TABLEWARE IN CLAY is long overdue. Finally, we have a focus on kitchen and dining-room pots that fills a giant need. As an amateur potter, I'm delighted to find, in this lovely book, bowls, jugs, pitchers, serving dishes, etc., that illustrate, by the crisp prose and marvelous photographs, an enormous range of the potter's art. This is a book to treasure and to pore over many, many times, from the chapters that give a sensitive history of ceramics to the overview of studio pottery today and all the interesting "in-betweens". A heartfelt thanks to the author.

This book was recommended to me by the owner of a well known Native American Arts gallery as possibly THE best book on the subject, and it completely lives up to the recommendation. Based on a series of interviews with prominent potters from each pueblo, it not only gives an overview of the history of the different potteries, it is filled with personal thoughts and views of the various artists about their work--not only the processes of creating pottery, but their feelings about how they as modern potters fit into the "history" as well. If you are at all interested in Southwest Pueblo Pottery, you MUST read this book. It's not a "picture book" like so many others, though it does have many great photos, but it's not a scholarly text book either. I cannot recommend this book highly enough and I cannot thank my gallery owner friend enough for recommending it to me.

Oh my god!!! I just started roping a few months ago and have been doing great, eventhou I am not even roping off a horse yet, I just got this book, (it arrived in 4 days!) and it has helped me hone my skills and makes me aware of how I am roping "the fundamentals" so if someone asks me "how" i am roping that dummy and can tell them how do it. Before I read this book I would have just told them, I dont know, I just "do" it. Well, e-mail me, and if Jake or Clay ever reads this E-MAIL ME!!! You guys are so cool and I think ure awesome. My email address is TeamRoperGal@geocities.com or QHJumperJB@aol.com.

Remember; Team Ropin' rules.

"Tennis's Most Wanted" is a really interesting and fun to read book that unearths amazing stuff about tennis and its most endearing and eccentric characters.
For example, W.C. Fields played tennis while holding a racket and a martini. Fausto Gardini was nicknamed "Vampire" because he used to bite tennis balls. Hans Redl lost an arm in World War II, but returned and won Davis Cup matches!
The best chapters are "Teen Phenoms," "Court Artists," "Embarrassing Losses," "Family Ties," "Fanatics" and "Believe It or Not."
You'll really enjoy this neat book that covers tennis from
strange but true angles.

This is a very rare book on theoretical mechanics. I am very picky about the books that I read. And this book is "just right". It treats the development of vector calculus from a viewpoint unseen in other books. And this viewpoint helps you to understand the concepts better. In my opinion, this is a better way than beginning to learn variational calculus and ending up wondering "why am I doing this?". If I were a professor, I would teach with this book! Beware of some problems though. There are a few mistakes here and there (easy to pick out). Unfortunately, Professor Bradbury is no more with us to correct his book in another printing.

Marjory Bankson's experience as a potter has given her great insight into the imagery of God as the potter. She takes the reader through each step in the process of forming a lump of clay into a useable pot. But this is not a book about how to become a potter; it is a book about how to become a pot!

Each step that the Potter takes, from kneading, centering, shaping, firing, glazing... each one is a step in the process of forming each of us into the unique individuals God wants us to be. Marjory Bankson explains what it means to be that lump of clay, to need to be kneaded, to have those hard resisting spots gently smoothed out by the Creator. I have seen her demonstrate with her potting wheel what happens when the clay is NOT centered... if we are not grounded careful our lives DO go "flying off the wheel."

And how can the Potter shape a pot unless the clay gives Him an opening? The potter must get inside the clay, exerting inward and outward pressure, forming the life and personality of the pot.

Through each stage, Marjory Bankson explains not just the Potter's role, but the soul work that acoompanies it, using examples from her own life to clearly illustrate the meaning. If you ever wondered what it means to be the clay in the Potter's hands, this book is for you!

Reading this book took my enjoyment and understanding of War and Peace to another level. I am greatly pleased with the authors perceptiveness, simplicity and revealing insights into the novel. His profound understanding of Tolstoys methods and ideas has added to my pleasure when thinking about the book, and I can now see quite clearly why it is the great novel it is, why people are so overwhelmed when reading it and why it appeals to the human spirit so. I strongly urge you to read this superb criticism, and heartily thank the author for contributing so much to my enjoyment of Tolstoys great novel. I do not put forth a summary of this book for fear of diluting the authors original and clearly explained ideas.

An idyllic love affair in Vernazza, Italy, changed Suzanne Lane's life, she found herself pregnant and alone. She married another man, and they raised a family. But she never forgot that one heavenly time, or forgave. A return trip to the Mediterranean shores years later was a dream come true, until he arrived.

David Marshall should have had the appeal of the devil incarnate, but Suzanne could no more resist his seductive lure than when she was young and in love. Even as she succumbed, she feared the results. If either David or her daughter learned the truth, the consequences would be devastating...

from the back cover.

By the same publishing house that brought us Hamada Potter, Uncommon Clay has a very similar layout and feel. Beginning with one of the only significant catalogs of Rosanjin's work in print, the book moves into a collection of Rosanjin's writngs, most of them some form of memoir. Considered the "Picasso of Japan," not because his work was similar, but because of his temperament. Firey, inconsistent, boisterous and bullying, Rosanjin always announced his own presence in every situation. Seemingly the opposite of the image that is promoted of the contemplative, Zen-serious potter, Rosanjin created a body of work out of necessity. As a famous restauranteur, he needed dinnerware to match the quality of the food his kitchens prepared, and the quality, charm, humor and sheer beauty of the resulting crafts cannot be denied. Uncommon Clay is an important view into the life of one of the century's great characters and craftsmen.

VOICES FROM THE CLAY : The Development of Assyro-Babylonian Literature. By Silvestro Fiore. 254 pp. Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 1965. ISBN 0-8061-1119--4 (pbk.)

Although Fiore's book is primarily intended for students of non-Akkadian Semitics, theology, and the humanities, it can also be read with profit by the general reader. In it, he is concerned to demonstrate that the Hebrew and Greek civilizations, the "two pillars" of Western culture, far from being original, had their roots in the much more ancient realm of Mesopotamia.

The "Greek Miracle," in other words, was not a miracle, but only seemed so because the civilizational achievements of the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians only started to become known over the course of the last century or so. For our new understanding of the past we have to thank archaeology, in particular for its discovery of many tens of thousands of baked clay tablets which have miraculously preserved the complex cuneiform writing system, languages, and literatures of the ancient Mesopotamians, and for the patient decipherment of these tablets and other cuneiform-bearing artefacts by a small and dedicated group of international scholars.

What Fiore sets out to do in this book is to offer "a comprehensive presentation of Assyro-Babylonian poetry and its spiritual background" (p.viii). His treatment of the poetry is preceded by a sketch of the cultural background in three chapters: Chapter I - 'Prehistoric Interlude and Historic Background' - a brief historical survey; Chapter II - 'Spiritual Life in Mesopotamia' - magic, divination, religion, kingship; Chapter III - 'The Testimony of Culture' - the cuneiform script and the pictorial art.

The second part of the book deals with the following poems and epics: The Creation Story; Gilgamesh; The Flood Story; Ishtar's Descent to the Nether World; Nergal and Ereshkigal; Kumma's Vision of the Nether World; The Epic of Era; The Myth of Zu; The Myth of Etana; The Myth of Adapa.

The text (or extracts) of each work is accompanied by a detailed commentary "which takes into account the spiritual background and the mythical implications of the compositions" (p.xi), and the book's Conclusion discusses the continuation of the Assyro-Babylonian heritage in the cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean, with special emphasis on Greece.

'Voices From the Clay' is richly illustrated with upwards of fifty black-and-white photographs and drawings of Mesopotamian sculptures, stelae, cylinder seals, buildings, and other artefacts, and also contains two maps. The book is rounded out with two Appendices, a useful Bibliography, and a detailed Index. An 8vo in size, it is beautifully printed on excellent strong paper, stitched, and bound in a sturdy glossy wrapper.

Within its limits, which are the limits of the conventional point-of-view, a point-of-view which assumes that "myths" are mere fabrications and that "gods" are "gods" and not the living flesh-and-blood entities who move through the ancient stories acting in wholly human ways, 'Voices From the Clay' is a scholarly book that will be of value to anyone who is interested in the literature and art of the ancient Near East.

After reading Fiore's conventional treatment, those who would like to set this literature and art into a larger and what seems to me a more meaningful context, might take a look at linguist and scholar Zecharia Sitchin's rather different way of interpreting these poems.

A good place to start might be to compare Fiore's interpretation of the Gilgamesh story with Sitchin's 'Gilgamesh : The King Who Refused to Die,' which occurs as Chapter VII of his 'The Stairway to Heaven' (New York : Avon Books, 1980, pp.118-143). I think that anyone who takes the trouble to read Sitchin's startling interpretation will find it extremely interesting.