Torrance Parker has written a book that is a must for anyone interested in the history of diving heavy gear and the development of the L.A. Harbour. Full of stories and pictures of the commercial divers; their accomplishments, their lives, and in many cases, their deaths.

VERY INTERESTING HISTORY OF DIVING, MANY OLD PHOTOS OF HARD HAT DIVING.

Very good historical background knowledge, for all divers, and others working in the maritime industry, from development of early equipment on jobes to the latest equipment found today. Shows the hows and whys of all types of underwater work and support equipment.

What a delightful book! A guide for Texas Teasippers or just a pleasant read - the author has a great sense of humor. This book will live in my car from now on.

A MUST FOR TEA LOVERS What a charming, humorous guide to the tearooms in Texas! Lori Torrance has done such a wonderful job, even my husband is ready to search out some of these places!! It's a miracle! ha If you're a tea lover and enjoy gathering yourself in quiet, little out of the way places, you've got to get this book. And it's the perfect gift for tea loving friends.

And, if you love Texas like I do, you would also enjoy checking out Last of the Old Time Texans, Texas Bad Girls: Harlots, Hussies, & Horsethieves, or a Browser's Book to Texas History....

This book is great! It is a guide to all the tearooms in Texas! It has pictures, menus, famous quotes, histories of the town the tearoom is in, as well as the history of the tearoom! It even has various fillers, like "How to Read Tea Leaves and What the Symbols Mean", "How to Make a Proper British Cup of Tea", etc. This is so worth the money. I know the author and she has spent well over a year, with her mother, traveling to all these tearooms. They took pictures (inside and out) and the pictures look fantastic. It is not a critique, but a handy guide you can take with you. Why settle for fast food, when you can have an ice cold glass (or even cup of hot) Almond tea , choices of homemade sandwiches, soups and outrageous desserts in a quiet victorian decorated room. In one tearoom, you can even hear singing English Countryside birds. Personally, I have always been a coffee drinker, but now, I am even ready to go drink tea!! (cold or hot). Enjoy the book, I sure do..

"Your Affectionate Daughter, Isabella" is a very entertaining book - the kind of book I always slow down on reading, towards the end, because I don't want it to be over - but also a fascinating look into the world of the Antebellum South. Most of us have a picture of plantation owners as Clark Gables and Scarlett O'Haras in silks and brocades; the Torrances' plantation in North Carolina is a reasonably prosperous but serious working plantation, whose owners do care about their slaves - apparently the only information we now have about them comes from annual summaries James Torrance writes up - and who would probably free their slaves, except that "Then, where would we get workers for the Plantation?" A good summary of much of the prewar Southern situation.
The basis of the book is an extensive collection of letters written by Isabella and various other family members, all interwoven with just enough history and background so that it all makes an absorbing story. The Torrance plantation - in western North Carolina - prospers and exemplifies the good life, sure enough; various sons and daughters, including Isabella, go off elsewhere to find their fortunes, mostly with indifferent success, and often as not drift back to the old homestead. This is life as it was lived by a group of attractive but fairly ordinary people, in a world in which the vagaries of the weather, the agonizingly high rate of infant and adult mortality and the price of cotton, year by year, were far more important than far-off Abolitionists and Fire-eaters.
As a part-time Civil-War buff, I found this a fascinating insight into the people on the Other Side, who are of course now Us. It's part of the magic of Your Affectionate Daughter that you really want to know how they all came out - the book tells us all the letters know, but I found myself wanting more. And, if making you really care about the characters isn't a measure of a book's narrative power, what is?

p.s. Well, yes, I am a brother-in-law of the Author. But it's still a really good book.

"Your Affectionate Daughter, Isabella" is particularly noteworthy as Ms. Williams has avoided the trap that most authors who base their work on a collection of letters fall into... her narrative carries the story, using the letters only to support the text.. rather than the reverse.

She accomplishes this with an impressive working knowledge of the post 1800 south and plantation lifestyles, presented to us with both a flair for writing and a skillful turn of phrase that, when combined, turn this work into a charming story that will find favor with anyone who enjoys well written and educational history. I hope we'll see more of Ms. William's work.

What a wonderful book! A good read, a touching story, and accurate history. Isabella Torrance was a strong woman who suffered much, and accomplished much, growing up in North Carolina and Mississippi in the early part of the 19th Century.

This story is set in the early 1800s in the American South and is totally based on existing letters from the period. The Torrance family of North Carolina must have kept every piece of paper they ever got. It follows Isabella from the age of 7 when she was sent off to boarding school (Salem College, North Carolina), to coming home at the age of nine to a new mother and growing up on a large farm which was turning into a plantation. She married early and pioneered with her husband and baby in Mississippi - the edge of the wilderness at that time. After much suffering on the frontier, and the death of her husband, she returned to North Carolina to more adventures and a full life.

The story is told through family letters, using the actual letters and other family records, plus enough imagined dialog to keep the story moving along. Ms. Williams seems to have done her research well and all of the details, from the largest to the most minute, ring true. I really enjoyed reading the book as a story, plus the added value of finding out what life was really like in the American South and on the frontier in the period just before the Civil War.

This is a must read; Torrance cuts right to the heart of "evangelicalism" by calling the very nature of Scripture into question. To what extent do evangelicals engage in "Scripture worship?" Borrowing philosophy's well known linguistic/semantic relationship between "sign" and "thing signified," Torrance argues that evangelicals all too often may stop short of -- and indeed confine -- the ontological Reality of the One True God ("thing signified") in their defense of the authority of the Scriptures ("sign"). That is, awareness of the reality of God in its totality may be compromised when evangelicals continue to insist on finding this reality in the Scriptures alone.

There exists a Reality of God that language -- and thus Scripture -- is impotent to convey. It is this Reality, Torrance suggests, that Christians should be seeking, and not stopping short at the signs that point to it.

T. F. Torrance has been an important voice in Protestant theology for over 50 years. This relatively brief book offers an accessible summary of what he takes to be theology's claims to speak truth about reality. His writing is marked by an impressive awareness of historic Christian theology combined with an equally impressive awareness of contemporary writers such as Dummett, Gadamer, and (above all) Polanyi. Anyone interested in Christian epistemology should be aware of Torrance, and this book is a fine place to start.

sory i don,t read this book but i love it

Unlike most of the titles one would find listed in the ever-growing "Nature Writing" sections of our bookstores, this one is truly 'foundational'--it begins with childrens's stories, includes selections from the very best of the anthropological literature, ranges from Mesopotamia to India, Japan to China, & then offers the most inclusive represtentative selection of writings (religious, epic, scientific, poetic) from the West, beginning with the ancient Greeks and ending in the early 18th century. Many of the translations are new and quite stunning (see especially the Petrarch and Dante), the historical introductions and commentaries are models of concision, and the volume is graced by the most complete and detailed index imaginable. This is a book that will reset the ways in which people think about "Nature Writing" for decades to come.

Confused by the basic concept of a limit? Just memorizing stuff to get through calculus, and wondering what it is really all about? This book, referred to as an "old pot-boiler" by one of its authors (Torrance)was written back before calculus was a required course. It actually explains the basic concepts, and takes time to build the theory from the ground up. Burrington and Torrance did such a careful job with the concepts, without skipping steps, or substituting slick shortcuts, that it was used for a couple of decades as an alternate text after newer texts were written. After all, any calculus text that stayed in print for over 25 years can't be all bad !! The book is also of interest to anyone concerned with the history of scientific ideas, or the history of the teaching of higher math.
Disclaimer: reviewer is the daughter of one of the authors.

The classic introductory work for Protestants (Presbyterians in particular) for the last thirty years now has been Shirley Guthrie's "Christian Doctrine." It really stood alone, it was so well done. Now there is a replacement that deserves a serious reading and close study. Michael Jinkins' new book is a worthy successor to that enduring classic. The theology is trinitarian and incarnational--that is, it is in the mainstream of Christianity. It is also easy to read. Jinkins' book builds slowly in introducing information, slowly enough so that novices may learn and understand. This is a worthy book for Sunday School classes or for Wednesday/ Sunday night bible study groups. Jinkins' has produced a new classic here for those of us in the church and we are greatly indebted to him. Read and enjoy!

Another look into the mind of Karl Marx. His communist views of economics and revolution show in what in written, and what is to be inferred. It shows the essence of Marx's ideas and gives a generalization of his thoughts. Another thing you can see is the relationship Marx has had on the mindset of other authors. Included in this could Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. A good read and well worth the time to get to know Marx.

I used this book in a college course and it was great! Our professor was friends with the author so he had a lot of inside advice to go along with it, but even without that, the book helped us understand new concepts in becoming more creative. I didn't think I had a creative bone in my body, but this helped me realize anyone can be creative if they look at it the right way and explore these steps toward creativity. This book really helped me make the creative leap beyond!