"The Deliverance of Dancing Bears" tells the story ofan unnamed bear that is taken every day by its "owner" to amarket square in a mountain village of eastern Turkey and set to dance on its hind legs for hours. Elizabeth Stanley's prose makes clear to young readers that this is not really dancing. "Around and around the poor bear turned on her two back legs, her head pulled from side to side by the chain which Haluk jangled to the clatter of his tambourine... The performance continued relentlessly for many hours until day began to fade [and] Haluk led the bear back to her cage and lock[ed] the door." Stanley's pastel illustrations in purple, blue, gold, scarlet and indigo evoke the liveliness of Turkish village life as people go about their ordinary business of shopping, eating and paying the bearkeeper to see dancing bear. The overall effect of these village scenes, however, is depressing. The heavily textured paper to which the pastels are applied seems to drain the light out of these sad market scenes, in which no-one seems to smile.

The power of the book, however, comes from the scenes that depict the dreams of the chained bear. The scenes that show her fishing in mountain streams with her mate or lying lazily with her babies in the sun are full of shimmering light and vibrant energy.

And thankfully, the bear's dreams come true. An old man named Yusuf buys the bear from Haluk, takes it with him to his house by a stream and slowly reintroduces it to the wild. And that is just the beginning of this eloquently written and superbly illustrated book dedicated to relieving the suffering of captive bears.

Stanley saw her first "dancing bear" in 1979 in Athens and decided then to write a book to challenge the assumption that men could cruelly use wild animals to make money. In 1992 she took her written text to Turkey to take photos and to make sketches for the artwork. In the same year The World Society for the Protection of Animals effected the release and the return to the wild of all chained bears in Turkey. Today there are no dancing bears in Greece or Turkey.

But a recent WISPA report has revealed that the trade in dancing bears is still alive and well in India. It says that "60-70% of cubs taken from the wild die before they even begin their brutal training. Dehydration, starvation and trauma are all reasons [for their dying]. Should the cub be lucky enough to live, a punishing regime of starvation and beating will begin to condition it to perform. The piercing of the cub's sensitive muzzle with a rope for control is the next ordeal. It is held down without anaesthetic while a crude iron needle is heated in a coal fire and plunged in with a group of men holding the squealing cub tight. The investigators also found that the site of the nose piercing was invariably infected in all the seventeen cases observed. 'The cub would the have to suffer a second piercing before the first was healed, compounding his agony,' explained Geete Seshamani. 'The tug of this rope, along with an intense fear of the strike of a heavy stick, motivates the bear to lift its legs in turn and 'dance'.'"

The WISPA site also provides gory and even more gruesome details of bearbaiting in Pakistan and of the farming of bears for bear bile in China.

WISPA has done and will continue to provide facts about animal mistreatment and about campaigns and projects to challenge these abuses. Whilst it is important for the thinking public to have access to information like that on the WISPA site, I believe that Elizabeth Stanley's "The Deliverance of Dancing Bears" is one of the best books for introducing pre-school, elementary and junior high school aged children to these issues.

While not so sparsely written as Anthony Browne's "Gorilla", the prose is tight. The illustrations are similar to and as powerful as those in Brian Wildsmith's animal books. The interleaving of reality and dream is reminiscent of Shirley Hughes' "Stay Away from the Water Shirley" or of the more recently published "Magic Beach" by Alison Lester. All in all, this is an ideal book to get the young and the not-so-young thinking about animal rights issues. It is a beautiful book that can help us all to realise the epigraph that Stanley has taken from Aristotle: "Hope is a waking dream."

I'm the author and explain some of the lessons learned
in designing and building a house using styrofoam ICF blocks.
The approach is to design a large house and then build a small
house (subset) allowing for future expansion. There are lot's
of photos and quite a few diagrams and lessons learned.
I hope you'll enjoy reading and using this book.
stan

I teach high school math, and this book was a great help to me! It provided a great set of extra activities for students in algebra to learn and understand Pascal's triangle and modular addition. In addition, they got a chance to use their creativity! A must-have as a tool for introducing art and design into the math classroom.

I have enjoyed other books in the "story behind the scenery" series and wanted to share with my children the riches of Lake Tahoe before we go there for another vacation. This book was wonderful! We have been there before, but we learned things about Lake Tahoe we had never heard before. The pictures are beautiful and true to the real place. The kids asked so many questions from the pictures that it was great that all the answers were available in the pages. We are now interested in visiting specific sites and participating in certain activites because of the thorough information and history covered in this book. Anyone interested in the history of the Lake Tahoe area should give this book a read!

Movie Proposal

Date: 3 December 2000

To: Steven Spielberg

From: Artur Avetyan, Detective reader

Subject: A movie proposal for the Detective, by Parnell Hall

Proposal:

Detective by Parnell Hall is one of the best mystery books I have ever read. Detective is all about life. Its about a detective name Jack Stanley who works really hard to become a good detective. The events that take place in this book are often seen in our lives; like drugs and murders. Also by reading this book you will find out how hard and dangerous the lives of detective's are. This book should be made into a feature film because it is important for people to know what happens in their lives. People need to know what it takes to be a real detective. This movie will inspire people to try their best at their job to become the best. This movie will show what drug dealers go through to sell drugs, and it will also show what police and detectives go through to catch this drug dealers, who are trying to ruin our lives, and our kids.

I think this will be a great movie because it shows what happens to people when they become involved in drugs and gangs. Drugs and gangs are a major problem in our lives these days and I think when people watch this movie they will be more careful. Parents will also pay more attention to their kids. This movie if made into a movie wouldn't cost too much to make. The Police and the special detectives team would help out with the making of the film. It would also be a successful movie because people like action and real life movies, but most of all this will be a great inspiring movie. It will prove that if you want something or if you want to become someone, you have to work hard for it.

the book is an excellent review of development in pediatrics and is a great addittion to a pediatric resident library. Very easy to read, organised and list important references.

Published by the American Diabetes Association, an organization whose mission is to prevent and cure diabetes and to improve the lives of all people affected by diabetes, Diabetic Cooking For Seniors is a highly practical, time and effort-saving cookbook. All recipes use five ingredients or less, and the portions are scaled down for seniors rather than the usual immense quantities meant to feed large families. Useful advice, tips, tricks, and techniques help people with arthritis or a fading sense of taste create meals that are nutritious, delicious, and healthy. Nutritional information and official American Diabetes Association exchanges are included for each recipe, and the text is in reasonably large type to make reading easier. Diabetic Cooking For Seniors is a "must" for any independent senior looking for useful and delicious culinary ways to help keep their blood sugar and calorie intake down.

I use this book in my work every day and find the information well presented and easy to find.

This is Module 3 (of 4) in W. A. Benjamin's "Malmstadt-Enke Instrumentation for Scientists Series." I have all four, copyrighted 1973 & 1974, and they are awesome. (I'm not selling them, though!)

These books were the text used in the self-paced Instrumentation class, Chemistry 838, which I took at Michigan State University, circa 1974. It was easily the best class I ever took at MSU, and these were easily the best texts I ever used at MSU.

I was an undergraduate student in MSU's Electrical Engineering Dept. at the time, when a friend tipped me off to a graduate Instrumentation lab class taught in the Chemistry department. The purpose of the class was to teach Chemistry and Physics graduate students how to build electronic instruments for their research work.

Well, I learned MUCH more practical Electrical Engineering in that one year (three quarter) self-paced graduate Chemistry class than I learned in ALL my EE labs COMBINED! It is impossible to overstate just how much better this series was than the usual college texts of the day. (However, part of the disparity in quality between Chem 838 and my EE labs was certainly due to the fact that in 1974 MSU had a very good Chemistry department, but a truly miserable excuse for an EE department.)

The four "modules" (books) are:

1. Electronic Analog Measurements and Transducers, by Malmstadt, Enke & Crouch. ISBN 0-8053-6903-1. 203 pages pbk.

2. Control of Electrical Quantities in Instrumentation, by Malmstadt, Enke & Crouch. ISBN 0-8053-6904-X. 356 pages pbk.

3. Digital and Analog Data Conversions, by Malmstadt, Enke & Crouch. ISBN 0-8053-6905-8. 455 pages pbk.

4. Optimization of Electronic Measurements, by Malmstadt, Enke, Crouch & Horlick. ISBN 0-8053-6906-6. 203 pages pbk.

Note: I would not recommend trying to study these texts out of order.

The combined material from these 4 texts, sans experiments, was also published as a single textbook, "Electronic Measurements for Scientists." But that's out of print, too.

However, there is one book by these authors that is still in print. Their "new" (1994) book is, "Microcomputers and Electronic Instrumentation: Making the Right Connections," ISBN 0841228612. I've not read it, but I'll bet it is terrific.

27 years later, I remain grateful to Prof. Howard V. Malmstadt (U. of Illinois), Prof. Chris G. Enke (MSU), and Prof. Stanley R. Crouch (MSU), for their disproportionate contribution to my education, as authors of these books and designers of that course.

....

-Dave

This is a wonderful way to become acquainted with the thought of Stanley Cavell--one of the most important living philosophers in America. The essays on Shakespeare are stunning, and one can feel the force of a restless, moral, rigorous mind at work in every turn of the arguments. Some of these essays are collected from earlier publications, but the reprinting of all his essays on Shakespeare, plus some new work, make it very worth owning!