Hello God! A Daily Call to Faith and Worship. In this outstanding, well-written book Lamar Hunt sounds a clear and certain, and deeply spiritual call to daily worship. Hello God is garnished with anecdotes drawn from a lifetime of living and serving that will greatly enrich the worshipper. This great book reflects the author's down-to-earth simplicity and clarity or writing, reinforced by long experience as a pastor and Army chaplain during peacetime and war.

Lamar Hunt's work clearly reflects his faith, work ethic and love for God and God's children, whom he serves, as I knew him and observed him under combat conditions and since.

Hello God is a liturgical, work of art that should be on the desk of every pastor who faces the continuous challenge of sermon preparation, and on the nightstand of every soul in the pastor's flock that seeks a daily, guided walk with the Lord.

Hello God! A Daily Call to Faith and Worship by Claude Newby 4/1/2001 In this outstanding, well written book Lamar Hunt sounds a clear and certain, and deeply spiritual call to daily worship. This great book reflects the author's down-to-earth simplicity and clarity or writing, reinforced by long experience as a pastor and Army chaplain during peacetime and war.

Lamar Hunt's work clearly reflects his faith, work ethic and love for God and God's children, whom he serves, as I knew him and observed him under combat conditions and since.

Hello God is a liturgical, work of art that should be on the desk of every pastor who faces the continuous challenge of sermon preparation, and on the nightstand of every soul in the pastor's flock that seeks a daily, guided walk with the Lord.

Hello God is such a delightful daily devotional. It is impossible for me to read just one a day. I am always several weeks ahead in my reading. I find myself reading parts of the book to my husband.

The ideas for each devotional are so practical for the lives of Christians. Yet non-Christians will also find wonderful meaning in the daily commentaries.

Henry always gets five stars from me, but when I was a kid my favorite thing about this book was the very idea of building a real clubhouse. It seemed like such a fun and cool thing to do. I like that the kids in this book take the initiative to have fun rather than expecting adults to provide all of their amusements, as so often happens today.

I used to read this all the time and sometimes I still do.When i was young like Henry I thought about how girls shouldnt beallowed too, and even though i know its silly now, I remember. And thats why its good. I was a lot like Henry Huggins. And thats good characterisation. But i didnt have a dog. But I had a clubhouse. It was my garage and it smelled like paint.

This book is the best! I will buy it for all my kids someday, if they're boys. Girls arent allowed! ... just kidding girls.

I read Henery and the Clubhouse by Bevrely Cleary.And I want to tell you that it was great! This story is about Henery Huggens and his friends, Robert and Murph who ars building a clubhouse in Henry's backyard. Henry, also has a paper rout to look after. Will Henry be able to build his clubhouse and deliver his papers? Well I am not telling you, you have to find out by reading this book!

My son Joseph loves all the books in this series. Any boy that loves Thomas the Tank will! They are easy to handle for small boys. The pages are durable.

As every parent of a Thomas Fan knows, these books would better be durable and easy to carry. This book is an excellent combination of both. The four original stories are accompanied by the original illustrations, and put together in a durable hardcover, easy to carry format.

When my 3-yr old takes an interest in something, it usually becomes an all-out obsession: dinosaurs, construction vehicles, space and so it continues with Thomas the Tank Engine. We've read other books and rented videos, but these books (there are four in this series) are his beloved. The stories are simple and plentiful with a bit of a moral to them, without being pretentious or zealous. The writing style is delightful: adult enough not to bore the reader and yet perfectly understandable for the listener (assuming it's a child!). The pictures are clear but not movie or television tie-ins - it makes them more lovable! The books are small and my son loves to stack them and carry them around with him.

If your child loves Thomas and you're tired of media tie-ins, these books are for you!

THis is the real, hard to believe story of Hitler's ascent to the corridors of power. Chancellor was the only real job he ever had, other than his military service...and this book charts his rise over all the educated, polished saps who tried to use Hitler, and wound being suckered by him instead. His seizure of power in Germany, thanks to Von Papen and Hindenburg was as unfortunate for everyone else, as it was lucky for him.
If you want to know how Hitler rose to Chancellor in Germany, read this book.

There is little I can say that would do justice to Turner's magisterial work. It is carefully researched and documented and is extraordinarily well-written. While it is very much a work of historical scholarship, it is also written with an eye toward an almost dramatic narrative style (without the embellishments which some of today's "popular historians" resort to). To be quite truthful, I got so absorbed by the book, I couldn't put it down. Of course, you know what happens in the end, but Turner's writing is so vivid and his analyses so keen that it is an absolutely riveting account. And Turner's general thesis--that Hitler's rise to power was anything but inevitable--is one that he proves (at least as far as I'm concerned) beyond a shadow of a doubt. Chance played a tremendous role, as did human error and personal folly and misjudgment. On the topic of personal folly, Turner's assessment of General Schleicher is justifiably harsh. It is almost unfathomable to ponder, for example, that Hitler's rise might not have happened had Franz von Papen not nursed an inner animosity toward Schleicher, which led him to collaboration with the Nazi leader. So many if's. But such is history. And as far as histories of the Third Reich go, those who want to understand how Hitler became Chancellor of Germany will turn to this phenomenal work.

Mr. Turner's study on the Hitler's rise to power is excellent and maddening. It is excellent as an historical treatise reviewing the facts that caused Hitler to seize power and it is maddening in that it did not have to happen. In some circles there is a misbelief that Hitler's rise to the Chancellorship was inevitable. Turner puts that myth to rest in describing how the personal ambition of Hindenburg, Papen and Schleicher, as well as their ineptitude had more to do with Hitler's rise than Hitler himself.

The writing flows and keeps the readers attention riveted. This is an important book and a must read for anyone interested to Nazi Germany.

When Stephen Vincent Benet finished John Brown's Body in 1928 and the critics awaited its issue, the South was most anxious and skeptical that they would be portrayed honestly. They were and Stephen Benet's masterpiece is America's greatest epic poem and a most unappreciated work of literature. But, I love it and always will love it, because it makes those historic figures of so long ago - come alive. Out of the mist, they ride. Come traveler, pick it up, open its pages and from fish hook Gettysburg to the end, watch them ride and try to understand over all the years what was happening and why they were fighting. It was not all about Slavery!

During the Pax Romana the emperor Augustus commissioned Vergil to write an epic history of the Romans. The result, of course, was The Aeneid, a stunning blend of epic poetry and historical fiction that some would argue has yet to be topped. John Brown's Body is the closest thing we have to an epic poem "about" America. And while it takes place during the civil war and makes no claim to be an authoritative history, the book is no less impressive as a literary feat. No book in the history of this country has so artfully depicted our nation's great schism.

Written in the 20s, John Brown's Body redefines the word ananchronism. Its contemporaries are The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Professors widely praise these modern works for their groundbreaking aesthetics, and not without justification. However, it's hard to imagine a more daring or daunting task than the writing of John Brown's Body. Never mind the fact that he pulled it off marvelously. Stephen Vincent Benet remains the only writer to have even _attempted_ to write an American epic poem. Stephen Vincent Benet deserves high scores both for degree of difficulty and final product. Yet conventional education regarding 20th century American books never seems to give him these high marks.

Why Benet and his book don't get the recognition they merit is a terrific question. Is his book canonically superior to Gatsby and Their Eyes? No. And on some level, it's difficult to see what someone living in Taiwan could glean from this document of American struggle and triumph. To wit, the book can also be criticized for being slightly skewed toward a Yankee perspective. But as a whole, the book is outright better than a lot of works revered as American classics.

What does better mean? What it should mean. Simply a more impressive work of art. More entertaining. More provactive. More fun to read. More intellectual depth, conveyed subtly and beautifully, embedded skillfully but not invisibly in an absorbing tale. On these counts, John Brown's Body is vastly superior to classics like The Sun Also Rises; The USA series of John Dos Passos; Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis; and certainly Hawthorne's later novels. Yet John Brown's Body continues to get short shrift, to the point where it's well nigh unfindable in many a book store. One can only hope that the critics and canon-makers of later generations restore the book to its proper place, high atop our shining history of American letters.

This book won the Pulitzer Prize in the '40's. It covers the Civil War principally from the perspectives of a young, small town Connecticutt boy and the heir to a Geogia plantation. It begins with a gripping view of events on a slave ship and ends with two crippled young men and the women they love, beginning to rebuild ther lives. Part poetry, part prose, it all sings.

The Heart Of Thoreau's Journals provides readers with an intimate glimpse into the heart and mind of American literature's premier individualist. Consolidated into 218 concise pages by Odell Shepard from the 39 volumes Thoreau left behind upon his death at 45 in 1862, the journals reveal Thoreau as an irreverent and shrewd observer of the human character who was happily fated with the gift of forever seeing the king riding proudly in public without clothes ("The mass never comes up the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to the level with the lowest," "After all, the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing - room. There is at least no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which makes one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand - play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask," "This lament for a golden age is only a lament for golden men").

Requiring solitude in the manner most require food and shelter, the philosophical, ascetic Thoreau lived most of his life in isolation ("The poet must keep himself unstained and aloof") as an ardent lover and keen observer of the natural world ("All of nature is my bride," "My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature, to know his lurking - places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas, in nature"). A comedic misanthrope ("I have lived some thirty - odd years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors," "The society of young women is the most unprofitable I have ever tried"), Thoreau also wrote with sympathy, understanding, and concern about the townspeople whose company he preferred not to keep. Even his plain - spoken contempt for the boorish, the smug, the pretentious and the assertively conformist ("What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm") was often tempered with humanity and matter - of - fact acceptance for the inevitable variations of man's psychology. The simple, the genuine, the uncomplicated and the sincere came in for high marks in Thoreau's estimation of people, places, and things.

A Harvard graduate who was born and spent most of his life in New England, bachelor Thoreau set the standard and defined the blueprint for all introverted American artists and thinkers to come. Though Thoreau wrote incessantly and found work as a lecturer, schoolteacher, editor, and tutor at different periods of his life, he typically worked as a gardener, handyman or land surveyor, and spent a particularly frustrating period working in his father's pencil factory. Though he knew himself to be misunderstood by most, Thoreau was uncomplaining ("Ah! How I have thriven on solitude and poverty! I cannot overstate this advantage"), confident, ultimately self - satisfied, and generally unconcerned with what, if anything, future generations would make of him. The respect, acknowledgement, and honor of society meant far less to him than his day - to - day, moment - to - moment freedom to continue to enjoy his perceptions, sensations, and ideas, which he rightfully understood to be his life's work and birthright.

As one of the founders of Transcendentalism, the idealistic Thoreau was a dryly passionate believer in man's capacity to overcome mundane (and often self - imposed) obstacles, identify and focus his attention on the eternal fundamentals of life, and enjoy personal communion with God by utilizing nature as a lens. The journals abound with declarative passages which readers have found enlightening, guiding, and inspirational for generations ("Despair and postponement are cowardice and defeat. Men were born to succeed, and not to fail," "We forever and ever and habitually underrate our fate...ninety - nine and one - hundredths of our lives we are mere hedgers and ditchers, but from time to time we meet with reminders of our destiny"). Thoreau's journals, along with key American text and masterpiece Walden, represent the cream of his work.

I once sat through a very snide speech, by a very snide editor, who pontificated in a very snide manner, that "no one wants to read your journals." This editor was of course a fool- the very best writing is to be found in personal journals. Nowhere is this demonstrated to be more true than in Thoreau's. Or as he himself put it,"The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience." Well, these writings inflame the mind. Thoreau was that rarest of of divine gifts, a true Individual. I often wonder if he did not represent the highest point that anyone in our society ever reached- the high water mark of a civilization before steam engines, corporations, and mass education reduced us to our present state.
I was concerned that the journals might suffer by editing, especially if an academic type with a deconstructionist ax to grind got his hands on them. Mr. Shepard's brief introduction put my mind to rest. He obviously has a close sympathy with the spirit of Henry David Thoreau and his selections are masterful. As Shepard puts it: "With a fit audience, though few, he is likely to win a more thoughtful reading now that individuals are so obviously withering among us, now that men are quite obviously enslaved by machines, now that we have floundered about as far as we can in the bogs of stupidity, greed, and cowering compliance that he warned us against long ago."
If _Walden_ spoke to you, these journal entries will speak even more strongly to you. This is the spring from which _Walden_ and all the rest sprang. This is the soul of Thoreau. It is the soul of the true America before the Byzantine rot set in.
There is one line from the very first year of the journals that has never ceased to inspire me: "All fear of the world or consequences is swallowed up in a manly anxiety to do Truth justice."

"The words of some men are thrown forcibly against you and adhere like burs." Thoreau's Journal, June 4, 1839. This is certainly true with me and this book.

No book that I own -- aside from Scripture -- is more valuable to me than this slim one. I have reread it countless times, usually while sitting of a warm or cool evening beneath the trees waiting for the stars to troop out.

In Walden Thoreau speaks of Alexander carrying the Iliad in a precious cask with him on his journeys. This is book worthy to be carried with me on my journey.

As I read and reread this book it causes me to look on everything I have ever thought, done or believed in a new and startlingly new light.

This little paperback is at once one of the cheapest and most valuable books I own.

For anyone looking to enter the unreal realms of Henry Darger, his writings and his artwork, MacGregor's book is essential. He has both exhaustively researched and reconstructed Darger's life as an isolated, perhaps mentally disturbed individual working as a dishwasher and janitor in Chicago and delved deeply into the often gruesome content of Darger's fantasy realm. The book itself is a wonder - it is like a great independent film, unflinching, provocative, well-constructed.

As an art therapist, I read Dr.John M.MacGregor's book, 'Henry
Darger,In the Realms of the Unreal'and marvelled at the potency of art as a therapeutic agent.

Henry Darger initiated his own therapy. He painted a torrent of images representing his rage. Without his art and his writing, I wonder who would have been the target of this volcanic fury.

John MacGregor's book is a must for all art therapy faculties and departments.

Beth Robinson

Darger's voluminous work, of which the drawings are only the tip of the iceberg, are inaccessable, literally, except for fragments published in a previous collection. Even if the full opus was available it would still be a alien monument due to it's sheer size, attracting only the peculiarly curious and those who have aquired the taste for Darger's vision. This said, MacGregor's work is a valuable description by a voyager to a dark continent who is capable of expressing the awe, fear and wonder that he experienced when immersed in this strange land. The book is lush, in design and writing, and each chapter tackles a different aspect of the Darger mystery. I imagine attempting to read all of Darger would cause the odd combination of shock and boredom that de Sade's work elicits, trangressive scenes compulsively written ad nausiam. MacGregor distills the major themes of Henry's work, avoids the mind-numbing repetition, yet preserves the vertigo of scale that Darger achieved, intentionally or otherwise. An odd masterpeice written about an even odder masterpeice.

I had the honor of meeting Professor Grene in his office at the University of Chicago. I was like a boy in a candy store. After spending about 15 minutes with this man, I could see how he was able to take this ancient work and bring it to the a level that made it very interesting reading. Regardless of what his critics may say, Professor Grene has brought us a historical work translated in such a way that will continue to attract new students of Ancient History. I continue to re-read his book not only for its content but also for the chance to see his autograph at the beginning.

I give Herodotus five stars, but Grene would get less for his translation. As one reviewer has already stated, Grene's attempt to put this massive work into modern language has some jarring effects. I can't remember any other historical work that actually uses the F word. It reduces the importance of this book, which is the first significant historical work ever written.

The History is an encyclopedic account of the known world in the 5th century before Christ (or Common Era for you secularists). The reader not only gets a detailed account of the hostilities between Greek and Persian, but also is introduced to in-depth accounts of the various peoples and tribes that inhabit the Near East and Mediterranean region. Drawbacks to Herodotus as a historian is his tendency to exaggerate figures, such as claiming that the Persian forces invading Greece numbered in the millions (at a time when armies rarely numbered over 100,000). Herodotus also has a tendency to tell a story and situation and then say something like, "But I won't go into the reasons for that happening." This makes modern historians cringe! But this is also an example of modern historians trying to instill their views back into history. Let's be glad Herodotus did what he did. A must for ANY student of history.

In an attempt to make up the deficiencies of my education, I am currently studying Greek history. This book was wonderful! The translator did an excellent job. The translation is not into what I would consider modern English. It is readable, but not slangy or crude as much of modern speech is. The rabbit trails Herodotus goes on make the History soooo interesting. Plus every now and then, the reader feels like he is absolutely face to face with Herodotus. It's an eerie but joyful feeling to share a common humanity with some dead guy from the 5th century BC. Even non-intellectual, don't really like history types should read this book.

The photographs by Lisa Watson are the first thing to catch your eye about this beautifully produced book. The majority are of museum specimens, which oddly is what makes the pictures so attractive: we're used to seeing high quality pictures of wildlife, but the displays here juxtapose many different beetles and have more impact than wildlife shots would.

The pictures are beautiful but the text is high-quality too. The authors start by reciting some statistics on the number of beetle species. Linnaeus, two hundred and fifty years ago, described 654 species; and Fabricius added another 4,112 species between 1775 and 1801. By 1876 Gemminger and von Harold's catalog contained nearly 77,000 species; and when Junk and Schenkling's catalogue was completed, in 1940, it listed nearly 221,500 species. It's now estimated that there are 350,000 described beetle species. However, recent work by Terry Erwin, extrapolating from detailed studies of a small area, suggests that there are more than eight *million* species of beetle just in the tropics!

The rest of the book is a fairly detailed survey of beetles in all their aspects. The authors are enthusiasts as well as experts, and it shows in their writing, which is crisp, clear and engaging. They cover beetle anatomy, fossilized beetles, habitats and niches, the beetle life cycle, and mimicry. There is also substantial coverage of beetles and humans: naming, appearance in mythology, use as jewels (really!), a discussion of pest control, and use in education. The book has more scientific depth than is usual for a coffee table book, without sacrificing interest value.

There is a website that appears to be maintained by one of the authors (Evans) that contains some material from the book; I recommend you take a look if you are hesitating about buying this. I found it by searching for the book title using a standard search engine; when I looked it was on the Lorquin Entomological Society's website, but it may have moved.

Recommended.

This is one of the most gorgeous books I own. I look at these pictures, and I think that human beings could not dream up jewelry that touches the beauty of these creatures. It is utterly unbelievable! Every time I page through this book my jaw is open in disbelief. They are so breathtaking they almost bring tears to my eyes. Okay. Confession time. They HAVE brought tears to my eyes.

Not only does this book have absolutely gorgeous photographs of many species of beatles, the factual content of the book is also very good. Not dumbed down, yet not inaccesible by the general public. Overall Excellent!

I recently finished reading a handful of secondary sources on Kant's Transcendental Idealism/Critique of Pure Reason, and this was one of the most fair and most readable ones. .... While Allison could be criticized for sympathizing a bit too much with Kant, he is simply attempting to present Kant in a less idealistic light than that in which he is usually examined. While many scholars see Kant as a Berkeleian idealist who was too scared to admit his true beliefs, or who did not recognize his true beliefs, Allison takes Kant's statements rebuking Cartesian/Humean skepticism and Berkeleian idealism seriously.
Allison makes one of his most important points early on, that is, that Berkeleian idealist readings of Kant always interpret the transcendental ideality of space and time as meaning that space and time are a set of either ontological or psychological conditions for the possibility of the representation of objects, while in fact Kant only means that space and time are epistemic conditions of human knowledge. This is the basis for Kant's revolution, that objects have to be representable to be represented, meaning that they have to conform to a priori epistemic human conditions to be possibly experienced. This seems much easier to swallow than the contents of Transcendental Analytic, even though those contents have recieved so much acclaim from English scholars who write very boring books which get published only because they hold teaching positions at major overrated English univeristies. Anyhow, while critiques of Kant which represent him as an idealist and view his Transcendental Aesthetic as skeptical hogwash certainly gain some support from some of Kant's statements, these critiques are abundant and all say basically the same thing. For a fresh interpretation of Kant that takes statements Kant makes about the nature of his own philosophy seriously, and which shows the true merit in Kant's work, Allison's book gets the job done.

Henry Allison has become one of the world's best living Kant Scholars, and KTI is his best work. With Kantian epistemology becoming more and more important, not to mention controversial, many of Kant's critics have got in the habit of smashing down straw-man versions of Kant (often without even realizing it). Here however, Allison weaves together a stunning interpretation and defense of Kant's Transcendental Idealism that leaves little room for those wanting to flail away at poorer constructions. For anyone who loves Kant this is the book for you, and for those who don't this is one of the most important books you'll ever read because it really lets you know what you're up against.

This text is the most sympathetic reading of Kant's CPR in English. Allison is perhaps the ablest defender of Kant in the USA. Burge once said that Allison defends Kant a bit too sympathetically--perhaps believes that K. is right. I think Allison's defensive reading is crucial in understanding Kant's Transcendental Project, or the Critical Project. If one wants a clear notion of what Kant meant by "Transcendental Idealism," this text is required reading. Allison's prose is careful, clear, and cautious. He brings light to often obscure passages of 'the Master.'

While I have the chance to plug it, I highly recommend Kuehn's biography on Kant (Cambridge UP), esp. for students new to the CPR.

Also, the N. Kemp Smith translation of K's CPR is standard in the field, but the new Guyer-Wood translation (Cambridge UP) is certainly worth checking out. Many corrections.

For an 'empirical' reading of Kant, see Strawson's Bounds of Sense. Also, his Individuals.

For excellent readings and clear interpretations of Kant, see Allison, Guyer (K and the Claims of Knowledge), Strawson (not altogether sympathetic with K's 'T.I.'), and Collins (Possible Experience/ U CAL).

On Kant and "Transcendental Arguments," see Stroud's articles (Human Knowledge/Oxford UP), A. Brueckner (articles), and D. Stern's anthology (Oxford UP).