When you travel to Jerusalem - take this book with you! Because it is as if a legend teller is acompanying you in your visit to the beautiful churches of Jerusalem. It tells you stories that no tourist guidebook will tell you, and it makes your days in Jerusalem's churches unforgettable.

The book is a colourful and absorbing one. It gives a detailed and interesting account of the life of Z. A Bhutto. It is a must read for anyone who wants a view into the life of the Bhutto's of Pakistan

Now in a fully updated second edition, Doug Shidell and Vicky Vogels' Bicycle Vacation Guide: Minnesota And Wisconsin has everything the adventurous cyclist would want or need to know about biking the trails and byways of two premier upper Midwest states. If you want to go biking anywhere in Minnesota or Wisconsin for fun and healthy exercise, begin planning for your cycling excursion by reading Doug Shidell and Vicky Vogels' Bicycle Vacation Guide!

The Biddle Street Bridge was an outstanding read. I couldn't put it down. It was definatley a feel good book, that brought a smile to my face & a warm feeling to my heart. THIS IS A MUST READ!!

Since most studies of Russian industrialization tend to examine the capitalist system as a whole and downplay the role of individual firms, Jonathan Grant's Big Business in Russia fills an important niche. Originating from his Ph.D. dissertation (University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1995), this in-depth study of the St. Petersburg-based Putilov Company, Imperial Russia's largest arms manufacturer, advances our understanding of Russian industrial history at the micro level. The few specialists who have explored business activity in Imperial Russia have focused either on firms established by foreigners or non-industrial firms (e.g. banking, publishing, or insurance). Grant, now an assistant professor of modern Russian history at Florida State University in Tallahassee, poses the question: "Did Russian businessmen conduct their affairs in a unique way based on an essentially different understanding of the market and state, or did they pursue strategies for growth that would have been intelligible to their contemporaries in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States?" (p. 1). Grant concludes that Putilov's market behavior did not differ from that of the key Western arms manufacturers such as Krupp, Skoda, Vickers, and Scneider-Creusot. Thus, Grant maintains, Russian business behavior was not "deviant." The board of directors at the Putilov Company followed expansionist strategies as aggressive as any of its Western counterparts, hesitating neither to jettison old product lines, nor to invent new ones based on market forecasts. Hence Grant's study shows that the state's role in the Putilov Company-still extant today as the Kirovsky Zavod--has been exaggerated.
The book is divided into seven chronological chapters: 1) "The Rise and Fall of a Rail Manufacturing Giant: N. I. Putilov and the Putilov Company, 1868-1885;" 2) "Engineering Growth: Locomotives, Artillery, and Diversification Strategies, 1885-1900;" 3)"The Russian Krupp: Putilov and the Artillery Business, 1900-1907; 4) "Banks, Boards, and Naval Expansion: The Question of Bank Dominance, 1907-1914;" 5) "Putilov at War, 1914-1917; 6) "Conclusion: Between State and Market;" and 7) "Epilogue: Putilov's Successors." Grant's Introduction skillfully reviews the scholarly literature on Russian industrial history.
Because the Putilov factory had experiences typical of other industrial enterprises in Late Imperial Russia, Grant's choice of a case study is ideal. Originally purchased and owned by Nikolai Ivanovich Putilov (1817-1880), the factory was dependent on the tsarist state, then sold out to foreign investors whence it became a joint-stock company (p. 4).
Grant's wide use of foreign archival documents contributes to the book's uniqueness. He draws extensively on the Putilov factory's correspondence with banks and government offices from the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA) in St. Petersburg, as well as its correspondence with the tsarist army and navy from the Russian State Archive of the Navy in St. Petersburg and from the Russian State Military-Historical Archive in Moscow. For the discussion of Putilov's armaments production in Chapters Two and Three, Grant used the records of the Main Artillery Administration (Glavnoe Artilleriiskoe Upravleniye), as well as British Admiralty intelligence reports located in the British Public Record Office (Kew, Surrey, United Kingdom). In addition, he found the company's published annual account books, housed at the Moscow-based Lenin Library, to be largely reliable, despite rumors by a Soviet scholar that they may have been falsified (p. 15).
While Grant defends admirably his argument about the Putilov Company, one wishes he had extended it a bit farther. If "the image of Russia as fundamentally exceptional in its economic development should be discarded," and if Russian capitalists before the Bolshevik Revolution were just as astute as their Western counterparts, what made Soviet Russia so vulnerable to the mythology of Marxist economic and political theory?
In any case, serious graduate students interested in Russian and European business history should read Big Business in Russia: The Putilov Company in conjunction with other key works such as Susan McCaffray's The Politics of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia: The Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers, 1874-1914 (Northern Illinois University Press, 1996); Thomas C. Owen's Entrepreneurship in the Russian Empire, 1861-1914 (M.E. Sharpe, 1996); and Ruth A. Roosa's and Thomas Owen's Russian Industrialists in an Era of Revolution: the Association of Industry and Trade, 1906-1917 (M.E. Sharpe, 1997).---Johanna Granville, Ph.D., Stanford University

An "indispensable book for bikers, hikers, walkers, joggers and families who want to enjoy Wisconsin's trails." Shawn E. Richardson's book Biking Wisconsin's Rail-Trails follows an identical format to Shawn E. Richardson's first book Biking Ohio's Rail-Trails. This colorful paperback book includes detailed maps, photos, and a description to each trail. Trail lengths range from 1 mile to 96 miles and include information about trail surface (smooth crushed limestone, asphalt), trail use (biking, roller blading, horses, wheelchair, hiking), parking, and points of interest. Shawn E. Richardson provides information about the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and their involvement with Wisconsin's rail-trails. If you live in Wisconsin, or plan to visit Wisconsin, this book is a must for any cyclist!

Field guides are great for helping you identify the bird you just scoped, but once you want to learn more about the birds you've been seeing the field guides aren't of much use. This book covers a limited number of birds, but the information provided is excellent. He covers the life history of the birds, including a season by season account of the typical year in the bird's life. Mating habits, habitat preferences, and threats to their enviroment are some of the topics covered. In general, there are 3-5 pages devoted to each species. The illustrations are black and white, but are well done.

Birthing the Nation is a remarkable work of anthropology as well as an important political document. It is one of those books that, by taking a narrow topic and exploring it thoroughly, offers stunning insights on everything from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to the nature of modernity itself. It also is a fun read, filled with hilarious anecdotes and fascinating details. (It is, after all, about sex.)

The author is both an American and Israeli citizen who grew up in a Palestinian village in Israel. She speaks fluent Arabic, Hebrew, and English and did her advanced schooling in the U.S. This special background makes her uniquely qualified to explore such a topic. Because she was raised in a Palestinian village, people from that area were willing to talk to her freely about their private lives. Because she is American-educated and has lived in the United States (and is married to a Jewish American), she knows how to describe Arab culture to Western readers. She knows what we will be interested in, and knows what needs explaining. Kanaaneh devotes a decent amount of time to Israeli government policies regarding reproduction and Israeli political rhetoric on these issues. But the heart of her book is her fieldwork -- hundreds of hours of interviews with Palestinians about having children and having sex, and how the people themselves take stock of such things.

The book's main contention is that in Palestinian communities in Israel, reproductive decisions are used as a way of measuring modernity. For example, for many Palestinians, a family's decision to have few children is seen as an indication of how advanced they are. For others, having many children is seen as an indication of how dedicated they are to their national cause. Either way, reproductive decisions are interpreted in a highly politicized manner (by the people involved in them, not by Kanaaneh). The same is true for birth control methods and sex education programs.

The book is chock full of surprising details. Kanaaneh presents a picture of a vibrant, changing society that is not quite so "backward" as some of us like to believe. One detail that surprised me particularly was that in Palestinian sex education classes, masturbation is taught as a safe alternative to sex. When a U.S. Surgeon General suggested such a thing during the Clinton administration, the American political establishment went into a delirium (both Democrats and Republicans) and she was quickly stripped of her position! Another thing that is evident is that sensual pleasures -- for both women and men -- have always been an important part of Arab culture, and in some ways the Palestinians are more open about these things than we have been.

As a way of "getting into" another culture, this book can't be beat. And given the rapidly changing nature of Palestinian society (and its sadly uncertain future), one feels as though one is reading a historical document in the making. This is a real find.

Bit by bit the obscure story of the legendary Negro Leaguers is being reconstructed, and books like this are playing a major role. Recounted here are all the East-West Games, the annual All-Star Games of the Negro Leagues, complete with boxscores, play-by-play, and contemporary newspaper coverage from the great African-American sportswriters & newspapers of the day. Finally those names from the dusty archives are being fleshed out into real players with recognizable skills. A superb reference. This is also a great companion volume to David Vincent's "The Midsummer Classic" about the (White) Major League All-Star Games, issued by the same publisher.

Using Walt Disney's Space Mountain attraction as a backdrop, there are five stories intended to be exciting for students who are in Junior High. This book is intended to motivate students to read with high interest, yet low reading difficulty stories.

The titles of the stories are: 1) The Ride of Your Life 2) Scout's Honor 3) My Sister Is A Real Brat 4) Home Sweet Home 5) Freaks

Teachers of students who have been to Disney, Get This Book For Your Classroom.