Ro Wauer is an excellent author, and this book is an enjoyable read. His island accounts are essentially trip reports, with additional comments on natural history, history, geography, and other aspects of the islands. The accounts average around 10 pages each, and there is also a detailed checklist at the front of the book.
My only problem with this book is that it does not include Trinidad and Tobago. It does include Jamaica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and 14 other islands.

Bradford's Crossword Key Dictionary is another fine aid to both solvers and setters. A hefty paperback with 1174 pages, it boasts a comprehensive list of words. Its 390,000 entries are organised into chapters according to the length of the word (from four to fifteen letters) and sorted according to each letter position within the word. The method takes a bit to get used to but after a while it is easy to use. It means that the 4-letter words are entered four times, listed alphabetically according to the first letter, then the second letter and so on. Thus FRAB comes after FOZY in the first section, after ERYX in the second, after FOAM in the third and after FORB in the last. Of course, this means that the 15-letter words are listed 15 times.

What it means to the solver is that it is easy to find a word when you only have a few letters. If you only have the fourth and last letters of a ten-letter word it is a simple matter to find all the words that match and to choose the best match. It is far easier than trawling through Chambers. The book claims to be based on 20 dictionaries that they publish - Collins, I suppose. It proved to very efficient in finding words to complete a Guardian blocked puzzle.

Anne Bradford is a crossword solver with much experience of solving Ximenes and Azed puzzles. She has kept notes of all the clues that she has encountered in 40 years of solving. This is why her Crossword Solvers' Dictionary is such a superb aid for solvers. Unlike many other crossword dictionaries, hers includes lots of rare and unusual words.

The real test for solvers of Azed or the Listener puzzles is whether the Crossword Key Dictionary includes all those obscure words. Using this month's Azed competition puzzle there were at least four of the answers that were not in this book. Then I compared pages at random against the entries in my 1978 edition of Chambers Words. The Key dictionary missed a few of the entries but included words that did not appear in the Chambers list. For instance, it included DJIBOUTI but omitted DJELLABA. I have not had time to give the book a thorough test but it initially it does seem to be inferior to the Chambers' listing.

This is certainly a book that I will keep on my desk and I will certainly use it to help me solve a puzzle or compose a grid.

This book is comprised of documents, and historical accounts of black history all the way from biblical references to the concept of being black as a curse, to Nat Turner, to Malcom X and black separatism. It's a very easy read, and starts off primarily offering background into the documents, and then later discussing the implications of them. There are some instances in the book where the reader could misconstrue the writing to be biased and injust, but in all honesty, the book was written in 1968, and I think the retrospect afforded by this fact justifies this. Overall this was a very well written, and important book in black history, and I only wish it was continued on, as history is a continual process.

This book is a summary of articles about how we, the humans, see the art through the cognition, or how our brains perceive art. There's no need to be a cognition master to read this book, and all chapters can be read separately. An easy to read and quite interesting book.

A very solid book on all aspects of the short game by one of the top rated PGA instructors. Includes practice routines and drills, equipment needed, course management, grip, distance control, shots for every situation(rough, sand, backspin, chipping, and even a little on putting and much more), as well as a list of golf schools if you REALLY need help. Even lists who and what to watch for when watching golf on TV. I love "Idiot's" books for reference, this one included, for their great indexing and detailed contents pages that let you go directly to a section without reading the whole book if you are looking for an instant solution to one particular problem. I would also recommend Dave Pelz's great book.

An all-poetry anthology, featuring the very best established and up-and-coming contemporary American writers. CONJUNCTIONS:35 American Poetry: States of the Art

FALL, 2000 Edited by Bradford Morrow

Table of contents

John Ashbery, Four Poems

Lyn Hejinian, Two Poems

Myung Mi Kim, Siege Document

Brenda Coultas, Three Poems

Arthur Sze, Quipu

Jorie Graham, Six Poems

Michael Palmer, Three Poems

Mark McMorris, Reef: Shadow of Green

Susan Wheeler, Each's Cot An Altar Then

Ann Lauterbach, Three Poems

Clark Coolidge, Arc of His Slow Demeanors

Gustaf Sobin, Two Poems

Alice Notley, Four Poems

Tessa Rumsey, The Expansion of the Self

Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling, Two Landscapes

Forrest Gander, Voiced Stops

Tan Lin, Ambient Stylistics

Marjorie Welish, Delight Instruct

Laynie Browne, Roseate, Points of Gold

James Tate, Two Poems

Honor Moore, Four Poems

Leslie Scalapino, From The Tango

Bin Ramke, Gravity & Levity

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Two Poems

Charles Bernstein, Reading Red

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Charles Bernstein, A Dialogue

Rosmarie Waldrop, Five Poems

Martine Bellen, Two Poems

Peter Sacks, Five Poems

Reginald Shepherd, Two Poems

Barbara Guest, Two Poems

Donald Revell, Two Poems for the Seventeenth Century

Paul Hoover, Resemblance

Elaine Equi, Five Poems

Norma Cole, Conjunctions

Jena Osman, Boxing Captions

Ron Silliman, Fubar Clus

John Yau, Three Movie Poems

Melanie Neilson, Two Poems

Robert Kelly, Orion: Opening the Seals

Nathaniel Mackey, Two Poems

C.D. Wright, From One Big Self

Peter Gizzi, Fin Amor

Carol Moldaw, Festina Lente

Charles Norton, Five Poems

Robert Creeley, Supper

Brenda Shaughnessy, Three Poems

Malinda Markham, Four Poems

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Draft 38: Georgics and Shadow

Nathaniel Tarn, Two Poems

Peter Cole, Proverbial Drawing

Fanny Howe, Splinter

Anne Tardos, Four Plus One K

Robert Tejada, Four Poems

Andrew Mossin, The Forest

Elizabeth Willis, Two Poems

David Shapiro, Two Poems

Camille Guthrie, At the Fountain

Susan Howe, From Preterient

Cole Swensen, Seven Hands

Susan Howe and Cole Swensen, A Dialogue

Keith Waldrop, A Vanity

Will Alexander, Fishing as Impenetrable Stray

Juliana Spahr, Blood Sonnets

Jerome Sala, Two Poems

Leonard Schwartz, Ecstatic Persistence

Catherine Imbriglio, Three Poems

Vincent Katz, Two Poems

Thalia Field, Land at Church City

John Taggart, Not Egypt

Renee Gladman, The Interrogation

Laura Moriarty, Seven Poems

Kevin Young, Film Noir

Jackson Mac Low, Five Stein Poems

Rae Armantrout, Four Poems

Anselm Hollo, Guests of Space

For those who wish for an academic and thorough reference of knighthood and chivalry, this is the book.

I enjoyed every aspect of this work and it is well-worth the price. Buy it now!

Plutarch tends to be moralistic and tangential. Thucydides slows down his narrative with an abundance of detail and set speeches. If you want a good, straightforward "rumpty tumpty" presentation of exciting and dramatic historical events, then Diodorus is your man. He doesn't shy away either from describing violence and brutality when necessary. Although Plutarch's characterization and Thucydides's clarity are beyond compare, Diodorus's history can compete because its sweep is so much grander.

This volume from the Loeb Classical Library, Greek on one page, English on the other, covers the period 345 BC to 323 BC. The volume starts with an account of the career of Timoleon, the great liberator of Sicily. Arriving in an island terrorized by tyrants and torn by constant warfare, he succeeded in driving out the tyrants, restoring democracy, uniting the Greek-speaking population, and defeating a massive Carthaginian invasion with a scratch army of mercenaries. The invincibility of Greek heavy infantry is presented here as a simple fact without according it any special religious or racial significance. This refusal to respond emotionally to the events he describes, events which involved his own native island, is both a strength and a weakness of Diodorus. He is more a trainspotter of historical facts than a propagandist of Greek civilization.

The focus of the book soon switches to Greece and the final rise of Macedonian power leading to Alexander's invasion of Asia. This territory has perhaps been more ably covered by Arrian and, in parts, by Plutarch, nevertheless there is much here which other writers have missed, for example the description of Memnon's campaign in the Troad, an extremely interesting account of the siege and defense engines employed at Tyre, and an account of the origins of the Indian practice of suttee.

After the main battles have been won and the great cities of the Persian Empire conquered, the narrative becomes a little tedious as we plough through Alexander's endless campaigns against central Asian hill tribes and Indian towns and villages. When the army finally refuses to go any further, the reader is in perfect agreement.

It was at this point that Alexander commanded his troops to build a camp with everything in it doubled in size to give subsequent generations of Indians the impression that the Macedonians were giants instead of men. Alexander then returned to Babylon where his death was predicted and soon followed, a suitable end for this volume which starts with a liberator and ends with a conqueror.

In the side margin of each page there is a date so that the chronology is always clear, and any omissions by Diodorus are effectively dealt with by excellent footnotes which cross reference with other historical sources.

The author provides a thorough insight of the rise of a commoner of jewish descent to the highest political rank, Prime Minister and leader of the aristocratic Tory party.

Despite its initial slow start the book gathers pace as Disraeli developes into the skilled debater and master parlimentary tatician. The various interchanges between Gladstone, Peel, Bright, O'Connell and Derby make for interesting reading.

The author explores the relationships that Disraeli formed during his life and provides the reader with a glimpse of the era and the mind of the man through many extracts of private correspondance between the subject and his peers,friends and loves.

A thorough commentry of an interesting life.

This is a journal with an entire issue devoted to the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and its impact on America's Southwest. This is a great example of local history with a lot of original research put into the effort. For a study of the American experience, I would highly recommend this journal volume. It gives the general feeling and history of the pandemic while at the same time concentrating on a very specific, local impact. It is well worth the back order wait!