GB Books

The Yummys Lollipops are good but you have to be careful they come out of their stick very easy and any child or grown up can choke on them.

This is a great book for little gilrs who would like to read a story about the WNBA. Also tells you from the time woman started playing basketball in skirts to the WNBA. It also says a little about each team of the 97' season. And what you can be if you really want it and practice hard for it.

Please, whatever you do, DON'T buy this book for your daughter or any other woman. It is incredibly off-base about a lot of things. Testoterone isn't what makes boys boys, and estrogen doesn't make girls girls. 90% of boys don't abandon their pregnant teenage girlfriends cause they lack the hormone to bond with a baby. Men's bodies and brains and speech patterns were not built specifically to accomodate hunting. Men's bodies are not biologically inferior to women's emotionally. Men do not repress emotions cause "it's a better way to survive" if ancient men didn't cry when their buddies were killed by a lion. The author talks about our primitive ancestors as if there are records showing how men & women culturally treated each other, but we have no records of that cause there are no surviving written testamonies. His comment that "for millions of years it didn't matter if males didn't 'feel' as much as females" is beyond preposterous because human beings have only inhabited the Earth for about 10,000 years and there are no records about what prehistoric men felt.

Pure nonsense, atrocious reductionist science...STAY AWAY!

As an adult woman, married for 16 years, I found that this book explained 98% of the arguments I have had with my husband. The author has excellent insights about the differences between males and females--such as those caused by hormones and brain structure. (He is careful to say that not all males or females align to the characteristics he describes.) The author travels into territory that will be controversial, but I think he is right on. For example, while he makes it clear that no one should ever be violent, he is one of the few authors to talk about the role females play in date and domestic violence--even if they don't hit. (And he notes that females often do slap their partners). Three quarters of the way through the book I was ready to hand it out on street corners, because if read and understood it could help to prevent so much of the pain and violence couples experience. However, at the end of the book, he suggests sexual practices for those protecting their virginity. While I absolutely concur with the author that we need to "get real" about how kids will act on their sexuality, I expect this will keep me from using the book in the schools (unless those pages are removed). I do intend to have all my friends with girls or husbands read this book.

This book in no way will help a teenage girl,it will only cause her to feel more different and polarized from males and become more ashamed of any sexual needs she may have,because the book tends to carp on only the male having monster hormones and thinking about sex.What happens to the girl who has just as strong needs,she is not helped,she is thought of as a freak by society. Women rarely get the help they need in the area of temptation that men do.Women are told they will want romance and love,but they never hear what they need to hear about sex drive and how it affects the indiviual.All this book will do is cause more misunderstandings and relationship problems,because the female being a sexual being as well is overlooked.

This book is definitely not what I expected. I didn't realize that this was a miniture book that was more or less on a kids level.

Academic specialists of Islam overwhelmingly agree on two points: that Islamism (or fundamentalist Islam) can be divided into "moderate" and "extremist" elements; and that the former can prevail over the latter, ideally forming Islamo-Democratic parties along the lines of the Christian-Democratic parties found throughout Europe. In this spirit, the "Islamist dilemma" of the title refers to the challenges of Islamism's moving away from violence and toward political participation.

The editor suggests a solution to the dilemma with which all the contributors would largely concur: integrating the Islamists "in a truly pluralistic context which defines the rules and limits of political competition." To critics who would say that this approach has been tried in such countries as Algeria, Egypt, and the Sudan, she replies that "this strategy has in fact never been fully and consistently tried." In the same spirit, Michael C. Hudson calls for "full inclusion" of Islamists in the political process while Shireen T. Hunter declares that Islamists in power "would have little choice but to come to terms with the West."

To all this delusion, the nonspecialist can only shake his head in wonder. As in the case of prior radical utopian movements of the twentieth century, the specialists are trying to convince us that this one can be successfully accommodated and co-opted, but never confronted. But, pray tell, how exactly were the fascist and communist menaces beaten? Why should it be different this time?

Middle East Quarterly, Sept 1996

This juvenile biography of the French underwater explorer is illustrated with excellent sketches by Hal Ashmead (although the lettering on pp. 13 and 31 is in English rather than French). There is no mention, however, of the window breaking, which led to Cousteau being sent off to school, while the statement that Cousteau was assigned to a ship in the Mediterranean to recuperate after his automobile accident (see p. 17), is not reflected in either Madsen's nor Munson's more thorough biographies, both of which merely state that he was assigned to the naval port of Toulon. The account of the Undersea Research Group (more correctly, the Groupe d'Etudes et de Recherches Sous-Marines - or Group of Studies and Undersea Research) was established after the defeat of Germany, rather than during the war as Iverson's text suggests (see p. 30), while "the first undersea human colony" (at p. 47), mentioned as being built in 1963, was clearly Conshelf II - its prototype had been constructed in the Mediterranean the previous year.

I was hoping this would be an interactive book my daughter could use to learn to read. She can, but the pieces can only be used once in the story and there are only a handful of words that she has to put together. Also, the words are at a higher level than I'd hoped. She's just beginning to read and I thought she'd enjoy moving the magnetic pieces around to create words. As it is, it will be a short-term item that I'll pull out when she's more confident in her reading abilities. Then, I don't know what I'll do with it.

Most of this thin book consists of quotations from various letters written by Grubb and his associates. While interesting in that respect, I feel the author failed to bring them all together into a story of the lives and work of these men. I sometimes had the distinct impression that the author does not understand the industry he is writing about. In any case I believe this book is certainly not worth the high price.

In recent years, Yemen, a backwater for centuries, is in the news as Osama bin Laden's ancestral homeland and an important battlefield in the war on terrorism, M. Rubin from the MEQ states. But don't expect this volume, assembled by researchers and lecturers at Exeter University (Mahdi and Lackner) and the Free University of Berlin (Würth), to touch these subjects as this collection of papers dates from a conference that took place in 1998. Rather, subjects covered include political economy, the legal system, environment, and social and regional issues. Left unaddressed--by the editors' own admission--are foreign relations, military affairs, and party politics.

Many articles show their age. Charles Schmitz, an associate professor at Towson University, for example, seeks to extrapolate future challenges to the Yemeni society based on economic indicators from the early 1990s. What once may have been timely becomes silly when delayed publication means, in effect, skipping over a decade of more recent statistics. Drew University professor Nora Ann Colton's section on labor migration raises eyebrows because it addresses "the Gulf crisis" without reference to the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent fall of the Saddam Hussein regime.

Such datedness is a pity. Scholarly literature on Yemen is sparse, and many of the chapters are serious. The contributors have not substituted theory for research, and the analysis of the judiciary and its machinations is useful. Updating former presidential legal advisor Hussein al-Hubaishi's chapter on commercial litigation would be especially valuable given growing U.S., European, and Chinese interest in investment in the region. Also in need of expansion are the articles on medical care and health. Given its potential, how frustrating it is that Yemen into the Twenty-First Century remains stubbornly in the twentieth.

The previous reviewer was too kind.

I thought my precocious 5-year-old granddaughter would have great fun with this. Her favorite things are shoes and problem solving puzzles.

When she and I could not make heads or tails of the illustrations, I thought it was just that we were distracting each other and I left her to figure it out on her own with a big shoe.

Eventually she threw the book aside in defeat and allowed as how she'll keep on with her bunny ears technique.

Later, I sat with the book (and shoe) myself and tried my darnedest to end up with tied shoelaces based on the steps (1-7) given.

No helpful instructions appear, just illustrations by a person who color codes the laces and then reverses the colors for step 7, by which time it really doesn't matter.

This book should be taken off the market.

Tying shoes is a milestone for a child's sense of accomplishment and competence.

Causing readers to surrender to hopelessness and to doubt their capabilities instead is outrageous.

While this book was easy for my son to read, it did nothing to help him learn to tie his shoes.