I have just read Richard Archer's newly published "Fissures in the Rock: New England in the Seventeenth Century." This wonderfully informative and entertaining work details how the people of seventeenth century New England, while often differing from one another when viewed close in, were at the same time, in the larger sense, participants in a common culture.

In this comprehensive and well-researched study, Professor Archer describes relations, often rocky, between the colonists and the native Americans; the spiritual, social, and political role of the colonists' religion; how women and men experienced, individually and together, their family life, along with their life cycles; what it was to trod the moral fringes of that society; how the culture functioned economically; and the several types of New England towns, which I found particularly enlightening.

To illustrate these areas, the author gives us the lives, some darn good stories, of such colorful individuals as George Walton, Herodias Long, Robert Keayne, Ann Hutchinson, and John Cotton, to name a few.

With a satisfying concluding chapter, extensive footnotes, bibliography, and appendixes, this work has something for everyone.

When on a dare last December I read Morison's "The European Discovery of American: The Northern Voyages A.D. 500-1600" I felt another shoe waiting to drop. Well, here is that other shoe. I highly recommend that everyone try it on.

This book must be interesting

I just have to say that I have read a lot of Fleetwood Mac sheet music books and this one has to be one of the most complete books. It has music to pretty much every popular Fleetwood Mac songs out there. The music is very clearly written and is very easy to follow.I must say that I have truly enjoyed using this delightful book. I reccomend it to anyone who is wanting to learn Fleetwood Mac music. I sure am positive I will be using this book for years to come.

This is an outstanding effort in explaining and documenting the science involved in mineral fluorescence. It fills a void in the literature, bridging the gap between technical treatises and gem hunters' field notes. Robbins presents what is known about the causes of fluorescence in minerals, relating it to atomic structure and behavior in a clear fashion for the non-technical reader.

The next chapters detail some of the classic localities and types of fluorescent minerals, with comprehensive summaries of their characteristics. A final chapter describes ideas for investigations into the nature of fluorescence that are easy enough to be carried out with simple equipment. This may be a valuable resource to secondary school Earth Science teachers.

The book is written in an engaging fashion. It reveals many issues that are still unresolved. I wanted to grab my UV light and go collecting as soon as possible!

This is definitely a book for the fans.

At first, I wasn't going to bother to order this until the price came down, or I just wasn't excited enough. I don't know what I was thinking. Plus, being an American Manics fan, it wasn't exactly easy to find here...and our pub. date kept getting pushed back...yadda yadda yadda.

After reading reviews of the book, and seeing some of the photos previewed, I gave in. I'm glad I did. It's beautiful.

These are photos taken by longtime photographer and friend-of-the-band Mitch Ikeda. It's a tribute to his incredible competence and artistic sense that he manages to make every moment caught on film as epic as the band itself. From the first shot of the band, through Richey's disappearance, to the current Manic Street Preachers, Mitch manages to capture James, Nicky, Sean, and Richey as friends, family members, musicians, and--most importantly--as human beings. As for Richey himself, he is shown in his lighter moments (puppet!), as well as his increasingly darker and haunted moments. It proves that he wasn't always moping about as popular mythology (and Simon Price's book) has it.

Not only do you have the photos to tell the story, but most of them have captions from the bandmembers...touching, funny, telling.

Grab a bottle of your favorite spirits, put on the appropriate music, get comfortable, and open this book. You'll find it difficult to put it down.

I bought the book because it has one of the best sections on fire pit firing of homemade pottery that I have seen, complete with excellent photos, as well as step by step info and historical info. The section on Quilting - The Joy Of My Life - Auntie Arie Carpenter is extensive and even has templates you can copy and use for making your own quilts. There is also a wonderful section on the country store, which as I read it seemed to be a combination of pay with cash or goods, like eggs, crops etc. Very worth the expense and a book I will treasure.

The entire Fox Fire colledtion should be required reading for all people of this country. You would get a feel for where we came from and our heritage. The books show a deep respect for each other, God and country. Very good.

He apply methodology already frame by the fractal's matematichians to the best understandig of mechanism of fracture in rocks, as well as brittle and ductile behaviours of rock materials.

His description of brittle damages is very interesting because he start from the microdamage linking to the macro damage, using the physical properties of the initial microvoids as well as geometrical relations between mineral crystals, and microcrystalline weak surfaces and orientation of the stresses field.

Another good topic analyzed for the author is the dynamic damage in brittle rock. To relate temporal changes with fragiles conditions is an excellent starting point to understand processes of deterioring on physiscal properties of the rocks.

In the topic of description of the fractures in practical rock masses, the use of the Fractal Dimension (Df) is very sucessful because the relation between different rock masss conditions is easier using statistical distributions of numerical values of geotecnical descriptions of geometrical features in fractures than classical descriptions of qualitative numbers assigned using conventional methods. Of course if your target is a fast initial correlation.

Fabio Antonio Gil Escobar Special Graduate Course Department of Geoscienc Faculty of Science and Engineering Japan (Asia)

I came across National Public Radio many years ago just tooling around the FM dial. I found "Fresh Air with Terry Gross" and was hooked by the interview at the time, with Clint Eastwood. The questions were ones I would want to ask him. I was intrigued by this voice I have never heard before on radio, sophisticated, smart, smooth, curious, and down to earth. No commercial radio hype, none of the exaggeration for a big news story, not a celebrity exclusive. I've since heard this audio compilation of the the comedians interviewed on "Fresh Air laughs" and loved it. This isn't just a side splitting laugh a minute tape, it also brings you a realization that these are real people. The Bill Murray interview is so unlike his performer identity we all know that you have to listen to it carefully, because Terry brings out his humanity with her interview style. We get to listen to conversation that has substance and not just style. This is a tape you can sink your teeth into, it's that thick.

If you use this book in conjunction with the basic Guitar Fretboard Roadmaps you'll do yourself (and your guitar) a great favor. If you want to rock - but understand what you're doing and how to do it - get this book. It's very practical and you'll easily understand how to play rhythms or melody in any key.

This book was written by two of my teachers at college, in Lincroft, NJ @ Brookdale Community College. Carl Francese and Richard Sorrell teach the course "1960's Pop Music" @ Brookdale, and in 1998, they wrote this book for their course, because they could find no genuine college level books about the 1960's Music scene. I had known Richard Sorrell from a previous course and I had mentioned to him that I am Die-Hard Beatles fan, and I would talk at length of different topics. He told me that he and another teacher teach a course in Rock and Roll and he thought that I'd be a wonderful addition to the class. So 1 year later, I enrolled in the class. The book does an excellent job of providing the student with detailed biograhpies and discograhpies. Noted chapters of great detail in this book are The Beatles and Elvis Presley. It also is the ideal book for the student who does not know the minimum of any particular artist of the 1960's. Myself, I was not one for Aretha Franklin and Soul, but this book gave me a good overview of what it was about. The most recent version of this book was done in 2000, I believe. It's an excellent book, taught by a pair of exceptional rock and roll buffs.