this is an excellent intermediate deck. i really loved the designs and the vibrant colour. also, the meanings of each card are quite open to the reader's interpretation. (which as we all know, is quite important when the picture can differ from the meaning.) this is a great deck to advance to. and i consider it the "sequel" (hee hee) to the hanson roberts tarot deck. i highly reccomend both of them!

Times were that graphic novels were about intrepid crews battling evil intergalactic empires, or apprentice wizards going on quests to recover stolen artifacts, or bands of superheroes duking it out with Earth's greatest menaces.

Lately, a growing number of graphic novels are about fairly average people leading fairly average lives. In these collections, no one is pulling on a pair of Spandex tights to race off to battle crime, nor are the conflicts on an epic and history-changing scale. Often, there are no real plotlines as such, or at least, the narratives tend to center on such relatively prosaic crises as the loss of a job or the breakup of a relationship or estrangement from family.

This particular volume pulls together some of the issues of the now-defunct sorta-monthly series "Box Office Poison", which was about the lives of Sherman, his girlfriend Dorothy, his friend Jane and her lover Stephen, and his friend Ed and Ed's cartoonist boss Irving Flavor. Sherman is a disgruntled college-educated bookstore employee (some of the most amusing sections deal with his trials at the hands of witless customers who wander in to ask for "that book about that guy in the blue cover"). He longs to be a serious writer, but seems to suffer from some low-grade slacker infestation which keeps him from accomplishing anything, while still remaining rather self-righteous about his integrity.

Jane and Stephen are academics, with Jane providing the fiery passion and Stephen a calming influence. He dearly wants to marry her; she's indifferent to the concept. Ed is a schlub with crippling self-esteem issues. He's an aspiring cartoonist who lands a job with former industry great Irving Flavor, a stand-in for Siegel/Shuster/Kane and other Golden Age comic book figures who created Superman, Batman, and others but never received a fraction of the riches their heroes brought to the publishers.

Dorothy is a successful commercial writer on the staff of a metropolitan magazine. She smokes incessantly, drinks too much, and lives in a wretched den of slovenly filth. She may also have a mysterious and shady past; Jane, her former roommate, despises her, but won't tell Sherman why.

The most fully developed plotline relates to Ed's attempt to force a comic book company to render a fair share of royalties to the aged and cantankerous Flavor. Most of the rest of the material involves vignettes about finding a new place to live after getting evicted, searching for roommates, dealing with insufferable bosses, wretched customers, and boring co-workers, and the trade-off between certain but low-paying work and the risk of seeking greater fulfillment but possible financial ruin. And, of course, the search for love.

Sherman and Dorothy make a strange and not always likable couple. Indeed, sometimes the reader simply wants to smack Sherman upside the head. Stephen and Jane live together happily, but Jane is strangely reluctant to make a commitment. Ed stumbles about unhappily, being painfully shy. And recurring characters who pop up at first in the margins slowly develop their own minor sideplots and pursue their own connections.

The artwork is quite nicely done and has a vividly distinct and appealing style. Many of the episodes are amusing; some are actually poignant. Separate sections are bookended by little flights of fancy, where both the main and lesser characters get to answer questions about sex and celebrity. On the whole, it's a well-produced work, but, like real life, it's not very focused narratively; there are small triumphs and losses, strange but bitter arguments over nonsense, relationships that implode spectacularly or simply wither away. None of the characters is without fault, but all of them have some virtue. It's kinda messy, but strangely absorbing. Give it a try.

The only thing I don't really like about this book is the categorization. It discusses Napoleon, then skips to the industrial revolution, but then comes back to Napoleon again and the Bourbon restoration. In my opinion, history books should follow the chronology of history, and include everything from one time period in one section.

I am a teacher in Mexico and i use this book like a textbook. I think is a great history book, because all the mayor events are compress, so in one semester we see vol. 1 and 10 chapters from vol. 2, we start second semester in chapter 42 to the end. And now we are searchin for the books in english. Our intention is gave the class in english.

We use this book in my sociology 101 class at USC. It is very easy to understand. Covering a little on all of the major themes in sociology, this book is very ideal if your professor makes sociology seem difficult through his/her lectures.

I bought this book because it is organized well, and has lots of lists that make it easy to use. The chapters are timely, and offer good information on how everyone can work to eliminate stressors in their lives.

McGraw Hill's 'Calculus and Analytic Geometry' is an excellent calc book in itself, and this guide is an excellent resource for any student using that book. It contains solutions for all of the problems in the textbook, step by step in an easy to understand manner. I definitely recommend this book and it deserves 5 stars, but I'm only giving it 4 stars because the price is a bit steep.

I am limiting myself to four stars because I have only now ordered this book; why then, might you ask am I expressing the audacity to review a book I am only now ordering? Because this title is a collection of four related novels of which I have only ever read the fourth, but that fourth entry alone is a stunner.

The final story deals with a musical choreographer sent to an abandoned deep space station in the far far future, and the space station had been a bordello. Such themes are dealt with as the life of the prostitues, the conflict of a writer who wants to tell the truth, a harsh one, but who is under contract to paint it over into a musical comedy and a computer learning to appreciate aesthetics.

As usual this work is written in Resnick's deceptively easy to follow style wherein one is not hit over the head with his often poignent themes but rather do they sneak up with subtly haunting impact on one who thinks he is merely enjoying a fluff piece.

If the first three selections in the series are weak, and I have no reason to think they are, this collection is still worth the price of admission for the final novel

I enjoyed this work. Even though it was not an exhaustive report on General Sherman, (as it probably never was intended to be), it was interesting and thought provoking. I especially liked the somewhat fresh ideas on Sherman's treatment of the Carolinas after his well known march to the sea. Not all authors have the poetry and flow of a Carl Sandburg but Mark Coburn has a style that makes this work an enjoyable read as opposed to some that can lose you in details that are not important to the issue. If you can obtain a copy, I would recommend you do so.

Volumes in the "Twentieth Century Views" series are often found on the library shelves of high schools and colleges, and for good reason. Even though the set was first published in the 1960s, the scholarly pieces of literary criticism found here can provide students with interesting perspectives from which to view an author's work. This kind of book is not designed to be read from cover to cover; even the most devoted followers of Thoreau (in this case) are apt to find themselves reading the same paragraph a dozen times every once in a while, or perhaps even occasionally nodding off. It's not a late-night page-turner. (!)


Nevertheless, this title contains 16 entries that touch on themes in _Walden_, _A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_, Thoreau's _Journal_, his poetry, and his views on individualism, simplicity, politics, and Indians. All were written in the first half of the 20th century. Appropriately enough, the volume begins and ends with a poetry tribute to Henry David Thoreau: Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" and "Letter from a Distant Land" by Philip Booth. The excerpts that appear here do not overlap with those found in _Thoreau in our Season_ or _Twentieth Century Interpretations of Walden_. So if you've got a literature project underway, perhaps you'd better look at all the offerings on the library shelf. Thought-provoking supplemental material for research and understanding.