I recommend this book highly. George Hambidge visited our school to talk to our students about writing a book, and gave a copy to our library. It is now the hottest book in school! Wonderful story, touching, and enjoyable.

As a relative newcomer to the Texas Plains-Panhandle region, I found The Texas Panhandle Frontier quite helpful in advancing my understanding of the forces that crafted its culture. Rathjen artfully begins with a geographic review of the llano flat lands and the canyons that splay out from them. He moves chronologically from the Paleo Indian cultures through the Spanish explorers, the Anglo-American scientist-explorers, the historic Indian cultures, the buffalo hunters, and finally, the U.S. military conquest. The Panhandle region was discovered by Europeans twice-first by Coronado and his followers from Spanish New Mexico and later by the Anglo scientists, such as James Abert and Randolph Marcy. Yet, the wearying sameness of the region, its extreme weather, and paucity of water intimidated settlers, leaving it open through the middle 19th century for the free run of semi-nomadic Comanches and other native groups.

Coming to this region from El Paso, I wondered why the Spanish influence was nearly absent from the Plains-Panhandle. Rathjen shows how the area today might have been oriented toward New Mexico if the Spanish explorers of the 16th and 17th centuries had seen the region as a place of settlement rather than as an expanse to be crossed in the search for gold. Ultimately in the 19th century, as more choice lands were claimed, the region attracted Texas cattlemen and ranchers who saw financial opportunity in the emptiness. Hence, the region today is oriented east to the heart of Texas and even north toward Dodge City, Kansas.

Rathjen suggests that the tough barren landscape drew settlers who were equally as tough. His book helps a reader to understand how an intense and often uncompromising Christian Bible-based culture took hold in an uncompromising region. The book also leads the outsider begrudgingly to admire this land and its relatively new residents, yet also to lament that its Native American peoples were not permitted to flourish and add a plurality to the region.

Rathjen deals sensitively with the various groups who crossed the land, crediting both the Indians and their Anglo adversaries with the intelligence and nobility of worthy opponents. In different ways each found a niche in a difficult land. He acknowledges the sometimes severe military tactics on both sides and also presents a dispassionate but sympathetic look at the buffalo slaughter of the late 1800s. Rathjen's prose is never overbearing, melodramatic, or intrusively opinionated. He allows readers to draw their own conclusions about the complex relationships between humans of different cultures, animals, and the environment that all must share.

The book is well written and engaged in its subject. Rathjen is to be commended for the way in which he periodically summarizes the chapters and draws meaningful conclusions. Passages like the following are especially insightful:

"Significantly the scientific exploration of the Texas Panhandle was exclusively financed and directed by the federal government and executed by its agents, and was in no way a function of state or private enterprise. Having occurred in a state that owned its public lands, this fact, in turn, suggests that the federal government was far more a factor in the development of the American West than has generally been supposed" (113).

The Texas Panhandle Frontier is a classic study of this region. It is an excellent companion to Walter Prescott Webb's The Great Plains, Dan Flores's Caprock Canyonlands, and Donald Worster's Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. Rathjen provides a highly readable history of a part of the West that is indelibly woven into our American heritage.

Touching story of a Mom and Pop store in New England, where children and adults learn that not all life's items are for sale.

Jefferson's architectural drawings, edited and compiled by a noted architectural historian who taught at the university which Jefferson founded, give the general reader a perfect opportunity to observe Jefferson's talents not just as an architect but as a draftsman and artist. The drawings of the 1st and 2nd Monticello convincingly reveal to a general audience how the design and shape of his beloved home evolved from that of a two-story villa derived from the designs of the famous Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio to the red-bricked, octagonal, and domed three-story Neoclassical building that we see today. The drawings of Jefferson's other architectural masterpieces like the University of Virginia, Virginia State Capitol, and Poplar Forest also show this extraordinary Virginian's knowledge and mastery of the concepts of Classical architecture. This book is a must for all who admire Thomas Jefferson the architect and for all who want to know how he designed and built such beautiful buildings without any professional training as an architect.

It is a treat to see this work available again to the general reading public for a number of reasons. First, the book remains as fresh, exciting, and stylistically pleasing as it did when first appearing many years ago. Also, the book helps clarify and confirm the skills of the remarkable Frederick Cook as a writer of great merit, a photographer of immense talent, an intrepid and resourceful explorer, and perhaps above all as a kind and helpful human being both toward his fellow travellers and toward the indigenous peoples through whose lands he travelled over his long exploring career.

These talents of Cook's have been too often obscured by the intense and often acrimonious debates that have raged for nearly a century over whether he really achieved his claims of having been the first man to climb Alaska's Mount Mckinley and the first man to reach the North Pole. Whether he achieved those claims or not, his achievements on the expedition to Antartica recounted in this book cannot be denied as he played a vital role in keeping the crew as physically and psychologically sound as was possible during the long Antarctic night while their ship, THE BELGICA, lay trapped in the grinding ice. Cook was ahead of his time in realizing that raw penguin meat would protect the crew from scurvy and that sitting in front of a hot bright fire would help counteract symptoms of what we now call "seasonal affective disorders" that include depression, withdrawal, and other emotional problems. Cook was also instrumental in devising a system of digging and blasting out canals through the ice that allowed the ship to eventually escape into open water many months earlier than would otherwise have been possible. During their many months of confinement, Cook and his companions were pioneers in being the first to travel out onto the continent and experiment with Cook's novel ideas of sleds (they used a sail when the wind was favorable) and tents (Cook's design became a lightweight and sturdy standard for many future espeditions.)

But Cook is generous with praise for the other members of this international crew that included the Captain, Adrian de Gerlache who, though first forbidding Cook to serve raw penguin, was in general an enlightened leader who was instrumental in helping Cook in the planning and execution of their strategy for digging out of their predicament. We meet, too, the young Roald Amundsen who would become a lifelong friend of Cook's and who would later become famous for being the first man to reach the South Pole in his famous race against the ill-fated Scott expedition.

Cook's extraordinary photographic gift is amply shown in his famous moonlight picture of THE BELGICA as it sits trapped, its deck and rigging glittering in a sheath of ice. This picture, and others, astound when we consider the primitive equipment in use at the end of the Nineteenth century.

Cook brings home the excitement, the beauty, and the tragedy of this remarkable tale with a wonderfully descriptive writing style that will win over those readers with a yen for adventures of exploration, not only of a place but of the human heart and mind.

This is one of the most complete reproducible coloring books for age 3 that I've seen. I highly recommend it!

I feel a little inadequate writing a review of this book - think of this as a letter of appreciation. I just completed reading these ten stories and found them all very touching and masterful. There is much here that I need to read again and consider more thoughtfully . It is a little scary to me that anyone can be as perceptive as this author. Certain things you can only see from certain angles, and you are almost surely never going to find those angles on your own... you need help. I felt closer to finding a path to some of those angles here. I read to learn and enjoy, but I am rarely able to learn and enjoy as much in one place as I did with this book. One thing that might improve the sale of this book would be to get rid of the stupid reference to Ernest Hemingway on the dust cover. In my mind, it created a false comparison. Frederick Busch's insights are much more humane and free than the dust jacket insight from Hemingway. Read this book.

This book is one of the best I've ever read. It is incredibly suspenseful yet deals with the deepest issues of conscience and morality. I strongly recommend it.

This book is a must have for anyone considering hip replacement surgery. It cleary covers the evolution of the technology and techniques most commonly used in an understandable format. While technical, it facilitates easy comparison between the various technologies with valuable information on outcomes, longevity, and durability. It is especially valuable for candidates younger than 50 years who are struggling to find long lasting technology that will require fewer revisions. I highly recommend this book.

Bailey uses conflicting situations that occur in his rich ethnography to illustrate how Karl Popper's methodological individualism can be pursued. It's a refreshing change from structural analyses of culture. Just the methodology, not to mention the in depth field work, make this book well worth its price. It should be on the book shelf of anyone with a serious interest in anthropology.