This book is a great resource for looking up baseball records. It contains sections with records on a team by team basis, regular season, all star game, divisional series, L.C.S., and world series. With this book you can go through the entire baseball season comparing how the achievements of the players this season compare to the all-time records. This book is very well organized, making it easy to find just the record you are looking for. I also find it enjoyable just thumbing through the book and finding some of the more interesting and obscure records I might not have found. This book also contains lists ranking the all-time best players in many different catagories which makes it easy to compare current players to the greats of the past. In summary , I would highly reccomend this to any baseball fan.

I have been a professional faux painter for over 5 years. This is the book I turn to when a client is looking for something unusual. The photos provide endless, timeless finishes and designs. I have spent countless hours poured over Mr. Carter's book and I always find a little something in the pictures that I can turn into a 'new' look. The current 'in-style' colors may change, but that is the beauty of paint! Change the colors and you have a new look. As I always say, the best ideas usually begin as someone else's!

This is an excellent resource book for children's worship. It has many ideas and activities. It follows the lectionary reading well, and that really helps in planning the service. It is just a GREAT resource.

CONAN THE SWORDSMAN, the latest reprint of the now legendary 1970s-1980s Conan revival, is a marvelous short story collection. Each story holds its own with the overall Conan mythos and most add depth to the celebrated character and his world. The delightful eight stories are well written with each tale co-authored by L. Sprague de Camp (had to be a Howard clone) with either Lin Carter or Bjorn Nyberg. Especially good is "Legions of the Dead" that Robert E. Howard would have believed he authored because it reads so much like his original works. Equally fascinating to readers is a seven-page essay that provides plenty of insight into Conan and his world as well as Robert E. Howard from the late L. Sprague de Camp's perspective. Fans of Conan will want to read this wonderful anthology that showcases one of fantasy's most endearing and enduring protagonists.

Harriet Klausner

It's been about nine years since Clarence Thomas was narrowly confirmed to sit on the Supreme Court, which makes it enough time to be able to reflect upon the passionate debate over whether he deserved the nomination/confirmation.

Not that Justice Thomas is the sole focus of this insightful book by Stephen Carter (a professor of law at Yale). Rather, Carter is interested in analyzing what has gone wrong with the nomination/confirmation process. His primary case studies include the rejection of Robert Bork for the Supreme Court and Lani Guinier for Deputy Attorney General (head of the Civil Rights Division), as well as the successful confirmations of Justice Thomas and Justice Thurgood Marshall (who Carter believes should have been confirmed easily, rather than subjected to ridiculous attacks by Southern senators).

In Carter's view, the central problem with the process is that candidates are presumed to be qualified, with the search on to root out disqualifying pasts. Thus, Zoe Baird, nominated for the Attorney General, was withdrawn when it turned out that she had a "nanny problem." Should she have been disqualified for that? According to Carter, maybe, maybe not. But the sequence and emphasis of questions is all wrong.

The process, he argues, should work something like this: (1) do not presume that the candidate is qualified; (2) if a potential disqualifying factor arises, determine how serious it is -- unqualified is uncurable, minor ethical lapse may be easily curable, and other matters in between.

Moreover, Carter's analysis is non-partisan. He aptly demonstrates that Guinier's candidacy went down in flames because her academic writing was grossly distorted (if even read) -- as was Bork's.

Finally, Carter is a clear and direct writer, and lay persons as well as those involved in law will find this a fascinating analysis of the nomination/confirmation process.

Connecticut Survival, part of The Survival Series, is a comprehensive guide to dealing with all of the bureaucratic stuff of life, yet it is concisely written. It has all the forms your teenager or young adult will have to fill out sooner or later -- registration to vote, job application, passport, tax forms, and more, so they can become familiar with them in advance. It also has good advice -- like how much money is safe to borrow or how to make a budget. It explains how to open a checking account and balance a check book! That's why I think every high school senior should have this book, or its companion books, New York Survival and California Survival. The books list lots of web sites that are useful for navigating life. I feel better knowing my college freshman can use this guide to help her manage her new independence.

This workbook is filled with beautiful pictures of container arrangements with step-by-step instructions for each. First, it has a full-page picture of the arrangement. On the opposite page, it'll describe the types of flowers used. Then there is a fold-out page with very clear diagrams and instructions on how to make the container itself (if you don't wanna buy one. Pretty easy stuff like paint and simply woodwork); and then how to arrange the plants inside.

I have several other garden books, including another container garden book, but this is much more "fun"! It's a great idea book even if you don't want to follow the instructions 100%. It shows huge arrangements (for small trees), as well as small ones (with pots of pansies). I'm getting more of these workbooks!

This is the nearest thing you'll ever get to an idiot's guide to corpus linguistics. It is a collection of papers which discusses everything it says on the label - corpus, concordance, collocation, and more. Corpora are now very much part of mainstream linguistics; this book opens the door to the 'uninitiated', explaining the fundamentals in the lucid prose that characterises all of Sinclair's writing. Although there have been many advances in the field since this book was first published (nearly a decade ago), the basic principles remain the same. If you've heard of corpus linguistics, but don't know what it is, then this is the book for you.

The book's clear instructions and color photographs are excellent. However, procedures used are extremely time-consuming and require a lot of hands-on work. Basically, they're industrial techniques adapted for home use. Entirely different from making cold process bar soaps. Even for experienced hot process soap makers, at least 3-4 hours are needed to complete the initial phase. In the recipes, you have to be comfortable with using solvents and thickeners. Neutralizing and sequestering agents too. pH control and preservatives can be significant issues as well. Aside from that, you won't find a better consumer-level book on this interesting subject. GREAT book!