During the past two years,I have often gone back to this book for support and suggestions. As a new director, I have found many helpful ideas for training and handling staff. One of the best suggestions was the reading of children's books at staff meetings. I have read these books or had staff read them. I often wish that there was a longer list of appropriate books to read to staff. At this time,I need to refer again to the community and parent relationships sections. It is an excellent book for new directors and experienced directors that are ready for the challenge of taking on new ideas. When starting my first year as director, my staff created a mission/vision statement for our preschool. We spent 2 days sharing our memories of childhood and our expectations and philosophies of early childhood education before we finalized this statement. A year later we reviewed it, which we will do annually. Thank you to these authors for this wonderful first step that helped to pull my staff together, something we all constantly and continually strive to do.

I am sure that when most people read these astounding adventures of Prince Zarkon, that they see the ghost of Robeson's Doc Savage moving through the pages. (Though to me Zarkon seems a more original, believable character than Doc Savage.) But when I read Volcano Ogre (note to Amazon.com - I believe the word in the title is "Ogre" not "Orge"!) I think back to those great Scooby Doo cartoons I used to watch as a kid. Scooby and the gang were always battling some villan who was masquerading as a mysterious monster. Volcano Ogre has the same feel, though of course Lin Carter's novel has a lot more depth than a 1 hour cartoon. Doc Menlo is like the brainy Valerie, only more so; and Scorchy can be likened to Shaggy. Of course, no cartoon character compares to the towering literary figure which is Prince Zarkon. I guess you've got to read this book - and I highly recommend it - to appreciate what Lin Carter has crafted here.

I recently moved to D.C. Being unfamiliar with the area, it helped me find some great running routes. A must have for anyone living in or around Washington D.C.

This is wonderful book for the beginner and intermidiate philosophers

This is a book beautifully illustrated by the author covering all the seasons of the year with space for your guests to make comments or simply to sign their names. Excellent for a house warming gift or wedding gift or just a thank you for your hospitality.

My father bought it on Amazon.com and when it arrived, I was so excited! It came with a poster so you could write down the time and the other info. The kit also included six play scripts, a production guide That included a "make-your-own program" on the back cover, and 20 tickets. The play was about a bored girl who went out with her puppy and they meet an alien director who wants to film a movie about earth. They go many places and the girl realizes that its not so boring on a Saturday.

"What's in the Cave" is a very good book. It has really cool and creative artistic work. For example, it has a lot of nice bright colors and the pictures pop out. The book's about a trip to a mysterious cave looking at a variety of animals such as a bat, a bird, and even more. There is even a suprise at the end of the book that you would never expect. I'm not going to tell you though because you'll just have to go to the local library. The book is very simple but it is a lot of fun to read.

This book focuses on a neglected chapter of reconstrution, the period of "presidential recontruction" which preceded "congressional" or "radical recontruction." Carter gives a detailed picture based almost entirely on primary sources of the south immediately after the civil war and the hosts of dilemmas that confront both the region and the nation as a whole. In the process, Carter gives the most sympathetic picture of southern conservatives who lead reconstruction efforts since the school of Dunning, perhaps since Dunning himself. In contrast to the characterization of them being unreconstructed rebels, Carter illustrates that while many of them were confederates, most were reluctant confederates who either opposed secession until after the election of Lincoln or until their states seceded. (Contrary to unionist myth making at the time, the bulk of white southerners were not "straight-sect" unionists, oppressed by a miniscule "slavocracy." After war's end there was just not enough of them to reestablish elected government.)

Indeed this book it almost a companion piece to Croft's RELUCTANT CONFEDERATES, as most of these "conservatives" were old whigs and constitutional unionist, just as Croft's subjects, who were conscious of the south's backwardness before the war and dreamed of south with manufacturing, infrastructure, diversified agriculture, and public education. To all advocates of the "failure of southern leadership" to explain everything that's gone wrong with the region since antebellum, Carter makes a compelling case, that these were the best, most far sighted men the south could have chosen.

But in Carter's book, this is almost to damn them with faint praise for as a group they are blinkered by notions of negro inequality, "the sanctity of debt", and a positive horror of confiscation. As the south refuses to be suitably "penitent" for their past sins of slavery and secession as well as enacting "black codes" that, at best, make freedmen "wards of the state" and less than truly free, the north becomes more open-ended in their demands for re-admission to the union. Carter's "old whigs" end up being overcome, as "reasonable, moderate" men often do, by inexorable events, losing support in the south *and* the north.

Along the way Carter illustrates the collapse of social order, familiar to any observer of South Africa after aparthied or Russia after communism, interracial conflict, especially fears of an black insurrection to confiscate land, the debate over "wartime debts," strangely pertinent today with the issue of "third world debt," not to mention the difficult (and not wholly successful) transition from slave labor to free labor, which ultimately results in the tenant/sharecropping system. In sum this book presents what Barabara Tuchman would call "a distant mirror", not with contemporary U.S. but the *world* at the turn of the millenium.

Carter writes excellently and as mentioned above depends heavily on primary materials. This does however bias the books perceptions toward the perceptions of conservatives, the "mobs" of white southerns demanding debt relief or the unionist who rather liked the idea of confiscation of plantation lands, have little or no voice in the debate. (They left little in the way of personal letters or published opinion, and even less that found its way into a university collection.) Hence in his conclusion, Carter glumly writes that while their were options "not all things were possible." Without a doubt, but by seeing things through elite southerners eyes, Carter seems to limit the range of possibilities to what was acceptable to *them.*

Perhaps, political theorists and historians expect too much from leaders. Perhaps at this time the wisest course was one, unthinkable to the old "whigs" but endorsed by a nameless north GA farmer after reconstruction. "We could've tuk the land. Split it. Gi'n some to the [freedmen], 'n' some to me 'n' t'other union fellers." (Quoted in McMath's AMERICAN POPULISM)

A program of debt relief, land re-distribution (to whites and blacks alike), public education, and federal investment in infrastructure (like that promised by the Hayes administration as part of the compromise of 1877, but never enacted) would have gone a long way to both "binding up the wounds" *and* guaranteeing equal rights for african americans. But that's hindsight speaking...

I only recently discovered Stephen Kirkpatrick's work at his Wilder Mississippi exibit at the Natural Science Museum in Jackson, MS. The exibit was breathtaking! Stephen Kirkpatrick has spent hours in the wilderness, swamps, creeks, woods of Mississippi capturing wildlife up close and in a way that I have never been able to experience in all my 36 years in the Mississippi outdoors. This book is bound to become a classic coffee table book for ALL nature enthusiast, not just Mississippians. Breathtaking photography!

I bought this book last week and it's about my 10th guide to wildflowers. It's a really spendid guide in three respects at least. First the photographs are wonderful. Ms. Carter is a first-class photographer. Second, the guide fits in your pocket, something no other guides do. Third, it doesn't bog you down in lots of details that are not important in the field. Once you have identified a plant, you can enter the name, or Latin name into a Web search engine such as Google and find out more than any guide could possible cover anyway. It has lots of little embellishments that show the author is also a good publisher (this isn't from an international conglomerate, but from her own publishing company). Flowers are organized by color, and flower size is emphasized so you don't think that 2-inch color blossom in the book is different from the 1/4-inch flower in the field. It's a great little guide and is useful throughout the NorthEast because we share the same wildflowers.