Along the lines of "When Bad Things Happen to Good People," this book can really helpful in allowing you work through your grief in a positive, healthy way.

I have experienced a great deal of loss in my life (parent, sister, husband) and -- at 34 years old -- am not one to swallow trite explanations like "everything happens for a reason." This book doesn't try to do that, but it does try to help you figure out how to go on with the rest of your life and find joy.

I would recommend it to anyone who is suffering a loss. It would make a very meaningful gift, as well.

As I move through the grieving experience in my life - as the years go by since the loss of my daughter - I find myself coming back to this book and rereading sections. It's a huge help.

Ashley Prend has written a sensitive and well organized book that is good for clinicians and those coping with loss. Her clear delineation of the stages of grief and the hope she holds out that one can get through the stuck places and make loss meaningful stand out. She writes well and the structure of the book makes it easy to read. The message that one does not need to "get over" one's loss is an important one as is her SOAR solution for integrating the loss in one's life so that one can "get on with" life.

Twin City, a first novel by southern author Jerry Lee Davis, is a marvelous and emotional tale of humanity in the context of inhumanity in a small rural town. Tommy, the main character, is a small child growing up in rural Georgia who is exposed to hate, inhumanity, and intolerance due to his sensitive and uncorrupted emotional state and his willingness to befriend others who are also different. Although set in the South, the themes of the book resonate to anyone who has ever faced emotional judgement--that is all of us. Although human beings can be wonderful and loving to each other, they can also be amazingly cruel, often for no other reason than their inability to heal the scars of cruelty inflicted upon them.

The book is consuming, both from the point of view of Davis' story-telling expertise and the humanistic subplots. It is at times quite riveting. I read it in a couple of nights and was engaged--eager to learn the final climatic conclusion on the last page.

Davis has much to teach us but in a way that is not only emotionally challenging but satisfying for someone who wants to be amused and engaged. Davis does not preach. He teaches by engaging our hearts and spirits and by tapping universal wounds in the human experience. There are some magnificient turns of phrase, the writing is smooth, the story is enveloping, the style is very southern, but the message is applicable to a wide audience.

A good book to give your high school aged children or any adult as a gift--one they are sure to remember.

Jerry Lee Davis' characters are so fresh and painfully real that they appeal to us as someone we actually know, or have known, and by the middle of the book, they have become people we love. The author becomes completely transparant; his characters grow and develop their own multi-faceted personalities, complete with frailties as well as strengths. It's been months since I read the book, yet I find myself looking for Blayne and Tommy as though they are just in front of me at Starbuck's, or relaxing on the grassy hill at Piedmont Park.

This is a wonderful book that portrays the lifelong friendship between two children. It is so well-written that I found myself getting lost in the characters, their daily adventures, and the town in which they lived. I could not wait to read more about them. It is also easy to lose yourself in the humorous antics and forget about the pain that lies beneath the surface of these two characters. It is a wonderfully written book that captures friendship, childhood, and the South all in one great story!

We tend to think eating a compassionate, vegetarian diet as being a "new" thing. But Ms Davis' book proves that humans have been choosing a kinder, healthier way of eating since the beginning of recorded time! It is fascinating to read the thoughts of many notorious, brilliant minds in history--authors, poets, philosophers, doctors, spiritual leaders---very intelligent, educated & respected people in society. As I read it I highlighted my favorite quotes...the book is now predominently yellow!!!! I think my very fave is from Ovid, a Roman poet who died in 17AD: "...Earth is generous with her provision, and her sustenance is very kind; she offers, for your table, food that requires no bloodshed and no slaughter." Something to keep in mind when you sit down to your next meal...

This is a superb collection of quotes relating to vegetarianism from an incredibly wide range of sources. You'll find quotes from ancients like Plato and Buddha, but also from your favorite celebrities living today (some of whom you'd be surprised to learn are vegetarians!). Ms. Davis is a thorough and impressive researcher, and I can't even begin to guess how much time and effort she spent to bring us these unforgettable quotes. A must buy!

Since the beginning of recorded human history, sages have written and spoken about the many benefits of vegetarianism. Here is a collection of wisdom that is funny, insightful, inspirational, and moving. I will be referring to the quotations in this book again and again. Highly recommended.

When I first started throwing, I found this book an extremely useful source for reminders, clarifications, and pointers on techniques I'd learned in class. It's a great practical guide for beginners. Now that I've been throwing for a while, I find I continue to turn to it for ideas and pointers. I've purchased several other clay books that were touted as "must haves" for potters, but I've been disappointed with them. They often focused only a few pages on wheel throwing, or were not as clear when describing techniques. Davis' book, with its straightforward instructions, good illustrative technique photos, and interesting photos of varied designs and forms, is the reference I keep turning to for myself and sharing with my classmates.

This is a good book for beginners. The book has great pictures and the instructions are easy to follow. I also like the progression in the projects. It builds your throwing skills step by step.

A wonderful book for beginners and experienced potters alike. Lots of new ideas with detailed explanation and pictures. An absolute must, and a great price too!

I approached this book as a dachshund lover, and found much, much more. By the time I left the last page, I knew intimately the life of a person with epilepsy and the near-miracle of a small dog who is the key to a new and more confident life for his owner. A true story of struggle against adversity and passion for the advancement of a good cause -- assistance dogs. You'll want to fly to Los Angeles to see this wonderful dog for yourself.

An amazing, heartfelt and honest description of the level of affection and mutual trust possible between man and dog...

Through Alex, Davis opens our eyes to the untapped potentials of assistance dogs and the sense of freedom and happiness they provide, and educates us about the urgent need for tolerance of these day-to-day canine partners.

This is a man's-best-friend story, in the true sense.

Assistance dogs enable their human partners to have confidence, independence, and the ability to continue their lives in any way they choose. These canine bravehearts provide eyes, ears, alarms and strength, all while giving their partners the love, loyalty, and devotion of 24-hour companionship. Joel Davis shows us size doesn't matter and that his relationship with Alex, his seizure-alert dog, is special.

This is a guide to the many items produced with the Scottie Dog (Scottish Terrier)image. The Scottie's heyday was in the 1930's when the registration with the AKC was at it's highest. Also in this same era, U.S. President, Franklin Roosevelt had a Scottish Terrier named Fala, who was world famous. Therefore a large amount of items were produced with the likeness of the Scottie in the past, and of course in the present as well. This book has a sampling of those items in various categories such as banks, bookends, paper products, figurines, smoking sets, tins, kitchen, etc. In fact almost anything you can think of, has at one time, probably been produced with a Scottie on it! This book also gives a dollar value to each item, usually in a range. The text is accompanied by good color photgraphs of the representative items. At the end of the book is a listing of books with Scotties, films with Scotties. The cover is an attractive plaid with photographs of various Scottie items. There has long been a large cult of Scottie collectors, finally there is a guide! One drawback however, is the noticeable increase in price for Scottie items since this book was published as more antique dealers now realize they can command higher prices for these items. Readers should also be advised that there is now a volume 2 in this series.

Brand new, year 2001, 192 page volume is the 3rd in the series. It features 192 pages with every page loaded with large, sharp, full color photos. There's a nice introduction to the topic. A variety of Scottie collectibles are covered ranging from banks, bookends, doorstops, planters, statues, calendars and advertisements, to greeting cards, movies, and more. If you love Scotties, you'll really enjoy this book. Add it to your library.

This book contains beautiful pictures of various Scottie Dog collectibles, some with manufacturers listed and all with values. I can not say enough wonderful things about this book. Anybody who is into dog collectibles must have this book. Anxiously awaiting the next edition! The only change I would suggest in future editions is to give more educational information about the manufacturers. Order this book, you will not be disappointed!

This book is basically a manual for Unicode 3.0. It is not a light read but well worth the price and then some just for the glyphs from all of the various scripts that Unicode supports.

At 1040 large (8.5 x 11) pages it is the ultimate guide to unicode. With information on scripts and glyphs I had no idea even existed.

However if you are just getting started with Unicode I would recomend you get Unicode a Primer written by Tony Graham from M&T books. If you understand or feel you are starting to understand Unicode then The Unicode Standard Version 3.0 is the best comprehensive reference on the subject out today.

Consider it an overview of the developing UNICODE standard. As such, it will serve the engineer working on software in English and many other European countries rather well. It will be a good _starting_ _point_ for engineers developing software for other languages.

This book is essential for software engineers, at least for the next ten years or so. All programmers should understand characters, and UNICODE is the best we have for now. Even if you don't need it in your personal library, you need it in your company or school library.

The standard is flawed, as all real standards are, but it is a functioning standard, and it should be sufficient for many purposes for the near future.

The book itself is fairly well laid out, contains an introduction to character handling problems and methods for most of the major languages in use in our present world as well as tables of basic images for all code points. Be aware that these are _only_ basic images. For most internationalization purposes, be prepared for more research. (And please share your results.)

**** Finally, UNICODE is _not_ a 16 bit code. ****

(This is well explained in the book.) It just turned out that there really are over 50,000 Han characters. (Mojikyo records more than 90,000.) UNICODE can be encoded in an eight-bit or 16-bit expanding method or a 32-bit non-expanding method. The expanding methods can be _cleanly_ parsed, frontwards, backwards, and from the middle, which is a significant improvement over previous methods.

Some of the material in the book is available at the UNICODE consortium's site, but the book is easier to read anyway. One complaint I have about the included CD is that the music track gets in the way of reading the transform files on my iBook.

This is not just a reference for computer people, but for anyone interested in alphabets, symbols and character sets.

Central to the book, taking up the larger part of it, are the tables of the characters themselves, printed large with annotations and cross-references. If you enjoy the lure of strange symbols and curious writing systems then browsing these will occupy delightful hours.

For the Latin alphabet alone there are pages of accented letters and extended Latin alphabet characters used in particular languages or places or traditions: Pan-Turkic "oi", African clicks and other African sounds, obsolete letters from Old English and Old Norse, an "ou" digraph used only in Huron/Algonquin languages in Quebec, and many others, particularly those used for phonetic/phonemic transcriptions.

The Greek character set includes archaic letters and additional letters used in Coptic.

Character sets carried over from previous editions with additions and corrections are Cyrillic (with many national characters), Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Arabic (again many national and dialect characters), the most common Hindu scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam), Tibetan, Thai, Lao, Hangul, Bopomofo, Japanese Katakana and Hiragana, capped by the enormous Han character set containing over 27,000 of the most commonly used ideographs in Chinese/Japanese/Korean writing. Then there are the symbols: mathematical/logical (including lots of arrows), technical, geometrical, and pictographic. You'll find astrological/zodiacal signs, chess pieces, I-Ching trigrams, Roman numerals not commonly known, and much more.

Scripts appearing for the first time this release are Syriac, Ethiopic, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherookee, Runes, Ogham, Yi, Mongolian, Sinhala, Thaana, Khmer, Myanmar, complete Braille patterns, and keyboard character sets. And yes, there are public domain/shareware fonts available on the web that support these with their new Unicode values.

There are very good (and not always brief) descriptions of the various scripts and of the special symbol sets. Rounding out the book are some involved, turgid (necessarily so) technical articles on composition, character properties, implementation guidelines, and combining characters, providing rules to use the character properties tables on the CD that accompanies the book. After all, this is the complete official, definitive Unicode standard.

Of course this version, 3.0, is already out-of-date. But updates and corrections are easily available from the official Unicode website where data for 3.1 Beta appears as I write this. My book bulges with interleaved additions and changes. And that's very good. Many standards have died or been superceded because the organizations behind them did not keep up with users' needs or the information was not easily accessible.

Caveats?

The notes on actual uses of the characters could be more extensive, particularly on Latin extended characters. More variants of some glyphs should be shown, as in previous editions, if only in the notations.

Some character names are clumsy or inaccurate (occasionly noted in the book), because of necessity to be compatible with ISO/IEC 10646 and with earlier versions of the Unicode standard. For example, many character names begin with "LEFT" rather than "OPENING" or "RIGHT" rather than "CLOSING" though the same character code is to be used for a mirrored version of the character in right-to-left scripts where "LEFT" and "RIGHT" then become incorrect. And sample this humorous quotation from page 298: "Despite its name, U+0043 SCRIPT CAPITAL LETTER P is neither script nor capital--it is uniquely the Weierstrass elliptic function derived from a calligraphic lowercase p."

This probably won't go anywhere but I met you Terry when I was a Junior, wrestling for Shadle Park. I was at North Central High at a wrestling match when Ms. Olson came up and introduced you to myself and my good friend Brett. You told us about wrestling at Shadle, with I believe Lyle Pugh as your coach. Anyway if this makes it to you that will be great. I'm now 34 and still remember meeting you and I've watched your movie more than once. Thanks for putting "Shadle" on the map. DJ_Anderson@battelle.org

Seventeen years ago, as a junior going through a rather undistinguished high school wrestling career and frustrating first relationship with a member of the opposite sex, this book really hit home with me. The story was much more complex than the movie, as were the characters. It was about more than wrestling, it was about the insecurities, fears and hang-ups of a young man trying to find his place in the world. It wasn't just about Loudon's relationships with Carla and Kuch, it was about his whole world. His family, his friends, his teachers. It's a cliche, but it's true. It made me laugh and it made me cry. It still does.

I wrestled in high school, and saw this movie before I read the book. I was nowhere near a state champ, but this story inspired me to do more and work harder than I ever have in my life. It is about goal setting, and dreaming big dreams. Trust me, if you haven't read this DO!!! It is one of the most inspirational books I have ever read, and one of the most quotable as well. It celebrates the triumph of the human spirit. We all have our own Shute to get on the mat with, in all walks of life. You will be inspired by Terry Davis, and the story of a young man who is looking to find his place in the circle. "Ready gentlemen? Let's wrestle!"

IT REALLY EXPLAINS IN AN EASY WAY ALL THE BASIC AND FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS ABOUT THE STOCK MARKET AND THE MOST POPULAR INVESTMENTS. IF YOU ARE A BEGINNER, IT SHOULD BE YOUR BOOK.

Sallie Mae, Freddie Mac, Investment grade, junk bonds, Moody's, averages, indexes, up-tick, supply and demand, coupons, convertibles, mutual funds, inflation, corporate structure, IPO's, OTC, volatility, types of trades, derivatives, financial statements, etc.

This book has everything. It is perfect for somebody who has started to dabble in stocks and is looking to become a little more sophisticated.

I will read this book multiple times and keep it as a desk reference. Everything is so organized right where you need it! It even gives you a few sentences of background to give you a feel for why things are the way they are. It explains where things got their names from. It is a GOOD BOOK.

I would not recommend this book for a total novice. It might be a little too much. But for somebody who has seen all these terms banging around for a while, this clears stuff up so much.

The organization is amazing. It just all fits together like never before.

Rod Davis shows how microeconomic, market and industry concepts interrelate and, eventually, how they affect the net wealth of each individual investor. This book nicely combines the big-picture approach with simple explanation of quantitative indicators/calculations. The stock market will not seem that much of puzzle to you after you've read this book.

Oh looks so tempting. From the way windows 95 secrets went i could only wish. This is really torture because it's infront of me and i can't have it. Dag! WOW Nice Book i don't want to leave this web page.

This book gives you every tool you need to get yourself through the rough edges, yet get the most from the Operating System! I love it and its tools!!!

This is THE book on WINDOWS 98! I also have the Windows 95 version, and find it to be the most helpful, so I am now reading my new copy of Windows 98...AND with 4 CDs, it is truly a great deal! Windows 95 users can benefit from this book also! A MUST have book for YOUR library.