ezloan

The Adventures of Buzz and Ollie are an excellent resource for early childhood music education. I have experienced the value of this book in two roles. As a music educator, I appreciate this insightful introduction to the fundamental musical concept of amplitude. As a parent, I appreciate how the clever rhymes and colorful graphics hold the attention of my own children as they enjoy the amusing plots. This is one volume in a great set of well-produced books for home and school. My family bought a set for ourselves and one for our children's elementary school library.

This book is fun to read, both to children and by children. Without even realizing it, they will be learning key musical concepts. The illustrations are great! And they are large enough to be seen by a group of children if the book is being read to them.

I found Buzz and Ollie's Loud, Soft Adventure to be a delightful and enjoyable reading experience. What a fun way to learn musical concepts! I especially enjoyed the bright, colorful illustrations. Children of all ages will surely enjoy the advertures that Buzz and Ollie find themselves in and they will be learning foundational music concepts in the process. My four year old grandson (who rarely sits still for long) enjoyed it from cover to cover as did I. I highly recommend this book.

This is a simple, direct story that works. It doesn't let the reader down in any way, from first page to last. The plot is sensible, the side-plots are engaging, and the characters are deftly drawn with a few short sentences.

William Coughlin has a way of keeping you hanging on and won't let you go. Just when you think you know what is going to happen, he comes up with a surprise. The more I read, the more I wanted to read!! Although most people hate lawyers, this one was actually human!

This book was still on 3,000 ft. plateau and was still good

This book is fantastic. Detailed pictures, lists of required tools and woods, and step-by-step instructions help you create great-looking Shaker furniture. I used this book to create a Shaker blanket chest, which was my second "large" woodworking project. The quality of results surpassed my expectations. This book is a must for the beginning woodworker who wants to produce quality items while at the same time learning or re-learning basic techniques.

Perhaps I'm biased, I think Norm is to woodworking what Carl Sagan was to science. The projects are described in detail with Norm's hand on your shoulder. Complete and well detailed with out wasting time. I recommend this book and the rest of Norm's books highly.

I bought one of Norm Abram's book on outdoor furniture. I built the adirondack chairs, and then the garden bench. I learned alot, they turned out very well, and I subsequently bought all his other manuals. I wish he'd do some more. His plans and choices of projects are the best among the current title offered.

This isn't your typical twelve come to a dinner party murder mystery, but that is where it begins. Twelve came to dinner at the manor house and after that dinner, the lord of the manor, Bill Fent is killed in a car accident. That doesn't look like murder, but Sloane finds out from the irrepressible Mr. Dabbe that there were enough barbituates in Bill's body to kill two lords of the manor. So Sloane and the bumbling Crosby are on the hunt for a murderer. As with all of Ms. Aird's books, if you follow the clues you may be able to figure out who the murderer is, but that in no way takes away from the fun. There is enough "tongue-in-cheek" in each of her books to keep the reader chuckling all the way through. And oh what a gem Sloane's boss, Leeyes is! I really enjoy these English cozies. Each one is totally unique and enjoyable in it's own right.

Bill Fent, driving old Professor Berry home dinner, would have been just another Road Traffic Accident at Tappet's Corner for Inspector "Happy" Harry Harpe - that perenially depressed member of the Berebury Force, who's never seen anything to smile at in Traffic Division - just another accident on the way back from Berry's, one life gone and the life of another driver hanging by a thread. Unfortunately for somebody, Dr. Dabbe is *very* thorough in his work as police pathologist, so during the routine post-mortem, he found the poison somebody slipped to Bill Fent during dinner at Strontfield Park. If Dr. Washby hadn't been called away unexpectedly, Fent wouldn't have had to drive Berry home, and a poisoner might have got away with murder.

Now, of course, the case belongs to Harpe's friend "Seedy" Sloan and his raw assistant Crosby of the CID, working out who at a dinner for twelve could have poisoned the host without being seen. After attending the funeral, they have another loose end to worry about: the widow, hearing of their presence, fainted dead away, then shut herself up in her room - but it seems more like fear than guilt.

Who would want to murder Bill Fent, a respectable local magistrate burdened with an entailed estate? His next of kin seems to have had a good reason *not* to - both the owner and an adult heir have to work together to break an entail and start turning land into cash, and the Fents had had bad luck in meeting the requirements, what with the World Wars killing off family members at inopportune moments. But *somebody* thinks Sloan can make sense of it; before long, he has a second murder on his hands...

This isn't what I would call a country house party case, although Constance Parva is definitely in the country. The dinner guests were local worthies: the local doctor, his new bride (hence the reason for the party), the old rector's daughter Cynthia Paterson, Quentin Fent the heir, to name a few. Cynthia Paterson alternates with Sloan as the viewpoint character, filling in background information in a gentle way; as a rector's daughter, she's attended far too many funerals to concentrate solely on the service, and contemplates the attendees instead, with some of her father's taste for literature thrown in. (In one of Aird's many references to Italian art, the notion that Charity's opposite is Folly was always good for a sermon. That kind of thing.)

Twelve people sat down to dinner at Strontfield Park, William Fent's ancestral home. But my midnight the host was dead - killed in a car crash as he was giving one of his guests a lift home.

The problem for Detective Inspector Sloan was the autopsy. For the victim, apparently, would have died anyway. Along with the cold cucumber soup, crown of lamb, raspberry cremets and a fine old port, someone had slipped the lord of the manor a dose of deadly poison.

This, the seventh in Catherine Aird's C.D. Sloan mysteries, is a thoroughly enjoyable read. As usual, Aird drops clues all throughout her text, so if you pay close attention, you too will be able to figure out what is going on. Constable Crosby provides his usual comic relief by being the worst and yet the most enthusiastic of police officers.

If you enjoy Ellis Peter's George Felse mysteries, you'll like this series too. If this series could finally be reprinted, I'd be a very happy person. So would you! Hope you can find this book somewhere.

Altruism has always been a problem for evolutionists. How does one explain a creature giving up something for another, sometimes its very life? Why, for example, will a monkey give a warning cry that alerts other members of the troop, but that gives away its own position? How could genes governing such behavior persist in the relentless competition for a place in the genome?

The kinds of reasoning used to explain behavior that is good for the group but perhaps not so good for the individual performing it is as old as Darwin. Until George Williams demolished whole classes of argument in his lovely 1966 book, "Adaptation and Natural Selection", it was common to invoke "group selection" as an analog to individual selection, and explain, in a vague, hand-waving sort of way, how altruistic behavior could arise by enhancing the survival of the herd, or school, or flock. And after Dawkins, both the individual and the group were banished from consideration, and the selfish gene reigned supreme.

Only one category of altruism has been taken as consonant with the unit of replication being the gene, namely "kin selection". This is the favoring of relatives: since relatives share genes, helping a gene-mate helps one's own genes, whether or not it benefits one's self. Yet much altruism in nature goes unexplained by kin selection. Think of the soldier who falls on the hand grenade so his (unrelated) buddies can live. There are many more examples from the lives of many creatures, most of whom never saw a war movie. How does one explain the clear patterns of altruistic behavior in animals at all levels of consciousness and cuddliness? Wilson, a biologist, and Sober, a philosopher, dare to think the unthinkable, or at least the unfashionable: is it possible that individuals or groups really do play a replicator role in evolution? They believe that group selection deserves another chance, but this time more rigorously specified.

I was very impressed with the first half of the book, in which they justify a group-selection model for adaptive evolution that can explain a persistent strain of altruism. What they show is that selection can take place at the level of a group of individuals in many more sorts of situations than were thought possible. (A nice bonus of this approach is that kin selection can be explained more simply using this more general context of the group.) Groups, however ephemeral, do have a role to play in selection.

The second half of the book is less convincing, as it involves psychological and philosophical arguments for "psychological altruism" in humans (that is, you not only behave unselfishly, but "want" to behave unselfishly), which, by its very nature, is hard (or very hard) to tease out in experiments, or to introspect to. However, the authors are reasonably convincing that nature would most likely not employ some Rube Goldberg-type of mental devices that depended on hedonism (pleasure-and-pain-driven behavior) to accomplish important tasks, such as child-rearing, but rather build in directly the mechanism to make a parent care to care for its child. In that way, the care of its child would be a primary motivation, rather than an intrumental one (sorry about the jargon!) on the way to getting pleasure or avoiding pain. Parents will find this convincing, as the desire to take care of one's children seems not to depend on how much we "enjoy" doing it.

This book is detailed, conscientious and well-written, but it covers a lot of ground and many of its arguments, especially in the second part, are subtle. So I recommend reading it more than once: this is contentious material. While the authors do not make anything of the political and social implications of their work, these are always waiting in the wings. Altruism, after all, is in direct opposition to selfishness. Many people see in this a political point, and a social point. Those issues are not properly a part of such a work, but do give great interest to its arguments and conclusions. And whether or not its conclusions finally survive intact, this book's arguments and approach seem exemplary and fruitful.

This book is a continuation of those books that keep moving us closer to where we came from. After decades of wandering in the jungle of postmodernism, we are finally emerging to find our roots. This book is not for the casual reader. But it is an important contribution in understanding the evolution of groupism, why humans go to war, and why belonging to the human race is not enough to bring forth altruism. Altruism evolved as a means of group consolidation of the ingroup, and genocide towards all other groups. This book should be read along with "Demonic Males" to get a good understanding of how altruism evolved.

For more than a generation now, students of evolutionary biology have been taught that natural selection is a process that works on individuals. Where there is a conflict between the good of the individual and the good of the community, the selfish almost always prevails. There are good theoretical reasons to believe this should be so. Most of the work that has been done in the last century to turn Darwin's theory into a quantitative science seems to point in that direction. Individual selection should be fast and efficient; group selection slow and unreliable. Yet the biological world that we see seems to fly in the face of this conclusion. So much of the adaptation we see in the natural world looks like it benefits the community or the species, often at the expense of the individual. So the pure individual selectionists (99% of evolutionary biologists today) have had to concoct a series of excuses, kluges, and workarounds. There are a multitude of reasons! that what looks like a group adaptation is really an individual adaptation. Most of our community has unthinkingly adopted the view that the "selfish gene" perspective holds a key to understanding the "illusion" of group selection. Wilson has been working for 20 years to reform this situation, and to restore common sense. If it looks like a group adaptation, it probably is a group adaptation. No surprise here - except to that 99% of the academic community who has been raised to think that "group selection" is a dirty word - something like "Lamarckism" or "Creationism". Wilson's book is just the kick in the pants that the 99% of us need. It is readable, yet meticulously documented. He traces the history of our prejudice against group selection, and exposes the faulty logic in those kluges and workarounds. Group selection really is necessary to explain what we observe in nature. Then, he goes on to offer us the th! eoretical foundation we need to make group selection plausi! ble. There are mechanisms overlooked by the quantitative theorists that make group selection a far more viable process than they give it credit for. If you're a lay person, you may think "of course - what's the big deal." But if you're an academic evolutionist educated in the last 30 years, you need this book; your thinking about altruism and fitness of communities will be changed forever. All this is in the first half of the book. The second half, presumably contributed by Sober, is much less focused and scientific, more apt to dwell on definitions and philosophical distinctions. The attempt to connect the sound conclusions of the book's first half to attitudes about human cultures is both more speculative and somehow less ambitious and important than the book's first half.

I got tired of Dick and Jane. Saw this, read it and fell in love with it. ABC's... was well thought of, well put together, and is the one my grandchild will read first. And, of course, it has my favorite animals in it.. beanie babies.. Wonderful, awesome book. A must.

This book is a great learning tool for my kids. They love it and are making a connection between each letter of the alphabet and their favorite Beanie Babies. I highly recommend this book for all kids and anyone who loves Beanies.

In a market overcrowded with books on decorative paint effects and techniques, Decorative Gilding is far and away one of the best. Particularly useful (and unusual) are two formatting
layouts used by this author. The first is the inclusion of "Pitfalls", text boxes which include common problems in applying the technique described. The second is the identical application of the particular finish on different kinds/colors of backgrounds. From my own experience, a gilding technique will have a very different appearance, depending on the background color used, from item to item. The photography is excellent, the text clear and concise. A must for any serious artist's library!

This book is an excellent resource for anyone interested in guilding techniques including metal leaf, brozing powders, dyes, and tortoiseshell. Highly recomended!

This one kept me up way past my bedtime. Truly an addictive read, Lenny Bliss is an engaging character. The story unfolds in such a way that you become wrapped up in the crime itself and the supporting characters. I am so glad I happened upon Bob Sloans novel and hope he continues the Bliss story line.

All New York City police detective Lenny Bliss needed was to release some stress. His partner recovers from bullet wound. Hollywood has discovered his spouse's success as a stand-up comedian. He needs to study his prayers for his daughter's upcoming Bat Mitzvah. Then there is the city. To release his frustrations, Lenny decides to bungee jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. So his gun does not drop into the East River, he asks fellow jumper Li-Jung to hold his weapon. As he leaps, she leaves with his revolver.

As Lenny begins to search for the crazy Li-Jung who just might use his gun, he also investigates the murder of actor James Roderick. However, James' peers at the off-off Broadway theater seem more like a gentle but eccentric troupe. Though this case seems simple enough, Bliss follows the trail of Li-Jung as she travels the boroughs. He needs to regain his revolver before she commits an irreversible act of violence that will bring Lenny down when his superiors learn how naively he handed her his gun.

BLISS JUMPS THE GUN, the second Lenny Bliss tale (see BLISS), is a very entertaining tale that allows readers an opportunity to see inside the mind of the lead protagonist. The story line is loaded with action-packed moments, but clearly retains a character-driven charm as the audience understands the deeds of the support cast as well as Lenny. The talent of Bob Sloan is that he hooks readers from start to finish whether the plot is filled with red hot action or a simple passive discussion between characters. Fans of New York police tales will ecstatically delight in this novel and want more Bliss in the future.

I am studying Interior Design...and this book is great! It is easy to read and very helpful!

I own about 25 books on interior design and home decoration. This is certainly in my top three, and probably the most oft consulted of them all. Each chapter covers one of the basic colours, from green and blue through to pinks and neutrals. But after this sparse description it is hard to convey the beauty and depth of this book. When I say cover a colour, I mean really explore it. It's cool version, warm version, soft, light, borderline with its neighbouring colour on the colour wheel.

And the way that each colour is covered is unique. Very minimal (but useful) text, and instead full page pictures of utterly inspiring interiors featuring the colour tone/intensity on each and every page. It uses excellent photographs from a wide and rich range of interior design. All true to life from real (moderna and historical) homes - and usually illustrating a good marriage between a particular colour/shade and the style it most compliments. Going through it, one soon becomes aware of one's taste. The pictures are so good - so evocative of the theme of that particular colour - that one has a simple emotional response of things like "love", "comforting", "not me", "does nothing for me", "joyful", etc. Using this book and trusting my visceral response to the delightful, subtle shades on each page, I virtually decorated my whole house.

A very sophisticated book on colour, that speaks to us in the most simple of ways - through the eye to the heart.

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I have never read such smart or helpful advice about how to protect myself as a consumer. The best $15.00 investment I ever made.

These people really care about people. Boy, do they know what they're talking about!

Green in 2001!