From the back...
She purely terrified him--Hank Travis, a poor peanut farmer's son from South Texas, was no match for Miss Mary Margaret MacGregor. Hank had a dream. His future lay in the exploding Texas oil fields. But Mary had a plan. Her future lay with Hank! It was J.T.'s job to immortalize his grandfather's history for Crystal Creek, and for all of Texas, and it would have been a different tale indeed without the formidable Mary!

In my Opinion...
Hank has been a part of the Crystal Creek series since the very first book. It was great to read about his early years with Mary. Hank was not all that great a husband and father, considering he was always off chasing oil. He did, however, love Mary very much, and she loved him. Mary was a strong independent woman, and she had to be, to put up with Hank. Hank was a force to be reckoned with in the oil business. It was easy to see why he was so successful. It was sad that cranky old grandpa Hank died, but this was a fitting end to his character.

I am a LPE engineer and doing biz with LPE grown epitaxial wafers for various kinds of applications. Especially for opto-devices. In this book I hoped to get some information for GaP:N and GaP:Zn-O for green and red color LED during my developing stage. I hope to get some information in the next edition of this book about mass producing recent industrialized LPE technology and state-of the-art growth concept and technology.

I picked this book up and couldn't put it down. I've always got a rock in my pocket - it seems like a natural thing. This book enlightens one as to what the meaning is of our natural attraction to stones. It is a metaphysical type of book that an average reader can understand and learn from. It offers food for thought to all the rock-hounds of the world.

From the back...
Some folks ssaid it would never be the same--There was a new doctor in town, and he just wasn't their sort. Though Dr. Purdy said Sonny Dekker was the best, the man was a troublemaker. He was messing with the football team, risking boys' futures. And lots of townspeople wanted nothing to do with him. But not Beverly Townsend. Suprisingly, the exotic Dr. Dekker appealed to her in ways she'd never dreamed of. They were just friends, but their friendship set the grapevine buzzing. Then, on an eerily calm spring day, the heavens opened up and all hell broke loose. Gossip stopped. Hearts stopped. It was the end for many, and the beginning for some. Crystal Creek never would be the same again.

In my Opinion..
In 'Hearts Against the Wind' we read the love sory of Jeff Harris and Beverly Townsend. Sadly, in a later Crystal Creek book (Shameless) Jeff is killed at an oil sight. I had a difficult time accepting that Jeff was dead. As a reader I invested time in reading about their relationship and blossoming love. And than to have him dead in a couple lines of a later book just did not seem right. So, when I started to read this book I knew that I was going to have a hard time with Sonny Dekker as the new man in Beverly's life. But the more I read the harder it was not to like him. He is a good man and a terrific doctor and most importantly he loves Beverly. Unfortunately, the town of Crystal Creek is full of prejudice people, including Beverly's own mother Carolyn. No one wanted to give Sonny a chance, except for Beverly and a handful of others. But something terrible was going on with the towns football players, and when Sonny goes digging for the truth, he becomes even more unpopular with the citizens of Crystal Creek. As if the town did not have enough to deal with-nature strikes in the form of a tornado. Sonny is the only man that can help the people of Crystal Creek, whether they like it or not. This was an exciting conclusion to the Crystal Creek series.

As far as I can tell, there are just two editions. I have both. The 2nd edition was released in 1985. Both editions are heavily underlined and dog-eared from repeated readings.

This MIT professor has done a masterful job at describing the process of making predictions and forecasting. The book is extremely easy to read and is well footnoted. This is obviously a labor of love for this expert on forecasting.

You'll laugh at some of his stories of predictions gone astray or methodologies foolishly executed. There's not much math to this book (680 pages) but there is a lot of logic and thinking going on.

This book covers all the major forms of forecasting and discusses the pro's and con's of each method. It provides many, many examples of forecasts. He then analyzes them to back up his major points.

Then goes on to recommend why you should combine forecast methodologies to increase your accuracy. If you're an economist making forecasts on the economy, or if your a stock analyst making forecasts for Earnings, you'll enjoy this book. The book is aimed at researchers preparing forecasts for economics and social sciences. My interest was in the stock market and commoditiy markets. And I feel I was richly rewarded with this book.

This book gives you the framework to work within. Other books give the math background for each of the techniques.

The author has been very active in writing articles for journals and has helped start a journal for the forecasting field.

Must have book, if you make any kind of forecasts - including just forecasting your business's sales. I can't recommend it highly enough.

John Dunbar

While I am interested in architecture in general, the Crystal Palace is the reason why I'm so interested in learning more about it. Truly a 19th century megaproject, mostly forgotten, except in books like these.

Think of this - it is a gigantic glass-and-iron building that's longer than Toronto's CN Tower is tall - using nearly a million square feet of glass, for all the walls and the cielings. It was also one of the first prefabricated modular buildings. Nothing of such a gigantic scale like that had been accomplished before that time - with a huge grand 3-storey tall hallway through the length of the building approximately 60 feet wide by 60 feet high stretching more than 1800 feet long.... Not only this, there was a huge arched transept in the centre that housed some large trees. Even more amazing, this building was built in a scant 4 months, a technical achievement of victorian times.

Although this books cover mainly architecture, it helps to remember that The Crystal Palace was built for a great purpose: the purpose of peace, as the first world's fair, to showcase all the nations' products, early technologies, and cultures. Some of the early "innovations" - such as Jacquard's automated loom - and Otis' safety elevator brake demoed in public - relates to today's technologies! Without the Internet, without the Telephone, and without many of the communications technologies - this world fair had a huge impact in communicating these innovations to other nations. It is not surprising that it helped accelerate the pace of inventions over the decades, at a time when communications is nowhere nearly as prevalent as today, and travel was a time consuming affair was often by sail, steam, or horse power. Despite these difficulties, the Great Exhibition of 1851 was a spetacular success, earned profit, and attracted huge numbers of people despite difficult travel. It is generally considered to be more successful than even all of the 20th century world's fair. All this in itself, makes the Crystal Palace building more fascinating. This is the definitive, original Crystal Palace - not the smaller copycats that popped up in other nations.

It is not easy to find books that relates to the Crystal Palace architecture still in print and available for purchase online.

Williams, a beautiful, intellecutal, slam champion, wordsmith offers us another volume of poetry ringing with truth and depth. I know truth is relative, but dang if she doesn't expose so many truths that we try to hide about relationship, loss, love, and longing.

Nice colours and nice drawings for a world of flowers, elfs, magicians and space ships.
A whole saga of 6 (soon 7) books, with a sense of spirituality in the complex world of the Galatic Confederation. A ray of sun in the french cartoons.

Nice colours and nice drawings for a world of flowers, elfs, magicians and space ships.
A whole saga of 6 (soon 7) books, with a sense of spirituality in the complex world of the Galatic Confederation. A ray of sun in the french cartoons.

Crystal Bowman knows what it's like to be a mom. She shares humorous and touching insight into the world of motherhood with wonderful creativity. I would recommend this little book to ANY mom, at any stage of life. It's a breath of fresh air!