I purchased this book used at the University of Houston bookstore. I like it primarily because it is concise and easy to carry. I can pack it in my travel bags when I head out to Italy. It is easy for me to look in the table of contents and navigate to the appropriate section.
In a nutshell: compact, to the point, easy to find the info.

This book is a wonderful read if you were only interested in English grammar, What a wonderful concept to show the concepts of Italian and English grammar side by side. Each section is very readable and I particularly like the fact that each section includes references to other relevant sections. I thought I'd be reading it cover to cover, but I find it's more informative to hop around as my cuiousity is piqued.

This book makes the grammar of both English and Italian stand out in high relief. You'll emerge from it with a firmer grasp of both languages.

If you want to learn Italian, it should be one of the first five things that you buy. The other four should be a good dictionary, How To Pronounce Italian Correctly (the booklet and tape cassette), Ultimate Italian (the book and audio CD or cassettes) and Pimsleur Italian, if you can afford it.

Grief . . . comforting friends . . . food . . . threatening enemy . . . victory . . . happiness. What more could you want in a book? Well actually, there is more. You can read it, look at Alex de Wolf's clever pictures, listen to it on tape, and learn French -- all at the same time. Mary Risk, as usual, has not been satisfied just to "feed" the reader French - she has created an engaging story that my 4-year-old listens to and "reads" over and over.

I teach French to elementary school children and they loved this book. The illustrations are beautiful and colorful. And the story is entertaining enough for them to catch up on new vocabulary. The book itself is excellent quality as well.

What a great way to learn another language! My son loves the pictures, and we tirelessly read it over and over again in both French and English. The pronunciation guide is very helpful. I wish they offered this book in several more languages.

Special agent bud wilson investigates crimes onboard an american nuclear aircraft carrier, the site of many a patriotic movie or Discovery Channel documentary, and an unlikely scene for a murder. Wilson is a bit of a corpse himself, a one time driver of attack jets until an unlucky mission over Vietnam led to a stint as a POW. Suffice it to say that Wilson is now a spectator to other Top Guns. When one of these top guns, a female F-14 pilot, is found dead in the bowels of the mighty carrier, Wilson springs to action - but remains a corpse. Wilson's job is complicated by the fact that an aircraft carrier is is less a ship than a floating city, with a milliuon places to hide and small illegal communities that breed or mask sinister agendas.

It's an awesome premise for a book, but it doesn't quite work because author Morton never solves the mystery - only reshapes it like a lump of clay that never had a form of its own to lose. Charachters never reveal their secrets, they emote feelings which is supposed to stand in for dialog - but doesn't. That actually works for some charachters who have a lot to feel angry about - like sailors who take the dirty jobs that keep the carrier steaming or surface officers who were failed aviators never freed from their dreams of mach two glory. But other charachter seem unlikley reservoirs of resentment, like the victims' squadronmates - the fighter drivers who should be on top of the world - are the ones who should be attracting the most suspicion, if only because of their proximity to the dead flier. Morton keeps things opaque, drowning the mystery in darkness. I gave up trying to care who the murderer was - dark souls in a dark world are no great discovery.

Pilots Die Faster is your basic detective who dun it set aboard a navy aircraft carrier. The protagonist is Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) Special Agent Bud Wilson; a former A-4 pilot that still has never forgot his flying days, nor the two years that he spent in the Hanoi Hilton.

The biggest item on Special Agent Wilson's to-do list is to solve the murder of a female F-14 pilot named Gina Wilson who is found floating down in the bowels of the aircraft carrier. As with nothing in life, it is not easy, the squadron has closed ranks to all outsiders and the list of suspects starts at about five thousand sailors and Marines and about two hundred civilian contractors.

A Flight Surgeon, Dr. Carol Benning and an Airman Fernandez a gang kid from the barrio begin helping Bud Wilson in his pursuit for the real killer and the list of suspects begins to narrow and before long, Wilson is engaged in a deadly cat and mouse game the forces the killers hand.

As this book was being published, I had the opportunity to meet Cynthia Ann Mobley AKA C.W. Morton on the old Prodigy Classic Books & Writing Bulletin Board. I am so grateful for that chance internet encounter because otherwise I would have missed this book.

It is a fast-paced read and gives the reader an excellent view into today's modern aircraft carrier. I found myself constantly guessing wrong as to the killer's identity and was satisfied with the way the events unfolded and the ending.

The book is an excellent read for those who like who-dun-its and for the military techno crowd. The book did not receive a large circulation, however that does not diminish it's standing as a good read.

Fast paced and fascinating, this book is definitely at the top of the list for both mystery and military fans. The author weaves a complex tale, full of well-rounded, believable charcters. What makes it unique is that it takes place on a nuclear carrier. The details of life on board, both the good and bad, are obviously based on extensive personal experience. Not to be missed.

Reviewed by Ann Penhallurick, for Intellectual Disability, Australasia: March, 2002 pp. 16-17

This book is definitely a "must read". Forget the "Multicultural" in the title, or, more precisely, do not limit yourself to Australian definitions thereof. This is not a how-to guide for, say, Chinese-Australians to work with Lebanese-Australians: the book's concept of culture is much broader than nation-of-origin. Lilah Pengra was originally an anthropologist with an interest in culture not usually recognised as relevant in the delivery of social and disability support services. However, she began working with people with disabilities who were also people of indigenous American culture and, in the book, she cites some wonderfully thought provoking examples of the conflicting sets of values that brought her anthropological training into play and eventually resulted in what is evidently excellent practice, and also this remarkable book.

And it is remarkable; one of the most accessible reads that I have come across in a long professional career while, at the same time, one of the best informed and informative books I will have on my shelves for, I suspect, a long time. Having said that, I have to also say that I do, personally, have some problems with what seem to me to be inherent contradictions between Pengra's assertion that culture is learned and her lack of analysis of the learning that has taken place for her clients: it seems that she accepts and even promotes their values without thinking about how we all acquire values that are, for example, market-driven or gender-driven and not necessarily consistent with either ourselves or our well-being. However, the examples of value conflict and resolution that Pengra so eloquently cites are essential to read and to think about because, quibbles aside, good practice in disability support cannot become excellent practice without a very clear awareness of the issues she is raising.

Your Values, My Values is also more than extremely readable presentation of information about how culture (which could be class culture, gender culture, national culture and so on and on) affects service direction and delivery. Pengra also deals with the way culture is embedded within our cognitive schemas, providing a well researched theoretical basis that moves away from the simple behaviourist theories that have dominated thinking in disability services for too long. The 256 page book is divided into four parts: Principles of Values-Based Service, Designing Values-Based Services, Values-Based Services in Context and My Own Values. There are three chapters in each of the first three sections and one in the final section. Sub-sections of chapters like "Identifying Problem Behaviour and Designing Interventions", and "Identifying the problem from the person's point of view" seem standard but present an easily accessible, alternative analysis of approaching a "problem" that we are all familiar with. The book is well referenced, too, and has a good index, particularly given that it is not written as an academic text so would have been much harder to index than most.

I've already made a dozen notes and whipped off half a dozen overheads from this book in planning for various talks I am giving in the near future. I would recommend the book for ALL services which support people with disabilities, ALL policy makers, and just about every academic course in disabilities that is around. It's focus is American and as aforesaid there are times when I find it perhaps overinclusive or perhaps overgenerous in its notion and analysis of culture, but, if you will forgive the cliché, Your values, My Values really is a giant step forward.

Very well thought out book, which could be used as a neat reference for all who work in the helping profession. Ms. Pengra establishes herself as knowledgeable in her assesments of people espeacially ones with disabilites. She cuts through the analytical language making it understandable for all. Thus, giving them the ability to apply towards one's own daily living. Highly recommended.

Beyond "Cultural Competency" reprinted, with permission of the author, from Disability Studies Quarterly summer 2001 special issue, "Engaging Anthropology in Disability Studies." Beyond Cultural Competency by Devva Kasnitz, Ph.D., Mary Switzer Fellow In Your Values, My Values: Multicultural Services in Developmental Disabilities, Lilah Morton Pengra (2000, Paul H. Brooks, Baltimore) has written an unusually successful and useful book. Marketed for service providers, it also belongs in the collections of disability studies scholars and applied anthropologists. And, it is a good read. It is not a research piece. For those interested in Pengra in research mode, I direct you to her dissertation. This book is both theoretical and practical. She uses a theoretical framework of "value based services" and "schema analysis," the analysis of groups of meanings and norms that together underlie "definitions and beliefs that specify what features of the environment to notice" (p. 26). This framework is well described and documented with scholarly care. Her bibliography alone is valuable. In the heart of the book each new topic is introduced with reference to the literature and demonstrated with examples of real-life situations. She culls these examples from her South Dakota career in social services to people considered developmentally disabled, many of them Dakota or Lakota. She then follows with service protocols. These are actual fill-in-the-blanks and check-off assessment, progress, and evaluation tools. She closes each chapter with "Points to Remember." At first this seemed too "teachy" to me. Then, I realized, that is exactly the point. You can read the book on many levels. Why not remind those who may skip some of the scholarly text and go directly to the protocols what to remember during their use as you photo-copy and enlarge and try to decide if you will need to retype and edit a protocol for your own situation. The book also hangs together if you skip the protocols entirely and read for the theory and its implications. Taken together, policy makers and service directors will gain insight. I called this brief book reviewing "Beyond Cultural Competency" out of my biases. I remember Cultural Competency as an idea creeping in and around medical anthropology more than twenty years ago. It started innocently enough with the assertion that service providers needed to understand the culture of the people with whom they work. However, it quickly devolved into a cook-book approach, this is what to do with a Latino patient, this is how to treat a Chinese person, Native American, Black, etc. This is more dangerous than a travel phrase book without a dictionary. And who certifies "competence?" Hiring a token person of the culture in question then became the next step. This, of course, puts tremendous pressure on the supposedly "representative" staff member. First, it ignores intracultural variation. Second, if the individual wants to succeed in their career in the service sector they can usual only do so by bolstering the existing structure. They effectively become the one who helps their cultural group reinvent themselves in the image of the dominant culture so that they can fit in and receive services through the existing structure. We all know that minority culture groups adapt to new bureaucracies much faster than bureaucracies change to reflect diversity. What are needed are approaches that expect and value cultural diversity. We need scholars, policy makers, and service providers who are skilled at recognizing, including, and protecting cultural diversity. This book makes a significant contribution in that direction. Read it.

When I first knew of the existence of this book, I wondered: why, there should be such a dictionary in every language! And, yet, how come I didn't even once think of searching for that kind of dictionary in English?? I should have known of it much earlier!

English is my second language, and even though I belong to the cateogry of "advanced" learner, I still have difficulty, for instance, in locating the right preposition or adverb that go with certain verbs or adjectives. For example, the very subtle difference in meaning between "be familiar to vs. be familar with" is a very difficult one for a non-native English speaker like me to grasp. The BBI dictionary of English Word Combinations aims to address problems unique to ESL learners, including the one I just mentioned. Keep it handy, and it will let you command more accurate & "real" English.

The BBI Dictionary of English Word Combinations is useful for the ESL student, but also for professional translators. Translators are often "in the zone," between both the source and target language and forget the simplest phrasal verbs. I've found this book helpful in sweeping up those messy pronouns that betrayed the original source language of my translation. Praise to the authors. They would have gotten 5 stars if there was more emphasis on modern use of the word combinations. The ESL reader still won't know what it means "to come out" (as in announcing a sexual preference or a hidden attribute) by consulting this book. But, I know, writing a dictionary is like sweeping the beach!

This is an extraordinary tool for translators into English. It is a dictionary of collocations, and provides information that is hard to find in other dictionaries. It helps you find that elusive word that goes with another, and answers many questions about which preposition to use.

This book will not teach you all the rules, cases, or declensions in German. But it will clearly explain what they are, what they correspond to in English, how the German and English practices differ, and what the role of each concept is in German. If your formal grammar is a bit shaky then this is a splendid place to start.

If your interest is English grammar in and of its (twisted) self then the book for you is The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, by K Gordon.

As you learn German you find more information about the mysteries of English. When I went to collage they said I had a pretty good grasp of English and would be wasting my time English 101 and dangling participles. Then it came time to acquire German. This Book opened up a whole new world as I learned the fundamentals of German I also found the parallel principle s of English. This book by placing the differences and similarities side by side helped me to better understand both languages. I am not sure I will get it down pat, but without this book, I would be dead in the water.

Some sample contents:

What is a Noun?

What are Indefinite and Definite Articles?

What is meant by gender?

What is a Participle?

Appendix A - Noun Gender Reference List

This is indispensable knowledge of "English Grammar for Students of German"

English Grammar for Students is a fascinating book. It compares and contrasts English and German grammar, point by point, making it easier to understand the grammar of each language.

Reading this book, you'll end with a deeper knowledge of such things as nouns, gender, number, articles, case, verbs, subjects and objects. You'll also learn more about predicate nouns, promouns, personal pronouns, parts of verbs, infinitives, verb conjugation, tenses and much, much more.

The structure of both languages will pop out at you.

This book features humourous comic strips about rock and roll music. Fans of pop culture should dig it. Some of the jokes may be too British for Americans, though.

It's bloody brilliant. That's all that needs to be said. This book may well have changed my life. Also, Colin B. Morton is a very nice man.

Chuck Death, aka Jon Langford of the Mekons, has been poking his finger into the eyeball of rock 'n' roll for the better part of the past 20 years. Now, with the aid of equally cynical Colin Morton, we find out what really matters to Langford. And what we learn is that what matters is unpretentious, true-believer rock. Death and Morton have no time for hair bands.

This collection of cartoons is consistently visually interesting, with the writing equally challenging. Highly recommended for anyone who realizes that just maybe Pink Floyd isn't as relevent we all once believed. The punk years are presented as well as any history to date - the complete antithesis to Greil Marcus' magnum opus "Lipstick Traces" (ironically, Marcus pens the forward).

"Great Pop Things" is a great book.

This book (5th edition) cover the topics of undergraduate number theory well. The chapters are -
(1)divisibility
(2)congruences
(3)quadratic reciprocity and quadratic forms
(4)some funtions of number theory
(5)some diophantine equations
(6)farey fractions and irrational numbers
(7)simple continued fractions
(8)prime estimates and multiplicative number theory
(9)algebraic numbers
(10)partition funtion
(11)density of sequences of integers.
It also contains basic cryptography, basic group theory and basic elliptical curves in some of the chapters. The authors give notes on the end of each chapter about some research results, which I enjoy reading.

However, the author give too much hints spoling the fun of solving the problems. Eg 32-36, 40-3, 59-53, 108-36, 136-17, 312-8, and most of the problems in chapter 8. The author should put these hints at the back of the book. I suggest you look up IMO (imo.math.ca) for problems suitable for chapter 1-7 because IMO is well-knowned for its excellent number theory problems (especially 1990-3).

Overall this is an excellent book. I give it a rating of 4.5/5, I don't give it 5 because of the author give too much hints to problems instead of putting hints at back of the book.

I have started my studies in Number Theory reading this book from the preface to the last word. It is amazing! I think it is a better introduction to the subject than the classical Hardy and Wright...it is "more objective" and almost 100% elementary...a good high school reader could do well with it. The chapter of diophantine equations has some divine proofs, very clever and very beautiful. And there is an easy proof of the irracionality of Pi. The only negative point is the existence of some points where the authors could be less concise and a bit clearer, stating the theorems before giving the demonstrations, instead of saying at the end of the paragraph "we then have proved the theorem of..." Its a good book for self-study. It has many exercises.

This is a fantastic book on number theory. It covers far more ground than most introductory text (comparable to Hardy and Wright in depth with much less concern for the big O). It covers material usually only available in separate texts: Rational points on elliptic curves, the partition function, and Dirchlet series. Quite readable chapters, well motivated theoretically, although the historic motivation for the subject matter comes largely in the end-of-the-chapter notes. It's an excellent refresher and reference for non-specialist who find themselves using an algorithm or formula they've forgotten (number theory now playing a role in physics and CS, like never before). It is well cross-referenced with regards to methods of proofs the can be accomplished in different section by different methods - this again making it an excellent reference.

Alas, it is pre-FLT. So you'll have to look elsewhere for that.

This average book for the most part is good to use as a general reference. It is somewhat outdated and it uses California law for most of its examples so if you live in another state, you'll need to find out what the law is in YOUR state. The best parts of the book are the practice exercises at the end of each chapter in which you use the disk provided. This gives "hands-on" experience.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It is interesting, and helped me a lot when it came to my studies. It is something every office worker should have.

These are just a few of the reasons students studying to become a legal secretary or paralegal continue to rave about this book.

1. It provides up-to-date procedures from the top legal firms represented.

2. It is organized in an easy-to-follow manner.

3. The author provides relevant samples that guide the student to successful completion of the end-of-chapter hands on exercises.

4. The pictures in the book show how professionally groomed people are who work in most legal offices.

5. Students say, "Dr. Morton really knows how to make difficult concepts understandable."

6. The book is ACCURATE.

7. The student files are perfect.

8. This book is written with the student in mind. It is written to help students gain confidence in their skills, and it allows ambitious students to build the speed and accuracy necessary to compete in today's legal offices. Entry level students build their skills and sometimes create the documents more than once to show their speed and accuracy have improved.

9. This book is perfect for the classroom, online, or self-study.

10. The instructor's materials are organized, clearly written, and correct.

(...)This book IS a history of the telecommunication movement through the eyes of the most competent labor leader of our time! This book details the struggle that our country has gone through in order to achieve the technological advances and human rights that we enjoy today. We are lucky to have a labor leader like President Bahr heading the fight for everyday people. We are even luckier that he has shared his stories and viewpoints with us in this informative, entertaining, and poignant book.

This book IS a very thorough history of the telecommunication movement through the eyes of the most competent labor leader of our time! This book details the struggle that our country has gone through in order to achieve the technological advances and human rights that we enjoy today. We are lucky to have a labor leader like President Bahr heading the fight for everyday people. We are even luckier that he has shared his stories and viewpoints with us in this informative, entertaining, and poignant book.

(...) This book IS a history of the telecommunication movement through the eyes of the most competent labor leader of our time! This book details the struggle that our country has gone through in order to achieve the technological advances and human rights that we enjoy today. We are lucky to have a labor leader like President Bahr heading the fight for everyday people. We are even luckier that he has shared his stories and viewpoints with us in this informative, entertaining, and poignant book.