Joan Allen Books

This book is a great read. It is refeshing to be able to read words, thoughts and dreams from people as they perform such honorable duty overseas. This book is powerful and should be required reading for all, especially Americans.

Some anti-war activist may think it is "pro-war" but it isn't just that. This book reveals personal thoughts and challenges faced by American military personnel in wars from the Civil War until the later conflicts in the 20th century. It is pro-war, anti-war and everything in between.

This book reminds me of the sacrifice that so many make for their country. It is a great tribute for those who have served.

I actually read a review about this book and gave it as a gift to my sister-in-law who teaches high school history. She LOVES it and told me it was an amazing collection of actual letters. She said all of the teachers that she works with have been borrowing it!!

I received this book as a gift because my family knows I love reading personal histories from those who lived it and "War Letters" seemed perfect for that. I enjoy learning what life was like for the average citizen in an era, whether its someone riding the Erie Canal in 1840, a foot soldier in the American revolution, or a journal from the Civil War.

This is a remarkable book and taken individually there are many, many heart-rending emotional stories that probably need to be read by many people. It does in fact put a personal face on war. Because it is a collection of letters, the book is easily read in short spurts; you don't want (and shouldn't) read this book quickly.

I only gave the book 4 stars because I actually found it hard to read. While the personal letters (the spelling, mannerisms of the authors) help tell their stories, it also keeps the book from developing any flow. Some letters are agonzingly slow to read and understand. I'm certainly not faulting the authors or their stories; but if you're looking for a great, well-written, smooth-flowing story that you can't put down, this isn't it.

i only gave it three stars because many of the stories were more about patriotism than about the war themselves. Of course every book has its bias so its still a useful and moving read when taken with this grain of salt.

This book is awesome, I have read it numerous times. My heart goes out to the letters writers and receivers... I urge you to spread the word of this book... It will really open your eyes to see that Military Personel and their signifigant others are real people, with real feelings... I really look forward to another book like this coming out. I will definately buy it.

Joan and Marc wrote on an interesting subject in a different sort of style -- stories mixed with poetry. I'm married and I enjoyed reading this book! I shook my head at stories that could have been my own, as well as remember the joy of realizing love.

Inspirational, guiding and at times comforting. A bedside companion...a new found friend...a cat without the fur.

Among the plethora of self-help books on fixing a broken romance, Celebrating Single stands out as a relevant, brilliant, humorous, down-to-earth approach to improving one's self-esteem by finding the right mate, rather than settling for a dysfunctional relationship to avoid loneliness. It is a definite must-read for any adult. And it is highly readable. Joan and Marc's friendly, conversational styles--interspersed with testimonies from "real people" and poignant poetry--make this book an entertaining and riveting read. I look forward to seeing Celebrating Single on Oprah's Booklist some day.

I read the book celebrating single and getting love right in one day. I was rivited to it. The writing style was easy to follow and made it difficult to put down. The writers really came across truthful, and it is apparent that they really researched their topic well. I look forward to reading the next book written by Ms allen, and Dr kusinitz. This is a must have item. It is really helpful for the singles who keep making the same mistakes over and over in relationships, and are not happy with themselves. If you find that life is not going the way you would like for yourself, then Celebrating Single is the answer. I am giving this book as a gift for some of my friends.Oprah needs to add this one to her book list.

Wow! What a great book! I read it in a flash. It flows beautifully and the stories and poems are interesting and helpful. It even had some good suggestions for an old guy like me. I liked the conversational style with just the right amount of humor and kidding back and forth between the two authors. Their unusual writeing style was very effective and added to the enjoyment of the book. After reading the book Joan & Marc seem like my close friends.

This book is basically a manual for Unicode 3.0. It is not a light read but well worth the price and then some just for the glyphs from all of the various scripts that Unicode supports.

At 1040 large (8.5 x 11) pages it is the ultimate guide to unicode. With information on scripts and glyphs I had no idea even existed.

However if you are just getting started with Unicode I would recomend you get Unicode a Primer written by Tony Graham from M&T books. If you understand or feel you are starting to understand Unicode then The Unicode Standard Version 3.0 is the best comprehensive reference on the subject out today.

Consider it an overview of the developing UNICODE standard. As such, it will serve the engineer working on software in English and many other European countries rather well. It will be a good _starting_ _point_ for engineers developing software for other languages.

This book is essential for software engineers, at least for the next ten years or so. All programmers should understand characters, and UNICODE is the best we have for now. Even if you don't need it in your personal library, you need it in your company or school library.

The standard is flawed, as all real standards are, but it is a functioning standard, and it should be sufficient for many purposes for the near future.

The book itself is fairly well laid out, contains an introduction to character handling problems and methods for most of the major languages in use in our present world as well as tables of basic images for all code points. Be aware that these are _only_ basic images. For most internationalization purposes, be prepared for more research. (And please share your results.)

**** Finally, UNICODE is _not_ a 16 bit code. ****

(This is well explained in the book.) It just turned out that there really are over 50,000 Han characters. (Mojikyo records more than 90,000.) UNICODE can be encoded in an eight-bit or 16-bit expanding method or a 32-bit non-expanding method. The expanding methods can be _cleanly_ parsed, frontwards, backwards, and from the middle, which is a significant improvement over previous methods.

Some of the material in the book is available at the UNICODE consortium's site, but the book is easier to read anyway. One complaint I have about the included CD is that the music track gets in the way of reading the transform files on my iBook.

This is not just a reference for computer people, but for anyone interested in alphabets, symbols and character sets.

Central to the book, taking up the larger part of it, are the tables of the characters themselves, printed large with annotations and cross-references. If you enjoy the lure of strange symbols and curious writing systems then browsing these will occupy delightful hours.

For the Latin alphabet alone there are pages of accented letters and extended Latin alphabet characters used in particular languages or places or traditions: Pan-Turkic "oi", African clicks and other African sounds, obsolete letters from Old English and Old Norse, an "ou" digraph used only in Huron/Algonquin languages in Quebec, and many others, particularly those used for phonetic/phonemic transcriptions.

The Greek character set includes archaic letters and additional letters used in Coptic.

Character sets carried over from previous editions with additions and corrections are Cyrillic (with many national characters), Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Arabic (again many national and dialect characters), the most common Hindu scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam), Tibetan, Thai, Lao, Hangul, Bopomofo, Japanese Katakana and Hiragana, capped by the enormous Han character set containing over 27,000 of the most commonly used ideographs in Chinese/Japanese/Korean writing. Then there are the symbols: mathematical/logical (including lots of arrows), technical, geometrical, and pictographic. You'll find astrological/zodiacal signs, chess pieces, I-Ching trigrams, Roman numerals not commonly known, and much more.

Scripts appearing for the first time this release are Syriac, Ethiopic, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherookee, Runes, Ogham, Yi, Mongolian, Sinhala, Thaana, Khmer, Myanmar, complete Braille patterns, and keyboard character sets. And yes, there are public domain/shareware fonts available on the web that support these with their new Unicode values.

There are very good (and not always brief) descriptions of the various scripts and of the special symbol sets. Rounding out the book are some involved, turgid (necessarily so) technical articles on composition, character properties, implementation guidelines, and combining characters, providing rules to use the character properties tables on the CD that accompanies the book. After all, this is the complete official, definitive Unicode standard.

Of course this version, 3.0, is already out-of-date. But updates and corrections are easily available from the official Unicode website where data for 3.1 Beta appears as I write this. My book bulges with interleaved additions and changes. And that's very good. Many standards have died or been superceded because the organizations behind them did not keep up with users' needs or the information was not easily accessible.

Caveats?

The notes on actual uses of the characters could be more extensive, particularly on Latin extended characters. More variants of some glyphs should be shown, as in previous editions, if only in the notations.

Some character names are clumsy or inaccurate (occasionly noted in the book), because of necessity to be compatible with ISO/IEC 10646 and with earlier versions of the Unicode standard. For example, many character names begin with "LEFT" rather than "OPENING" or "RIGHT" rather than "CLOSING" though the same character code is to be used for a mirrored version of the character in right-to-left scripts where "LEFT" and "RIGHT" then become incorrect. And sample this humorous quotation from page 298: "Despite its name, U+0043 SCRIPT CAPITAL LETTER P is neither script nor capital--it is uniquely the Weierstrass elliptic function derived from a calligraphic lowercase p."

Although the Internet and web commerce is still very much an American phenomena, there are many signs that it is about to change. After many years of explosive growth, the curve of new Internet users in the United States is leveling off. Recent articles point to other countries, Brazil in particular, where there could be an explosion of new users. Argentina, India and China also show signs of being poised to enter the only true global market.
To compete in this arena, it is necessary to understand how to display the characters of the "local" language, and for that, you need Unicode. This book is absolutely the best reference on Unicode that currently exists. Often overused, the word definitive is an understatement. Created by the members of the Unicode consortium, it is difficult to conceive of an aspect of Unicode that is not covered in this book.
However, Unicode is more than just characters in spoken languages. With significant sections devoted to mathematical and other commonly used symbols, this is a reference for all who wish to communicate effectively. In every area, there are some references that are essential, and this is one of them.

A delightful, well-written tale of a nine-year-old boy dealing with his parents' separation. Daniel expects to spend a boring summer with his grandmother in Corpus Christi. Hot air balloons, a hurricane, and an adventuresome cat turn the summer into a special time with his grandmother. The author cleverly weaves interesting information into a highly entertaining plot.

The Backpack Cat, by Marcia Allen Bennett, is a lovely and timely story of a lonely boy and his eccentric grandmother. It has a strong South Texas flavor, but its appeal will be universal to any child. Ms Bennett shows her affection and understanding of children in this book filled with adventure and laughs. From bank robbers, to a hurricane, to a silly (and quite ugly!) cat, this book's fast pace and believable characters make it one a child (and parent) will want to read again and again. Highly recommended, this book is something very special.

"A true delight! Marcia Bennett has written a joy to read and a story to share. I laughed out loud. Young Daniel, the protagonist, finds what he really needs - love. He finds the love in unexpected places and people, and even in an ugly old cat. What promised to be the most boring summer of his life turns out to be the most cherished of times. Join Daniel, Gram and Feogato on a journey of love, hope and lasting memories. This book will lift your spirit as it reminds you of the tender love that can only come from Grandmothers, the bond between boy and animal, and the answered prayers of God."

A very affordably priced hardcover picturebook, Help Me Learn Counting 1-10 in American Sign Language is a counting book with a twist - it shows children how to make the American Sign Language handsign for each number from one to ten. Photographs show a woman demonstrating each number's handsign, while the opposite page features a simple color illustration of a mnemonic for the number. For example, the handsign for "five" resembles a butterfly, so the accompanying illustration shows five blue butterflies flying about the numeral 5. The final page gives a visual summary of how to sign the alphabet in American Sign Language. An excellent counting book for young people learning American Sign Language for their own use or to better communicate with deaf friends and relatives.

Tbis book is really nice.. from the charming and colorful pictures to the easy to understand signs! It is a wonderful ASL addition for children and adults to learn and use.

Joan and Allen Silvey have expertly published a hard cover children's book which will teach and delight!

I look forward to the next book in this series. Thank you Joan and Allen for caring.

Linda Delgado
Author and Publisher - Tempe, Arizona

It's a relief to finally be able to teach my child the concept of true ASL. This book is well put together and I for one cannot wait for the next one in the series. My daughter can already sign with ease by following the illustrations as well as the colorful but non distracting paintings.

My 4- and 6-year-old daughters love the story and illustrations, and we can't wait to try the recipes. I am very sad to see this is out of print and hope to find a copy somewhere.

This book is entertaining as well as educational. I purchased this book for my 9 yod, who is interested in baking. She has made several of the recipes from the book, and they have all been delicious. The directions are simple to follow. There is a story in the book that is entertaining with beautiful illustrations. I would like to see more quality children's cookbooks like this one, which have fantastic recipes simple enough for children to make. I think this book would encourage any young cook.

This is not a get rich quick book full of hype or questionable schemes, scams and new age anecdotes. Rather, it is a down-to-earth manual of true and tried basic principles of how to create and retain wealth.

It includes a lot of practical common sense advice and deals with some important topics like how to use and manage risk and how to avoid going broke and loosing everything. It also includes many useful exercises.

In my opinion, this book would be a useful resource to anybody who is just starting out or is experiencing difficulty aquiring wealth.

I borrowed this book from the local public library, read it and then decided to purchase my own copy. It is a book I expect to refer back to from time to time.

Rudolf Steiner described Fingal's Cave as "a temple built by the spirits of nature". Anyone wanting to understand Celtic Christianity should read this book, and anyone visiting Scotland should visit this sacred site, only 5 miles from Iona. This site has had a profound influence on many artists and writers, and the Poems of Ossian are one of the great treasures of spiritual literature. Read, learn and enjoy.

I would suggest this for anyone who is looking for a new book to either tuck their children into bed with, or one for kids begining how to read. I love the storyline as well as the wonderful illustrations. I am waiting to see more books by this author.

"What's your favorite ESL textbook?"

Yesterday, I asked this question at ESL teachers conference workshop on conversations. This series, by far, was the top choice among the more than 25 workshop participants. Consider me impressed. I have ordered a copy and look forward to reading it. Evidently, the focus on authentic speech and realistic model conversations works.