Chicken Socks is a great resource for stimulating the love of poetry for children of all ages. Children can relate to the books sense of humor- as well as understand that not all poetry must be sentimental, serious, or complicated. I use it in my classroom, and the kids eat it up!

General Bruce Cooper Clark met with us at our reunion in Knoxville, TN in 1974. Of course he had his book for sale and autographed it for all who purchased it. He was highly complimentary of the job that my unit the 275th AFABn did in defense of St. Vith. He was a graduate of the University of Tennessee. His book is very interesting and he says his armored tactics were designed for the Single wing Football formations that the University of TN made famous under General Neyland their long time football coach.

Although no photographs by Ellis are provided, this book is helpful for therapists who are familiar with RET or at least cognitive therapy. It touches on many therapeutic topics, basically providing the handful of irrational beliefs that are likely to be encountered in each problem area. Of course, these are always variants on basic irrational beliefs or faulty thinking, but the book is helpful guidance for eliciting and working to change these irrational beliefs. The range of topics is the real value in this book: super-romantic love/obsessive love/jealousy, divorce, healthy lifestyle, substance abuse, excessive religiously-based concern with sin and guilt, and death.

How would you explore a planet that was totally impossible to set foot on. This book gives you a perspective of how this could be done by the people that live there. The plot is conceivable. The characters, both human and otherwise are realistic, and the scientific basis for the situation they find themselves in is based on true physics. This book could have been written by Asimov. I think anyone that enjoys a fine fantasy that is plausible will enjoy this book.

Clough Williams Ellis was a peripheral figure in the world of the bright young things of the 1920s and 30s. A fashionable architect with a busy practice in London, he is best remembered as the designer of the extraordinary folly village of Portmeirion in North Wales, later to be the location of the TV series "The Prisoner". Jonah Jones, a Welsh sculptor, worked with Clough on Portmeirion and in this entertaining biography he describes Clough's life and work, not only at Portmeirion but as far afield as China, with revealing insights into his working methods - which even in old age were decidedly hands-on, hand-gilding the finial of one of his most elaborate creations from a rickety ladder at the age of 75, dressed in his unvarying costume of yellow waistcoat and knee-breeches. Clough's buildings always manage to charm, and so does this book.

Carol Simon is born into a wealthy Jewish family who suffers total loss of their money and home in the Wall St. crash of 1929.Her father gives in to despair and suicides, leaving Carol with a lifelong horror of guns.Her selfish,uncaring mother emotionally blackmails her into a teenage wedding to a minor hoodlum who is gunned to death, leaving Carol, who was also shot, a widow while still a girl. She falls in with a group of stage struck young people with whom she bonds closely and also meets Sharon, who is to remain a lifelong friend.After a disastrous love affair with Mat, another of the group, Carol and Sharon spend a year in Paris where they study at the Sorbonne and Carol meets Seth, an aspiring writer whom she'd met briefly in New York.Carol is determined to become an architect despite the setbacks and put-downs she encounters along the way. She succeeds at this and the story continues with the ups and downs of Carol, Seth and the rest of their family.I found this to be one of those big comfy reads where I found myself totally involved with the characters and felt part of a family to the extent that I wanted to give some of them a good push(like you do with family) and tell them to get on with it and stop whining!

The author gives you a real feeling for the lives women emigrating from German speaking countries. It is very informative and quite a good reference. I found it somewhat difficult reading because of the numerous citations and language style.

Very good if you want to find out about the experiences of the German speaking immigrant woman.

"Theory," wrote philosopher George Santayana, "helps us to bear our ignorance of fact." Theory illuminates and instructs, it is a lens through which one may look forward while also reflecting on the past. Theory lets us comprehend rather than simply to apprehend.

In "Cultural Theory," Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis and the late Aaron Wildavsky have taken a measurable step forward in understanding sociocultural viability. They do not argue one or the other competiting views of culture--i.e., mental products (values, beliefs, norms, ideologies) vice the total way of life of a people. They focus on three areas: cultural biases, social relations, and ways of life. The result is a "grid-group" typology, which is at the heart of cultural theory.

"Group" refers to the extent to which an individual is incorporated into well defined units. "Grid" is the degree to which an individual's life is circumscribed by externally imposed perscriptions. These two dimensions of sociality are used to show the relationship between five "ways of life" of people: hierarchy (strong group/strong grid), egalitarianism (strong group/weak grid), individualism (weak group/weak grid), fatalism (weak group/strong grid), and autonomy (null group/null grid). The authors defend why these five ways of life are the only viable ones.

"The causal mechanism driving cultural theory's predictions of who will want what, when and why," the authors write, "is that as people organize so they will behave." It is the combination of the experience of well defined social units (group) and the pervasiveness of rules which relate one person to another on an ego-centered basis (grid) that leads people who organize themselves in one of the viable ways of life to seek the objectives they do.

"Cultural Theory" is not a quick read, nor should it be, and it is not a work that most people will want to tackle, much less to read and wax philosophic. But for those who are interested in human factors--the "soft factors" in military models and simulations, for example--"Cultural Theory" offers a portal of understanding that is indispensable to further analysis.

One possible application of cultural theory is to apply its constructs as a framework to understand the frictions and conflicts between different groups in troubled states--places where peacekeepers, the military and aid workers are likely to be sent, and where a checklist to help organize operations to mitigate, respond and recover from social disintegration would be helpful to senior leaders. Thus it is possible that cultural theory could provide a starting point for real world solutions to resolving conflict.

What part of the animal does the London Broil come from? Anyone who has been frustrated trying to decipher the marketing nomenclature of the meat industry will appreciate Merle's straightforward and frank explanations. Hailing from the U.S. heartland and practicing his trade in California, Merle shows himself to be a knowledgable butcher with a knack for writing in a conversational style. The writing is puncuated by clear line drawings of carcasses and cuts that aid the exposition, as well as other drawings that bring out the romance of meat. A few B/W photographs illustrate the difference between Prime and other US Grades of meat. I've looked for similar information in many other cookbooks without success. My only criticism is that the text does not refer directly to figures. Rather they are dropped on the page and one must guess which figure relates to what part of the text.