I was very disappointed in this book. I got it because of the authors Sulieman Allen, LeAnne Howe, and Julian Lang, none of whom are in the book. The writers in the book are all very good, but I really wanted to read more of LeAnne Howe's work!

If you truly want to understand the spirituality of Native Americans, you must read their poetry and fiction, not some white person's weekend workshop going on a spirit quest. Native spirituality is embedded in Indian humor, reflections on nature, and the tears that have been spilled dealing with the aftermath of 300 years of persecution. I laughed and cried as I read such literary treasures as "Old Harjo" and "How Coyote Lost His Manhood." The majority of the these stories are modern, and they show us that Indian literature is richly poignant. The anthology is compiled by Paula Gunn Allen, America's Indian Poet Laureate, and is a wonderful addition Gunn Allen's other fine books.

Page 421 Formula #15-27 Formula #15-27b (?) originally published by Joshi are WRONG! A book that costs more than US$300 should at least be checked for correct equations!

Excellent in-depth treatment of core processes involved in modern well construction ... these processes are examined theoretically and pragmatically ... and each topic is extensively documented ... very complete and compressed without losing detail ... a great work!

While this small book is just right as an introductions to the questions one should ask about ancient civilizations in the Americans, it is not good for someone with some historical background. Indeed it best serves scholars interested in the ancient Americas better than anyone else.

Shirely Dunn's guide to celluloid provides a useful history of the "Celluloid Era" of 1888 - 1920, including manufacturer's marks. She also includes color photos of a wide range of celluloid items, from clocks and toys, to manicure sets and advertising ware. Without an index, it is not very useful as a value guide.

A good book for beginners, but not too terrific if you want to identify & value a specific piece.

Now ten years old A Concise History of New Zealand Painting is still the most recent work in this field. According to the Introduction, Dunn intended it to be "...a short, accessible account..." of what he sees as the major developments in New Zealand painting . Rather than being short and accessible, it is verbose and fails to make any points. Dunn dances around making any actual statements, preferring to give plenty of evidence, but not deriving any thesis from this evidence.

Michael Dunn does a good job of grouping together a broad selection of New Zealand painters to demonstrate the stylistic evolution of New Zealand paintings from our early colonists to recent times. The chapters are based around themes, not strictly chronologically and include such topics as landscapes, images of Mäori, the La Trobe scheme, expatriate New Zealand painters and various stylistic classifications. The weakness of the work is not in the content which is very well researched, but in the style that information is presented.

Dunn does not make connections between events in New Zealand's history, other than the colonial period, and their effect on New Zealand painters and their paintings. Nor does he mention of other happenings in other mediums, which may have influenced painting.

In contrast to his omission of the influence of New Zealand history Dunn does a good job of contrasting developments in New Zealand Painting with art movements overseas. The main fault in this area is that Dunn chooses not to draw any conclusions from his research. This causes his writing to seem tedious in places and dull in others. An example of this is the lack of emphasis on our isolation from the beginnings of modernist painting. It seems as if Dunn recognises this as one of the main factors in forming a definitive style in New Zealand painting, but again he stops short of actually stating this.

A Concise History of New Zealand Painting is a very specific work. It is a textbook style piece, quite like Gordon H brown & Hamish Keith's An Introduction to New Zealand Painting 1839-1980. It is not an entry-level book, but is suitable for students of the subject. It has little biographic information or explanation of motivations. It would, however, be a useful supplement to an existing collection of books on New Zealand painters, putting all of our diverse history into a single narrative.

Dunn tends to be too specific regarding style in a specific painting. He chooses to neglect the history aspect of art history, choosing to investigate the technical merits of the works instead. The layout, especially the use of reproductions is very poor compared to most books about art. The whole book has the feeling of a government document. The readability suffers from being formed of long chapters, which are not broken up into smaller sections to guide readers to points of interest, even though with the material this would be easy to do. The pictures are small, many are black & white, and all seem squeezed in by the incessant and bland text surrounding them.

While this would not be the first book you would consult on a matter of New Zealand painting, it does warrant reading, as there are so few works on this scale in the subject of New Zealand art. For the artists among us A concise History of New Zealand Painting provides a whakapapa of our influences and teachers, linking us to the traditions that may still be visible in our own works. A book that does live up to Dunn's aspirations of being accessible is Gil Docking's 200 Years of New Zealand Painting to which Michael Dunn even wrote the last chapter in the latest edition. It is a book that allows the art works to be dominant over the text, a book that gives the feeling that it is about art, and values art. It is Docking's book that I would recommend over A concise History of New Zealand Painting.

Dunn is a Political Theorist at Cambridge who makes good in this book on the Theorist part of his academic title. Informing us at the outset that he's writing a book for the general reader about how to think about politics, his prose style (which employs parentheses to a fault) nearly defeats both him and us. Oracular, dense, he is prone to starting paragraphs that state there are such things as "three factors one must explore when thinking of government as coercive structure based on the provision of security for it's citizens." He writes sentences so long and so carefully balanced in tone that you forget what he's talking about before you get to the end of the sentence. Not really for the general reader in other words.

And yet...once he gets away from discussing great political thinkers from the past (and how to think about what they thought, and how to decide what makes them applicable) and gets down to describing a case study -- how Margaret Thatcher got into power and stayed in power -- he's quite readable.

Here's a passage about Thatcher that shows both Mr. Dunn for good and ill:

"In the case of the global neo-liberal agenda of the 80s and 90s (of which Reagan and Thatcher were prominent and consequential exponents), its public impact across large areas of the world, from some of the richest states to some of the poorest, depended both upon ideological impetus and upon drastic shifts in the international context in which the national economies operated.

"There were close and obtrusive links between these two factors throughout, since the agencies of international economic coordination were often potent vectors of the the conceptions of sound policy, and the ways in which they operated, and the institutional changes which they brought about, themselves brusquely altered the incentives faced by governments and economic actors across the world.

"Thge ideas themselves were in no important way novel(though their expression was naturally more up to the minute). What had always been less than engaging about them, and what had long proved ineffectual, remained just as engaging, and very often every bit as ineffectual. But ideological infection and institutional change, both carefully planned and essentially inadvertent, reinforced each other massively. What was evidently going on was a single interconnected process, a vast tipping in the balance of advantage between one set of ways of organizing production, distribution and exchange, subordinated, at least in intention to the pursuit of social welfare through public policy, and another set of ways of organizing production, distribution and exhange which had far weaker connections with the goal of pursuing social welfare, more especially through public policy." pg. 173-4

Not for the general reader, but nevertheless one appreciates his wide knowledge, flashes of insight and wit.

Midston University, as part of a convention, builds (as suggested by Danny Dunn) a dream future house. Danny, Irene, and Joe check out the house before it opens. The gadgets are interesting, though they don't project how much computers would change things for us all - on that level. Some things in the house aren't quite meant to be (as always, the book shows technology's practical limits), and that's how they get in trouble - locked in because the voice-activated door malfunctions. They use a little ingenuity, though...

Well, the culmination of a project, anyway. The whole gang (Danny Dunn, Irene Miller, Joe Pearson, Prof. Euclid Bullfinch, Dr. A. J. Grimes) accompany another scientist to England, where he has secured time on a radio telescope, to listen for interplanetary radio signals. They have the usual mishaps, but Danny comes through in the end when a message comes in, and figures out how to decipher it. What does it say? That, you'll have to find out for yourself.

The Professor goes on the road, and so naturally, Danny, Irene and Joe tinker with his latest creation. When they discover some of its capabilites (like creating thunderstorms in the kitchen) they think they have a new weapon in their ongoing battles with Eddie "Snitcher" Phillips.

The Essential Browning is a great book to read if you love poetry. If you don't it might get boring pretty fast. I like poetry enough to where I could keep going on, but it didn't all appeal to me to much. There are alot of poems in the book that I like, like "Porphyria's Lover" and "My Last Duchess." Those two poems are also two of Robert Browning's more famous poems. I think anybody can get into those two. I would reccomend this book to anybody who is really serious about poetry.