Participation Books

I am a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work, and it was very reassuring to know that I could easily find and quickly purchase this much needed text online. Thanks guys, keep up the good work.

P.S. The book was new and in excellent condition.

Es dificil encontrar una vision de la Guerra Civil Española que sea objetiva. Este libro de Orwell cuenta su experiencia como voluntario de las Brigadas Internacionales.

Como revolucionario se alistó para defender al mundo democrático del avance fascista. Pero la Guerra no era para idealistas y las profundas divisiones en el Frente Republicano lo decepcionaron, por lo que volvió a Inglaterra tras ser herido en batalla.

Es una lectura obligada para los admiradores de Orwell. Su relato de la Guerra Civil Española es fundamental para interesados en la historia.

I am one of the personal students of L.N. Taylor who has been helped by the teachings and philosophies in this book. His discussions of how or why we make the choices we make and how to learn how to use our minds better is truly amazing! To most people a book on how to use your brain sounds off the wall, but let me say that most people make decisions every day that they don't even know why they do it. Sometimes those choices lead to great results, but for many those choices lead to frustration and medicore results.

Larry shows you how to understand what type of person you are and guide you in creating a framework that you can use for the rest of your life to make better decisions and use your insight of others to facilitate better communication, increased sales and more effective management of your own skills and actions.

When I first started studying with Larry I had no idea why I did the things I did, his techniques showed me where I was effective and where I was not. I used the framework in this book to improve my communication skills, which I have used in politics very successfully and it also showed me how to better communicate my concepts and strategies to my clients, which has improved the sales in my business and increased my profits!

If you have ever been wondering why people don't seem to understand you or you make decisions that don't ever seem to work out as you would have liked then you need to read this. If you are one of the people who have ever been told by a spouse, boss, or peer that "you just don't get it" then you NEED to read this now.

This article, written by one of the most attractive women on the planet, is sooooo good. It is scholarly, funny, brilliant and a joy to read, and the sexy parts are, well, darn sexy. I don't think i have ever read anything better than this, including Gone With My Wind by Orson Wells, or David Kopperfield, by the noted Dutch author, Charles Dikkens. Too bad this is out of print.

It takes a village to raise a child, as the proverb goes. "Mobilizing the Community to Help Students Succeed" is a guide for community leaders who want to encourage educational success in school age children. With ideas for initiatives, moral support, involving parents, involving local businesses, and using the media as well, all ideas are fresh and sure to be effective. "Mobilizing the Community to Help Students Succeed" is a solid guide for those who want to go farther in the education of our children.

This little book is packed with useful info for parents of music students, including lots of answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. (like can you play the trumpet with braces?) Tips for practicing, selecting instruments based on your child's physical makeup, performing, purchasing vs. renting, it's all here. Clear illustrations and clear writing.

What fun it was to sit with my child just 5 minutes a day and watch her become a reader in short order!!

Guy Dempsey has once again written and delivered an authoritative work on the Napoleonic period. Having two excellent uniform studies already to his credit, this superb volume, in my opinion, establishes the author as one of the leading Napoleonic scholars that is writing today.

The Grande Armee was an army of many nations and myriad combat and support units that were not native Frenchmen. This volume lists them all, covering their history, colors, uniforms, and commanders, and gives the historian, enthusiast, and wargamer a ready reference that is both easy to use and packed full of useful information.

Relying on much primary source material, the author tells a factual, highly intricate tale of the non-French units that followed Napoleon's eagles across Europe. These units were an integral part of the Grande Armee and were not allied units. Well-known and famous outfits such as the Swiss, whom St. Cyr considered 'stronger than nature' for their epic stand in the Berezina in 1812, Berthier's private army, the Neuchatel Battalion of Swiss, the famous Tirailleurs do Po and the equally famous, and deadly, Tirailleurs Corses, to the lesser known units such as the Croatian provisional units that served in Russia in 1812 and exotic creations such as the Greek and Albanian crowd that served well, or not, beside their French comrades-in-arms.

I can think of no other publication in English that does such a thorough job of putting into print and logical order dozens of regiments, battalions, and detachments that made up the foreign contingent of the Grande Armee. This magnificent volume will be the standard work in English on this subject for years to come.

This book is enthusiastically recommended.

This book is the most complete and intelligent essay I have seen for the past 10 years of work with wildlife conservation and management. Should I have read before, it would have given me more insight in my career. This book is the result of an enormous work load done by scientists, politicians and anthropologists very well compiled in 400 pages.

Code Breaking was an important part of World War II. The success of the Allies against the Axis powers was due in part to the ability to break Japanese and Nazi codes. Of course, enemy code breakers were trying to do the same thing with Allied codes. During the war, about 400 Navajos who served in the U.S. Marines Corps were employed as code talkers, sending and receiving codes messages. The code they invented was never broken by the enemy and was based on the Navajo language. In a war that would be ended by the advanced technology of atomic bombs, the simple elegance of using a Native American language to befuddle Japanese code breakers is one of the most interesting footnotes of World War II.

In "Navajo Code Talkers," Andrew Santella begins with how Pearl Harbor got the United States into the war and how being able to communicate battle plans and information over long distances was crucial to military success. The Japanese listened in to American military radio messages (there is even a photograph of them doing this) and the American military had developed codes that were so complex they took hours to translate messages. Then Philip Johnson, a Los Angeles engineer who was the son of missionaries who had worked the Navajos, came up with the idea of using the Navajo language to make a simple code that would be almost impossible to break. Santella explains how the pronunciation and tone of each syllable is crucial in Navajo, and how the Army had used Native American languages in both World War I and World War II (File this under the "I did not know that" category). I always thought the Navajo simply spoke in their own language, but indeed a code was developed based on the language.

After providing a section on the history of the Navajo, Santella looks at the training of the original 29 Navajos as code breakers, emphasizing the clash with Navajo traditions. Then we get to the interesting section, which explains how the code was created. Basically, they used Navajo words to represent each English letter, from Wol-la-chee (ant) for "A" to Besh-do-tilz (zinc) for "Z." Because some English letters could be represented by as many as three different Navajo words (e.g., be-la-sana for apple and tse-nill for axe), the code could be complicated by simple means. They also used Navajo words for English words, such as Gini (chicken hawk) for dive-bomber and Ne-hem-ah (Our mother) for America. I can see a bunch of school children across the country are going to use the material in this book for a poster presentation (those are getting a lot more complicated than they were in my day, that is for sure).

The rest of the book look at how this worked on the battlefields of most of the major battles fought in the Pacific theater, what happened when the Navajos returned home after the war. It was not until 2001 that Congressional gold medals were presented to each of the 29 original code talkers, only five of who were still alive. Silver medals were awarded to all of the Navajo code talkers later in 2001. This goes in the better late than never category, but this We the People book makes it clear the honor is richly deserved. Even young students who are not particularly interested in books about war will find this story fascinating. In the back of the book Santella provides the names of a couple of books, a safe web search engine to use for an Internet search, an address for the official group that represents the Navajo code talkers, and a trio of sites in New Mexico and Maryland that young readers can actually visit.