly. This book is never too far out of my reach.

One of the finest, most comprehensive, and easiest-to-use guidebooks on the market, updated with concise direction in dealing with documentation of the newest forms of media. Helped me through four years of college, three years as a high school English teacher (where my students used it more than I did), and now as a manager with an internet company. Highly recommended!

Larry's photo's are pretty good, but Patricia's writing is very informative and she was nice enough to include a map so you can see exactly where each lighthouse is located. I learned much about maintanence, and I didn't even know there was such a thing as the Huron Lightship. This book is well worth the money.

This is a small book that's worth twice its price. Each of the 43 lighthouses gets its own full page photograph. Each facing page has concise, interesting information about the pictured light. A minor flaw is the map of the Great Lakes. Michigan has a strange shape and the Keweenaw Peninsula has become an island. But that is forgiven by the rest of the book. A great plus is the 19 Canadian lighthouses. Up until now all the books I've found only have US lights. The most curious picture of a Michigan light is Sand Hills. Waving high above the lantern room is the Canadian Maple Leaf. Guess that proves that Michigan and Canada are truly good neighbors--as I've always known! Treat yourself to this book if you like lighthouses, out door settings, or good photography.

There has been major growth in the popularity of Korean-American literature lately, and Kori represents the first anthology to provide a comprehensive collection of 20th century works by Koreans from the 1930s to the 1990s. Prominent Korean-American scholars and writers edit and present the 16 entries in this excellent and recommended collection.

This is a splendid and useful anthology, tastefully deployed and edited with historical range, literary verve, and critical care. The generational waves and generic diversity of Korean American writing is captured in a way that leaves the future open to a range of forms and possibilities that can draw upon everything from the ur-realism of Ty Pak to the transcendental deconstructions of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

This is an excellent book on the existing lighthouses of the Chesapeake Bay, and a must-have for anyone interested in lighthouses.

A chapter is dedicated to each of the remaining lighthouses of the bay, and is teaming with historical facts surrounding the lighthouse in question. Along with wonderful, large color photographs of the lights as they presently exist, many chapters include additional black and white prints of the lighthouses in earlier days.

The introduction is very good and gives a nice overview of the lighthouses and their history in the Chesapeake Bay, and sets the stage for what follows in the book. A general map of the Chesapeake Bay showing the location of each of the lights is also included.

The text is very informative about each lighthouse covered, right down to the dollars spent on each light, the approval process for those monies, construction, light keepers, daily life at a lighthouse...and in some cases, the move of a lighthouse to another location in order to save the light from destruction or for posterity. Other facts are discussed as well, many unique in nature. Did you know that nuclear power was once used in a lighthouse? It was, and in the Chesapeake Bay.

A framed section with identification information on each lighthouse is also included in each chapter, detailing such items as date of establishment, lighthouse position, light characteristic, height, range, etc.

All in all, I don't think you could ask for more in a perfect book on Chesapeake Bay lighthouses. This book will make any "wickie" very happy.

"'Culture' is indeed a "beacon of the future," a new paradigm that promises ways of using dynamic artistic and cultural understanding as a means of finding new paths for the future. Culture - Beacon of the Future should be in the briefcases of political, educational and business leaders and even more in the consciousness of the public at large. We need an understanding of the whole cultural environment and a realization of how attention to cultural matters could be an asset in discovering the paths to survival as a species and as a civilization. The book deserves promotion and wide readership."

Walter Pitman, O.C., O. Ont., LL'D.

"This volume by D. Paul Schafer expands the decade-long academic attention given to the problem of culture, and sheds much additional light on this subject. It is a valuable contribution in this regard, and specifically in offering an exhaustive and penetrating analysis of the idea of culture itself, stressing its heuristic and normative potentialities towards the construction of a new world order...(T)his work...has merits that transcend the purely technical aspect. It can stimulate and enrich discussion in sociology, anthropology, and social philosophy courses that examine the nature and role of culture in the modern world, and its utility for global welfare and salvation in the future."

- The Great Plains Sociologist

Schafer's CULTURE: BEACON OF THE FUTURE is a noble attempt at defining a new paradigm for thinking about human potentialities and prospects. Schafer suggests we need to go beyond traditional and restricted definitions of human nature drawn from economics, political science, religion, psychology, and so on, and try to see humans, instead, in the broader context of culture as a whole. A more systematic, refined, and advanced view of culture, drawing on insights from many scientific and artistic disciplines, may, Schafer argues, help point the way toward a future in which human potentialities are more fully realized."

- David Stover, co-author of A Mind for Tomorrow with Dr. Erika Erdmann

The poems bring us close to nature and enable us to create a link of awareness that is sometimes soft, sometimes shattering. We are connected closely to the animals and birds - "The Kookaburras" made me cry. The reality of death is treated in a way that makes us pay attention and live NOW and know that when we are enveloped by that vast darkness, as everything eventually is, it will be alright.

I've read just about everything that Mary Oliver has written...and something about "House of Light" makes me sit up and LISTEN to the natural world. These poems -- I think especially of "The Kookaburras" -- invite us to become more accountable for every thought, action, and gesture. Mary's poems break my heart open again and again; they're soul-food for me; they remind me of what is essential. Mary is a compassionate witness for the exquisite minutae of life.

I read this book on the recommendation of a friend, and found it to be a spiritually-filling experience. I particularly like the imagery of "The Ponds". Read it, all of you!