This is a 5 volume masterpiece which is definitely the quintessential guide for the very keen gardener and the horticultural professional and would also be an extremely good companion for the student in this industry. W. J. Bean takes us through many genera from A to Z and also includes some principals in the very first volume. A real gem. The books are fairly pricey which is not surprising due to the immense amount of work which went in to producing all the volumes. A true classic.

This book was the coolest book! Not the best in my whole life, for animorphs take the cake for that. But this book was still action-packed, intense, and worth your money!

It's the absolute complete Hardy Boys book! Trouble in the Pipeline is chock full of espionage, slick saves, and lousy pick-up lines of Joe's. The scene where Joe is hooked up to the lie-detector which is connected to a bomb on Frank's stomach is classic Dixon. If you can get your hands on it, by all means, grab it. The best suspence ride yet from the Hardy's.

This little book is wonderful to have nearby to lift your spirits and put problems in context. It is also a great little gift to give to anyone you care about. It comes straight from the heart and is full of wondeful wisdom.

Frank and Joe's friend Ben Martin Wins a cool $5 Million, but all he gets is trouble. First his uncle demands to get a share because he's family, then his sister gets kiddnapped and he gets black mailed by a crook for his sisters safety. Read this book and be thrilled

I rate this book a 9 because I thought it was cool! Frank and Joe go to investigate who is making threats on windsurfer Doug Newman's life. Whoever it is does things like make the statue collapse and push tiles down on top of Frank, Catherine, and Doug, but Joe saves them. If you want to find out more, read "Wipeout!" It was great!

This wonderful book is rightly considered a classic among gardening books. Though it was originally published in 1903, it is still a marvelous resource for the modern gardener. The book starts out with gardening basics, such as soil preparation (the beginning of any garden), laying out the garden, seeds-beds, and planting. Then, the author begins her examination of the flowers that were popular in her time, covering annuals and perennials, and the moving into biennials, roses, lilies, and bulbs. At the end, she turns back to the practical, with a discussion about water for the garden, walkways and other decorations, and finally insecticides (OK, this is rather out-of-date) and tools. The conclusion is also worth reading, containing Ms. Ely's thoughts and several interesting garden diagrams.

This is an excellent book, and a wonderful resource. It puts so much knowledge together is a readable and interesting format. I highly recommend this book to you. [As a companion to this book, please let me recommend An Island Garden by Celia Thaxter.]

Have you ever read poetry that left you wondering what in the world the poor guy/gal was trying to say? Ever wondered if the poet was deliberately trying to leave you to choke in the dust of their own confusion? (hey, that's pretty poetic)! Ever felt that you'd like to revoke some poetic licenses? My guess is that if any of these feelings apply to you... you weren't reading Hardy at the time. Hardy may be a bit pessimistic, (Philip Larkin correctly remarked that "the dominant emotion in Hardy is sadness") and for him the glass may be forever half empty... but he's always clearheaded, and he makes sense. No confusion or rambling. The hundreds of poems in this huge volume span a lifetime, and are written by a man who considered himself a poet by choice; a novelist by necessity. Poetry was his heart's passion. This is why someone as great as Ezra Pound could claim that "no-one has taught me anything about writing since Thomas Hardy died."

For pathos, depth of content, and variety of style and rhyme, I think you have to go to Shakespeare or Browning to find anyone to compare with Hardy's verse. Who has written anything to rival "The Darkling Thrush" in the 100 years since? Let me know.

O.K., I'm stranded on a desert island... give me the Holy Bible and this book, and don't rescue me too soon.....

The last time I studied history was during high school and it was mostly a different part of it (let's say ancient civilization in one semester, european in another etc..) However I later on realized that there were some gaps and missing links between all these periods where I was mostly confused about the time intervals and the important events that started as a chain reaction and effected somehow all civilazations at different periods in time. This book offered me exactly what I was looking for. An overall summary of every civilization in the world history in a chronological and geographical order. Also the writer breaks the whole world history into very well organized sections with a two dimensional (time and geography) reference chart and maps at the beginning of each section. He also provides his personal summary and recaping the important events that marks the human history overall at the end of each section. I must add that he has an intense knowledge and background in every civilization and has a very objective point of view. Overall I recommend this book to everybody who wants to know a little bit more about all the cultures that has affected the human civilization (and I must say that we are not always thought objectively at high school where some bias can be observed about our own culture or civilazation that is thought by our people versus an outsider looking at it).

This is a good piece of work, though you can be easily misled by the blurb about the book. The book promises to contain a lot of comparative material between Sima Qian and ancient Classical historians, but in fact you get a few observations comparing some of the Greeks historians like Herodotus, and virtually nothing at all about Roman historiography. What you will find in this book (and it's certainly worth a read) is a continuation of Hardy's ideas as expressed in his PhD thesis. This is basically that we cannot take the apparent objectivity of Sima Qian at face value. He shows clearly how Qian is not just a "scissors and past" historian who just copies out his sources verbatim and gives us a dry and accurate rendering of events. It's easy to get this wrong impression because the author is far less overtly "present" in the narrative compared with an ancient western historian, and he only speaks for himself in chapter summaries after telling us "the grand historian remarks...". The primary method that Hardy uses to show us Qian's methodology is his examination of the historian's multiple narratives dealing with the same events. He shows clearly that Qian is playing with his sources, manipulating them, in order to bring out a certain theme, and this sometimes includes recounting contradictory versions of the same events.

I'd highly recommend this book to anyone planning to read Sima Qian's work. Without it, it's easy to miss the implications of what the ancient historian is telling you.