This book is a very good ECONOMIC history of Colonial America, focusing on the Chesapeake Bay region. The "down-side" is that it reduces all the colorful, interesting, tragic events of that period (pirates, revolution, famine, slavery) down to their impact upon the economy (imports, exports, balance of trade, etc.) and could be very "dry" reading. The book tends to focus on maritime issues, simply because that was the major transportation mode at that time. If you are interested in Colonial America, particularly the Chesapeake Bay region, I recommend reading this book simply to give you an understanding of the economic forces that had so great a role in shaping this region.

This is one of the best books on the eastern seaboard from the earliest of times. Easy to read and terrific research. If you are writing anything about this time and place, this book is a necessity.

This book provided a lot of useful information about the fascinating topic of microbiological advances in the area of liquid feces, in both humans and bovines. Particularly interesting was the section on various bacteria and how one can identify the contents of the diarrhea by carefully examining and searching the various hues and consistencies of the matter. I must remark at the astonishment I felt as I learned to perceive such advances in the microsciences in such daily matters of my own life and the lives of my children.

This book gives a solid overview of the entire Civil War but doesn't read like a just the facts book.The book focus on the key events in both theaters of the war and has chapters on the homefronts as well as the poltical aspects of the war.

There are two titles claiming to be the "Best of Murray Leinster"
and this is the better of the two (The other appeared in Britain and has only three stories in common with this book).
This book is/was part of a series of "Best of's" from Ballantine and forms a good introduction into the work of Will F. Jenkins, who wrote SF under the pseudonym Murray Leinster. The stories range from as early as 1934 (The famous "Sidewise in Time", about alternate history lines parallel to ours) till 1956 ("Critical Difference") and amongst them are classics as "First Contact", ground for an idealogical flap with Soviet writer Yefremov back in 1959, and "A Logic Named Joe".
The book shows Murray Leinster at his best, being the writer of entertaining short fiction. Compared to some other writers of his period his work hardly seem dated and considering that his earliest story was sold in 1919 (!) that's quite a compliment.

I've owned this book for a number of years, and have found it really helpful for finding prime birding locations in Ohio. It could stand a little updating, & the maps are not very useful, but the detailed directions of how to get to a location are really useful, when coupled with a DeLorme map for the state.

Thomson's division of the state is also rather odd. There are locations that seem to be arbitrarily grouped into a geographic region that it doesn't seem appropriate to be in.

Overall, it is very useful if you're going to be doing birding in the state and are either a new Ohio birder, or coming from out-of-state to do some birding.

Even if you've only got a deck, this book will encourage you to pick up all those fantastic veggies at the Farmers Market that you had to leave behind before! Written by a group of city gardeners, its' more than a cook book. The recipes are delicious and unusual, and if you want to grow your own veggies they throw in all sorts of helpful hints.

Historians will record the age we are living as another cardinal contribution to Church growth. The excitement of this prophetic age is not releasing audiences but scores of participants who are moving in the prophetic gifting. Prophesying will soon become a way of life.

Nevertheless prophecy is still a recently recognized gift. Many are still seeking for directions. Mature believers will know that prophetic words must be edited and correctly presented before they are spewed to the public or individual ears. This is because the effects of a prophetic word are almost uncontainable within the four walls of the church when it is released.

Unlike any gifting, mishandling of prophecy can lead to helter-skelter in House of the Lord. Foreseeing this potential danger, God has breed many trustable prophetic teachers and instructors with experiences. Chuck Pierce is just one of them ! His modular teachings in this book will put the fear of prophesying at bay and encourage the usage of this wonderful gift in the right approach.

The pattern of madness over the way prophecy is released is one of the reasons why this book is a must for beginners or those who have gifting skew towards the prophetic. So, include this book as your collection. It contains no-frills manual-like which readers will find assurance and confidence.

This book is clearly a political move made by Huey Long when he was aiming for the presidency. I found it interesting to discover about his life, and how he tried to show that he was just like everybody else.

Reading juvenile biographies of Franklin Pierce is rather depressing because we are talking about arguably the greatest failure ever to be elected to the Presidency. In this volume for the Our Presidents series author Steven Ferry tries to put the best face on things, calling the first chapter A Promising Start, but the other chapters make it clear the course of Pierce's life: Life in Politics, An Unhappy President, and A Sad Ending. In fact, young readers will discover that most of Pierce's adult life was a sad time. His wife, Jane, disapproved of his life in politics, all three of their sons died; the last in between Pierce's election and inaugural. Pierce served briefly in the U.S. Senate but gave up his seat to practice law in Concord, New Hampshire to please his wife. He turned down the post of Attorney General in the Polk Administration for similar reasons.

Young students reading this juvenile biography will wonder why it was that Pierce was ever nominated for the White House by the Democrats in the first place (actually it was about the 50th place once you counted all the Convention ballots it took). Although he served in the Mexican War, rising from private to brigadier soldier, he was not a war hero; at least, not in the same sense as General Winfield Scott, who was the Whig candidate in 1952. Pierce was selected because Southerners wanted someone who approved of slavery and Northerners appreciated the fact he had not made any enemies in politics, mainly because he had never done anything. However, this was not a good time to be in the White House and the story of Pierce's one time in office is that the slavery issue was threatening to tear the nation in two. His administration accomplished virtually nothing and his ideas for expanding the United States into Central America was rejected. When he sent federal troops to put down the abolitionist government established in "Bleeding Kansas," Democrats refused to re-nominate Pierce in 1956.

I am not sure why Pierce is considered a worse President than his successor, James Buchannan, who also did essentially nothing but put off the coming of the Civil War for a few more years. Ultimately, the personal tragedies of his family life overwhelm the story of his political career. Ferry provides a basic biography of Pierce and in the final analysis tries to focus on the fact he was an honest man who wanted to uphold the Constitution. However, the judgment of history is that Pierce was not able to solve the problem of slavery and probably made things worse.

This is a handsome look volume, filled with photographs and paintings, focusing on the life and times of Franklin Pierce. Each chapter has a sidebar and the fact that these are as likely to be devoted to topics in which Pierce was not involved, such as the attack by Representative Preston Brooks on Senator Charles Sumner in Congress, again speaks to Pierce as a political cipher. As always, the margins have all sorts of interesting facts, such as how the cabin in which Pierce was born is now underwater because a river was dammed to create a lake called Lake Franklin Pierce. This book provides basic biographical information about Pierce, but it is hard to come up with a really interesting book about a fairly uninteresting and extremely unhappy man.

The title is almost a misnomer - much of the book is concerned with the past and present of US banking law - but the book itself is powerful. Mr. Pierce traces the evolution of commercial banking law at the Federal level from the founding of the first Bank of the United States to the present day, and the changing nature of the banking industry with an eye towards proving the thesis that current law, still based largely around New Deal thinking, is both out of sync with the state of the industry and inefficient. Pierce argues consistently for allowing market forces to play a greater role in shaping the industry and for regulating types of financial activity rather than types of institutions. The writing is consistently clear enough for the layman to follow without being simplistic, and the author argues his case eloquently.