This book is good for the beginner in GSD or to the casual reader and covers dog care comprehensively, but I think it is a generic book with GSD pictures thrown in. Also, if you are an experienced GSD person in Britain you will be annoyed at how many of the dogs pictured, including those in the Breed Standard section, are anything but to the Standard, and are mostly of Alsatian type, not the SV type, favoured internationally. If you need every book on GSD then buy it, but if you are experienced don't bother.

Compact size. Carefully put together information. Solid basics given without too many words but understandable. Pictures are very helpfull and exceptional quality. This is cheap and good book for novice GS owner. I favor this book out of 4 i bought before.

I have had this book for some time and have recently decided to revisit it. I am glad I did. Along with the incredibly good quality photos of the many different 'models' of GSD that are available (and so co-operative for the camera!),there is lots of sound advice on anything you could possibly need regarding your GS. It is a bit short on words, but this makes the information concise and easy to remember. I particularly liked the first aid advice, so this book could prove invaluable and is small enough to be portable, so the advice can be at hand should you need it... The book would be great for a new GSD owner (perhaps included by the breeder on purchase of the pup?), as well as the experienced, especially if you like pictures of nice, everyday, non show dogs!

I was so excited when I bought this book. Dispair set in once I disovered the focus was on stay at home moms of very young children. I couldn't get past all of the examples of the trails and tribulatiions of "new moms" to focus on the 24/7 balancing act of working moms.

If you are a mom and are struggling with your new role and how to adjust, this book is for you!! It is funny, compassionate, and well-written. I love the realistic quotes from other moms as well as the inspiring ones from other books. Reading this reminds me that I do have a very important job and that I am important to my family. Buy this book!

. . .Author Deborah Lewis once said that while the early years of your children's lives go by quicker than you think, there are some individual days that seem to go on forever. For those days and those times, this book is just what you need. It's very, very easy to read--you can usually get through a chapter in just a few minutes after your child is finally down for the night, or just before you finally get to bed yourself. This is usually the one I've reached for after a day with my daughter where one or both of us were not as noble or Christlike toward one another as we maybe should be. And I always come away with something that I try out to make tomorrow better. It deals in very plain, simple prose with how tough it can be to get your own needs met in the midst of diapers, messy floors, and emergencies. But then it takes things one step further. You won't find any "magazine article perfect" advice here--just simple-but-effective steps you can take toward keeping your dreams alive, finding the support you need to go on, managing the load, and feeling good about your choice to become a mother. You will not feel talked down to here--in fact, you'll say, "oh, man, that's JUST how I feel right now" and "I'm NOT the only woman who feels this way." And the ideas for taking action are great--they realize that these are not the years to just totally make over your life, but that, just as learning to walk is a cumulative process for your kids, little steps toward your own self-improvement really do add up.

Two other things that made have made this book a real winner as far as I'm concerned: First of all, Elisa and Carol give very generous credit to their sources, including an appendix with footnotes, and a "for further reading" list at the end of each chapter. What I especially liked about this was that they did not limit their research to Christian authors and sources. Thanks to them, I rediscovered Barbara Sher's book "Wishcraft" and as a result of digging through HER book, have more or less rekindled some dreams of my own. So, I feel as if I owe Elisa and Carol as much a debt of gratitude as I do Barbara. Isn't that cool? And secondly, they emphasize very strongly that all moms need to look out for each other--none of this "mommy war" stuff between women who work outside the home and women who are spending a season at home.

And I do have to agree with the other reviewer about this book making a great shower gift. I heartily recommend that this be given to a new or expectant mom, along with a gift certificate for a free night of babysitting. You'll definitely get that mom's prize for best present!

After being catapulted to fame by his first book--the best-selling "The Road Less Travelled" --psychiatrist Morgan Scott Peck follows it up with another one on psychology and spirituality. The chapter that captured my interest without let was the one on his theory of psychospiritual development. He delineates four stages, each representing a more mature level of development than the preceding stage.

Peck claims that he arrived at this theory through experience, although he footnotes the fact that there have been many theories on psychological development prior to his, the most recent being a six-stage faith developmental model (see "Stages of Faith" by James W. Fowler)

Although Peck's elucidation of his theory is informal and sketchy, I find his model of psychospiritual development idiosyncratic enough to be regarded as a separate theory by itself.

Peck aptly calls it psychospiritual since it has both psychological and spiritual/religious dimensions. It is much akin to the developmental theories in psychology, yet it has a very strong religious flavor--Stage 1 being the lack of spirituality/ethical behavior, Stage 2 as orthodoxly religious, Stage 3 as a time of religious skepticism or atheism, and Stage 4 the mystical level.

Yet I believe Peck's theory tends to be ethically judgmental in character, i.e., it explicitly holds the higher stages as undeniably better than the lower ones, and tends to describe people in ethical terms--'chaotic/unprincipled' (Stage 1), or dogmatic (Stage 2), or principled (Stage 3)

Nevertheless, I see the veracity of such categories, albeit demanding much care and caution. Pigeonholing, specially in ethical terms, is dangerous business and can easily be misused and abused. However, I believe that Dr. Peck has realized the limitations of his theory and has provided caveats and exceptions in his later books, such as in "Further Along the Road Less Travelled"

All appeals for us to learn to get along despite our differences, and to actually celebrate those differences, have become bromidic, cliched, even corny. The harder it gets for people of different beliefs to get along, the more true community seems to be an Utopian dream. Through this book, Scott Peck shows that the creation and maintenance of community is not just possible, but probable.

In fact, Dr. Peck says that we are _called_ to community. (For more on callings and vocations, read his book "A World Waiting to Be Born".) Using mystical _and_ scientific terms, myths _and_ true stories, he describes our need to recognize that we are all part of the Mystical Body of God (regardless of what we believe about God) and to put our understanding of this truth into practice. By describing four stages of human spirituality, he shows that we always have the potential to move higher and higher, closer and closer to God, but that we also always have the capacity to regress or backslide: on the one hand, we have wings; on the other hand, we are natural crawlers.

"The Different Drum" is a guide for creating and maintaining community, which Dr. Peck describes as a place where no one is attempting to heal or convert you, which makes it the best place for you to heal and convert yourself. This is possible because people are called to wholeness, to be the best that they can be; but healing and converting need to happen in community, for we are also called to recognize our limitations and cannot be whole without each other. These are just a few of the paradoxes in "The Different Drum", which is perhaps ten times as challenging than "The Road Less Traveled".

This book is both overflowing with joy and saturated with sorrow. The joy comes from the realization that, yes, community is possible; the sorrow comes from the acceptance of the fact that we must "die" to achieve community. The necessary act of emptying ourselves of our prejudices, our need to control, our need to convert, our theology, etc., is so much like death that Dr. Peck even discussed the stages people go through when they are faced with physical death--stages taken from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' book "On Death and Dying".

I don't agree with everything Dr. Peck writes. For instance, I am a little leery over his stand on world government. Yet any criticisms of mine only remind me of my limitations and prove unarguably that I am called to wholeness through community with people with whom I disagree. I say that "The Different Drum" is both joyful and sorrowful because it is filled with truth.

Community isn't what we think it is. Peck does an impeccable job of explaining true community and why it is so elusive in our society. Though he mentions over and over that he is an idealist, Peck presents some very intelligent arguments as to why a community approach just makes sense. He isn't naive either. He says the road to community can be painful and extremely hard.

I liked most of this book. I have a male chocolate lab and wanted to know more about the breed. It covered every area from showing, to the breed standard to lab behaviors. The only subject I was dissapointed about was the lack of information on breeding a male labrador. I wanted to know more about the basic steps to take when breeding my male lab with a female. For example, when can I breed him? How do I get the word out that I have a male labrador to breed? If you're an owner of a female labrador, this book covered those areas. However, there were only a few lines on breeding a male.

If you're considering a purebred dog, make sure you check out these books by Dr. Bruce Fogle. They're full of up to date info and colour photos. The profile on the Labrador Retriever features information on general care, feeding, training, grooming, and exercise.

This book is very helpful when it comes to learning about and understanding this intelligent breed. This book covers the following subjects: Puppy Care, Adult Care, Feeding and Food, Grooming, Health, Breeding, Showing, the Working Dog, and a special chapter called "The Dog For You", which introduces you to the Labrador breed. I recommend this book to anyone who is considering or already owns a Lab.

This book is good, not great. Its to small and many of the illistrations are too small,and hard to see. But for the money its worth it. They have many other books that are a bit better than this one. Here is one that is very good 'Masterpieces of the J.Paul Getty Museum Illuminated Manuscripts'. This book is awesome with easy to read text and wonderful pictures. Happy Reading.

This is one of my favorite illumination books. Being a practicing illuminator, I need photos much more than I need lengthy discussions, historical analyses, elaborate provenance notes, etc. They have to be color photos and they have to be large enough, and at a high enough resolution, that I can learn something from them--and maybe even copy an initial, a diapering pattern, a bit of the border, or more.

This book satisfies all these criteria. In fact, the only thing I dislike about this book is the fact that it's so small, it's really hard to keep open while I paint from it. REALLY hard, because if you get large and heavy enough items to hold both sides down, inevitably the items obscure parts of the page you are painting from!

Its size can be an advantage, though. I purchased this at the National Gallery in Washington, on a midday jaunt during a conference, then went back for the next conference presentation. When the speaker turned out to be droningly boring, I brought out this tiny book and paged through it inconspicuously under the table. Could I have done that with Janet Backhouse's monumental work? I think not...;)

The selections are wonderful, and they're usefully broken down into sections based on content--excellent when you need to find a quick animal or floral image for a border, a rendering of a king or queen, or a picture of a dragon or other supernatural being. Not so excellent when you need to find an example of, say, a late 1400's eastern French book of hours (there are many, just not in any kind of chronological or geographical order). But then, there are other resources that do that. This book is interesting for its variety, its excellent reproductions, and its well-selected and unusual miniatures.

Excellent reproduction of a number of styles, with reasonable commentary. Very valuable for me as a newbie, to provide a sense of medieval style and composition. The size is at once very handy and very frustrating.

As a voracious reader of everything, but especially social history and even more of olde new york, I was so excited to discover this book. But, it is hard to plow through the verbiage, repetition, and confusion of this book. Each of these woman could have been the subject of her own book and Lewis has done little in the first three quarters to give us anything so we may understand connections that merit their lives being twined together in this fashion. Also, Lewis has tried hard to develop mystery and suspense where there doesn't need to be any - these ladies are great just the way they are, the endless foreshadowing, broad hinting and leaving a story just when it gets interesting is rather silly. The author has obviously done detailed research, but I found it confusing enough to have to jump back and forth between the narratives about the four subjects, but threw up my hands as chapter after chapter began with three pages on someone new who turned out to be the sister or next door neighbor of one of the subjects. Whew, I finally deconstructed the thing by reading each woman's story through by picking it out of the morass. What a shame, because these are interesting women.

Each of these women could easily have had their own biography, but the author does a pretty good job of covering all four, their relationships with their world and each other. This book is a bit disorganized, but once you sort out the characters, this is a wonderful view of four outstanding women and their world.

Thank you Alfred Allan Lewis for creating a book of these spirited women who were the backbone of New York City, American society and worldwide. They are invisible in our history books, but thanks to you and your accuracy for facts their spirit remains alive!

These women influenced their power, money, political and social status to unite and heal mankind. I should know, I was there........to carry on, and say every "Queen" to there own home..

The Morgan-Greer tarot deck is full of bright, yellow colour that is almost sickening. The paintings are quite nice themselves apart from the intense colours on many cards, but they are so plastic they slide all over the place and feel too smooth to the touch. The corners of the cards are too curved so that they get damaged from shuffling very easily. The dark blue cover of the deck looks quite appealing but I was unpleasantly surprised when I took out the cards.

I reckon the Morgan-Greer is the best Rider-Waite clone ever published; even surpassing the latter in several respects. For starters, the cards are borderless which imparts a feeling of expansiveness, and of nothing being wasted. (Contrast this with the big, wasteful borders of the New Palladini deck!) Also, its people look like real people: the men are down-to-earth attractive, and the women - buxomly curvaceous. None of that pathetic waifish, pixie-ish, anorexic visages which plague many modern Tarot decks. The pip scenes are also very well done: several of them actually improve on their original Waite-predecessors; and the cards' lack of borders assist in this achievement.

Some readers may complain that this deck looks "ugly", but they should re-evaluate it in the right context. not only does the Morgan-Greer capture the epoch of the 70s era succinctly, but also, its color schemes conform to a carefully-thought-out, esoteric plan. It is a nicely-executed memoir of a bygone Golden Era.

You have to see this tarot deck to truly enjoy it. It's colors are rich and the drawings are very expressive. The meaning of the cards are well expressed in the pictures.

Truly one of a kind. Most tarot decks have blaise borders and pale colors. Not this one. Each picture is artfully done. On top of that the picture dominates the entire card, there is no border, so the card really stands out.

The only negative is the plain blue with white stars back. With such a beautiful face the backing is somewhat of a dissappointment.

The terrorist atrocity of 9/11 spurred a lot of writers into thought. Unfortunately, the thought was usually something like this: "I've got a book in the works, or out of print, touching on terrorism, Islam, the Israel-Palestine nightmare, etc. Those topics are going to be huge, so with a bit of tweaking to link the book to 9/11..."

Fair enough; writers have to live. So here's Robin Morgan's 1989 book, reissued with a subtle title change and a few pages of post 9/11 stream-of-consciousness typing. But this book was already anachronistic in 1989. Most feminists had moved past the sloganeering of the 1970s, in which men and women were caricatured as (respectively) death-worshipping rapists with horrible yucky genitalia, and beautiful, loving, gentle, spiritual flower-beings. But Morgan's book was firmly a product of that mindset.

So Morgan will tell you that the cause of terrorism is simpler than you think. "_The terrorist is the logical incarnation of patriarchal politics in a technological world._ The terrorist is the son practicing what the father has practiced, and claiming to have found his own identity in doing so." [Italics in original.] "The phallic malady is epidemic and systemic."

So the cause of terrorism is those dreadful humans with bollocks. Morgan's prose is also not un-bollockular. Try: "He [heterosexual men] knows that his actions are supported by the twin pillars of the State of man - the brotherhood ritual of political exigency and the brotherhood ritual of a sexual thrill in dominance. As a devotee of Thanatos, he is one with the practitioner of sado-masochistic 'play' between 'consenting adults,' as he is one with the rapist."

Some "devotees of Thanatos" and their partners and children may wonder what Thanatos is. It's Freud-speak for a supposed human death-drive, except that Morgan took Freud's fantasy a step further by declaring that "Thanatos" is exclusively male: Men are from Thanatos, women are from Eros.

Morgan's pop-Freudianism doesn't end there: sometimes a cigar is just a thrusting, phallic weapon. Morgan reveals: "The war toy, the rigid penetrating missiles, the dynamite and the blasting cap-these are at first only symbols of the message he must learn, fetishes of the ecstasy he is promised. But he must become them before he is rewarded with what the lack of ambivalence promises him: a frenzy, an excitement, an exhilaration-an orgasmic thrill in violent domination with which, he is taught, no act of lovemaking could possibly compete."

But this feels wrong, as well as tiredly shallow. Does a suicide bomber really feel sexual about the cylindrical objects he, or she, straps to her, or his, body? Other mental processes, involving religion, politics, hate, cycles of revenge, seem more relevant, more causative, than Morgan's pop-Freudian phallus fixation. Even in the 1980s, Morgan had to turn a blind eye to female terrorists like poster-girl Leila Khaled and others, whose actions were inconvenient facts Morgan dismissed as "tokens". And since Morgan counts military action by male heads of state as terrorism, she also had to turn a blind eye to the military activities of such bellicose political leaders as Meyer, Thatcher, and Indira Ghandi, whose wars were recent history when Morgan was writing. But the current terrorist wave has brought a feminisation of terrorism; increasing numbers of women suicide bombers make Morgan's focus on willies as the root of terrorism now seem quaint.

Morgan also claims that you can gauge a culture's potential for producing terrorists by assessing the status of women in that culture: the higher the status of women, the lower the potential for producing terrorist acts.

But Morgan rightly condemns US Government agencies for sponsoring wars, dictatorships, terrorists, the overthrow of democracies, and so on, particularly in the 1950s through to the 1990s. (I'm leaving Afghanistan and Iraq out of this picture, with ambivalence, though Morgan wouldn't.) But the status of women in the US is among the highest in the world. Ditto France: supporting genocide in Africa, "Rainbow-Warrior-Boum!", etc, plus childcare. While more patriarchal cultures like Thailand, Tonga, Switzerland, etc, produce somewhere between very little terrorism and none at all. Of course patriarchy is an evil; it's just not the _only_ evil in the world.

A more relevant distinction is between cultures that have universal, cheap, secular, education and those that don't. If you won't fund decent education, plenty of bad people will be glad to fill the gap, teaching hate and terrorism. There is certainly also a nexus between terrorism and the subjection of women, not only in relation to Islamism but strongly concentrated around Islamism. But Morgan's shallow book is useless as a discussion of that nexus.

There is one other problem with this book. Morgan writes about men with enormous and unrelenting disdain: she has said that she thinks hating men is proper, and (as a joke, though she expressly denied that she was joking) that perhaps heterosexual men could help the world by ceasing to exist. Me, I don't really like being hated, especially on doctrinaire grounds by someone who doesn't even know me. That's just my vested interest, of course. Still, I can't help thinking the world has enough hatred, and that Morgan's own contribution in that regard is perhaps more part of the problem than part of the solution.

Finally, there's the subtle title change. The book was originally published as _The Demon Lover: The Sexuality of Terrorism_. The new edition is called _The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism_.

I can see why the original title had to go; in the English-speaking world, post 9/11, potential buyers might be irritated by Morgan's linkage of sexuality and terrorism, also the apparent implicit hint that terrorism is sexy. The new title makes the book sound more sensible, and for that reason it is a less accurate indication of the kind of book this is.

Cheers!

Laon

I was captivated by this book, which is incredibly timely though published 13 years ago. Morgan blends hard edged investigative reporting, sharp political critique, poetry and biography together in ways I found startling. Her analysis, especially of the Middle East's conflicts and how they affect the region's women, are eye-opening and surprisingly optimistic. She tells the stories and viewpoints of women who are usually left out of the "news." The book is definitely not for men who turn belligerent or squeamish when confronted with a sophisticated feminist critique. I recommend it highly.

The events of Sept. 11 make this book a vital read. Morgan's analysis is mind-opening and well-documented.

Lots of information that the average person can understand, without the confusion of medical terminology. Easy to read the entire book or just pick out areas of interest.

I'm glad I have this book. I like to know myself what I need to do if something goes wrong. This book is easy to understand. They put everything in terms you can understand. Every woman needs this book. Only you know what's really wrong with you. Doctor's can't fix everything.

I use this book constantly in my work in public health. Alphabetical listings of every body part and how to take care of it from the cosmetic ("How to Give Yourself a Pedicure" in the section for Feet) to the crucial (i.e. what is involved in a basic gyn appt.) As long as you have a body you intend to take good care of, you have a need for this book.