Forest trees of the Pacific coast: Including a brief account of the outstanding characters, distribution and habitats of the trees native Alaska, British ... to the western slopes of the Rocky mountains

Book Description

The captivating story of a woman who has led an extraordinary life of privilege, power, and pleasure.

Customer Reviews:

Good Reading!.......1999-08-23

Who would think a book of long-ago political figures could be so interesting. Chocked full of behind-the-scenes, in-depth portrayals of past presidents, ambassadors, foreign dignitaries, family and friends. Gives an excellent window on the political scene and how with "one hand washing the other", the work of government is accomplished. Well Done!

Book Description

This book highlights all species commonly referred to as "horned frogs," including the Argentine horned frog, the fantasy frog, and the surinam horned frog.

The Quick & Easy series features educational, value-priced books. All pet owners will benefit from reading the wide variety of titles in this series, each offering an abundance of advice in a delightfully concise format.

Book Description

The definative guide to the work of this highly respected, contemporary ceramic designer. The major achievements from her prolific career are discussed. Includes sixteen comprehensive authoritative.

Customer Reviews:

Good book for amateur non-woodworkers.......2007-03-28

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This is another in the generally terrific Black & Decker Portable Workshop series. Many of these books, including this one, deal with construction of sturdy wood furniture and/or accessories using mostly hand tools and lumber.

All these books contain a basic introduction to the tools, materials and techniques. They also contain many full-color photos of the finished projects and several steps in the construction, as well as exploded drawings and materials/cutting list.

Keep in mind that this is NOT a "fine-woodworking" book! You are not going to build any "heirlooms." The projects in this book are more "rough" than that, made mostly from "1-by" and "2-by" lumber, using non-power hand tools, circular saw, jig saw, router, power sander and drill. (You will find a power miter saw useful, but not absolutely necessary. Likewise, for some projects, a table saw and band saw could come in handy, but are not required.) But if that's what you're looking for, it's a great project book.

The projects in this book include:

1) picnic table for two
2) park bench
3) firewood shelter
4) trellis planter
5) driveway marker
6) sundial
7) yard & garden cart
8) backyard fire pit
9) fire pit bench
10) trash can corral
11) luminary
12) garden bridge
13) fold-up lawn seat
14) gardener's tote
15) plant boxes
16) compost bin
17) birdfeeder stand
18) tree surround
19) prairie windmill
20) doghouse

Anyone with the ability to work with basic hand tools and simple hand-held power tools should have no difficulty completing any of the projects in this book.

IMPORTANT: Some of the projects in this book also appear in other books in the series. If you are considering this book, you might want to look at the projects listed in the other books in the series. You might find that one book contains several projects you find interesting from this book, but includes an extra interesting project or two. For example, the fire pit bench in this book appears in two other books in the series, but the backyard fire pit itself does not.

You won't go wrong with this book. But check the others in the series first to make sure you're getting the best one to suit your interests.

Now go build something... ;-)
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Average customer rating:

Must have for new dads

A must for new dads

Exactly what a man needs

great advice

A Must-Read for Expecting Fathers

Be Prepared: A Practical Handbook for New Dads
Gary Greenberg , and Jeannie Hayden
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Men | Gender Studies | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
Marriage & Family | Sociology | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
Men | Sociology | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
Fatherhood | Family Relationships | Parenting & Families | Subjects | Books
General | Parenting | Parenting & Families | Subjects | Books
General | Parenting & Families | Subjects | Books
Parenting & Families | Humor | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
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The Baby Owner's Manual: Operating Instructions, Trouble-Shooting Tips, and Advice on First-Year Maintenance

The Father's Almanac: From Pregnancy to Pre-school, Baby Care to Behavior, the Complete and Indispensable Book of Practical Advice and Ideas for Every Man Discovering the Fun and Challenge of Fatherhood

The New Dad's Survival Guide: Man-to-Man Advice for First-Time Fathers

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Father's First Steps: 25 Things Every New Dad Should Know

Accessories:

Health o Meter HDC100-01 "Grow with Me" Teddy Bear Scale for Babies and Toddlers

ASIN: 0743251547

Amazon.com

Take your average guide for new mothers, chuck most of the stuff about breast feeding and ditch the deep background research and stats, then generously pepper with illustrations and burley humor and what do you have? Your average guide for new fathers. Be Prepared follows that template pretty closely, and that's really quite an acceptable thing. Yes, there's a bit too much emphasis here on broadly drawn manly stuff like changing a diaper at a ballgame, but there's also heaps of useful advice that's cleverly and efficiently presented for pops who, despite their best intentions, really aren't prepared to dig into encyclopedia-sized tomes. The basics (childproofing, bathing, feeding, entertaining) intermix with nifty sidebars (homemade bath toys, foods to never give your baby, exercises for dads) in easy-to-peruse chapters organized according to the age of the offspring up to age 1. There are more thorough how-to guides for new dads, but for most men moving into fatherhood, Be Prepared will fill the bill. --Steven Stolder

Book Description

An indispensable survival manual for guys entering the trenches of fatherhood, Be Prepared is loaded with one-of-a-kind insights, MacGyver-esque tips and tricks, and no-nonsense advice for mastering the first year as a dad.

Finally, a book that teaches men all the things they really need to know about fatherhood...including how to:

• change a baby at a packed sports stadium
• create a decoy drawer full of old wallets, remote controls, and cell phones to throw baby off the scent of your real gear
• stay awake (or at least upright) at work
• babyproof a hotel room in four minutes flat
• construct an emergency diaper out of a towel, a sock, and duct tape

Packed with helpful diagrams and detailed instructions, and delivered with a wry sense of humor, Be Prepared is the ultimate guide for sleep-deprived, applesauce-covered fathers everywhere.

Customer Reviews:

Must have for new dads.......2007-08-24

Wryly hilarious and filled with excellent tips, this is an essential guide to the strange world of becoming your father. I love the 50's-esque illustrations, and the information is well-presented. A great book for those rare private moments in the smallest room in the house.

A must for new dads.......2007-08-23

This book is hysterical. Think Boy Scout handbook meets parenting advice. My husband would read this book and chuckle (see "Evolution of the Boppy"). It's the only parenting book that he has read from cover to cover. The book has great, practical suggestions, but presents it in a fun, unassuming way. We've purchased a copy for all of our friends that are expecting their first child.

Exactly what a man needs.......2007-08-09

My husband is about to become a father and has never even touched a baby, much less cared for one. He was freaking out about all of the responsibilities, and this book calmed him. It explains the simplest tasks, like holding a baby, changing a diaper, burping, etc, all in a no-nonsense way. It's simplistic enough, and amusing enough for men to understand and actually read. I read it myself and learned a thing or two. There are great suggestions for babies that won't stop crying, what to do when you run out of diapers, how to help out your torn-up, exhausted wife who just gave birth.... it's everything a man needs to know.

great advice.......2007-07-31

this book made me laugh about a subject I was very nervous about as I was about to become a first time father. Not sure if I used any of the advice, but it has some good and entertaining stuff.

A Must-Read for Expecting Fathers.......2007-07-21

I know you are not supposed to "judge a book by its cover", but spending a good part of my childhood in the Boy Scouts is probably what encouraged me to pick up this book. It looks like a Boy Scout manual and the illustrations inside are reminiscent of old school Scout manuals from my childhood. The information, however, is much more useful than anything that I ever learned from one of those old books. Also, this book is much more humorous. This book is a very comforting and funny way to learn some of the things that aren't necessarily mentioned in some of the other pregnancy books.

I would definitely recomend this book to any soon-to-be father (or mother for that matter). I've already talked several of my friends into buying it, and they all agree that this one is a keeper!

Preparate, Papa/ Be Prepared: Un Manual Para Padres Novatos / A Practical Handbook for New Dads

Average customer rating:

Preparate, Papa/ Be Prepared: Un Manual Para Padres Novatos / A Practical Handbook for New Dads
Gary Greenberg , and Jeannie Hayden
Manufacturer: Grijalbo Mondadori Sa
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Fatherhood | Family Relationships | Parenting & Families | Subjects | Books

Spanish | Foreign Language Nonfiction | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Book Description

Contessa transcends a life span of extraordinary breadth and variety.

ContessaÂ's story is not only a bombshell of an expose but is also an insightful treatment of the life and career of a sensitive, creative, talented, and enigmatic icon of the theater and film. It offers the reader the untold stories and details of her victories and defeats.

Here is a totally candid and intimate self-portrait of a remarkable woman, her personal failures as well as her public successes. Contessa, the human being, is warm, witty, humorous and relentlessly honest.

Her story of chaos shows how she fought back at life and won control over her own destiny.

The fictitious Contessa is tempestuous, scintillating, poignant and passionate, open, honest and generous.

High praise for Jack Fitzgerald's previous workÂ—

Fitzgerald has an uncanny knack of capturing American types and speech; it is in their conversation and present-day mores that FitzgeraldÂ's talent shines. Fitzgerald is so adept with a pen he can make the improbably seem believable, utterly believable.
Â—The International Herald Tribune

FitzgeraldÂ's manipulation of quick caricature is akin to the scheme that Ring Lardner employed to depict baseball riffraff, goofy pugilists and Tin Pan Alley trash. It is a humor achieved not by physical identification but by verbal. Just let one of his characters open his or her mouth and personality is stamped with jocose exactitude.
Â—The International Herald Tribune

Fitzgerald has an extraordinarily acute ear for the talk of ordinary people and records and edits it amusingly.
Â—The International Herald Tribune

Customer Reviews:

Fabulous Contessa.......2003-01-09

This book was fabulous. The author certainly knows his subject matter. I am looking forward to a film version of this book.

hope.......2001-04-19

Contessa is the most touching book I have ever read. I was unable to put it down until i had finished it. I had gotton so emersed in the story that after I had finished it, it took another week to get over it. It affected me more than anything I had ever read before. This book gave me hope for my life! Her story is one of such success, in career and mainly in friendships. This is a truly wonderful story of overcoming extreme hatred and surviving through anything. Read it. It may open or change your mind, or at least allow you to understand!

A Must Read.......1999-12-23

I found Contessa to be a most entertaining book. It was difficult to put down because I became truly interested in the lives of Contessa and her friends. The book also paints a vivid portrait of pre Castro and present day Cuba.I think the book provides the perfect vehicle for a screen play and should be seriously considered by some Hollywood producer.

An entertaining, must read book!.......1999-12-15

I thought CONTESSA was sheer magic. I couldn't put it down. If there ever were a book where you dared not stop reading, CONTESSA is it. I was vividly entertained and in the process learned a lot more than in many sociology, psychology and history courses I've taken. This book is a MUST read!

Customer Reviews:

Marching to the Beat of Their Own Drums.......2004-05-09

December Bride offers a glimpse into the psyche of Ulster people in the past and today. Sam Hanna Bell perfectly catches the nuances of Ulster Scots dialect and people in this novel. We begin and end the novel in the meeting house, and indeed the harsh austerity of Presbyterianism is a key theme in the book. When Sarah Gomartin enters the house of the Echlin brothers as a servant and advances to be the mistress of both the house and the two brothers - bearing them two "by-blows", or illegitimate children, we see events unfold that unsettle the the close knit purtianical commumity. Strangford Lough and the surrounding pladdies and drumlins are also characters in the book in their own right, with the land showing a brutal indifference to human frality and emotion. The stubborn, stoic nature of the Ulster Scots is displayed in its many varities, from the desire to go their own way, to the Lambeg drums and finally to the close knit loving family. Although this book is set in the nineteenth century, its themes reach across the years and still have relevance now. I urge anyone with an interest in Ireland and particulary the north of Ireland to read this book.

A Northern Irish classic of love, lust, loathing + the land........2002-01-12

'December Bride' begins grimly with a wedding between two middle-aged farmfolk in an empty church. Outside, a curious band of onlookers lurk in the cemetary. In this opening sequence, the novel's Big Themes are set up - The Land, Family, Death, Religion, Community. Bell than switches back a quarter of a century to chart how this scanario came to be. Andrew Echlin, benevolent patriarch of a large lake-side farmstead in turn-of-the-20th-century Northern Ireland, widower father of two sons (silent Hamilton and impetuous Frank), hires labouring tenant Martha Gomartin and her 30-year-old daughter Sarah as domestic servants. After Andrew's death in a boating accident, both men enjoy Sarah's favours, producing a baby of uncertain parentage. Despite the ineffectual efforts of a disapproving clergy, and the scandalised hostility of the community, Sarah refuses to marry either brother, and effectively takes over the running of the household. This menage-a-trois is seen as a direct affront to Puritan Protestant Ulster values; as minister Sorleyson muses: 'One had obligations to one's fellow-men. Of what avail was virtue if lust and irresponsibility were to be crowned with contentment?'

Bell uses as an epigraph a verse by Thomas Hardy, and it is to the latter's novels that 'Bride' bears most resemblance, with its focus on austere agricultural life, on the influence of the weather and the land on characters, on the confict between the eternal cycle of the seasons and the brutal transience of individual lives. Dialect (in this case Ulster-Scots) is richly employed, both in dialogue and in the detailed descriptons of farming life; the transgressive behaviour of individuals and families are contrasted with the norms of the wider community. As in Hardy, Bell favours dramatic set-pieces, often self-contained; he is also alert to the shifting emotions and contradictions of characters. Although the book's pleasures pertain to the 19th century novel, the writing is tauter; 'Bride' is ultimately not as relentlessly bleak or fatalistic as Hardy, despite that opening scene, the brooding or portentous atmosphere of many sequences, and the shattering violence or accidents that break out.

'Bride' is a canonical text in Irish literature, looked at for insight into the bitter history of Northern Ireland and the 'Ulster mentality', with the Troubles breaking out less then two decades after its publication (1951). And it is true that the tensions between Protestants and Catholics are a feature, that the issue of land and its control is crucial, that events seem to take place around important historical dates. But to reduce this novel to its academia-friendly bones not only misses the subversive, non-nationalist narrative of a servant girl and her disruptive sexuality taking control of a powerful farmstead, but also minimises Bell's gifts as a novelist, his psychological acuity, the visual and verbal poetry of his scene-setting, and the power of extended sequences, such as that of a near-senile widower lost in the crowded Belfast streets with his beloved dog.

Average customer rating:
Across the Narrow Sea: A Romance
Sam Hanna Bell
Manufacturer: Blackstaff Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Historical | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0856403784

Average customer rating:
Arts in Ulster
Sam Hanna Bell
Manufacturer: GEORGE G HARRAP & CO LTD ENGLA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000UCWTI4

Average customer rating:
The Arts in Ulster: A Symposium: Edited By Sam Hanna Bell, Nesca A. Robb [and] J
Sam Hanna Bell
Manufacturer: Harrap
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000LHVRTA

Average customer rating:

Study of how a book became a film, full of modish theory.

December Bride (Ireland into Film)
Lance Pettitt
Manufacturer: Cork University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Adaptations | Movies | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
General | Movies | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
History & Criticism | Movies | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
General | Foreign Languages | Reference | Subjects | Books
General | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
General | Performing Arts | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1859182909

Book Description

Sam Hanna Bell's debut novel (1951), about life in a tight-knit Presbyterian community in turn-of-the-century Northern Ireland, was adapted for the screen by David Rudkin and directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan in 1990. Both as a novel and as a film, December Bride is a remarkable combination of passion and politics set against a rural backdrop of communal constraint and individual action. Visually and thematically, the film is a timely reinvestigation of Ulster Protestant history and culture, and in particular reclaims a tradition of radical independent thought exemplified by the work of Sam Hanna Bell. Drawing on previously unpublished archival material and new interviews, Lance Pettitt explores the intricate relationship between novel, screenplay and the wider film culture. December Bride is a consummate and provocative challenge to the politics of Irish society, its cinematic representations, and to the very process of film adaptation itself.

Customer Reviews:

Study of how a book became a film, full of modish theory........2002-01-21

Although it doesn't proclaim itself as such, Lance Pettit's study of the Thaddeus O'Sullivan film 'December Bride' is the perfect text for teachers and lecturers of cinema. Using the film as a starting point, it deals with such topics as cinematic adaptations of literature; the concepts of national and independent cinema; the funding and marketing of non-Hollywood films; and the collaborative process involved in making films and the validity of the auteur process. Pettit employs (very selectively) various theoretical frameworks, from Barthesian structuralism to feminism to new-historicism to post-colonialism, and the film becomes an extended case study with which to test them.

The book is part of the 'Ireland into Film' series, which seeks to examine representations of the auld sod in the cinema. With syllogistic predictability, Chapter 1 deals with Sam Hanna Bell's source novel (a background to Irish history as context for book and film; Bell as an Ulster Protestant, as a regional writer, as a Scottish emigre, as a socialist hostile to the bellicose Orange bluster hijacking Protestant identity; his efforts as both writer and broadcaster to record the culturally marginalised Protestant ways of life; the novel's importance as a way of understanding and revealing Protestant experience); Chapter 2 charts the film's production process, from turning the novel into a script to acquiring finance (potted histories of the director and screenwriter (playwright David Rudkin); a valuable discussion of the process of literary adaptation; the importance of creating a sense of the landscape, consciously avoiding the banal trouist-trap romanticism of most films about Ireland); Chapter 3 analyses the film itself (the ommissions from and compressions of the novel, and the making 'radical' its apparently less progressive elements; a look at key scenes; the thematic and aesthetic influence of European directors (Varda, Truffaut, Axel, Dreyer, Bergman), employed to avoid the cliches of Irish, British and American cinema).

Throughout, Pettit is eager to show that literary adaptations in film are not necessarily diminutions; he concludes that the film is a 'creative commentary' on the novel, an 'echo', a remembrance of reading it, all located in its own 'historical moment' of the late 1980s. He sees its creative and commerical heterogeneity - a novel by a Scotsman, made by two Irishmen living in England with British money and European personnel, marketed as a 'European' art-film, but concerned very much with Irish themes - as a way of breaking and critiquing tired old images and conceptions of what it is to 'be' Irish (this apparently bothers some people). The menage a trois at the centre of the film is turned into a metaphor for Northern Ireland, squeezed between the attentions of Ireland and England.

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