history

I am a twenty-one year old who is emerging into the excitement, confussion, and power of womanhood. I was incredibly blessed in the sense that I was exposed to Katherine's book in its' early stages. "Women of Courage" moved and touched me in ways that nothing else has. I would finish a story and feel blessed as well as excited to be a woman. I also had the potent experience of hearing Katherine speak at my college last month. The event reinforced the power that this book holds between the beautifully written stories. I know that after the event my peers walked away feeling a little bit stronger, prouder, and more courageous. I truly encourage all women, especially women my age, who like my myself are beginning to shed the layers of the little girl, to read this book. I also encourage you to write her, e-mail her, invite her to speak at your school and share her book more intimatly with you and your peers. Most importantly, this book will teach you and inspire you to cross lines that you once believed to be boundries.

Katherine Martin has created a wonderful resource book for women. There is hardly a story in the bunch where I wasn't moved to tears, as an ordinary woman, faced with challenging circumstances, made a set of extraordinary decisions.

Facing fear head-on, so many of these women found a courage that is often undiscovered in most of us. It seemed to me that in many instances they were fulfilling some part of what their soul was sent here to do and learn. In some cases I think they would have preferred that it was someone else's destiny to make it happen, none of their stories are about easy painless solutions, but the choices they make in the face of their respective situations make them "poster women" for what courageous women look and act like in today's world. They take responsibility and ownership for issues/circumstances and most importantly for themselves in ways that remove them from victim status and put them in conscious leadership of their destiny. Because of these women, my daughters can think differently about how they can contribute to the world they walk through. A must read for women, their daughters and the men who love them.

Katherine Martin's collection of stories reminds me that every woman, young and old, has natural talents and abilities to bring about supernatural results. A wonderful book that is sure to inspire readers to help make the world a better place.

I own a massive library of books on every imaginable collecting subject and none has given me more joy than "Chasing Rainbows". Barry Friedman has intertwined his vast knowledge of Indian blankets, American history, the antiques business and garnished the result with a unique sense of humor and breathtaking photos to create a book that is an absolute gem. This is a great book from a very gifted man.

I have never read a "coffee table book" cover to cover until I found Chasing Rainbows by Barry Friedman. This delightful, informative book pulls you in from the very beginning with humor and knowledge that prevents you from putting it down. I read it cover to cover in one sitting, an afternoon of sheer pleasure and factual understanding of the history and beauty of American Indian trade and camp blankets. I highly recommend this book for the pure joy of reading and understanding the history of a little known subject.

I received this book as an early Christmas gift and now I'm buying a dozen copies to give to friends and family. This is the most beautiful and interesting collecting book I've ever read. The author is remarkably funny while delivering all the information on the subject anyone could possibly absorb. Just a fantastic effort.

Children will enjoy this book and the illustrations clearly depict TITANIC's sinking and discovery. My daughter pointed this book out to me in 1991. I was surprised to see my picture in it! ( I was one of the US Naval officers to accompany Dr. Ballard on his 1986 expedition to the site.)

I am in love with the great liner that took her first and last voyage over 86 years ago. Titanic's 45,000 ton body was built in Belfast, Ireland, and now rests two miles under the sea! For many, many decades the question was put, over and over again- where exactly is the great liner in the sea?The question (along with many other questions) were answered when Robert D. Ballard discovered the long lost ship. Ballard's book, "Exploring the Titanic" takes you 12,460 feet under water to Titanic herself. "Exploring Titanic" has wonderful pictures, graphics, diagrams and intense information. Even though it is written for about the age of 8, adults might find interest in the book as well. I would have given it a 10, but graphics are not as clear as they could be, and is written quite simply.

I first read this book almost 15 years ago, at age 5 : I loved it, and read it uncountable times. Today it is still just as fascinating. Beautifully illustrated and clearly written, it was the first of many Ballard books that I read. I would also recommend the Discovery of the Bismark and The Wreck of the Isis, just as interesting but less well known. A great way to start reading about the great ships of the past.

This is one of the most beautifully published books I have ever had the pleasure of viewing. If you love animals, photography, or just high quality book publishing, this one will bring a great deal of satisfaction. Lanting's images transcend mere animal identification shots as he clearly develops a relationship with each of his subjects. When you look at a portrait of a chimpanzee, you see pride and when you look at a photo of a family of Emperor penguins, you feel all the symbolic meaning of parenting on a spiritual level. Full of amazing photographs, this magnificent book makes a great gift (my mom loved hers) and comes highly recommended!

The subject is not only the animals, but also life. Attitude is all, from cover to cover. By far the best book I've ever seen on the subject, where you can feel a relationship between Lanting and the animal. Just buy it !

Frans Lanting does it again in Eye To Eye--a brilliant collection of intimate portraits and daily activities of various animals. Like Jungles, it's a book that no natural photographer should be without. When you can see the individual hairs in a courgar's fur coat, it makes you kind of wonder what it would be like to be that close to one.
Looking at Lanting's work is always like looking through a book of artwork, as if he is the Picasso of photography and we are looking through his masterpieces.

There is relatively little I can say about this book.

The book is essentially photographs and news clippings from a newspaper in Wisconsin from about 1890 to 1910. Interspersed are snippets from novels dealing with life during the period.

Turning the pages, reading the articles, and looking not at the pictures but into the eyes of the people in the photographs, one gets a sense not of some sterilized, backward glance at these people as some great societal force, not as a band of pioneers, but as very human people, who die in childbirth, die as children, die of diseases that sweep through whole towns and infect the entire state with fear, go insane, murder, and still maintain enough inner dignity to be able to look into the lens of a camera and mask most of their emotions long enough for the half-second exposure but not long enough to pierce the heart of people living a century later. It is pain. It is a death trip.

The book speaks for itself. Actually, it doesn't. The people in word and image speak for themselves.

I was able to read this book in one day, and wanted more. Being a former resident of this area of Wisconsin made it even more interesting for me, but all that aside, it was one of the most intriguing books I've read in a long time. The photographs are a wonderful testament to life in that era & locale, if you're a collector of old photographs & post-mortem shots this is a great book for your library. Reading about all of the madness surrounding these people, their bizarre and sad behaviors really makes you think. The author's conclusion really draws it all together for you.

I read this book frequently during the 70's after leaving Wisconsin where I went to college and lived briefly on a farm. The impact has remained with me throughout my life; the devastating loneliness and alienation and great griefs that actually are so much a part of the 'roots' of white America. The spectre of the end of the timeless native american cultures, without a media to sensationalize or distort, were nevertheless traumatic to watch. Especially to people for whom there were few social holding places- in a world plagued and stark.

The style of the book with entries from the State Assylum intake log, the local newspapers, some journals and the shocking family pictures, and pictures of the dead, constitutes a multiple fact assault that feels nothing less than gothic fiction.
I don't believe it is possible to get a clearer understanding of the European agrarian foundations of America- and the incipient madness that was never far from the essence of that life. My Antonia is like a fairy tale by comparison.

The Children of Willseden Lane is a motivational piece of literature about a young woman, Lisa, who dared to dream and made that dream a reality. Her daughter, Mona Golabek, wrote this memoir on her mother's wondrous gift of playing the piano. Lisa spent all her life in Vienna, Austria before the Nazis invaded causing her to be sent to London on the Kindertransport leaving her heartbroken parents and two sisters behind. She was sent to a hostel on Willesden Lane where she lived with thirty other Jewish children for the duration of World War II. She felt a sense of comfort right away because these children were dealing with the same loneliness, and Lisa became part of the big family. The would have a special bond which would stay with all of them forever because they would spend most nights huddled together in a bomb shelter fleeing the late night bombings. As soon as her matron, Ms. Cohen, realized that she had a prodigy living under her roof, she did everything in her power to help Lisa achieve her goal. Before long, everyone in the hostel was encouraging her to become a pianist and begged her to play for them every night after dinner. After much hard work, Lisa was accepted into an elite music school, which proved that anything was possible. The children became motivated and were given a sense of hope that they too could "make something of themselves". After the war was over, she was reunited with her two sisters and learned that her parents were sent to a death camp. Lisa became even more motivated to continue with her musical talents so that she would always play for her mother as a tribute for their shared love of music.

Even if you are not a musician, you will find Lisa Jura's story compelling. It's the true tory of her escape from pre-WWII Vienna to an orphange in London-243 Willesden Lane ... hence the title. Her strength came from her music. Her mother prophetically told her that her music would be her best friend, and so it was. Lisa took the Kindertransport to London and safety, along with dozens of other Jewish refugees The book is compelling and hopeful. It reaffirms our belief in the humnan spirit to strive for and achieve happiness. I couldn't put it down, and neither will you. This is a must-read.

The Children of Willesden Lane is a compelling story about a Jewish girl growing up in a country overtaken by Hitler during World War Two. The Jura family, being allowed to send only one child to England on the Kindertransport, sent Lisa knowing that her musical talent would ensure her survival. When all is going wrong, and it seems as though she has nothing left to hold on to, Lisa lets all her feelings go through her music and holds on to her abilities.
This book never let me take my own musical talents for granted. Being a pianist myself, I have learned to really appreciate music for all it is worth. Many books have slow beginnings, but The Children of Willesden Lane was full of excitement from beginning to end. I recommed this book to anyone with any kind of passion. Through this book you will see what can come of your talents, no matter what is going on around you in your life. It will most certainly help you to fully understand the amazing power of music.

I haven't read a lot about the Hardings -- at least, nothing much that presented them as other than a brief, corrupt interlude in our country's history -- so it was with interest that I picked up this big, thick book on a woman I knew little about. Once I opened the cover, I was never bored, and seldom tempted to skip pages :-) It was truly fascinating to discover Florence Harding as a real person. This book does include all the rumors and intrigues that surrounded Florence and her contemporaries ... and without which you would lose sight of historical perspective, for we are all not only what we think of ourselves, but also what others think of us. But it covers more than rumors and scandal; extensively researched and well-written, this book presents a stunning portrait of a complex woman and her times. However ... the similarities between the Clintons and the Hardings has probably stimulated my interest in reincarnation more than this book's non-metaphysical author would prefer ! A good read!

Florence Harding's biography is not something that I would normally want to read, let alone spend money to obtain. However, after leafing through it in our local bookstore, I added it to my cart on a whim the last time I bought from Amazon. If you are interested in American History in general and the presidency in particular (as I am), you will devour this book (as I did). The parallels to the Clintons, while unmentioned by the author, are undeniable; in fact, it would be appropriate for Hillary to attempt channeling with Florence rather than Eleanor Roosevelt! This makes the reading all the more lively and contemporary. This biography does a great service to the memory of Florence Harding, who comes off very poorly in nearly all the historical summaries I have read. She is usually portrayed as imperious, aggressive, and authoritarian -- which she was, but not without reason; and Harding is portrayed as being the victim of a loveless marriage -- which he was not, she adored him. Why is the wife always blamed for her "coldness" when a husband sleeps around? I was left with great admiration for Mrs. Harding, and a desire to learn even more about her. Congratulations, Mr. Anthony, on a monumental biography.

How to make a fairly dull and unpleasant like Florence Harding come alive is a difficult enough feat, however the author does a splendid job of doing it! Expertly researched and pleasantly told, Mrs. Harding comes off far better than she has ever been depicted before - and perhaps even better than she deserves.

I bought this book hoping to learn the traditional techniques involved in the production of the wide variety of beautiful socks from many cultures featured in tantalizing color photographs. I was deeply disappointed to find that this was not the case.

The first edition had many factual errors in knitting history, of which some were corrected in subsequent editions. And Bush teaches few of the actual traditional techniques. In fact, her "reproduction" socks were all highly simplified modern inventions, based only in part on some of the colors and patterns of the original socks, but not truly involving their techniques.

While many of the socks were traditionally knitted from the toe up, in every case Bush knits them from the cuff down. The photographs are just teasers that left me frustrated and unfulfilled. I finally stopped looking at her directions for her simplified socks. Instead I analyzed the socks in the photos to attempt to knit them as they were originally made.

While it is a good book to learn modern sock knitting and in it Bush does cover a wide variety of techniques, it doesn't cover what its title says. If you want to knit modern socks, you may like this book. But if you're looking for the traditional knitting techniques of other cultures, Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' book "Ethnic Socks & Stockings" will actually teach you how, while Bush will not.

The book is beautiful, and has great history. The patterns are very interesting, but if you don't have sock experience I don't know how you'd work them. I have experience, but have never had this many problems. My first pair (light blue and white ones) had the weirdest heel. It made the sock almost completely straight, but since my foot bends at the heel, it was horribly uncomfortable. My local yarn shop couldn't understand how it would ever fit a normal foot so I rewrote the pattern and ripped back. The second pair (grey with off-white heel, toe, and top) was huge, although my guage was correct, and I had to restart that one, too. Then I did the ones on the cover, and the heel, though very interesting in concept, is way too big and forms basically a bubble jutting out from your foot (I just knitted every other row and it came out great). The last ones I did, the red cabled pair, came out very well (but cables give a sock more 'give,' so it's easier to fit them correctly). I'm tired of knitting 3 socks every time, so I'm going to be very careful about the patterns in the future. Here's what I suggest: knit a pair that fits your foot (preferably from a different book), and get the measurements of it, especially at the top and at your ankle. Then figure out the measurements of the pattern as it's written in this book, and change the pattern liberally until it is in normal human proportions.

They are beautiful when you finally get them right. My feet are always the prettiest in the room!

I love this book! I'd never knit a sock before I bought it and ended up making almost every pair in it. Some were easy; some required a lot of attention; but the patterns were clearly written so that a novice could do them. They are all just beautiful.

Her book "Knitting for the Road" is my second-favorite sock book.

The title R.L. Wing has is far more representative of the content. It really is not all about "The Art of War", though it does address combat strategy. I find it is far more about success without ever having to come to blows. The commentary on the "four conflicts" is of interest as we appear to live in a society that only recognizes three of the four stated and denies the remaining one. From the other side of the world, a radically different time, a very different culture, and more than a thousand years ago he predicts the consequences. As he is dealing with human nature and behavior, the book is timeless in its commentary.
A Chinese national who I once worked with told me after reading this edition he thought it the best translation visually and in content he had seen to date.

I have read numerous translations of the "Art of War", however "The Art of Strategy" takes the classic Chinese strategy to a level that modern Americans can easily relate. I use this version of the book in a course taught on public relations strategy and it is always well received by the students. It seems to be less militaristic in its presentation and more applicable to modern problems including those of a more personal nature. While I personally prefer Thomas Cleary's translation, there is no question that my students get much out of Wing's new twist. Great book!

Chinese language and culture differ so strongly from American thought and culture that it is impossible to think that a single translation of a classic Chinese text can give the reader the complete experience of having read the text in its original language and context. RL Wing's translation brilliantly shines a light on the ART OF WAR.

I came to Wing's translation after having studied and studied the old public domain English translation with its copius notes and explanations. Wing gives the reader a tremendous insight into THE ART OF WAR, the brevity and compactness of Chinese language expression, the morality and thinking of Sun Tzu, and the different ways that the Eastern mind comprehends war from the Western mind.

If you are a dedicated student of Sun Tzu's ART OF WAR, this translation belongs in your collection. I don't know if it's the best or not, but it's a vital translation. If peace is your highest aim and the resolution of conflict without coming to violence is your highest aspiration, this book displays the wisdom of the great general in terms that clarify meaning for Western readers.

The Consolation of Philosophy is the last work that can be described as classical. Boethius, a Christian scholar (De Tractes)and public servant, penned the Consolation while awaiting death by torture on the orders of Theodoric, Ostrogothic King of Italy. Boethius consoled himself by writing an allegory in which Philosophy, in the bodily form of his nurse, comes to him to clarify his mind, weighed down with unhappieness over his misfortune. The style is called the Menippian Satire, which alternates prose sections with short verse stanzas that serve to reinforce the points made in the subsequent prose. Philosophy shows Boethius that he is not abused by Fortune because, as Boethius agrees that God exists, that He is good, and all-powerful, that nothing can happen which God does not permit. His treatment of divine foreknowledge and free will is sublime, as is his discourse on Time and Eternity. Boethius is heavily indebted to Plato for much of his natural theology. This book became the bedside companion of many people, and was translated by Alfred the Great and Elizabeth I. All this, in a work that runs less than 100 pages, depending on the edition.

This is a must for any student of philosophy. Boethius is the transition from Roman and Neo-Platonic philosophy into the Medieval Period.

I would also recommend this book to those facing doubt in their studies, or college students thinking of quitting. It is a short work, easy to read and great in its comfort.

"Be not overcome by your misfortunes, for the gifts of fortune are fleeting and happiness is not to be found in temporal goods. Only by being like God, who is the highest good, can lasting happiness come to man." Lady Philosophy counsels.

Although the work is neo-Platonic Aristotle and Porphyry are heavily drawn from - so the advanced reader could consider those volumes too.

For a long time, this would stand as the last major work in which philosophy played the role it was accustomed to play in Antiquity; most medieval thinkers would make philosophy the servant of theology and strip it of its profoundly ethical roots - after all, Christianity became the philosophical way of life par excellence. By using philosophy as a character, Boethius emphasizes its vital role in everyday life and the choices that life entails. Although Boethius is usually mentioned in conjunction with Aristotelian and Christian thought, this work is especially linked to Platonism, Stoicism and Neoplatonism: a) it follows the progression of Socratic discourse in a journey that leads one from the suppression of false beliefs towards a gradually clearer approximation of what Good is, and Philosophy is akin to the priestess Diotima of Plato's Symposium; b) the harrowing context in which it was written mirrors the composition of Seneca's Letters to Lucilius; c) its frequent allegorical use of poetry and myths follows the path set forth by the Stoics and Neoplatonists. The first few books free Philosophy's interlocutor from his errors, and Boethius then explores the work's central subjects: justice, the nature of good and evil, providence (themes that also intensely preoccupied Plotinus late in his life). Treating 'Consolation...' only as a compendium of ancient Greek philosophy would be doing it a major disservice, as it would underscore the personal dimension lying at the very heart of the work. Those who forgot that philosophy is a lot more than the mere juggling of concepts should definitely read this key book.