I've used this book as a resource for teaching about slavery in an elementary school class. The thoughts conveyed are not the usual rhetoric presented in most lower level school social studies texts. Until recently children have not been exposed to the idea that slavery existed in parts of the world other than the USA. The long history of slavery - in the world and especially in Africa itself is new to many people. We learn much about slavery that has not before been related to school children, if not adults. The children in my classroom have been very absorbed by the thoughts presented in these pages. This is a must-read for Middle or High School students studying Aftican American history. As a teacher I would be sure to use it in my class.

We worry about plagues; AIDS is still scary even though it is being treated with considerable success, and the recent (although unfounded) scare about a woman with ebola virus entering Canada made headlines. There may have been bigger plagues before and since, but _The Black Death_ (Tempus Publishing) by William Naphy and Andrew Spicer is about _the_ plague, the one that is commemorated in countless paintings and woodblocks and in literature. It is still a mysterious and scary illness, and while the authors skimp on some of the horrors and medical explanations, they describe the atmosphere around the disease and the changes it wrought in fascinating detail. Christians and Muslims were agreed that the new arrival of the plague was sent upon humans by Divine Will, but Muslim clerics interpreted their Koran as insisting that no one should try to flee a plague deliberately sent from Allah. Bear it with humility, was the advice, and when you die, you get straight admittance to Paradise. Being sent straight from Allah precluded the understanding of the plague as contagious. The fairly monolithic Catholicism of the time could not see the plague as a blessed ticket to paradise. It did not insist that parishioners remain to stick out an infection, but it did insist that people consider their sins and those of their societies.

The decrease in population meant that it was harder to get priests, and that apprenticeships were shortened and younger men became masters; guilds recruited outside of the families that had been their historic sources. Women entered trades which had never welcomed them before. Attempts were made to hold wages down and agricultural workers were forbidden to leave their lands for better prospects. "Sumptuary laws" were instituted to make it illegal for one class to dress like the ones above it, implying that luxury goods were more available to the reduced market. Mere shopkeepers gave fine banquets. The plague is historically significant for bringing a sort of populism. Society was also turned upside down by people fleeing the communities that had nurtured them. People took solace from their saints. Mary was often depicted as wounded by arrows of grief for her son, so she became somewhat of a specific saint for those fearing plague; similarly, Saint Sebastian who was martyred by being an archery target was held to be particularly good for deflecting the arrows of the plague. Just how these secondary religious figures managed to thwart the marksmanship of God was never explained. Then the flagellants came to town, traveling to whip their bodies bloody to appease God's wrath and make the plague go away. They would go to the church, surround it, and start whipping themselves with cruel barbed whips. The clergy were horrified not by the blood, but by the threat to their monopoly on spiritual power, and Pope Clement VI quickly condemned the flagellants in 1349. A frequent recourse of religious people was scapegoating, and as usual the Jews got blamed as the cause of everything. It is nice to think that we have risen above such behavior, and of course we do have enormous technical expertise in dealing with diseases now, as well as refusing to accept that they are simply manifestations of angry deities. However, human nature is not really any different than it was seven centuries ago. Although the plague quite mysteriously collapsed in virulence, there will someday be a new one, I believe, to take a big chunk of us away. (What if ebola transformed into an illness that could be caught as simply as colds are?) _The Black Death_, with its descriptions of the plague process and many illustrations, gives a fine, sobering review of what happened before, and while it makes no attempt at prognostication, I think we may just see such things again.

Employing an exhaustive amount of first-rate materials and interviews into his research, Andrew DeRoche, an up and coming scholar of diplomatic history, has provided a splendid account of the complexities - setbacks, victories, racism, pain, pleasure and other elements that were a part of the relationship between the United Staes and Rhodesia(eventually Zimbabwe) from the Eisenhower years to the latter years of the Clinton Administration. DeRoche uses outstanding research to provide his arguments. His analysis (often cutting edge) of the more than 4 decade relationship (45 years to be precise) is nothing short of splendid. The book was enormously informative and it was a pleasure to read. I would reccomend it for anyone who is intersted in groundbreaking work in diplomatic history.

As someone who collected Dr. Who videos and novelizations, including the New Adventures, I'm familiar with Andrew Skilleter's work. An entire book devoted to his Who stuff (well, most of it, anyway)? Wow!

I never got any of the early calendars, of which material from the hit 1986 calendar is sampled. No, my first step into Who came in 1988. But the calendar art included is a treasure. Sil, with his marsh minnows beside him is just adorable. And check out the exploding Dalek from the 1986 calendar. He is strong in rendering all Who-related subjects, nothing weak in ANY of them. I must say that of the Doctors, he does Peter Davison and Sylvester McCoy the best.

Speaking of 1988, the shot of Tom Baker for the calendar that year includes a space-station shaped like a birthday cake for the 25th anniversary. Well, that kind of fulfills Baker's suggestion of pulling out a cake for The Stones Of Blood, the 100th story in the series.

Of the Profile Print posters I bought, I hung the Cybermen and Sontaran ones in my dorm room at NMSU.

His portraits of each of the then-six Doctors in the Kevin Judd Collection are masterpieces. Love that celery to the right of Peter Davison. Gouache is his preferred medium and perhaps it's because it's the same medium used by Olivia de Berardinis that I took to the art on the videos and books.

Now here's the trick. I'd bought the two books he'd done before I bought Blacklight, and that was The Cybermen with David Banks and The Monsters with Adrian Rigelsford. That cover of the Cybermen book is simply awesome! It didn't sink in until I bought Blacklight that that guy who drew the art in those books was Andrew Skilleter. Sure, his name was written on the books' spines but I was too absorbed in the text to find out. Now though, I have a special appreciation for the artwork.

In closing, I've no beef against the designs of the video releases since the E-Space Trilogy, but to me, part of owning a Doctor Who video collection is Andrew Skilleter's rich and imaginative cover art. Check out Blacklight and see what you're missing.

Readers may wonder about the obscure title: why exactly an 'Encyclopedic Dictionary'? Don't be put off, however, by this imposing name. What we have here is a genuinely useful book that should be close to hand in the offices of managers who really want to understand their profession. Organisational Behaviour studies what makes people do as they do when they gather together in task-oriented groups. This dictionary provides a (largely) jargon free guide to the best academic thinking on the subject. It contains around 500 entries of about 1000 words each, written by 180 specialists from the discipline.

The entries are cross-referenced so you can start reading on any topic of interest and follow a web of connections through the book that broadens and deepens your understanding of the subject. Like the best reference books its easy to pick it up wanting a quick definition only to find you're still reading an hour later because of the fascinating connected material it contains.

For example, looking at the entry on "crises" leads to references for 'accidents' (reviewing how failures happen because of the complex interactions of systems); 'Identification' (of causes); 'decentralisation' (as a means of avoiding accidents); 'risk taking and 'organisational learning'. Entries on 'decision-making', 'group decision-making', 'organisational neurosis', 'culture' and 'innovation' to name just five are all equally fascinating and lead on to yet more useful entries.

Any one responsible for managing people will find material here to improve their understanding of the task. Managers should avoid the latest airport news-stand pot-boiler on business advice and instead invest in this book. By business book standards the paperback is good value. More often than not you'll find it will be open on your desk rather than gathering dust on the shelf.

Taungpulu Sayadaw was a burmese forest monk{one who lives in the Forests in southeast asia,literaly meditating} who came to the United States in the late 1970's, and established the first Burmese Buddhist Temple in the United States.This gentle master of the Theravada tradition passed on his teachings , some of which have been lovingly recorded here by Anne Teich. These are not soft, new age readings,but straightfoward teachings that come staright to the herat of the matter.Chapters[some are only a paragraph long, others several pages long] such as UNWHOLESOME CONDUCTS,SAINTHOOD AND NIBBANA and THE HINDRANCE OF SENSUAL DESIRE are up front and not easy{the Sayadaw ,though coming off as quite gentle,doesnt seem to be interested in softening his message to make it palatable to the west. More's the better] Andrew Harvey contributes a short preface,and Ms. Teich gives us an excellent introduction. A very,very good primer on Buddhism from one considered by many to be a saint, a bodhisattva. Deserves to be more widely read,very very good, though the message is not easy...Excellent.

This is an excellent city for use in D&D. All kinds of plot hooks and statted characters. Still lots of room for DM's to stick in their own stuff. The only problem I have with it is the dislike of the city for sorcerors, which is caused by the local wizards.

Introduced to this book at National Naval Medical Center, although not the text we use at MUSC, I'm glad I found it, great buy for the cost.

Where Dead Voices Gather
Nick Tosches
Little Brown and Company

writer: BRUCE MILLER

With his big bushy moustache and sun-weathered skin,
Tom Rea looks like one of the tough paleontologists staring
out of one of the black-and-white photographs in his book,
Bone Wars: The Excavation and Celebrity of Andrew Carnegie's
Dinosaur. His voice, though, has the soft polite tone of a
professional who has worked indoors for the better part of his
life. Imagining Rea to be like one of the men he wrote about is
probably a tribute to how vividly he portrays the people who
made Carnegie's dinosaur such a sensation. Rea is quick to
cite the abundance of letters he used as primary source material.

"The whole story is filled with interesting characters," says Rea.
"The personalities are so strong in those letters. I don't know if
it's the line of work that draws strong-minded people to it --
they certainly weren't in it for the money -- but in any case they
didn't want other people to get in the way of finding out what
the bones could tell them. Sometimes they disagreed quite strongly."

Rea comes from a family that knows geology and paleontology
-- his uncle is a geologist; his brother is a geologist at the
University of Michigan; geology was also his mother's avocation
-- but he came to write his book by following a less scientific
path. He grew up in Pittsburgh looking at Carnegie's dinosaur
at the Carnegie Museum. After graduating from Williams
College in Massachusetts in the early 1970s, Rea spent a few
summers visiting his uncle's ranch. He became a reporter for
the Wyoming's Casper Star-Tribune for the next 13 years,
though he maintained an amateur interest in geology and
paleontology. In 1990, he started working on an article
for the paper about, how Carnegie's famous dinosaur
made its way from Wyoming to Pittsburgh.
During his research, he became fascinated with the fossil digs
and disputes that surrounded the unearthing of the bones.
When he quit the paper in 1998, he wanted to write a
book about a number of these controversies,
but an editor suggested he focus on just one. Then, in 1999,
he came to the Carnegie Museum.

"Not until I got here did I realize how many letters they were,"
says Rea. "They had archives there that yielded all the
resources to write the book I wanted to write."

Correspondence between Carnegie and then-museum director
William Holland, who Rea says figures as "the Darth Vader of
the story," was right next door at the Carnegie Library. Rea
ended up using the archives of a number of Pittsburgh groups.

"[Holland's] secretary typed and saved every letter, even put
them in chronological order, so it was very easy to follow,"
Rea says.

The first person who caught Rea's attention was Bill Reed, the
tough, autodidactic Wyomingite who found Carnegie's dinosaur.

"He was a frontiersman who was dealing with people from the
East who didn't particularly respect him because he was a
Westerner," Rea says. "It was a different time back then. A guy
like Reed who'd been a buffalo hunter and snow shoveler on
the railroad was one acquaintance away from the richest man in
the world. Although the men were divided profoundly by class
and opportunity, they were still all connected."

The story of Carnegie's dinosaur was "a natural for a book,"
and Rea easily sold the idea to the University of Pittsburgh
Press, then wrote it in a year and a half. This is Rea's first
published book, though perhaps not his last. Now he is
considering writing book about Earl Douglas,
the paleontologist who found the Jurassic quarry
of dinosaur bones that is now the Dinosaur National Monument
in Utah and Colorado.

a book i dearly enjoyed with beautifull photos of inside the house where light seems endless and shines in every corner. of this spleldid book also shows the great talent of the auther and skill in capturing the atmosphere on paper.a very interesting book from jane bolger