Though Ms. Coleman's book is written for families, I have found it to be an excellent classroom resource as well. Steps ahead of most "idea-a-day" books, the questions posed are both thought provoking and timely. Many universal themes are addressed, promoting lively discussion for all ages. Parents, teachers and students alike will find AROUND THE FAMILY TABLE a perennial favorite.

I read Sue's book after returning from my first Alaskan cruise. I wish I had read the book before my trip! Great folklore, stories and insights about the local culture. Absolutely beautiful watercolor pictures. Highly recommend the book.

As a Canadian I can vouch for the fact that Sue Coleman has captured the essence of Fisrt Nation's deep spiritual roots, their artistic beauty and the true beauty of their mythology! This book is a rare combination of visual and expressive art!

This was the best book I have ever read. I read it twice in one night and I wrote a book report on it. The main characters were very interesting and the action parts were alot of fun.I have read alot of sports books and this was the best.

Written by Andrew Conway (a professional astronomer) and Rosie Coleman (a primary school teacher), A Beginner's Guide To The Universe is an amazing, fact-filled science book especially recommended for inquisitive young readers ages seven to fourteen, but which would be intrinsically interesting introduction for readers of any age or background. Color artwork and photography superbly enhance the enriching and informative text packed from cover to cover with information about the solar system, planets, galaxies, and beyond. An amazing and educational guide to stir interest in the stars, A Beginner's Guide To The Universe is enthusiastically recommended for personal, school, and community library Astronomy collections.

I thought my kids would never stop laughing! After we had read it, all I had to do in similar situations was remind them of Bernie - and they would laugh and relax about whatever they were losing their temper over. Definitely a good buy.

More fun and social impact than a wistful communist.

This book gives you a very complete overview of how people two centuries ago discovered the Cell theory, natural selection theory, many aspects biochemistry and a lot of other very fascinating things. I was amazed that what we are learning within 45 minutes today costed a century of hard work to discover. This book vividly describs how people's understanding about ourselves, about our history and our natural environment changed and changed again and again as new instruments become available, more knowleges were collected and more resources were poured into the study of the science of life. This book is well written, a pleasure read in my standard. It give me a much better understanding of myself. Just so you know, this book is one in a series.

Physical Science in middle age. The construction of modern science: Mechanism and Mechanics and one other book that is out of print. For people want to know more about how biology used to be and how many hard works have been done for its study, it is a really good book to buy.

This third edition of The Biology of the Autistic Syndromes finally puts fully in place the new paradigm of autism which knocks down the two major myths about autism. 1)Autism is NOT caused by poor parenting - the parents are, if anything, the victims of this psychoneurological disease -- and 2)autism is NOT one disease -- it is many different diseases. The symptoms of autism are due to neurodevelopmental errors in the fetal brain. Modern neuroimaging techniques have shown that virtually every brain region is affected in autism.

Approximately three-quarters of the children diagnosed as autistic have one of the disease entities of autism, discussed in Chapter 10. Another quarter of the children have a double syndrome, that is an autistic syndrome in addition to a second, well-established medical syndrome, discussed in Chapter 11. Correct diagnosis of each individual child, as outlined in Chapter 16, is the essential first step toward accurate medical therapy.

There are chapters on Asperger syndrome, epidemiology, neuropsychology, epilepsy, biochemistry, neuropathology and molecular genetics.

The new paradigm of autism is changing the future for children with autism.

There ought to be a name for this genre. The jacket blurb says "nature/Southwest literature". But Annie Dillard did this in the Northeast and Edward Abbey did it all over the Southwest and down rivers. Everett Ruess and Ann Zwinger did it in SE Utah with superb sketches and wood cuts. C.L. Rawlins and Gretel Ehrlich do it in Wyoming with sketches and photographs. Stanley Crawford did it with *Mayordomo* and *A Garlic Testament* a few miles SE of Tom Ireland in the Embudo Valley between Taos and Santa Fe (or halfway to Los Alamos - whichever way your crow flies).

"People who bond with 'place' and then write about it with philosophical comments and profound/funny/zen-like observations along the way" is a bit cumbersome. These people out-Thoreau Thoreau (and I'm from Thoreau, New Mexico [heh heh]; I ought to know). All these authors (and more) do this thing superbly well, in their own unique voices, but all the same, the genre deserves a better name than "nature/Southwest" or "nature/Northeast."

Ireland has added a new dimension with Angie Coleman's joyful paintings of exactly this same country round about. [I've debated about extracting and framing these paintings - still debating. Think I'll have to buy another copy of the book.]

This author reproduces his encounters with his Spanish and Indian neighbors (sometimes poignant, somtimes frustrating, always funny). These little essays/vignettes stand by themselves, but at the very end, the writer includes a story about La Pascualita - a real person who sweeps the roads with her broom and is housed and adopted by the entire community of La Madera. Ireland weaves her into a story that is reminiscent of Rudolfo Anaya, but very much his own.

And his piece about Magdalena, the magpie he adopted, is an original for sure.

"Walking around with a bird on your head is like watching life from a tenement window." "What's the collective noun for magpies? How about 'complaint'? There's a complaint of magpies in a cottonwood on the hillside across the river."

He watches the ravens of La Junta: "I was still standing there when the raven blew up over the cliff and almost into my face. It must have scared him almost as much as it scared me, to be riding the blast sixty feet off the ground and then all of a sudden to be facing a man. He shat, climbed up over the reach of harm, and held there at the closest safe distance to look again, reassembling his world into the kind of order he trusted it to have. (Ravens up. Men down.) Then he spoke. It was a sort of rattle, as much from the bowel as from the throat, and in it there was both fear and outrage: 'This cliff is taken. You are not wanted here.' He drifted north, riding the thermal, checking to see if there were any more of me around, then fell up and away into the bottomless sky."

About roosters: "...their voices make me think of the smell of joss sticks because *things mean things:" the rooster means incense, and the helicopter means searching the river for the body of a dead man, and I deceive myself that at eight o'clock this morning the real work will begin. Things mean things: the substance of faith, what we live for, those meanings, those coincidences of sky & rain & thought that jump at us."

He makes you feel like you're perching on his shoulder, looking through his eyes, seeing what he sees, hearing what he hears, and understanding through his mind and heart.

"Towards evening, the sun dropped into a corridor between the clouds and the little valley was filled with pink light. I put down my shovel and stood under a juniper to witness the change. It was like being in an aquarium: immersed, the bare cottonwoods, the hillside, the vacant house across the river, the fence posts, my own hands acquired a light of their own. The air filled with sugary spines of ice, and a rainbow appeared, its northern pole planted in the willows of a neighbor's cow pasture. I could see impossible distances in every direction; up the valley to La Zorra, down the crooked Valleciros, up the canada behind Vigil's store - as if I could see around corners."

All through these reflections are little personal musings:

"What is it about the presence of parents that makes us feel something less than alive, when they're the ones responsible for bringing us here in the first place?"

About dreams and water: "To wake in the dark and peel off the skin of your dream: to go out in the dark in the wet yard where drops of water hang from the asparagus berries and the night sounds are swamp sounds, sounds of water. And this our dry land smells like water and the creek runs brown."

And about work: "Ulceration of the spirit. It seems that when I have a job, my life becomes the job and not much else. There is no true rest and no true work until it's over."

"...we have made our joy depend on our work, and having come this far, we can't renounce it, can't be free from it, but only look for freedom in it."

"When I stand outside watching the clouds and the birds, I'm doing my work. These things need to be studied and praised, at least reported on."

And report he does. The title of the book comes from a quote by Malcolm Lowry, "You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building a nest in your hair."

This is a beautiful little gem of a book with lovely paintings, anecdotes and musings - the kind of book to keep by your bed and pick up and read at random. It's also a book to read all the way through from the beginning - more than once. In a word - delight. Five stars - easy.

pamhan99@aol.com