This is a review of Beavers and Hampson's clinical and research work. The very strong research background makes the clinical suggestions valid. The most impressive part of the book is that therapists can tailor their interventions based on the initial assessment of the family.

It is seldom you can find a book that articulates feelings so well. The author is most gifted in saying to me, and to some to whom I will give this book as presents, that balance in life is not optional, and that in practicing balance between work and leisure, one shortens the distance between Creator and creature. Robert Morneau's other book"The Gift" is equally as wonderful.

The collaborative effort of Ingrid and Dieter Schubert, There's Always Room For One More is a thoroughly lighthearted tale about a beaver who builds a boat - and then discovers that one animal friend after another wants to get on and ride down the river too! A gentle tale, warmly illustrated and charmingly told, children will find There's Always Room For One More to be a delightful picture book reading experience.

This is a delightful book about the problems a beaver has measuring a log to repair the dam on his pond. His friend, Bubba Bullfrog, offers him many non-standard measurements that would be appropriate to use. All prove to be a pain for Milo, in more ways than one!Bubba realizes he has a yardstick at home to prove he's correct. What a great way to help children learn about equivalent measure! I recommend it highly.

In the Navy, your "Sea Daddy" was an older, more experienced sailor who took you under his wing and looked out for you. Your Sea Daddy would pat you on the back or kick you in the butt as was necessary. The Sea Daddy often helped you chart your way through the rocks and shoals of Navy life with apocryphal tales of former shipmates faced with similar situations. Floyd Beaver is a Sea Daddy.

The Navy was and is a strict caste system. At the top of the heap were the Commissioned Officers. They were the knights of the castle. In the middle of the heap were the Chief Petty Officers. They were the castle yeomen: stout retainers who had risen through the ranks by strict adherence to the holy book of Navy Regulations. At the bottom of the heap were the White Hats; so called because of the distinctive white "Dixie Cup" hats. These White Hats are the heroes in this book. These White Hats were well aware of their station in life. However, rather than relegating them to subservience; they were in fact freed to use their intelligence on having a good time in general and getting over on the Navy whenever possible.

Floyd Beaver tells the struggles and trials that sailors have faced throughout history. He writes of aloof officers, lousy duty details, constant inspections, and the free spending, drunken liberties in the seedy Navy ports of call. His stories are at once funny and painfully poignant. He writes of the enlisted sailor: the Goat Head, the Swabbie, the Deck Ape, and the Skivvie Waver. If you are looking for battle strategies and the élan of war at sea, this is NOT your book. However, if you want to know what it feels like to be in Navy whites on the signal bridge of a cruiser, or drinking in a sailor bar, or one step ahead of the Shore Patrol ducking out the window of a fleet cathouse, then White Hats is the book you have been looking for.

It's ok, good pictures, but.....there is a better book out there and it's half the price. This is not a complete book of it but a good base to start for information.

I though the pictures in this book were outstanding. The text that goes with them is somewhat brief however, and I would not recomend this particular book unless you have a solid base knowledge of SS Uniforms in general. It expects you to know the basics. But if you are farmiliar with SS Uniforms, then by all means this is a highly recomended addition to your collection.

If you love this stuff, this book is a must.

Maury!

Blondidog@hotmail.com

Arthur Gordon Pym was a young man who had dreams of great adventure. He defied his family and stowed away on board a whaling ship. Doing this lead him into all sorts of exciting adventures. He confronted things like mutiny, near starvation, and altercations with different cultures.

I'd have to say that this story is "classic Poe". If you are a fan of Poe's short stories, you'll definitely like this book. I only had a few problems with the story. There were times that the story dragged, but this is far outweighed by the times that the story was very exciting, and I couldn't put the book down. I won't go into the ending, but it left me unsettled.

I found that the explanatory notes were very helpful. I'm not a great scholar on any level, nor will I ever claim to be. The explanatory notes were very simple to understand, and it helped me understand portions of the story that caused confusion, particularly the end.

This story, Poe's only novel, is an endurance test for both reader and characters. I believe it was originally serialized, and reads like a collection of incidents rather than a complete story. However, it is a captivating tale, astounding in it's detail and casual horror. Arthur Gordon Pym was born under an unlucky star. He survives in the most inconceivable circumstances, from a drifting, overturned hulk to the frozen waters of the Antarctic. Each page turned piles more horror in his path, described with a growing clinical distance. Pym himself becomes more desensitized to each incident, until he views the irrational with a casual curiosity. The language is beautifully detailed, and some feel this story is the inspiration for "Moby Dick."

Altogether, a delightfully disturbing story. One of the best I have read.

I haven't yet ruled out the possibility that I'm simply an oddball, but I assume every boy goes through a sort of Poe mania at some stage, at least I did. In fact, I got so bad around 5th grade that, having torn through the stories and poems, I was even reading biographies about him. But somehow, even with all of that, I think I had missed this longer work. I'm sorry I did, because while this wildly overstuffed adventure is enjoyable now, I would have really loved it as a kid.

When Arthur Gordon Pym stows away on a whaling ship, he little dreams that he'll encounter tyranny, mutiny, biblical storms, cannibalism, shipwreck...and Poe's just getting warmed up.

I've read that he cobbled together this semi-novel from several shorter pieces he'd written. It has a somewhat uneven feel to it; episodic, even disjointed. And as the episodes are piled one on top of the other it becomes a tad much. But it is always fun, often thrilling, and the mayhem that lurks on the surface guards layer upon layer of allegory and allusion. As you read you find yourself saying, "Hey, Melville borrowed that scene and Jack London got that idea here and Lovecraft cadged this plot..." If you have any doubts about how influential a literary figure Edgar Allan Poe was, this melodramatic masterpiece will put them to rest. More importantly, you'll thoroughly enjoy yourself.

GRADE: A-

This book starts out innocent enough. Toby and his friend Cal find out that the fattest boy in the world has come to Antler, a slow moving town in the middle of Texas. So, they decide to go see them. And when they see him, Cal becomes obsessed with the boy. So starts out this books. Although many other things happen throughout the story, Toby and Cal's friendship with Zachary remains the main topic.

Toby has a lot happen to him, as this is one of those "Summer Of" books where your supposed to remember it as the greatest summer of your life. Holt did a great job telling the story to this one.

One problem I did have though, was its thing with religion. At a point, I began to think this was a religious book of sorts. It pushes a huge emphasis on baptism at one point, which I did not like.

Whats amazing is that this book is meant for Readers ages 9 to 12. I'm 16, and I seriously doubt the average 11 year old to read this book.

When Zachary Beaver Came To Town is a good book, and well worth reading, but I don't think it's one that deserved an award. And [it] definately should be directed towards an older age.

Life with Zachary Beaver
By: Kimberly Willis Holt

When Zachary Beaver Came to Town is about a fat 15- year old, Zachary Beaver coming to town. People visit him from all over the world. Zachary Beaver lives in a trailer with an assistant to help him.
Toby lived in Antler, which is a town that never has exciting until Zachary Beaver came. Toby?s mom went to Nashville to be in a contest for country music. Toby?s best friend?s brother went of to Vietnam to fight in the war. Until Zachary Beaver came to town Toby has lots of things planed for summer. Zachary was a mad, mean, angry person. He never went anywhere because he was to embarrass to be seen with anyone. Toby helped him by taking him food and going to a movie. Zachary tells Toby and Cal, who is Toby?s best friend, that he visited Florida and other places exciting but really happened is he was just looking at books to think that he did.
I liked this book because again it talked about friendship, love, caring, and responsibility. Toby did that he helped Zachary out and Zachary appreciated that.
I think there are lots and lots of books that talk about friendship and caring. Hope was Here is a book that was an adventure of two sisters developing friendship.
I really enjoyed this book a lot. I recommend it to anyone.

When Zachary Beavercame to Town, by kimderly Willis holt, is a story about one kid that will change the life of two friends forever. it takes place in a small town called Antler,Texas during the Vietnom War. There are a few main characters in the story named Zachary Beaver, Tobais(Toby), Calvin(Cal), and Ferris. Toby and Cal are best friends and have been since they met. Ferris works at the Bowl O Rama and Zachary and his manager,Paulie Rankin, drive into Antler. Zachary is a verry fat kid and is part of a freak show.

Toby and Cal, at first, are mean and make fun of Zachary, like everyone else. But once they got to know him, they learned what was making him act the way he does. He does this because his mother died and is embarresed about being fat. Toby and Cal both experience what it is like for someone you love to die or leave you in some way. This makes them feel terrible about friendship and getting to know someone before you judge them. It is one of those books when a stranger, Zachary in this case, comes into a towm, city, or courntry and makes everlasting memories.

Jackie tells her story of brokenness to receiving God's grace in a genuine, heartfelt way. Everyone can identify with her struggles, internal and external, and how God used these trials to bring Jackie to a greater knowledge of God's faithfulness. She continues to pour herself out to others, impacting the world for Christ.

This book is a testimony to God's grace and redeeming love, and to Jackie Beavers' faith and courage. She is a remarkable woman of God, Christian mother, and successful business woman. This book is beautifully and movingly written. Her labor of love, it gives inspirational insights into how God can lift up a faithful believer like Jackie from the depths of despair.

Jackie Beaver's new book Pour for More is a great testimony to the perseverance of a single mom in the face of almost insurmountable obstacles. It is also a book that will give both men and women a reason to hope in the future because we have a God who sees and who cares and who is powerful enough to change our circumstances. In the process, he will heal and change us, just as he did for Jackie. This is a must read for single moms, and anyone going through hardship, struggles or pain.

If you are an English teacher who is looking for a good punishment for their students, I highly recommend that you assign them 'Billy Budd.'

Not only is this book extremly hard to understand, it's theme is also quite depressing... it's your basic everyday, good vs. evil, but in this book: Evil conquers all.

Save your time.. don't read this book....

Though this fine collection contains the justly famous work, Billy Budd, and the amazing story of Bartleby, I would like to focus on Benito Cereno. This story is less well-known than these others, but it is equally great. And I want to focus on it also because I noticed a review here that stated that this story reveals that Melville was indifferent to the horror of slavery. It is difficult for me to read such a view without distress. This is not only not true, but nothing could be further from the truth. A more compassionate and profound commentary on slavery and on human blindness has never been written and never will be. Please consider my view of this story:
First of all consider the seeming irony of the title, Benito Cereno. In the story itself all the direct focus is on Captain Amasa Delano. He is seen here endlessly as the embodiment of large-minded nobility and generosity. He seems to be the real hero of the story, (just as Babo, the negro who master-minds the mutiny, seems to be a stereotypical villain). But the story is not called, Amasa Delano, it is called, Benito Cereno. Why? Because the ultimate subject here is what happens inside Benito Cereno. The surface focus on Delano is a distracting screen that Melville deliberately and carefully constructs. Melville allows this screen to distract us because the type of 'decency' that Delano represents in real life is exactly what allows people who consider themselves 'civilized' and basically 'good' to be blind and distracted from the real horror of slavery or any other evil. Please recall that Delano " took to negroes, not philanthropically, buy genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs." And consider the scene where Babo is shaving Captain Cereno. Delano thinks he is watching an agreeable but basically simple-minded negro doing a job that perfectly suits his one-dimensional, inferior being. And in reality we are watching a charade devised by Babo's brain, a "hive of subtlety" that has Delano fooled. When Delano notices that Babo has used the Spanish flag as a barber towell to cover Cereno, he comments on it in a forgiving, playful way and Babo laughs and plays the clown, but in fact it is a revelation of how painfully aware Babo really is. Delano can not quite see the truth about anything. All of his confusion and uncertainty throughout most of the story, and the vaporous mists of the sea-scape, are meant by Melville to be reflective of Delano's deeper blindness. Delano has one moment in the story where he almost sees reality and says, "Ah, this slavery breeds ugly passions in man...," but he slips back again into his smug blindness. And his certainty and cheerfulness at the end of the story are part of this blindness. No, he is not the hero of this story. The real hero is the feeling/consciousness that rises in the heart of Benito Cereno. Delano thinks, and the reader may think with him, that what afflicts and almost paralyzes Cereno through most of the story is that he is simply afraid that if he makes the wrong move then Delano will be killed. But this is only a fraction of what really afflicts Cereno. Cereno, through his experience with Babo, sees the truth about slavery and he can never be blind again. Look at the last part of the story: After the mutiny has been crushed and the negroes are brought to 'justice' and Delano is then out of danger Cereno is still buried in shadow and pain.
Why? Please read very carefully the last conversation between Delano and Cereno here. Cereno explains so movingly how Delano is blind, but Delano still does not see. Delano asks why he, Cereno, is so melancholy. Cereno answers simply,"The negro." At the trial Cereno refuses to identify Babo and faints when he is forced to look at him. Three months later Cereno dies of inner pain and darkness in a monastery. The monastery is on Mount Agonia. Agonia gives us the English word, agony, and in Greek in means a wrestling contest. Here the struggle is between tuth and falsehood. Crereno dies in the struggle, but he dies on the right side. This is why the story is called Benito Cereno.

Authors really have a hard time avoiding the fact their stories nearly always mirror their most closely guarded personal concerns. But the writers who care deepest about the messages they're sending are usually the hardest hit. "Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories"--a Penguin Classic pairing of both well-known and comparatively obscure short stories by America's ultimate "writer's writer"--details the immense artistry, messianic eccentricity and wounded vanity of a deeply troubled man who toiled--unsung, ridiculed--long before his time ever could have come.

This particular collection, refracted as it is by a heartfelt introduction by contemporary American author Frederick Busch, highlights both author and character in alienated reserve in the well-known "Bartleby, Scrivener"; exhibits the writer's knowing infatuation with the great satires of Swift and allegories of Milton in "The Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids" and "The Encantadas"; his obsession with the interplay of virtue and pragmatism in "Billy Budd, Sailor"; and reveals even prophetic intonations in a story about race, "Benito Cereno." Some seem little more than amusing studies, but even the least in this collection testifies to Melville's eternal ability to astonish and take your breath clean out of your body. Indeed, Melville's shorter work reveals just how far he was from the day's critical appraisal of him as an unsuccessful writer of mere adventures that simply didn't fit the bill.

"I would prefer not to," Bartleby, a lawyer's scrivener who ostensibly is hired to copy--by hand--the long-winded motions, quotidian depositions and byzantine judgments that pass through a New York corporate law office, tells his employer when he's needed to fill his role as a drafthorse of a copyist. While he's otherwise a model employee--nearly perfect handwriting, implacably accurate, always on time, never blotches the page, devoid of the scurrilous habits of his two oddball coworkers--Bartleby nevertheless stands out like a mythical portrait of Thoreau, cast upon the 19th Century urban business world, a conscientious objector, civil disobedient, a taciturn young man who, for unknown reasons, has chosen to literally step out of this world without leaving the office. Regardless of his employer's kindhearted attempts to convince Bartleby to "get with the program," Bartleby's unspoken show of both defiance and questionable sanity should tell us that, even then, individual sovereignty was being held hostage at the office.

This archetypically American conflict between ideals of freedom and practicalities of work--one more fully covered by the likes of Europeans such as Kafka, Sartre and Beckett, perhaps due to American considerations of "market forces"--is pallid in comparison to an epic tale of piracy and mutiny told in "Benito Cereno." An encounter in the South Seas between an American clipper and a wayward, sail-shorn Spanish slave galley--ostensibly a story of rescue--in the end turns into a timeless assessment of pan-Atlantic political and cultural affairs, and of the hypocricy of a young democracy's dependence on the slave trade. The ancient Mediterranian powers--Spain and the Catholic Church (itself a subject of widespread controversy in Melville's America...)--serving as puppets for those in the Third World who are determined to choose death before they lose their liberty in the service of commercial interests...well, imagine that! Did Melville ever feel himself a slave to the interests of literary commerce? Could he have been speculating on the ultimate fate of one of those Old World entanglements the nation midway through its first century obsessed over?

Like many American transcendentalists of the day, literary executors who found the world upon a doorstep, Melville's writing often takes a turn to the avant-garde as he stretches his themes--and the constraints of realism--to embrace much broader themes, many of them pitting Enlightenment bred values with Christian-borne systems from the decaying Old World of European monarchism. Nowhere in this collection is this more evident than in the gentle delight, "The Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids"--a short dyptich that pairs (and obliquely seems to betray some of the secrets of) a masonic men's club with the unmentioned women in their orbit. According to Melville, it's high time the democracy criticizes--rather than continue to play along with--the suffocating heirarcy in which man's role is to have a breezy go at enjoying obscure rituals rich with wine--while women supply the paper upon which to write.

Although Melville, like most great writers, was a real stickler when it came to asking his world to live up to its own standards and ideals, readers can get whatever they put into relating to his stories. "Billy Budd," for example, is one of America's finest adventure tales. You can leave it at that, too. Beyond that, Melville asks if it is even possible to believe that the virtues of character can protect a man from those whose main conceit stems from an underhanded contempt of those very virtues. Even though this era's preoccupation with the barest of bones of very real values that underpinned Melville's times is usually uncultivated and malinformed, the ridiculous paces through which we take our own cultural values do not in any way detract from two important messages about Melville's life and times to remember: first, Melville seems to remember for us far more effectively--and more subtly, too--than many of today's more high-profile commentators; and second, Melville was, more than anything, a victim of the failure of those very values. Had those values been real--even in the mid-19th Century--Melville would doubtless have been recognized as the genius we rever today.