Julian B. Barbour did an excellent job. His overview of the history of celestial ans terrestrial mechanics is really a must have. But I noticed he often uses a kind of sketchy reconstruction. For example what he says about Huygens who did not succeed in creating the very notions of a modern dynamics. This is true, but in the case of Huygens there are strong philosophical reasons for that. Huygens did NOT want to use dynamical concepts. So what is pictured here as a failure seems to be more complex. On that point, JB Barbour follows Richard Westfall. Both, in my opinion, are wrong. Anyway : one must have the book. As I said, it's a masterpiece.

Has no competitor in sight in the field. Nowhere else can you, e.g., find out what Huyghens and Descartes did, and also what Galileo and Copernicus really did, and in such clear, concise language. Reads like a good novel! Also im[portant: the author does not at all color his treatment of the history of mechanics by 'cheerleading' for Mach.

Philippe Babour's Brittany is guide with an obsessive attention to detail and content. Of the six hundred or so pages, probably 50% to 60% are filled with history and lore. The book scores high marks as a companion guide to The Miclelin Green Guide or to the 60 or so pages on Brittany and Nantes within the Lonely Planet's guide to France. Barbour logically arranges his sections geographically, connects them together, and contrasts them. Both The Lonely Planet and Barbour have nice sections on housing-hotel areas and specific hotel recommendations, and Barbour does the best. The Lonely Planet is, unfortunately, focused on one-star places and below, but Barbour casts a wide net.

Barbour's Brittany is a solid 4-star performer in the area of trip planning. However, it cannot stand-alone and be the only guidebook to Brittany that you will ever need. Different from Michelin's Green Guide, there are neither maplets with driving instructions of the areas nor photographs. It makes sense to get a visual glimpse of the area if you have never been there before, but Barbour paints only lavish word pictures that don't really prioritize one area in comparison to another. He has very strong opinions and is not shy conveying them to the reader. This generally presents a nice style and personality to the book. Occasionally, however, Barbour becomes mean-spirited and makes direct attacks against specific people and places. Discount that, and it is a fine book to plan your trip to Brittany.

The definitive travel book on Brittany. At 632 pages it is certainly the most comprehensive. While most travel books assume that tourists do little more than travel from city to city to see cathedrals and museums, Barbour's Brittany gives equal time to the countryside. He is opinionated and tells you where the most beautiful parts are Brittany are to be found and what to avoid. We planned our three-week trip to Brittany around his recommendations and were elated. Our landlord (we utilized the book's information to rent a gite) was amazed that we had been to places he considered to be the most beautiful spots when they require traveling along unpaved roads without signposts. We were delighted to find that the bargains he recommended were terrific. For example, we followed his advice and went to a Breton festival in the remote village of Spezet, which was outstanding. The bargain hotel in Spezet he recommended was excellent. He not only gives his opinionated and accurate recommendations, he provides actual prices as opposed to the vague pricing categories of most other guides. We followed his advice and avoided the congested touristy locales as much as possible. When we were unable to avoid them, it was painfully apparent why he was warning his readers away. If you're going to Brittany, buy this book. Considering the high cost of travel, it's foolish not to have at least one good guide book and this is the best by far of the four I bought.

Talking about details! Everything you would want to know(and some you don't)about the history, chateau, architecture, accommodations, restaurants, etc. of the Loire Valley. A "must read" for someone wanting to get into the deep things-it is packed full.

Tourists all too often waltz in and out of some of the most spectacular places on earth altogether unprepared for what they see. Everyone knows that the Loire Valley of France has hundreds of striking chateaux, but few know that for over 100 years, the kings of France preferred to live along the Loire rather than exposing themselves to the (then) noisome stinks of Paris and its rabble.

Philippe Barbour's excellent guide gives you the background to travel intelligently. You, too, will know how Charles VIII, Conqueror of Milan, died (by bumping his head on a low door at the Chateau of Amboise); how it happens that the Chateau of Cheverny still sports its original furnishings (the same family has dwelt there since before the Revolution); and how Marie de Medicis disposed of her dead husband's mistress Diane de Poitiers (she exiled her to the Cheateau de Chaumont -- I can imagine a worse fate). You will learn that the Loire was not only the home of the French kings, but also the literary giants Rabelais and Balzac, both of whom wrote prolifically about the valley of their birth.

At the same time, Barbour's book is a highly acceptable guidebook for accommodations and restaurants -- if you remember that the book was published in 1997. Cadogan does not redo its guides every year, so they tend to emphasize background information that supplements other, more up-to-date guides like those produced by Rick Steves or Frommer.

If you don't want to travel uninformed, this is perhaps your best bet for obtaining the background you need painlessly.

For anyone interested in issues at the interface of science and religion, this collection of interviews comes highly recommended. Chief among the merits of this volume is its level of engagement, and it is the people involved in this project who insure that the level of this conversation will be deep and its range wide. The core of the book is a set of interviews of twelve scientists conducted by philosopher Philip Clayton and science writer Gordy Slack. They are taken from the proceedings of a 1997 meeting in Berkeley (facilitated by the Science and the Spiritual Quest program under the auspices of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, a pioneer in the field of science and religion), where an international pool of sixty scientists met to discuss the relationships between their scientific work and their religious and spiritual lives. Interviewers Clayton and Slack set a philosophically sophisticated tone and manage at the same time to invite the scientists to talk at a more personal, intimate level, without letting them descend into grandstanding or evoking defensive apologetic. The nuances of each scientist's perspective surface in the interaction. Clayton and Slack probe; they push and encourage scientists to refine their thinking and their statements.
It is also the caliber of scientists that makes the depth of engagement here possible. Their caliber as scientists is beyond dispute; two of the twelve are Nobel laureates, most of the rest are at the top of their fields. But, clearly, they have also been chosen for inclusion in this volume for their ability to articulate and explore their faith or spiritual quest as it interfaces with their lives as scientists. The twelve come from a range of scientific disciplines and of religious stances and spiritualities, and their level of spiritual-religious maturity or of commitment to a particular tradition varies. There are Islamic scientists who speak more of complementarity between modes of knowing than of conflict between science and religion. Others among the twelve are Jewish, Roman Catholic, Anglican. Spiritual struggle is displayed and addressed; the various approaches and traditions are honored.
Taken together, these interviews constitute profound evidence for faith in science in several senses. They exhibit phenomenological evidence that at least some ranking scientists integrate deep faith and excellent science. In addition, the conversations turn, time and again, to points of personal struggle. There is struggle to find integration between one's life in science and one's religious tradition, to resolve epistemological issues, to reconcile belief in human freedom with evidence of bio-genetic determinism.
The conversation is revelatory, as well, of the faith that science itself entails. There are choices to be made at the confluence of science and religion, to be sure. But the choices cannot be distilled into one between purely rational science and a (supposedly irrational) life of faith. Science relies on doctrines, tenets, rituals, and customs which must be taken on faith, and no one seriously arrogates unto him- or herself absolute objectivity anymore. There is, then, an implicit (and sometimes stated) critique of scientism here, an exposure of the beliefs implicit in reductionistic science.
Scientists and theologians ought especially to find this book provocative and perhaps evocative of further discussion. The interviews could be excellent classroom discussion starters and the book could serve well as a sourcebook for courses in religion, the history of science, and in epistemology. Clayton and Slack have provided models, as well, for how to deepen discussion and help people refine their thinking about the science-religion interface.
In the middle of his talk with physicist Arno Penzias, Slack quotes Wittgenstein: 'We feel that when all scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely unanswered.' To this, Penzias replies: 'The meaning of life is not in science. The meaning of life has little to do with how good our description of the world is. The description of the world we have today is remarkable . . . . [but] with all of this scientific progress we've made, the addition to our understanding of meaning is not all that hot.' But when Slack offers the same Wittgenstein quote to another scientist, a very different response is forthcoming. That is the beauty and the challenge of this book.
If one comes away from the encounter with this array of approaches with any clarity, it is that, at the science-religion interface, humility and modesty are appropriate. It is also clear that these issues are important and that they are not going away ' and that some of our finest minds (meaning persons with fine minds!) and deepest spirits are engaged in working on them. We have so much yet to learn about the universe; our spiritual quests have just begun.

As Pope John Paul II points out in his encyclical, Fides et Ratio "(T)he more human beings know reality and the world, the more they know themselves in their uniqueness,...the question of the meaning of things and of their very existence becomes ever more pressing." The book Faith in Science intends to show, at least anecdotally, that this is indeed the case. Like most of the rest of us (or perhaps even more so than the rest of us), some of the world's leading scientists also wrestle with life's ultimate questions.
This book, published in 2001 compiles transcripts of twelve interviews with top scientists (including two Nobel Prize winners) that discuss how the scientists' personal beliefs and faith effect their understanding of life and their practice of science. I found the majority of the interviews insightful and thought provoking, providing a rare insiders' view of the scientists' struggles to make sense of life's questions in a milieu often regarded as devoid of or hostile to religion and theological inquiry. The interviews are as readable as those in popular newsmagazines and can be appreciated by both the general reader as well as the scientific specialist.
The book is ambitious in terms of its scope. The scientists' religious backgrounds range from more traditional monotheistic faiths (Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Islam and Judaism) to less common belief systems. A few of the scientists interviewed are also trained theologians or philosophers in their own right. These scientists' chosen fields range from biology and ecology to astronomy and cosmology, physics, computer science and psychiatry. With this broad scope, the book quickly reveals a diversity of individual approaches when dealing with the question of faith in science. Some of the interviewees have discovered a comfortable home within established religious communities; others have found their presence within these institutions more tentative or untenable. Some describe their need to pursue a religious tradition other than that of their family of origin in order to make sense of their spiritual journey. All accounts represent individual experiences of confronting life's significant questions.
Using this type of approach, the reader looking for a "faith versus science" confrontation may be disappointed. The point of the book is neither to minimize religion, nor to declare its superiority. Instead, the interviews along with book's title subtly raise an ironic question for this post-modern age. With issues such as those surrounding cloning, high-tech weaponry and bio-engineered organisms already present or on the near horizon, can humanity continue to have "faith in science?" Or will the human race ultimately find that a spiritual component working within science is helpful or even vital? What can science contribute to the understandings of theology or spirituality? While these questions remain open, this book does succeed in showing that faith and science can co-exist, interact, and enhance the lives and thinking of some of the world's leading scientists. Perhaps theology and science as broad fields of study can also ultimately learn and grow from the experience of these exceptional individuals.

This is a great book probably a 5 stars, but the photos are in black and white and because of this I decided to give it 4 stars, there isn't anything on the internal anatomy of turtles as well. But it's a must have if you are seriously interested in turtles

This book provides an excellent key to identify any turtle you may come across and provides consise and acurate natural history information. There are lots of good pictures too. I wish there were books like this for more taxa!

I thouroughly enjoyed the author's down-to-earth prayers. I highly recommend this book for all women. In fact, I have purchased several copies for friends and family members.

On my knees has helped me get through many of my own uncertainties that were happening in my life . When I was standing on the supermarket check out line, my eye immediately set on When I'm on my knees and I've been on my knees ever since, praying to god, thanking god, and realizing that I can count my blessings and not my troubles, and that I have been truly blessed... The book also helped me become stronger to deal with alot of issues that were happening in my life.

Thankyou, ANITA CORRINE DONIHUE

I use this book every day to help keep my mind focused on God. This is certainly the best Christian daily devotional on the market today. If you haven't read it, then pick one up. You won't regret it!

For those of us who like profound insight into everyday Christianity (along the line of C. S. Lewis), My Utmost For His Highest is a must. I now see why the typical reader of this Oswald Chamber's classic continue to read it for the rest of their lives. There are 365 devotionals about a page each (small pages too). Very quick reads for those of us who don't have time for the longer devotional books. Buy it...what'd'ya got to lose?

Note: I believe this is an updated version where the language is revised for the modern reader. I prefer the classic edition to see exactly how Chamber's wrote these devotionals, so you might want to search around for the original edition (though, the language can be a little King James-ish)

Oswald Chambers was a man who loved God and loved teaching. His teaching is astoundingly acute to our present day world. If you wish to gain growth knowledge on how much our Lord desires our intimate friendship and dependency on Him, add this devotional to your daily Bible study. You will read the daily entries for years and they will never speak to you in the same way twice.

Mathematics is used broadly in the book but limited to simple algebra, i.e., no calculus is used. So the level thus is appropriate for an introductory economics class.

The text is of medium reading level, although sometimes the extensive introduction to terms is unavoidable in introductory texts. That is to say, we can find pages with five or six terms crowded together, but that's what happens to almost every introductory textbook and generally expected when you touch a new subject at the first time.

The general orientation of the book is theory with applications, and the authors seem to emphasize the real-world application a lot.

The NIV is not translated from the correct manuscripts. Therefore, it is not God's Holy Word, and it contains many contradictions, errors, and straight out blasphemous material. For the truth in God's Word, you must read the King James Version!! you can contact me if you would like to discuss this at:Buzulak@hotmail.com

I've always owned a Bible Promise book like this one, however, I have another one that I like better than this one. This one doesn't seem to have as many of the promises in it as I would like, & I also prefer the New King James Version of my other promises book. But to each his own, so if you like NIV, & want a promise book that is compact in size, this would be a nice one for you.

This is a blessed book, and I have said that the first time I opened this book in the bookshop which I acquired it. I started reading the book, and tears started forming in the corners of my eyes. The Word of God is powerful, and even more awesome when selected verses about certain topics are collected together in this book.

Topics include Loneliness, Forgiveness, Eternal Life, Fear, Success, Shame, Repentance, Obedience, Worship, and more! There is definitely one topic that will minister to you at any time of the day, whether you are happy, or sad.

This book is even comes with a "Presented to" first page for you to fill in, if you are blessing a brother or sister with it.

Anne Barbour has always written interesting books with strong characters. Unfortunately, her recent novels have taken a turn into what might be termed "speculative history." In an introductory note, she points out that her story is "how it might have happened." The problem is that her proposed turn of events doesn't really make sense, and isn't consistent with her characters. I've read two of this new style of Barbour novel, and won't read any more.

Earl of Corday has bolted! His aunt, Lady Binstead, has set an engagement trap for him, and now he is on the run. Cord has always liked his neighbor, Corisande, but he isn't in love with her, so he heads for parts unknown -- to his relatives anyway. His aunt hires the Bow Street Runner to find him.

Ginny Tate lives with her aunt and uncle in Rose Cottage, on the Earls property. She is trying her best to help her aunt keep Uncle Henry's work under wraps. Her chance at married life was lost with her fiancée in the Battle of Waterloo, and now she is considered a spinster. Here are two people that believe love is for fools for different reasons, and are quite sure they will never fall into the marital entrapment, but alas fate and a rider-less horse are about to change things.

Buried Secrets isn't a romance with a hero and heroine playing a simpletons game of should we or shouldn't we. Embedded in this wonderful romance is a lesson in giving one's self and reaping the rewards. Anne Barbour's regencies are far from quixotic. Her stories are very practicable and reachable. Her readers find themselves surrounded by the storylines with a need to participate in the actions and emotions of the characters. If you don't believe me, read Buried Secrets and see if you don't wipe your brow with relief and cheer the Earl of Corday on as he escapes a near engagement, his aunt's frustration in thinking she is doing the right by the thankless Corday brothers, feel Ginny and Aunt Louisa's fear and worry at others learning their secret, or feel Uncle Henry's obsessive passion to solve the secret. It's a wonderful story that gets to the heart of the matter; people, emotions and voices are always in motion.

(I wish Signet would use larger print in their regency romances.)

Anne Barbour has done it again. I don't think it is possible for her to write a book that is less than excellent. She captures your interest until the last page with an enchanting heroine and a smashing hero in a unique plot. Brava, Ms Barbour!