The time invested in set-up and collecting materials for lessons from this text is well spent. The lessons are clearly presented, appropriate, and engaging, with many extension ideas included. The lessons were effective in primary and are adaptable for intermediate. To quote a friend who passed the lessons on to me: "There isn't a dud lesson in the book." She is right! Nicely done, J. Kopp!

This book is an invaluable tome of cross-referenced historical information covering every aspect of Superman's origin, his history, countless other characters in the mythos (including his friends, enemies, and lovers), and the mythology of Krypton. It is a labor of love and deserves to be in print.

This is one of my all-time favorite books! It is about Amy, a 6th grade girl who is pushed into being a member of the "Save the Earth Club" by her best friend Lindsay. Amy is very shy, and she refuses to do some of the things Lindsay wants her to. This causes a rift in their friendship, but eventually they put their differences aside. This book will really make you want to get out there and help save the earth. It isn't preachy, though, because of the way it succeeds in putting humor in throughout the book. Amy's way of facing her fears and helping the earth will inspire you. I give it two thumbs up!

When I sent copies of this book to members of my family and some friends, their reactions were all the same: "It sure is big!" That's true. Henry Halleck's War is more than 700 pages long; it uses roughly 250,000 words; its 20 chapters contain close to 1,800 source citations -- what we used to call footnotes; and it weighs three pounds, six and a half ounces. Why is it so big? A great many pages are devoted to messages, letters, and reports General Halleck wrote during the war. They show that his contributions to the Union's successful war effort were both numerous and valuable -- and that critics such as Gideon Welles were wrong. It was Welles who said, "Halleck originates nothing, anticipates nothing, takes no responsibility, plans nothing, suggests nothing, is good for nothing." Hardly anyone ever said anything good about Halleck during his lifetime. His friend Cump Sherman urged him to defend himself, to fight back. General Halleck refused. He was willing to be judged by what was in the records. In them, he told Cump, some future historian would find the truth about him and what he did. But during the past hundred years, too few scholars have bothered to go through the 128 thick volumes of the Official Records, flip through crumbling pages until they found the documents that involved General Halleck, and study them. As a result, just about everyone has agreed with Welles that Henry Halleck was a disaster. However, recently Guild Press of Indiana put the entire wall of books called the Official Records on a single wafer-thin CD-ROM. That made it possible for me to do what General Halleck trusted someone would do -- study his record. But I've gone beyond that. The messages, letters, and reports included in this book enable readers to judge Halleck for themselves -- which, I think, is what he hoped would happen. In the course of selecting all these materials and providing enough narrative to place them in historical context, several things surprised me. First, the requirements of the job of general-in-chief were very different from what Halleck's critics assumed. No one knew what a general-in-chief was supposed to do. No valid precedent or standards for judging his performance existed. Even so, ignorance didn't stop anyone from declaring General-in-Chief Halleck a failure. Second, his relationship to Abraham Lincoln had a special aspect that has been completely overlooked. Both men were lawyers: Lincoln in central Illinois, Old Brains out in San Francisco -- indeed, he was the respected senior partner of California's leading law firm. Accordingly, Halleck's performance ought to be judged as that of a special counsel retained to help Lincoln prosecute Union versus Confederacy -- a case that was being tried on battlefields from eastern Virginia to New Mexico. In everything General Halleck wrote you will find precision of thought and expression reflecting his expertise both in military art and in the ability to reduce complex questions to basic principles -- and then to apply them. These were skills that Lincoln needed desperately. Some observers have hailed him as a military genius -- but if you read closely some of the documents he signed, you will see how dependent he actually was on special counsel Halleck. Third, this book also contains messages and letters to Halleck from Don Carlos Buell, George McClellan, William Rosecrans, Cump Sherman, Ulysses Grant, and many other generals. I was surprised by how much they revealed about themselves in what they wrote Halleck. I had never known enough about General Buell, for example, to have an opinion about him. But from the messages he sent Old Brains, I learned why he was such a disappointment. Same regarding McClellan -- the "Young Napoleon." If you doubt that he was a spoiled brat, just read his messages to his wife and to General Halleck. My fourth surprise was that I could compress the quarter of a million words in this book into a single simple sentence: General Halleck didn't win the war, but clearly he kept Abraham Lincoln from losing it. Lincoln was completely unprepared to be Commander- in-Chief, and initially he made some dreadful mistakes. That stopped in mid-1862 when he sent a peremptory order to Halleck to come to Washington. Halleck saved the Union capital by moving McClellan's Army of the Potomac northward to help John Pope. He saved Grant when Lincoln secretly gave command of the Vicksburg operation to a political general already notorious for incompetence. But Halleck couldn't always save Lincoln from blundering. Behind Halleck's back, Lincoln gave command of the Army of the Potomac to "Fighting Joe" Hooker -- with General Lee's brilliant victory at Chancellorsville as a humiliating result. Ordinarily, however, Old Brains and the President reached a meeting of the minds. Both men, being lawyers, placed great weight on principles. Halleck was driven by a high sense of duty and of honor and of love of country. But he was also an expert on the principles of military art, and he enforced them. He told Lincoln and later Grant, You cannot, you dare not try to control a battle from a desk hundreds or thousands of miles from the killing site. "I hold," Old Brains declared, "that a general in command of an army in the field is the best judge of existing conditions."

That was the Halleck Doctrine. It was turned on its head recently during military operations in the Balkans directed from the White House. Reputations, Professor Walter McDougall has written, are the only things over which historians have control. Historians destroyed Henry Halleck's reputation. It's time to give some of his good name back to him.

Number twelve in a distinguished, and, multivolume effort by Dr. Gary Moulton, The University of Nebraska, The "Herbarium" volume of "The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition" is the most comprehensive, edited botanical reference of the known plant specimens of the Corps of Discovery, 1803-1806.

As an impressive culmination to the Journals, the herbarium collection finalizes the extensive botanical scholarship contained in the notes produced by Dr. Moulton in the previous eleven volumes, published periodically over the past twenty years. The product of extensive research into the known world repositories of the extent plant specimens, this volume contains only one known error in terms of inclusion of a plant specimen that cannot be attributed to the expedition's collection. This one specimen at the Charleston Museum has been discounted since publication.

Nevertheless, this volume contains relatively high-quality image reproductions of the known 238 specimens in the Lewis and Clark Herbarium, in addition to a clear introduction to the history of the Herbarium collection and the scholarship behind its most recent publication. 227 specimens are currently housed in the Academy of Natural Science in Philadelphia, and the remaining 11 are housed in the Kew Gardens, London. Of this list, 177 are distinct, individual specimens.

In the future, it is more than likely, despite this exhaustive effort on the part of Moulton, that a few new specimens will emerge from the depths of the American Philosophical Society, The Academy of Natural Sciences, and Kew.

Until such a time, this volume is an absolute necessity for anyone seriously interested in understanding the natural history ramifications of the expedition, the study of Lewis and Clark, and, for that matter, America's landscape legacy. One wonders how many more specimens would have been added to this collection if Lewis' early collections for the lower-Missouri had not been lost to decay during the expedition itself.

"Volume 12, Herbarium of the Lewis and Clark Expedition," Gary E. Moulton, Editor, The University of Nebraska Press, completes a fantastic series and must be added to complete one's collection of the first eleven volumes of the truly great American literary epic.

The only wish of this author would be the publication of high-resolution, color digital images of the Herbarium on CD or DVD, as a compendium to this volume. Perhaps in this way, we could all experience more clearly the wonder of viewing this most valuable treasure.

Dr. Gary Moulton should be congratulated for a job very well-done.

Alex Philp The University of Montana

In the preface to his "Life of Lincoln", William Herndon expounded that when writing the history of Lincoln's early life "the whole truth concerning him should be known" and there should be "nothing colored or suppressed." Having set the standard Herndon failed to follow it, for there were something's even Herndon must have felt should not be put into print. Scholars wishing to explore Lincoln's early life beyond the insights offered by Herndon's biography had to turn to examining the letters and notes collected for over a twenty year period by himself and his collaborator Jesse Weik. This often proved to be a daunting task. As the editor's in their introduction noted even though available on Micro roll film specific documents are "very hard to locate" and even if located are "very hard to read." To further complicate matters the index to the Herndon collection prepared by the Library of Congress is "neither accurate nor complete." What Editors Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis have done in their "Herndon's Informants" is to transcribe all of the known Herndon, Weik letters and notes into a readable and properly indexed Documentary Edition. What they have also done is create a masterpiece of scholarship that will be used by students of Lincoln for decades to come. "Herndon's Informants" offers the student the complete Herndon collection, unabridged and un-editorialized. To anyone who has a strong interest in learning more about Lincoln's early life this is just about all that is available and it simply must become a part of your personal library.

The cover of this tenth volume in The Drama of American History series by Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier is a bit deceptive. First, the title "Hispanic America, Texas, and the Mexican War: 1835-1850" really covers only the first two-thirds of the book. The final third deals with the settling of California and the political situation under which it was admitted to the Union. Second, the cover illustration shows how the Indians of the Great Plains built a culture around horses after acquiring them from the Spanish, an interesting fact but really but a footnote given the focus of this particular volume.

The period 1835-1850 begins with the establishment of Texan Independence and the Missouri Compromise. However, the first two chapters of the book go back much farther. (1) The Coming of the Europeans to the Southwest deals with the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Central America, and South America, albeit in abbreviated form. This chapter provides a southwestern counterpart to earlier volumes in the series devoted to the settlement of Virginia ("The Paradox of Jamestown") and New England ("Pilgrims and Puritans"). (2) The Creation of the Southwest Hispanic Culture, looks at the mixing of Spanish and Indian cultures and take the reader up to the siege of the Alamo and the Battle of San Jancinto. The key chapter in the book covers the concept of (3) Manifest Destiny, which becomes the justification for expanding America from the Mississippi river west to the Pacific. Within that context the first major acquisition of land results from (4) The War with Mexico, which offers one of the better explanations of the war's campaigns that I have seen in a juvenile history book. (5) California, Here I Come actually looks at the history of the west coast up to the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill. Similarly, (6) California Compromise deals with the whole western migration, covering not only the 49ers but also the Mormon trek to Utah.

Reading this volume I recalled the idea that when the United States won the Mexican War it basically took all of the "best" parts of Mexico. This made me wonder if America would have taken a similar approach if it had succeeded in conquering Canada: i.e., just take the southern parts and leave the frozen wastelands alone. Just a passing curiosity. Anyhow, I am really appreciative of the approach taken in this series, of focusing on the "core content" rather than a deluge of names and dates. This book is quite representative of what the Colliers are doing in this series, providing a historical context for key parts of American history that have resulted in the country we live in today. The book is illustrated with historic illustrations, including early photographs and political cartoons, all of which are presented with detailed captions making them more footnotes to the main text than mere pictures.

The perfect picture book biography about Lincoln. With bold, colorful illustrations the illustrator allows the author to cover dicey parts of Lincoln's story (ie., assassination) by portraying the subjects with folk-style looking characters. For example the scene where Lincoln is shot is appropriate for young kids to look at as it is not graphic nor bloody. Somehow, it works and allows for a discussion about how Lincoln died and why he died.Outstanding effort! Plus the book is bigger than average picture books!

I am a Springfield, Illinois native and can tell you that these recipes are well known in the Springfield area. The recipes in this book are very very good.

Some of my favorites include.....Lemon Shake-Ups as seen at the Illinois State Fair, Steak Diane as served at Baur's On the Green, Funnel Cakes And the all time Springfield favorite... HORSESHOES... if you don't know what this is I urge you to buy the book for that recipe alone! You will love it!