All of the Nancy Drew books are exacly the same. Not one of them ever has a change in plot. I bet the author used the exact same format for all 56 books. Nancy Drew hears that there is a mystery, so she and her friends go to solve it. She finds some clues, gets into a tight situation with the "bad guys", and get out of it. Repeat about three times. Then...it doesn't change a bit...she solves the mystery and is about to turn in the criminals when they catch her and she is about to die. She escapes, the "bad guys" are put in jail, and she and her friends cheer. Every single book is exactly the same. Can't the author use any creativity to change the plot around? It is so unrealistic that she would get into "scary" situations, and get out so many times. In every story she solves the mystery and it always comes out good. There are almost no obstacles and what few there are are so lame, it is almost pointless to have them in the first place. There is absolutely no point in reading all 56 of them. I can understand reading one just to try something new, but after that why read more? They are all exact photocopies of the last one. Spend your money on something worthwhile.

It was great reading the first set of Nancy Drew books. I love how they were written such a long time ago and they used old words. Their great books to read!

The Starter Set is a great way to hook new readers on the adventures of everyone's favorite girl sleuth, Nancy Drew.
Contained herein are the first six mysteries in the series which are among the best in the canon.
There is plenty of adventure and mystery in these stories as you follow along with Nancy and her best friends, Bess and George.
...

This is the story of a man who, by Fortune or Fate, became an aviator during WWII. This book is more about his transformation from boy to man than it is about the history of aviation in World War Two. Still, its an insightful piece and the imagery is fantastic. I can still see Mr. Hynes sitting in his tent during a typhoon, and the sunlight glinting off of the Mustang's wings just before it collided and fell into the ocean. If you're interested in "feeling", then this book is a "10". If you're more interested in the adventure and drama, then this book is a "5". My rating is the average of the two, as I bought it for the adventure and ended up with the feeling.

If you think this is just another old man remembering World War Two, you would be right.But this isn't some "blood and guts" recollection from the old timer who had one too many at the VFW, it is an honest and sincere account of young men coming of age at the height of the war. Hynes sets out to become a Marine flyer in 1943 and along the way to realizing this goal he introduces us to other real people like Joe,T, Rock,and Bergie. By the time Hynes and his friends get their wings and are trained as a Torpedo Bomber Pilots it is late in the war.But they are just in time for Okinawa. I originally bought this book because my fathers brother was a gunner on Hynes' pal Bergies aircraft, and I was looking for the attitude of that generation of young men that went off to fight in the last "good war". I wasn't disappointed.

I have read this book 4 times now, and it gets better every time. Samuel Hynes has achieved something a lot of other writers have not. He has written about events that happened to him decades before, yet tells his story with the same sense of wonder as if it had just happened to him. This is a blunt, emotional, and at times extraordinarily humorous book that pulls no punches in its depictions of military life and the actions of young men about to go off to war. It is a shame it is out of print. If you can find a copy, whether through Amazon or at your library, it is worth reading over and over again!

I was left with more questions than answers after reading this book. There was a tidbit on most every subject but it didn't give me enough to feel like I could proceed with my plans for building or gardening in a greenhouse

As I find true with most of the "Ortho" books, this one is pretty impressive. It is not very big but they have a knack for getting a lot of info into a small amount of real estate. It doesn't tell you everything there is to know about greenhouses and greenhouse growing, but if you are looking for a book to get you started that won't take six months to read (or figure out!), this is the book you need.

This was the first book I got in my quest for a greenhouse, and I found it worth twice it's cost. While it is not lengthy, it gives great insite into the home or hobby greenhouse.. from history, to "how to," to purchasing a kit, to what to grow. It's honest and to the point. I've read it cover to cover so as not to miss anything, and found useful information in every chapter! A worthy purchase for those considering the purchase of a home greenhouse.

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Robert Putnam, Simon & Schuster, 2000

Review

If you can read only one purportedly academic book this year choose this one. Despite being statistically dense, it reads like a business bestseller - a sort of Tipping Point with meat. Through a exhaustive use of polling and other socioeconomic indices, Putnam paints a compelling picture of a nation fragmenting into smaller and smaller pockets of disjointed individuals. A must read for anyone interested in political action into the next decades.

Synopsis

The basic premise here is that a growing social disconnect can be identified in trends of American public opinion over the course of the last century though analysis of "social capital" activities. Social capital is the connection - and the strength, utility and cohesion of these linkages - between individuals in a society.

Rather than a lamentation on this collapse of civics, Putnam traces polling, voting, memberships and leisure activities to debunk most of the myths that attempt to explain the failure of politics to engage the US public. We still have the same 19-20 hours for relaxation per week and work, with its focal points of 'team' capitalism and heightened customer service does not seemingly translate outside the office. By then bringing in Tocqueville's 'self interest, rightly served' [135] a clear trail of the decline of American civility is clearly traced.

The salient thought roaring through Bowling Alone is that "A society characterized by generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter." [21] This is the basic finding that such a simple premise forms the basis of all the political upheavals in America - and with little retinking, Canada - over the past century and of greater importance, since the silent reversal - 'disjunctive pattern of decline' - of civic connectives in the middle 70's.

The criticisms of Bowling Alone hinge primarily on the seeming Ozzie & Harriet lamentation for the good old days [see Mark Kingwell's The World We Want, 2000] when everyone liked each other, but they sorely miss the point of the work. Given that more people bowl in leagues than voted in the 1998 US congressional election , perhaps a look-see at Pleasantville is warranted. Putnam's prescriptions are not 'civic broccoli' or predicated on the ubiquitous they coming to our rescue, but simple, easy to articulate and ultimately deliverable.

Detail

Putnam typifies 2-type of social capital: bonding and bridging which provides a useful distinction in the book. Bonding capital coalesces similar groups while bridging arches socioeconomic groups. This differentiation provides Although this is a subtle distinction it is at the core of the thesis of Bowling Alone. It allows for a plausible explanation of the rise of chequebook participation and the proliferation of letterheads over civic action by individuals. Collective goals and causes have become secondary to personal growth with thin and cool trust.

Putnam's exploration of the causes of this decline follows leads from the number of personal injury lawyers, through television into bureaucratization of community action. He sees troubling social tendencies to 'hire organizations' for community action and the development of virtual social capital consciousness, which must be regarded as oxymoronic at best. These activities become captives of zealot 'dictators' or dilute their effectiveness as they denigrate into gab-feast anarchies. Thus, Putnam questions the effectiveness of the internet as a tool of bonding social capital as it has a tendency to create joy-stick democracy of the paramount individual. This "sociological Astroturf, suitable only where the real thing won't grow." [107]

Thus, although widespread discontent exists, incumbents are re-elected as astonishing rates in America as there are few focal points for the coalescing social disconnect. This raises the specter of niche markets in politics where single issue consumers' end up supporting causes that in effect erode the social cohesion of their communities. This finding is most troubling for today's youth whose values are filtered through the abstraction of the media - and especially by television the "single most consistent predicator" [229] of declining civic involvement - and are tuned out to organized civic action.

Overall, Putnam provides clear and compelling evidence that a catalyst is needed to re-engage Americans in collective civic action to address pressing social and growing economic ills that face the nation. Or in a chilling insight, he believes that we are bottoming out in "drive-by" civics.

It amazes me how often an academic with an important piece of the truth about the nature of contemporary social reality becomes embroiled in an avalanche of escalating public expectations & hyperbole until suddenly he is expected to become a hopped-up social prophet singularly able to explain, detail and unravel the heretofore-mysterious elements of our existential dilemma. Such is the case here with Professor Putnam's provocative findings regarding social disintegration in the America of the '90s.

This is an absorbing book, the result of Putnam's efforts to expand a short article Putnam had written regarding the observable facts of increasing social isolation and personal disconnection within our culture. Here he employs new data substantiating and extending the details of his original thesis, indicating that on almost every measure investigated, individual Americans are less likely to regularly socialize with their peers, becoming more isolated, more fractious, and less friendly to others than they have been in the recent past. The book is written in an engaging way, and entertains and seduces the reader with amusing (as well as frightening) facts and figures regarding the degree of animosity and alienation individual citizens feel.

Of course, it is easy to become so enthralled with reading through the entertaining list of particulars he enumerates than to pay heed to the burgeoning shapes and images lurking beneath the data; i.e., concerned readers should engage themselves in locating all this information usefully within a meaningful social context. Increasing social isolation and the progressive breakdown in what sociologists call social cohesion are not new phenomena, but have been steadily eroding the social fabric and our feelings of connectedness to one another for over a century. In fact, at the turn of the 20th century both Emile Durkheim and Max Weber were warning of the social dangers associated with the rise of a rational, secular and materialistic social milieu. Reading other recent books such as Sales Kirkpatrick's "Rebels Against The Future" or Philip Slater's classic 1970 book "Pursuit of Loneliness" give one a much better grounding in how the degree of social isolation and civil alienation are related to what is happening in the larger social surround individuals find themselves in.

In essence, the kinds of isolation detailed so well in this tome are the result of the long-term corrosive effects of materialism, with concentration on capital acquisition and gaining more wealth and more affluent lifestyles. Indeed, if one reads the recent book "The Overworked American" by Juliet Schor, one gets the distinct impression that many Americans are so focused on "getting ahead' that anything interfering with this obsessive reach for greater material security gets short shrift in contemporary society. There should be no confusion about the nature of the problem that confronts us; we have no community because we have no culture left. The revolution of scientific change and technical innovation has systematically swept away the web of meanings we once had to integrate and make sense of all this. All we really have today is a mutual acquisition society, based primarily on our mutual lust for material goods and minimally constrained by the skeletal rules and regulations civil society sets for the nature of the material quest. This is a terrific book. Read it.

Putnam's commentary on modern American life is frightening at best.

I read Putnam's article by the same title in college and it left a lasting imprint because it crystalized my feeling that Americans are no longer involving themselves in civic and community life. His new book expounds on this depressing thesis and explains, in tremendous detail how Americans no longer value civic engagement or regard relationships with neighbors as worthwhile. He cites declines in participation in public clubs such as the Shriners and Elks clubs as well as more informal social gatherings like poker playing and family dinners. Using statistics and time diaries he plots indicators of civic engagement from its peak in the early 1960's and its subsequent decline thereafter. The greatest casualty throughout this transformation is in social capital, a term which predates Putnam and describes the emotional and practical benefits of personal relationship.

Putnam shows that civic clubs that have shown growth in membership since the 1960's have mostly been in massive national organizations whose membership is nothing more than people on mailing lists who pay an annual fee. Furthermore, religious organizations, whose members participate in their communities at greater rates than non church goers, are beginning to change their focus from civic participation to only tending to the needs of their church members.

The affects of this disengagement have impacted our health, democracy and safety. Putnams points out an axiomatic principle that as people associate with one another in various capacities, whether it be at the kitchen table, the sidewalk, the card club or the PTA, people form relationships that provide a pool of friends who can be relied upon when time are hard, the dog needs to be walked, or the poor elderly woman next door needs her home painted. Each relationship is an asset, the accumulation of which can be called one's "social capital."

Putnam does not place the blame for this on one source, but cites the entrance of women into the workforce, high levels of divorce, and urban sprawl among others as possible contributors. His most damning remarks are reserved for television. According to Putnam, no single technology has had such a damaging effect on America's civic and personal relationships. I enjoyed his attack on TV on a personal level because I decided 5 years ago to throw away my television and have never looked back.

Certainly, Putnam's concerns are not new. He admits to this and provides the reader with an excellent look at the Progressive Era when American's decided to solve the vexing problems of an industialized urban society by forming civic clubs and actively involving themselves in their community.

This is not a particularly fun book to read. In summary, it details how Americans have become spectators on life. The recent success of "reality based" television programs only illustrates how we have traded the potential richness of personal relationships for a false reality on our television screens. Life is about personal relationships, and it is sad to see how Americans have avoided these relationships.

Putnam is not all gloom and doom. As with everything, hope abounds. After reading this book, one should only be encouraged to find ways to involve himself or herself in their communities and invite the neighbors over for a BBQ. This is an important social commentary, and I encourage all to read it.

It's unfortunate that given the opportunity and resources to study the birth and development of regional government in Italy over the course of twenty years, the best conclusions Putnam was able to draw from his observations are hackneyed paraphrases from Tocqueville. Most of his most careful fieldwork yields results that are stultifyingly obvious; and it's hard not to think that his questions and indicators were not deliberately chosen to demonstrate foregone conclusions. Probably most irritating to me is Putnam's irresponsible use of history as a tool for proving continuities that are largely imaginary.

That said, Making Democracy Work is not a boring read, and its flaws at least encourage the reader to contemplate the million ways the book and the study it describes might have been better.

Beginning in 1977, Putnam and his colleagues studied the performance and reception of the 15 regional governments that had been first established in 1970. Given pre-existing disparities among the regions -- economic, cultural, political, demographic, nevermind linguistic and geographic -- it's little surprise that the researchers found that not all the regional governments developed the same way. While he found that the 'institutional socialization' of the new parliamentary bodies had a consistently positive effect on the regional politicians' growing professionalism and willingness to explore constructive compromises with ideological opponents, the governments were not uniformly effective or responsive, nor were their constituents uniformly happy with their efforts.

Ruling out economics as a determining factor in these disparities (through a series of statistical negotiations that show an appalling lack of understanding about basic economics), and drawing heavily from Tocqueville's ideas about the mystical cultural underpinnings for successful democracy, Putnam constructed a 'civic community index' -- a list of indicators including newspaper readership, membership in associations, and what might be called 'enlightened' (abstract, issue-oriented) versus 'parochial' (personal) voting patterns. Again, it's small surprise that he finds a close correlation between the regions' scores on this index and their constituents' relative satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their regional governments.

Trying to explain why this might be so, Putnam then launches into a heavily simplified -- at times almost fanciful -- exposition of 1,000 years of Italian history in which somehow economic development patterns, demographics, religious institutions, and systems of political organization experience enormous changes while cultural traditions of 'civic-ness' remain more or less consistent, wonderfully cohering to the boundaries described by the modern regions and their scores on Putnam's civic community index. He concludes that habits die hard -- whether these be 'good' habits of mutual trust and social reciprocity or 'bad' habits of atomistic self-interest and traditionalist dependency -- and that the effects of institutional change on social and cultural norms is gradual, perhaps so gradual as to be almost imperceptible within a single lifetime.

Stopping just a hair's breadth short of claiming that culture determines economic and political success in the modern world, Putnam does the next worst thing, which is to give credit for present-day disparities in wealth and power to 'historical trends' in cultural development that don't bear close examination by anyone even slightly familiar with Italian history. For example, given Putnam's assessment of the disparity between North/Central Italy (very civic) and the 'amoral' South (terribly un-civic), the first with its innovative and republican cultural of mutual trust and democracy, the second with its stubbornly backward vertical social hierarchies, one could be forgiven for imagining that the South must certainly have been the base of support for Italian fascism in the 30s and 40s -- while in fact it was the gloriously civic-minded North that provided Mussolini with his most consistent support.

On the surface, there's nothing wrong with Putnam's basic political belief -- that democracy is strongest when it's built on a foundation of social reciprocity and trust, civic engagement, etc. My criticism shouldn't be taken as a condemnation of efforts to build or strengthen civil society, or to promote participatory democracy -- far from it! The trouble with Putnam's argument is its methodology, and the pernicious cultural determinism that lurks behind his rhetoric about path-dependent history.

The central concept of Putnam's study is "institutions," but he frames these institutions as both an independent and a dependent variable. Positing that institutions shape politics, but institutions themselves are shaped by history, Putnam is able to explain both the causes and the effects of political institutions among Italian regions. The "effects" portion of his study is the lesser of the two in importance; basically, the fact that all Italian regions got identical institutions in 1970, and yet the performance of these institutions varied widely across Italy, sheds much doubt on the questionable theory that formal institutional design itself is a primary determinant of government performance (although most Italians North and South agree that the new regional governments have been a change for the better).

But if institutional design has limited explanatory power, then what other variable can better account for institutional performance? This is the more important half of Putnam's work, for it is where he shows that "social context and history profoundly condition the effectiveness of institutions" (182), by unveiling his more controversial and powerful independent variable: civic culture. What is civic culture? It goes by many names and concepts for Putnam (civic traditions, political culture, civic involvement, social capital, republican virtues) but in its most basic form it is "norms of reciprocity and networks of civic engagement" (167).

In contrast with the existence of this civic culture in Northern Italy, identified as having a millenium-long pedigree due to the North's highly decentralized political history, Putnam uses the concept of "amoral familism" to characterize the civic culture (or lack thereof) in Southern Italy. Amoral familism implies that reciprocity and engagement are limited to family relations and to vertical networks of hierarchical power alone (in contrast to more participatory and egalitarian horizontal networks in the North), and that all other social relations, as a consequence, are characterized by material self-interest. Tracing the evolution of amoral familism to Southern Italy's monarchical past, Putnam finds that Southern regions have been doomed to institutional failure by their civic legacy, just as the North was guaranteed a relatively easy success by theirs. Putnam summarizes these two divergent starting points as "vicious and virtuous circles that have led to contrasting, path-dependent social equilibria" (180).

To prove this main causal argument, that civic culture determines institutional performance, one would obviously need adequate measures for both civic culture and institutional performance. As evidence of institutional performance, or "good government," Putnam chooses twelve indicators: cabinet stability, budget promptness, statistical and information services, reform legislation, legislative innovation, day care centers, family clinics, industrial policy instruments, agricultural spending capacity, local health unit expenditures, housing and urban development and bureaucratic responsiveness. Putnam then further evaluates the validity of these indicators by surveying both elite and public opinions regarding the institutional performance of their regional governments, to see if the public's perception matches his own.

For evidence of his primary independent variable, civic culture, Putnam proposes four indicators to put his finger on this elusive entity. These indicators are: voluntary associations, newspaper readership, referenda turnout, and (lack of) personalized preference voting. Putnam also correlates these "objective" measures with more opinion-based survey indicators of civic culture.

Most of Putnam's evidence coheres quite well with his causal argument. His quantitative indicators of both institutional performance and civic culture are relatively broad and accurate, with the minor exceptions that would be inherent in any attempt to quantify a complex, multi-dimensional concept like "civic culture". The strong statistical correlations identified by the measurement of his indicators, backed up with corresponding qualitative evidence (some, but not all of it historical), can probably be taken as reliable evidence of a meaningful causal relationship (in Italy) between civic culture and institutional performance. Perhaps the most striking implication of these results is that the ubiquitous relationship between economic development and democracy is actually shown to "disappear" in a statistical sense. In other words, Putnam has controlled for economic development and found that civic culture predicts both democracy and economic development, perhaps even better than economic development itself. This finding, if confirmed in other studies and settings, would obviously topple quite a few of the canonical theories in comparative politics.

Putnam's thesis on the importance of social capital in engendering the successful functioning of democracy is an intriguing idea that merits serious reflection in our context today. His study of the community-organizations in Italy, and their effects on the effective workings of democracy on a regional and national level, highlight the importance of civic organizations and their ability to inculcate in their members a sense of civic duty - which consequently leads to a vibrant democracy. This book is perhaps especially fitting in the American context today in light of declining interest in politics, diminishing belief in the efficacy of governing institutions in solving problems, and the general ethos of apathy and frustration felt around the nation in the realm of democracy (something that the most recent election's low voter turnout indicated). Although the study is interesting, the idea is perhaps a little less useful in the pragmatic sense; one could run into the question of a chicken-and-egg scenario where there is a debate between which came first: vibrant democracy or civic organizations. Regardless, the book is one of the best in its subject area and a recommended read for any student interested in such issues.

When will this author stick to a subject that he knows-- traditional medicine-- and quit inflicting flowery generalities that capitalize on other people's cultures (in this case, Native Peoples) to sell books? This book is so poorly researched it made my head spin (which is about the only shamanic aspect of it that was validated). I returned it immediately and should have learned with past experiences with this author's work.

I am native american and I like this book . If you like stuff like this then buy this book . I would recommend it to anyone .
From the first chapter I noticed a difference in the way I looked at life .

This book provides a great way to learn about Shamanism. Insightful look into guided imagery.

My favorite book of 2000!

If you didn't know, this book is hard. I am a first year engineering student, and I felt lost through most of it. I gather it was intended for full-fledged physicists, but I was intrigued to read it anyway because of a philosophical thread running through the work. But beware--get ready for some Immanuel Kant and Einstein in only the introduction. This book is as much about the physics of time as the philosophy concerning subjectivity of time. Even though I didn't understand a lot of the probability or almost any of the quantum mechanics math, I still got some pleasure out of some of the more bizzare conclusions of the book. Did you know that for an isolated system (one not interacting with any others), time can't be said to have any direction? Furthermore, time as we know it is just a statistic. Another interesting fact is that on the quantum mechanical level, there is no such thing as time! If these things intrigue you (and you know what a double Riemann sum is) go for this book. Otherwise, be very afraid...

It is a beautiful but exterememly difficult book. It covers the concept of time and direction of time from the beginning up to current thinking. Author, being one of the founding fathers of philosophical quantum theory first introduces a good understanding of Thermodaynamics and Statiastical Physics and defines the order of events to lead into statistical definition of arrow of time. A lot of difficult concepts from Classsical Statistical Physics, Probability Theory, Relativity and Mathematical Logic as well as a good understanding of Quantum Physics is assumed to be in the bag of the reader, after all this book is not a Popular Science book. Although the author claims that knowledge of derivations of the formulas used are not critical to understand this study yet time to time the language and logic becames exteremely difficult. This is a must read book in this subject, may be many times or time and time over after increasing the understanding in other subjects that only tools in this book.

H.Reichenbach is undoubtly one of the most remarkable scientists that the world has ever witnessed. The interested mind is to be very strongly urged to read the book 'The direction of time' by him. Time is an essential concept to every physics student, as without it nature would be meaningless, and therefore the study of nature would be an empty pursuit. Whenever we wish to understand why we are in the 'world', say rather than in the planet MARS we have to understand thoroughly what actually happenned in the past, beginning from The Big Bang, that is, from the beginning of time. The book gives us a clear understanding into this inquiry ('TIME') developing both classical and quantum mechanical content of the concept of time starting from the first principles. The book carefully clarifies many confusing conceptions about time. For instance, the author clearly explains the contradictions lying in the famous Zeno's paradox which attemts to prove that time does not exist, in such a way that the physics student is now much more confident with such essential concepts as displacement and velocity. Also in the book, another essential concept of statistical physics ENTROPY is developed in a very systematic way and through this concept the direction of time is decisively established. Moreover, the issue of DETERMINACY or INDETERMINACY , an issue which is simply ignored in the text books or mentioned briefly in a few sentences as if it is self-evident and therefore does not need further elaboration, is discussed in depth, so both theoretical and experimental physicists have now a strong ground in arguing their proposals. I, as a physicist of 18 years of university lecturing experience, strongly recommend it to every single physics student or actually every single mind (student or not) who cares about the future, and who needs a decisive explanation (justification) for their potential steps to save (before being too late) our home THE WORLD WHICH WE NOW LIVE IN, only home only home and only home for us and for our childeren including of course our organic bodies, the animals and the plants. The direction of time and equally of The ENTROPY are the key concepts to understand what technology actually is, and to understand why it is inevitable to face more and more polluted environment as technology advances.

This 2002 book is an abridgement of the excellent New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD, published 2001), with a price in line with other college dictionaries. Unfortunately, there seem to be a few problem areas.

The first thing that will strike many college students and graduates is the almost complete absence of etymologies. A few of the more interesting ones are highlighted with the heading WORD HISTORY; for example, this is one of very few sources that make clear why the Dutch for "the cage" appears in English as DECOY. A few other etymologies appear with the heading ORIGIN. For the most part, you won't find any. It would seem that such information would add a lot to many entries, such as UBUNTU, TRIFFID, GROK, TOHUBOHU, and thousands more. One consequence is that the usage note for ESKIMO refers to a deleted etymology. Granted, the etymologies in most competitors have a lot of fluff; they'll show two of numerous older spellings of "dog" before implying that the trail grows cold in Old English; a simple "In a brief survey of one-word lowercase entries from LI to LIEDER in this and three comparable (college) dictionaries, it appears that coverage in this dictionary is nearly as good. It is, however, the only one to omit LIAISE, LIBELANT, LIBELEE, LICENSURE, and an adjectival form for LIBATION (but the competitors disagree, two showing LIBATIONARY, one LIBATIONAL). This dictionary relegates LIBERALISM to a run-on, a word for which the competition had relatively long entries; the difference is partly offset by a longer entry for LIBERAL. But it was the only one not to relegate LIBERTARIANISM to a run-on. It has only run-ons for LIBERATION, LICHENOLOGY, and LIBRETTIST (the precise relation between a librettist and a libretto is not one of the senses given elsewhere for the suffix -IST). Two competitors explain the missing LIDLESS, a poetic form that may well still be met in colleges. It is the only one to list LICENSED, a form unlikely to be sought. Elsewhere, it is not hard to find entries that all the competitors omit; WAQF and CINQ will intrigue Scrabblers.

More than a dozen pages are blank. This is certainly a surprise, since most publishers allot their lexicographers however many pages can be printed affordably for the intended sales price, and they scramble to squash the available material into what seems to be too small a space. Larger Oxford dictionaries would provide plenty of material for filling these pages up.

No doubt Roger Staubach is pleased to have an entry, and would be even more so if his name were spelled correctly. It's unclear whether users would expect to find anything about him in a dictionary, but this one tries to include a lot of currently famous sports and entertainment personalities, and users might enjoy this feature. Cal Ripken makes an appearance too, but since the entry hasn't been updated, his 2001 retirement is unnoted. The space devoted to Perry, a tennis star from the thirties, might have been better devoted to Commodore Perry in a college dictionary, and there are many similar examples.

Unnecessarily in my opinion, an illustration for skyscraper has been edited to remove the World Trade Center. There are quite a number of illustrations, many adding little besides a break in what some readers might consider monotonous text. Whoever drew the picture for hyperbola has little appreciation for asymptotes. Every country comes with a large map, showing very few cities other than capitals, and mostly useless. The result is that the Northern Mariana Islands are shown with greater detail than in the National Geographic Atlas, while most of the largest U.S. cities appear on no map whatever. It's unclear that dictionary users expect maps, and those that do will probably look elsewhere.

Inevitably a new work has slipups here and there, of them possibly attributable to the abridgement. The entry for the noun SHANKS' MARE reads "used to walking"; you need the complete entry from NOAD to make any sense of the definition, which in itself is more of an explanation than something that can take the place of a noun. The symbol for SECOND didn't survive intact. The entries for GOODNESS and SAKE disagree on the punctuation of "for goodness' sake". Only the illustrative citation for Spartan hints that its metaphoric usage is now usually uncapitalized. And the spelling Stonehendge appears. At times one feels that one is the first human to be reading certain entries in their current form. Information for REIS, BO, SH, ADELGID, etc., is present, but not anywhere you are likely to look. On the other hand, "Sly" is cross-referenced to Stallone.

Kudos to Oxford for its sensible treatment of the spelling or usage of such entries as miniscule, flout/flaunt, plaintext, back seat, hopefully, disinterested, under way, supercede, they, and dozens more. Hopefully a future edition will have something to say against the spelling KI for the word pronounced CHI and now usually spelled QI. And hopefully we won't have to wait long for the Second Edition of this dictionary, a more patient and careful abridgement of NOAD. Except for price and portability, nearly all the pluses of this work are found in NOAD, while most of the minuses mentioned above are not in NOAD. For now, if you can afford only a college dictionary, I would have to recommend one of the others.

What I want in a (portable) dictionary is one that will have the words I look up. Since I have a pretty good vocabulary already, I tend to look up only words that are not in common usage. So, I want something to stick in a backpack, or have sitting on the end table next to me while I'm reading. Since I can't carry all 19 volumes of the OED around with me, and because I don't always have a computer handy, this is the dictionary I've selected. I don't often need etymology information, but I do want to know the meaning of words like orrery, exurb, or prandial before I read on. This is a good, all-around portable dictionary for all but a few who won't be satisfied with anything that doesn't take up six feet of shelf space.

If you need a dictionary for your son or daughter, this is it!