Dr. Stone is a genius with words. His stirring descriptions of his travels, the people and places he has met, and his sensual reactions to each draw the reader into the circumstances and delight the senses. Keep writing, Doc. Keep writing!

After his father's death, anthropologist Ben Orlove received the gift of a lifetime -- a study full of his father's papers. As Orlove sifted through sixty years' worth of photos, passports, diaries, news clippings, letters, postcards, and artwork, the richness and complexity of his father's life is gradually revealed to him. Orlove's father, a Russian Jew who emigrated to the U.S. in 1921, is revealed to the reader through the son's slow & loving examination of his father's own words, correspondence & artwork. Rather than present his father's life in strict chronology, Orlove explores different facets of his father's life through overlapping chapters that examine his father's relationship with others (such as mother, father, brother, wife, and artists-friends) and his lifelong effort to create art. Both the son -- and the reader -- come to know the father in a gradual, organic way, just as we come to know someone over long years of connection & caring. While Orlove's father is being revealed to us, the author is also revealing his growing understanding of the man who was his father and of those parts of his father that live on in the son. The book's liberal use of photographs and the father's artwork adds even more depth and richness to this book's portrayal of Orlove's father. Few of us have the opportunity to look so deeply into a parent's mind, heart and soul. This book is a rich journey that ultimately prompts the reader to think about what we might find in our own father's study...

I Love this book. It has so mush meaning about being your self. Even it is for young kids I read it to remind my self about life. The pictures are also wonderful. They are made with such care. I recomed it to every one.

If you want to know the history of Branson and the surrounding Ozarks, this book is for you. Lots of colorful stories and interesting photos.

This is a really good book about human inhabitants in the Canyon. Lots and lots of really wonderful photographs.

From Inside BU: A few weeks after winning the National Book Award, poet Ruth Stone, Bartle emerita professor of English, has won the Academy of American Poets' Wallace Stevens Prize. Given annually, the $150,000 award, which was announced December 23, recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Stone, 87, said she was "stunned, humbled and made jubilant" by the recognition. In explaining why the committee chose Stone, former Vermont Poet Laureate Galway Kinnell, one of the prize's five judges, wrote: "Ruth Stone's poems startle us over and over with their shapeliness, their humor, their youthfulness, their wild aptness, their strangeness, their sudden familiarity, the authority of their insights, the moral gulps they prompt, their fierce exactness of language and memory. Her poems are experiences, not the record of experiences. They are events, interactions between the poet and the world. They happen - there on the page before us and within us - surprising and inevitable."

Far more than a simple art-history guide, this book tells how to make these types of masonry. This is useful not only in the field of restoration, but also practical for the home owner. Now you can use methods and styles prevalent in early America to improve an existing house and also for the creation of new buildings including houses, barns, garages, and walls. Included are an assortment of photos, diagrams, and illustrations, which make this book invaluable to anyone interested in masonry work.

Even if you aren't a health care professional, you'll get something out of this easy-to-read, well-organized book. In my opinion, anyone who has ever needed to go to a hospital can benefit from this book, which de-mystifies and explains hospital structure and organization in terms clear enough for a lay-person to understand.

Don't be misled into thinking this is a coffee-table book because it has so many stunning photographs! This is one of the most illuminating voyages into the spiritual landscape of the Inuit that I have ever come across. Through his friendships with Inuit elders born before their people had any sustained contact with Europeans, Mr. Hallendy obtained information about the uses and meanings of inuksuit rarely if ever shared with whites and nearly forgotten even by the elders of today. His extraordinary and inevitably personal interpretation of the words and phrases they used to "explain" these monuments evoke reflection on some of the larger and more universal aspects of religion and art--because another thing evident in this book is that these megaliths are an as yet under-appreciated form of three-dimensional Inuit art. They are sculpture at its most powerful, and Mr. Hallendy's photographs not only provide us with a chance to see these virtually inaccessible masterpieces, but fully capture the spiritual power emanating from them.

It took me some time to track down this book, but I had heard that it was the best Jack London biography out there, and it is that and a whole lot more. Irving Stone writes a very easily readable book in which he takes a deep look at the life and character of an amazing man. I read it once in a night, I'm reading it again, and don't think it'll ever make it back to the bookcase for more than a week!