This book should be required reading for everyone, regardless of field or relationship status. If you encounter a friend, relative, or stranger with something on their mind, this book shows you the steps you can take to help that person find the solutions to their own problems, a skill we all have within us. I use the skills in this book as a psychology student, a parent, and someone in long-term relationships with family, friends, and loved ones. If you can't afford the new copy, find an old one. This book will improve how you connect with others tremendously!

I am an avid bear maker with mountains of mohair in my back room. Living in the country, there can be a sense of isolation when it comes to crafts. In this book Jenny takes you step-by-step through the making of several different types of bears, from the basic to the more advanced, with bear embroidery, cross stitch and applique to boot. The diagrams are clear and explicit, the directions concise and very easy to follow, and the colour photos will entice and motivate. It is like having a friend in the same room as you.

This book is about a girl who travels in time to the world fair in England. They lose their time machine. Will they get back to the future?

When I first saw this tiny book I balked at spending $9.95....until I really looked at the contents. The photos are wonderful: clear and beautiful. The directions are concise with great line drawings. Even if you've never tried these technics the book is inspiring.

This little book is a must for children of all ages. It's rhythm and rhyme are unparalleled. The text is poetic and whimsical. The story is a joy!

This is a great book for people who've recently been promoted to a middle management position and/or who are struggling to get the most from their team. Unlike most management books, which always seem to be aimed at the CEO, this one targets the 2nd or 3rd level manager, who's trying to motivate a team of 25-60. Although it's based on a pretty simple concept (articulate a clear vision, let employees to share in the mgmt responsibility, and then focus your energies on developing their abilities to do so), it helped me a lot in realizing that by trying to coordinate and stay in control of everything going on in my group, I was actually stifling the creativity and motivation of my employees. By turning over more of the day-to-day responsibility to them, and focusing my energies on the broader vision, we'll all be a lot more successful. This book is loaded with a lot of great examples that helped me see that.

Pirates, naval warfare, ship wrecks and sunken treasure...this book has it all !

While archeology (even the marine variety) can be a dry subject, Roger C. Smith does an excellent and workmanlike job of extensively documenting the maritime history of the Cayman Islands.

As the son, grandson and nephew of a long line of Cayman Island mariners (my ancestors were among the first permanent settlers) I found the documentation of many of the stories told by my elders to be fascinating.

Today the Islands are best known as a tourist destination and a major player in the world of off-shore banking.

This was not always the case. In the distant through relatively recent past the Cayman Islands were a significant supplier of manpower to the regional and even the world maritime industry.

Mr. Smith documents the maritime evolution of the Cayman Islands with extensive research in the Islands and Europe.

Coupling the research with detailed field work and an ability to write in an informative and entertaning fashion results in a GREAT READ.

I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in maritime history, pirates, treasure or the Cayman Islands.

Editor James C. Bradford does the academic and professional military establishments a great service with the publication of this interesting and insightful collection of historical analysis of military establishments caught or placed between competing cultures. This is a work of serious academic style military history, there is very little of the popular 'guns and trumpets' material in the work. It will appeal primarily to those that seek to understand broader questions of military history, not the specifics of particular events.
The central idea binding the work together, albeit loosely at times, is that throughout history it has been soldiers, or warriors, operating on the respective boundaries of their cultures that have increased or decreased the friction between the cultures. Along the same lines, it is soldiers that sometimes are the primary determinants of how much of that friction is translated into violence. In the post-superpower world of the 1990s this is an interesting framework to hang a series of essays on military history upon. It almost guarantees the utility, intended or not, of the book for the professional soldier or defense interested civilian.
Bradford brings together nine historians for this book. Each is a specialist in their respective sub-fields of military history. The book is divided chronologically into 'The Premodern era,' and 'Western Forces and Indigenous Peoples,' and finally 'Twentieth Century Cultural Perceptions.' It is also initially divided along a thematic line, primarily focused upon the idea that if early military forces were in fact polyglot in content, then how could that military maintain any sort of unique cultural character? The essays in the first part, written by Dr. John Guilmartin of Ohio State and Dr. Dennis Showalter of Colorado College, explain how even in pre-modern military forces, the specialization of specific types of troops led to de facto segregation by function if not by organization. The second part of the book stays in the Western Hemisphere. American Western historian Robert M. Utley leads off by examining the nature of the conflict between American Indians and the U.S. Government. John W. Bailey deals with the schism between the intent of the American 'civilizing' mission in the West, and the reality of some very uncivilized methods by looking at the different styles of the general officers at work on the Great Plains in the late 19th Century. Finally, in studying South America historian Richard W. Slatta finds that in Argentina there was a dual struggle going on. One was the cultural elite trying to gain control of their own populace, and the was second that larger group of Hispanics seeking to marginalize and eventually exterminate their own Native Americans. In the third section of the book Douglas Porch recounts the methods of the French used in northwest Africa while Carol Petillo looks at the effects of 50 years of Philippine involvement and its' effects upon the professional U.S. military. The closing essay by Robin Higham deals with the topic of intercultural command.
We need look no further than the Balkans, or Somalia, or Chechnya to validate the importance of this book. We are without any doubt, entering a new era where limited war is not only the most probable, but where it is increasing likely to occur between groups with unique cultures. At a minimum, there will be soldiers at the interface between cultures even if they are not necessarily at war. A reflective reader may therefore draw several useful insights from history from this work. Although it is somewhat more expensive than the normal work of popular military history due to the fact that it is an academic work, the cost is made up by the depth of the material. In all essays the writing is clean and free of excessive specialized jargon, and in most cases the footnotes serve double duty by adding depth through supplemental explanation. I would heartily recommend this book to any serious military historian.

Rexroth scores again in this second "Classics Revisited" volume. The books he loved -- the classics of the non-Western and the Western world -- he saw as emanations of living feeling, lines of communication miraculously kept open.

Rexroth wrote in the first volume: "Life may not be optimistic, but it certainly is comic, and the greatest literature present man wearing the two conventional masks; the grinning and the weeping faces that decorate theatre prosceniums. What is the face behind the mask? Just a human face -- yours or mine. That is the irony of it all -- the irony that distinguishes great literature -- it is all so ordinary."

(By the way: These essays are such that one can read volume two before volume one.)

I loved this book. I did tons of research on maximizing fertility and found this book to be the most comprehensive. It contained many facts and suggestions my doctors never mentioned but I found helpful and sensible. I recommend it to all of my friends who are trying to conceive (or even thinking about it). We are now expecting our first child in a few months!