The book is a little confusing, presented in an annals form of short biographies that are never brought together into a thesis. While this might help someone with a thesis, it does little for the average reader of Korean Buddhist history.

ASSIMILATION OF BUDDHISM IN KOREA is a good book for serious students of the history of Buddhism in East Asia. The strength of this book is its bibliographical depth and international representation. It is a series of separate essays, buttressed by numerous lists of ancient publications and mentor-student genealogies.

At the very least, this book puts Korea back in the pipeline from China to Korea to Japan. One article is written by a Japanese academician, and another concerns the unique character of Korean Son Buddhism.

The opening essay establishes an overview, the second highlights Wonhyo, the third identifies the Korean characteristics of Pure Land Buddhism, and the last introduces Son Buddhism. All are daunting, scholarly productions well translated from original Korean and Japanese sources. The biographical essay on Wonhyo is particularly welcome, and the last two essays are very readable.

The one theme which unites the four essays are a search for a unique Korean Buddhist character. Korean Buddhism's syncretic nature and balance of doctrine and practice are placed in historical perspective. However, this book is not for beginners of either Korean or Buddhist history.

Author presents the astronomy side of astro-archaelogy very well. Reader is advised to have firm understanding of solar and moon mechanics. The author gives considerable details regarding origin and cultural history of Stonehenge and other sarcens. Different historians are quoted throughout book and examined in context of present archaelogy. Debate still exists over ceremonial/religious usage of Stonehenge. Author presents past ideas of a Mycenaean influence, pre-Roman conquest, and Egyptian influence.

Very enjoyable overview of archaeo-astronomy. Brown neatly debunks the lunatic fringe, reveals some of the unsung heroes of the field, and provides a clear summary of current ideas for the lay person.

What can I say? I wasn't impressed by this so-called "textbook." It doesn't seem matter-of-fact enough to be an actual textbook, yet isn't interesting enough to be considered a decent historical work. There is surprisingly little detail about the events here depicted.

I had to use this book for a class, but I found that I got about ten times more out of my instructor's lectures than this text. There really is very little to boast about here--it's basically just a mundane, watered-down history of England.

I hate to say it, but I was disappointed. I haven't studied much of English history, but even my limited knowledge was enough to know that this book is but a scratch on the surface. If you have to have this for a class, there's not much you can do, but if you're looking for a good history of England, keep looking.

The second in an informative and entertaining series on English history, this book is not a difficult read, even if it's required for class. An excellent overview of this time period for any student of English history- or the average reader. One of the few disappointments was the section in which Oliver Cromwell appeared. Absent was any mention of reasons why historians such as Maurice Ashley have labelled Cromwell as a "brave, bad man", or of the atrocities he instigated in Ireland. If your interest does not include the information on Cromwell, this is an excellent book, one I did not sell back after the semester was over!

Like so many pieces of work about the effectiveness of aid, this piece by Lancaster has its strengths as well as its obvious blind spots. Lancaster does a relatively good job of analyzing the bureaucratic strengths and weaknesses of many of the larger national and multinational aid agencies. It is in this respect that the book shines. On the other hand, it is obvious that Lancaster is strongly wedded to neo-classical economic theory and this bias runs throughout the book and leads her to condemn many aid practices based almost solely on these fundamentalist beliefs. Even more damning, though, is her near absolute ignorance of the international economic and political realities that have destabilized Africa and that have been almost completely uncontrollable by the aid agencies that she so easily critiques. She even goes so far as to give her greatest praise to one of the few agencies that can be directly credited with much of the economic instability plaguing the continent, the World Bank. She is honest in her critique of USAID and DFID being partly handcuffed by their country's larger foreign policy goals, but fails to place blame at the feet of these agencies' mother nations for their roles in producing or at least aiding in the creation of political instability of the region. Still, with these very serious critiques aside, Lancaster does do a very good job in providing valuable organizational critiques of several very important aid agencies. In this respect, this is a valuable piece of scholarship. I just wish she had the ability to be more honest (as she is a former government employee and recipient of significant US government funding, it may not be realistic to expect this of her) or less blind.

Teachers are always looking to improve their instructional methods. Reading professional journals, taking graduate courses, and networking with colleagues are the ways most teachers find out how to refine their techniques. Andrea Fishman did it differently. In the early 1980s, she got a chance to visit a one-room Old Order Amish and Mennonite schoolhouse for a semester as part of her doctoral work. The resulting book details her ethnographic study and the changes she herself made in her own English courses upon her return to the classroom.

You need not know a lot about Amish society before opening these pages, because you'll quickly learn about the demands that special community has on an individual's life. And even if you were raised in the "Amish country" of central Pennsylvania like I was, you may still find some surprises here. Reading and writing are important parts of daily life for Amish people. They read a variety of books and magazines and write letters and newspaper account about their congregations' activities. Even if you're not a teacher, you can catch intriguing glimpses here. One example is the circle letter, where each recipient writes an entire page about himself/herself, then sends it on to the next person in an eventual circle of friends. Whenever the letter returns to the originator, he/she removes the previously written page and writes another...after reading everyone else's pages, of course.

Though the one-room schoolhouse environment has some merit to it, Fishman is far from saying that we should return to it. Some things she saw mirrored her own practices so much that she questioned their relevance in a more contemporary and diverse classroom. Some lessons were better; some seemed to stiffle student individualism -- but then again, the scholars and their teacher had to answer to their deeply-ingrained religious background.

Though published in the 1980s, this book still has ideas to offer to contemporary teachers interested in perking up their kids' literacy. At the very least, it'll make them think.

I want to make a tesis of duration models and this book is the appropriated

Charles Esdaile's short monograph provides students a basic outline for twenty-three years of warfare in Europe -a continuum traveling from Valmy to Waterloo. Solid maps and chronologies compliment the author's readable prose as, chapter by chapter, Esdaile deals with the efforts of succeeding anti-French coalitions. The author concludes with a chapter investigating the recent historiography of the era, discussing key points of the various works. He concludes with a short but useful bibliographic essay. I think this book is ideal for those who want to begin serious study of this period's conflicts. I recommend following it with Esdaile's The WARS of NAPOLEON, Gates' The NAPOLEONIC WARS and Owen Connelly's BLUNDERING to GLORY.

I'm mexican engineer and I design steel structurs and is important a book with the information that I have read in
the brief description.

The photos in this book are wonderful. While the authors developed their own fairly useful scheme for identifying appropriate growing areas (less useful than USDA or Sunset magazine zones, however), they give no information about the size of the plant, its rate of growth or amount of water needed. The information about types of soil required is sometimes questionable (e.g. both daphne and hydrangeas are listed as successful in "any type of soil"). The book is poorly bound and pages became loose even on my first reading.

There are many other books I would recommend before this one.