This is one of the most unique travel books I've ever read. The first 165 pages are written by Canadian novelist & short story writer Clark Blaise and are followed by a 115 page section by his wife, Bharati Mukherjee, also a novelist & short story writer & Berkeley professor. The book originally appeared in 1975 and documents in two distinct voices a year spent in the company of Mukherjee's family in India, first in Bombay then in Calcutta.
Blaise and Mukherjee met at a writers workshop in Iowa, married, and lived in Canada with their two children until their house burned down which left them homeless and prompted their journey east. Mukherjee spent her formative years in Calcutta and is returning to a largely familiar world but to Blaise everything is new. The first sixty pages of his narrative take place in Bombay and Blaise is never altogether at home there as they are staying with Mukherjees parents and her father is the uncontested head of the household. Blaise's trips into the city are flights from the congestion of stifling family life, his insights into the nature of Indian family life are in equal parts humorous and informative(the family does not even know the first name of a servant who has lived with them for years, nor do they show any interest in knowing). This view of India from an outsider given an insiders access is just one of many aspects of this book that distinguishes it from mere travel narrative. His initiation into the rituals and customs and (to him)peculiarites of Indian family life make for great reading. But the best section is the sustained amazement and energy of the 10-15 page description of Calcutta(where they have chosen to spend the better part of the year in a mission which caters to scholars) as he rides a rickshaw through its cluttered streets. Over the course of the year Blaise will meet many of Calcutta's elite including its most famous(to the west anyway)citizen, the film maker Satyajit Ray. Calcutta is the major city of Bengal, the eastern most province of India, filled with a proud and cultured people, and Blaise spends many fascinating pages analyzing both its culture and polotics:
The Bengali has lived with the English longer than any Indian, and he has absorbed him,while keeping his own soul, with astounding ease. -p.122
Blaise begins with illusions about India but over the course of his year in Calcutta he learns about its culture and people and the contact with this world different in every imaginable way from his own has a profound impact on him, the way he views the west, and the way he views his marriage.
In counterpoint to Blaise's description of the year is Mukherjee's. She is a westernised Indian who has married outside,and according to her father beneath,her caste and in caste conscious India that is often an unforgivable offense. The Mukherjee girls(Bharati and her sisters)are brilliant and Bharati is beautiful and her novel, The Tigers Daughter, just published to rave reviews, has made her famous in her home country. Her year is marked by equally profound realizations which include increased self awareness of her own very personal way of blending if not bridging the two very distinct cultures of which she is a part:
My aesthetic, then, must accomadate a decidedly Hindu imagination with an Americanized sense of the craft of fiction. To admit to possessing a Hindu imagination is to admit that my concepts of what constitutes a "story" and of narrative structure are noncausal, non-Western.-p.298
But perhaps the most fascinating part of her section is her portrait of her former classmates who have stayed in India and married and now make up the elite. These highly educated women are nonetheless stranded in their homes and live cloistered social lives atop an India which has grown restless and intolerant of the wide divisions that separate the rich from the poor. Riots and robbery are always imminent realities. The women Mukherjee observes clothed in silk saris and gold bracelets and diamond earings in their gated community of mansions in the worlds poorest city seem trapped in a world that they know cannot last. They go on as if immune(or wishing to be) from all the realites around them, a social elite with money to burn but drained of contact and significance to the greater India outside their own very high walls.

Rare book by two excellent writers & one that has not gone through too many reprintings so get a copy while you can. I especially like the sturdy(always good for a travel book) '95 Hungry Mind paperback edition with excellent cover art as well as updated prologues and epilogues by the authors.

"Milestones in Black American History" is a 16-volume exploration of the black experience from ancient Egypt to the present day, with each volume focusing on a specific period of African-American history. "Days of Sorrow, Years of Glory," focuses on the pivotal period between the slave revolt led by Nat Turner in southeastern Virginia in 1813 and the passage of the controversial Fugitive Slave Act by the U.S. Congress as part of the Great Compromise of 1850. Timothy J. Paulson contrasts the story of bondage in slavery for millions of African-Americans with the efforts of free blacks who produced an impressive array of industrial inventions, novels, music, sermons, newspapers, and political oratory. Paulson covers racist violence in the North, the foundation of the American Anti-Slavery Society, the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy, the black bandmaster Frank Johnson, the Battle of Lockahatchee between the U.S. Army and a black-Seminole army, David Ruggles's first black magazine, the "Amistad" and "Creole" slave ship revolts, and more.

"Days of Sorrow, Years of Glory" goes beyond the most famous names in the struggle of black Americans for liberty (Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass) to tell about Norbert Rillieux, William Henry Lane, and Joseph Cinque. I was pretty well versed in the political side of the story in terms of how the nation got from the Missouri Compromise to the Great Compromise of 1850, but Paulson is focusing more on the social side of the struggle. As a result, it is rather surprising to see how much was happening in Black American History in the years before the decade leading up to the Civil War. This book is illustrated with contemporary etchings, drawings, cartoons, and photographs from the period, including a photograph of the Hanging Tree where Nat Turner was executed, the title page of a book written by Frederick Douglass, and a much-reprinted lithograph entitled "The Old Plantation" showing the South's idealized view of slavery. For classes, students and teachers who want more information about American History from the African-American perspective than they will find in their textbooks, this is an excellent series.

this is a great book for those that love mystrey novels. When I first started reading it I wasn't too interested and a couple years later read it again and thought that it was the best book. It isn't really serious, in fact very funny. The characters in the book seem very real and after reading the book I would like to see this part of England for myself. The book is not what you would expect and niether are the chartactersin it. This book would be good for those between 13 and 90. It doesn't have much of an age catagorie, but the book might be hard to follow for younger readers. The story is about a muder 25 years old and the detective thats whats to do it gets sent on a first class cruise with an 80year old widow who seems and acts at least half her age. on the cruise ship with them is a jewelthief, a murderer, some newly weds, a pair of odd 2nd honeymooners, a murdermystery writer and a funeral parlor owner. The characters are some that you wouldn't expect. This is a very good book to buy and also read.

torsion testing,tension testin

This book provides all the instructional design details for the five content types. It describes the what and why of instructional design and describes how to display it on paper and a computer screen. There is a full chapter dedicated to CBT design. I am recommending this book as required reading for all our trainers.

This book is still a great resource! Ruth Colvin Clark's work remains one of the most widely quoted resources in instructional design circles, including the instructional design special interest group of the Society of Technical Communicators. While you wait for your copy to arrive, you can peruse some of her work on the macromedia site at http://www.macromedia.com/support/authorware/basics.html. Worth the time.

Ann Pavkovic, Consulting Technical Writer

Dialogical Apologetics is a very well done exploration of apologetical methodology. The book is divided into two parts: theoretical and practical. The theoretical section begins with an outline of traditional approaches to the relation between faith and reason. Clark expresses support, though equivocal, for the recently articulated Reformed Epistemology of Plantinga, Alston, and Wolterstorff. He then deals with the foremost opponent of Christianity in recent centuries: science, or more accurately, scientism. Clark sketches the developments in philosophy of science and their implications for epistemology in general. Though he rejects the more extreme relativistic formulation of Kuhn, he does accept the many insights that such a paradigm-based approach offers, even comparing, rightly I think, Christian conversion to a paradigm shift. Chapter four more carefully defines the apologetic enterprise by articulating the concepts of truth, proof, and evidence, concluding that proof is context-dependent and that the apologetic approach must be largely determined by audience. Dialogue is the most effective method for apologetic encounters because it allows the argumentation to be tailored to the listener's needs. Clark expounds this idea more fully in Chapter Five, where he explains the failure of the traditional apologetic methods and pinpoints the common problem. They fail because they claim exclusivity. They fail to center their approach in the person/s they address. Dialogical apologetics seeks to escape this by emphasizing conversational apologetics centered on the audience's needs. Part Two delves more deeply into the practical side of apologetics with chapters on logical argumentation and analysis, attitudes and their role in apologetics, cultural differences, and persuasion.

Dialogical Apologetics would serve well as an introductory text for an apologetics course as it provides helpful overviews of the developments in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science and transcends the usual presuppositionalist/evidentialist dichotomy, although it leans strongly toward presuppositionalism. My only complaint is that Part Two is fluff and could have been condensed into one chapter. Clark's main idea, though, is sound: apologetics must be context-sensitive and person-relative and is best practiced in a conversation or dialogue.

America's oldest living teenager is now 72 years old! I checked and he was born in 1929. We all should look half as good even no though he might of had help with plastic surgury, hair dye and make up. I would if I was in his line of work and He hasn't shown any signs of slowing down.
Now to get to the meat of this book review. I checked this book out of the library when I was a teenager myself and it had a big impact on how to groom myself (next to that provided by my Father). I Xeroxed out of it the page that deals with how to tie a neck tie 3 differant ways and how to tie a bow tie. There are chapters that deal with much of the basics of being male (how to select clothes, shaving, many very valuable topics). I strongly suggest this book to guys who did not have good male support (I did however). I have not seen this book since and would like to see it republished.

This is an excellent book on dinosaurs for the pre-school/Kindergarten and early/new-readers age groups. Pre-schoolers and Kindergarteners will enjoy it for the pictures. Children new to reading will like the large type and relatively simple sentences. I highly recommend the hardback version because I am replacing a paper-back that has received lots of use.

I read this book in 1 sitting. I made the mistake and let a friend borrow it. She moved and took it with her. That was over 10 years ago and I still hold a grudge! I am dying to find a copy!