Educational Books

I got my first dover coloring book about 30 years ago and have been hooked. I now have a collection of about 20. They are kind of hard to find in retail and when you do the selection is poor.

I find coloring to be very relaxing when you are stressed. I also cannot just watch tv I like to be doing crochet or cross stitching, coloring.

These books are very well done as far as the drawings are concerned. They can be very intricate. Some are made more for children but many would be hard for a child under say 10yrs old to do and feel good about.

They are best done with colored pencils as you can get really good at shading and make them really pretty.

I highly recommend this and many others. I do own this specific book.

I greatly enjoyed coloring these exceptionally well rendered drawings.

All kinds of dwellings/houses are featured, including foregrounds of trees, etc., and occasionally tiny people are pictured dressed as they would be from that period. There were also comments made about each, which I found interesting and informative.

The pictures contain small details. Definitely not for a child. I would say this is a coloring book for adults.

Highly recommended.

This coloring book has highly detailed, architectural pictures for grown-ups who still love to color. And while children might possibly enjoy this type of coloring book, the finely detailed, intricate pictures would be more fully appreciated by older teens or adults.

great book source, easy to use and has most anything i need.thanks russ patrick

I just purchased these Dover COloring Books for my mother and she loves them. The detail is out of this world and the variety of colors you can use are only limited by your inagination. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

This journal was purchased as a gift for someone and they love it. I would buy it for people in the future who have just lost a loved one.

My granddaughter who is 3 years old suddenly lost her father (my son) in January 2007 and this little journal is going to be just perfect for her to remember him - it is even better than I expected.

The worst part of losing a loved one is the scary thought that you'll forget them. This is a helpful aid in keeping important memories alive. Helping kids know that they can continue on...

This book is a vital resource for children aged 5-10years old. Often when there is a loss in the family, the children are usually the last persons we look to share how they are feeling about the loss. As adults we try to shelter them and not "upset" them by whispering or not talking about the loved one who died. This confuses children as they often wonder why everyone is acting so different around them. This book helps kids to put their very own feelings into words.

I just bought this book and I would call it phenomonal! My kids will love using it to remember their beloved cousin. I highly recommend it to parents of kids who have lost someone close to them. It is sort of like a scrapbook with lots of room for journaling. It will be a treasure and keepsake for life.

Along with Laurie Lee's other prose, among the most lyrical and magical travel memoirs, with characters drawn beautifully and moods captured poetically. He grew up in Slad, a village next to Stroud, a small market town in the Cotswolds. My mother was born just a couple of years later in Stroud, and grew up in the same environment he did. I was born nearby, and spent parts of my childhood in the 1950s and 1960s there, and it is indeed magical. Leaving Stroud was a bold step for him, as my mother could describe to me as she left Stroud when WWII started, having been due to start at a Music Conservatoire in London in September 1939. Since the War had just started, my mother at 19 went to London anyway to work for the RAF in the days, and as an air raid warden and ambulance driver in the Blitz, at night. She told me stories about Laurie Lee who became a favored son of the town, though his writing speaks for itself.
His prose, like so many of the great memoirists and travel writers is indeed poetic. As a man who was an auto-didact, he had an affinity for simplicity, but grace and elegance few others have mastered.

"As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning" [1], author Laurie Lee recounted his first sojourn away from home. At age 19, our narrator-biographer, walked out of his village at Stroud, Gloucestershire, and headed toward London. As Lee himself recalled, he was 'still soft at the edges' when he said farewell to his mother (a poignant scene in the opening chapter). All he had with him that Sunday morning in June 1934 was 'a small rolled-up tent, a violin in a blanket, a change of clothes, a tin of treacle biscuits, and some cheese.'

After nearly a year of living and working in London as a cement laborer, Lee decided it was time to move on. He bought a one-way ticket and sailed to Spain. He settled for Spain because he had had an introduction to Spanish. All he could speak then, Lee admitted, was only one Spanish phrase: 'Will you please give me a glass of water?'

In July 1935, Laurie Lee landed in northwestern Spain. For many months he roamed the exotic and history-filled landscape, living off his music and the kindness of the people he came to love. From Vigo, he wandered southward through the New Castile region (Segovia, Madrid, Toledo). By December, he came to the coastal region of Andalusia (Cordova, Seville, Granada). There, Lee holed up at a Castillo hotel until the outbreak of the civil war in July 1936.

This author's second autobiographical sketch could have been subtitled "From Spain With Love." His inimitable poetic description of the Spanish landscape and its inhabitants is sensual as it is lyrical. The warmth and beauty of this passage [no pun], for example, undulates this reviewer's reveries, not of memories but of what has never been: 'When twilight came I slept where I was, on the shore or some rock-strewn headland, and woke to the copper glow of the rising sun coming slowly across the sea. Mornings were pure resurrection, which I could watch sitting up, still wrapped like a corpse in my blanket, seeing the blood-warm light soak back into the Sierras, slowing re-animating their ash-grey cheeks, and feeling the cold of the ground drain away beneath me as the sunrise reached my body.'

Lee's "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning" and its third autobiograhy "A Moment In War" have had a farther reach than any of his other celebrated works. These writings have been adapted to music to which Charles Baudelaire could only spoke of metaphorically. In June of 2002, the Allegri String Quartet in The Salisbury Festival (UK) premiered "A Walk Into War." A musical piece which the quartet had commissioned based on the two latter biographies.

The author once wrote that autobiography is 'a celebration of life and an attempt to hoard its sensations...trophies snatched from the dark... to praise the life I'd had and so preserve it, and to live again both the good and the bad'. By all measures he had not done badly. He was and is the one modern author whose memoirs have transcended into the realms of music and visual arts ('Cider With Rosie', a 1998 film by John Mortimer).

1] Laurie Lee's autobiographical trilogy - Book 1:"Cider with Rosie" (1959); Book 2:"As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning" (1969); and Book 3: "A Moment of War" (1991).

It's a shame that this fine book is not in print. Those going after used editions--and you should--are encouraged to look for the 1985 reprint stunningly illustrated with classic paintings of Spanish life. But back to why you want to read this: in 1934, a young, naive Englishman who had never been out of his rural neighborhood packed up his violin and went walking, first to London, a hundred miles east and then via boat to Spain where he walked from Vigo in the north down to the southern coast. I'm having trouble shelving the book: is it a straight memoir? Certainly it is very much about the writer's encounter with the world at a historically significant time and about his own growth process. Or is it a travelogue? It is a very accurate account of the unique Spanish culture and countryside. Although written more than 30 years after the actual experience, Lee's account conveys a fresh sense of wonder and discovery and resists overlaying too much foreshadowing and hindsight. His style is lyrical, vivid as the blue Spanish sky and honest. He is refreshingly free of nationalism and prejudice.

Laurie Lee's writing is beautiful, simple and elegant: down-to-earth but poetic. I first read this book when I was 14. Twelve years later, it's still in my all-time top three. It is incredibly evocative of Spain before the Civil War - it describes a place and a moment in history seen through the excited eyes of a youth. It is nostalgic but not unrealistic. Read it. You won't regret it!

His admirers have commented, variously, that Laurie Lee 'writes like an angel', a 'poet, whose prose is quick and bright as a snake'. For another writer such praise might seem lavish but not for Laurie Lee. He writes beautifully, producing books that electrify and enchant, exhilarate and mesmerise. 'As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning' is the second volume of a marvellous trilogy. Part autobiography, part evocation of all the bewilderment and uncertainty of the 1930's, it is characterized by the lyricism of its poet author. Leaving his home in the Cotswolds, the young Lee walks to London in 'high, sulky Summer' with high hopes of making his fortune. He settles, happily enough, in a London boarding house with an engagingly eccentric Irish Cockney family, and supports himself by labouring on a building site and by playing the violin. In a life of opposites, we are treated to a first-hand account of the ugliness and tension of the disputes between employees and unions. In the dawn of the first, disquieting signs of dissatisfaction - a feeling in the 30's that led inexorably to the policy of Appeasement, and thus to war - we see through the eyes of a naive adolescent. It is this naivete, coupled with the glorious spontaneity that floods this book, which leads him to Spain. Knowing approximately one Spanish phrase, Lee decides to see Spain and so begins the love affair wtih a country that was to obsess him for the rest of his life. Never has Spain been so vividly painted. From the scorching heat and vivid, voluptous women of Vigo, to the false glamour and dilapidation of Madrid, Laurie Lee writes with a passion to match his captivation. An absolutely unforgettable book with a host of sharply drawn characters. From the sexily confident child, Patsy, to beautiful Cleo, Philip with his 'fine hungry face and a shock of thick obsidian curls' Lee sketches the myriad individuals he meets with a lucidity that stamps them in our minds forever. Who can read this novel and not dream wistfully of the days when cars were a rarity in our country. Or of a Spain unscarred by war, where the laundered, lacy dolls modestly avert their eyes from the gaze of the young men 'pocket dandies, carefully buttoned in spite of the heat.' Truly a book to treasure forever.

This delicate children's books reveals a small part of the talent of artist Tim Brown;one becomes curious to see more of his work.

Deceptively simple, Bark and Tim brings you an age-old story of friendship, that between a boy and his beloved dog. Tim Brown's colorful folk art and the spare (but evocative) text will engage and delight children, while it helps them to understand that, through art, we can keep our friends in our hearts forever.

This story flows like a river on a lazy summer afternoon, winding its way across the Mississippi countryside of the 1920's and 30's. Audrey Glassman Vernick and Ellen Glassman Gidaro's language is both deceptively simple and wonderfully rich. Tim Brown's folk art is as scruffy as Bark himself, and is all the more real for that.

Bark and Tim gives us rough-hewn truth and timeworn beauty. It gives us piny woods, soft grass, and shiny mud. It gives us the early-dark days between Halloween and Thanksgiving, the cloudy mist of Christmas dreams, the sweet air of Spring, and the warm summer sun. It gives us a boy, his dog, and all the seasons they spent together.

Bark and Tim gives us love. Not the some idealized, syrupy, slicked-up version of love. It gives us real love. And thank goodness for that.

I originally bought this book for myself. There is something about this book that pulls you in, and makes you want to own it. The combination of the author's story and Tim Brown's artwork is magical. After reading Bark and Tim to my daughter for the first time, she took over my copy and now likes to keep it beside her at night. She says she wants to sleep with Bark. It definitely has both adult and kid appeal.

Would also make a great gift to anyone who loves art, dogs, picture books, or just a good, unique story.

When you're done enjoying the book, don't forget to read the author's note at the end. The story of their collaboration with Tim Brown is worthy of its own book. It's a fascinating story.

this heartwarming story about a boy and his dog is even more special, knowing it's based on the artist's own childhood and illustrated with his paintings. Sisters Audrey and Ellen tell Tim Brown's story beautifully.

The relationship between Bark & Tim reminded me of pets I've loved and lost, bringing tears to my eyes. My son asks for it often, as he enjoys Bark's antics.

BARK & TIM is the perfect addition to a pet lovers library!

My AP bio teacher recommended this book to our class.
he owns every version out there of study guides and test preps, and recommended the Barron's version to us.

I defenitly agree with him...
it prepared me very well for tests in class and the final exam.
It was very simplified, easy to read, and diagrams that were easy to understand. It goes over all the required labs, has questions and answers, possible essays, etc.

It's a GREAT resource to have- and i recommend it over the cliff's version!

you won't regret buying it..!

Barron's AP Biology (Barron's How to Prepare for the Ap Biology Advanced Placement Examination) (Purchased on 08/30/2008)
Book received in excellent condition and in a timely manner.

The AP Biology advanced placement examination book and CD-rom is very helpful and has proven very valuable as a study tool.

I found most of the book a thorough review but would not attempt to learn new concepts from it, as it could be a confusing introduction. The multiple choice practice questions are more difficult than actual AP questions, but still a helpful tool. Overall, I found it excellent preparation and would definitely go with Barron's for biology review.

By WWHS student

I love this book. It helped me get great grades on tests in class and a 5 on the AP exam! Our textbook was more than 1200 pages -- too long! I bought this review book a few months after the class started. But I should have bought it at the beginning of the year because once I began to study from it, I started to do better on class tests.

My teacher always gave us essay questions on her tests and the Free-Response Questions and Answers at the end of every chapter are really great. They really explain the material clearly. Also, the review book has 1 diagnostic test and 2 practice tests. That's more than any other review book that I saw.

This book is amazing and helped me in class. This book got me good grades. It explains everything clearly. It helped me before each test and helped me score a 88 on the regents.

If your worried about the biology regents, or even if your not this book is a great and comprehensive reveiw of biology for the Regents exams. It included many practice tests that allow you to check your answers. It also includes many practice questions to help students fully prepare for the regents exam.

The questions in this book are very thorough and effective for studying for the regents. Although the questions are great, rarely does old regents questions appear again on future exams. However, I found The Ultimate Study Guide for Biology: Key Review Questions and Answers with Explanations, Volume 1, 2 and 3 by Patrick Leonardi to be a great resource for test preparation for the Regents. This is because these 3 study guides even have some harder questions compared to what is asked on the regents. For me, I found the secret to really doing well on this test was to study also even harder questions like the ones from The Ultimate Study Guide for Biology: Key Review Questions and Answers with Explanations. This is because if you just prepare for the regents by studying your typical high school biology book, sometimes the harder questions that are asked on the Regents are hard to figure out. This is where Leonardi's book helped me greatly.

Many Regents I have thought that there might be no help for me and then someone told me that about these books. They really have saved my life, because they give so many past regents questions that you can get really familiar with what is going to be on the test. It is really a must for anyone who will be talking the regents and it is all you need to study from.

This book is a valuable resource for help in studying for the NYS Bio regents. It gives very good explanations of answers and allows you to analyze your weak spots. The only reason I give it 4 stars is that the actual review material is skimpy and not well defined, but they do have a separate "Let's Review" book that better aids with that.

The news about public school education has been bad for almost 30 years. Statistics published by city, state, and federal information banks show that kids are just not learning what they need to know, schools are overcome with violence, teachers are demoralized, and yet billions of dollars are literally shovelled into the system. Where does this money go, we have all asked,as we walk down our children's school hallways and have seen the paint falling off the walls and ceilings, the broken desks and chairs, and we have heard about the lack of services and resources going to our kids. There has been little documentation of the misappropriation of these funds until now. Lydia Segal has written an excellent and important book on this topic that will become THE textbook on corruption, theft, fraud, and patronage within the Board of Education not only in New York City, but also in Chicago and Los Angeles.
Lydia Segal, a former Investigator of the New York City public schools, says that very little of the dollars allocated to students in our public schools actually gets used by them. She details how coding problems, the procurement process, compartmentalization and opacity of information leave administrators with only two options: good corruption (which ultimately helps the kids) and bad corruption (which never helps anyone but the perpetrator and his/her allies and accomplices). Indeed, the system fights those who try the good corruption route. Ms. Segal describes in graphic detail the "godfathers" and "godmothers" (the school board members), who obtain jobs for their "pieces". Furthermore, no one who reads her chapter "Lessons From Local Political School Control", with the sub-headings "How Language Illuminates the Pathology", "No Real Accountability", "The Ease of Building a Patronage Army", "Controlling the Tools For Patronage", and "Exploiting Parents' Poverty" will ever listen to a school Principal, Superintendent, or School Board official in the same way. Our perception of public school education is changed forever by this book.
The pathology of this corruption suggests the remedy, Ms. Segal says, which is decentralization of power into the schools and the hands of the Principals. The 52 pages of footnotes, interviews, and reference materials as well as the easy reading style make every word Ms. Segal writes believable, although depressing. There is no question, however, that anyone who is interested in school reform and/or who works toward a goal of establishing an education system that puts children first must read this book.

I almost did not buy this book. I would like to understand why our schools are doing such a bad job at educating our kids. The title to this book suggested a narrow focus on issues such as bribery, which, while interesting to a District Attorney, do not seem central to the problem.

What I discovered, however, is that this book really covers alot more ground that the title suggests. Yes, Segal is a lawyer, and she started out in this area by investigating honest to goodness corruption. She is concerned about bribery, waste and abuse, all of which are larger problems than I had realized.

The book goes way beyond those relatively small issues, however. It really gets to the heart of WHY our schools stink, in a way that I have not seen anyone else do. What Segal really gets into are the reasons why our largest school districts are such ossified bureaucratic dinosaurs. She tells a number of really hair-raising stories about how totally the system does not care about efficiency or educational quality, and, perhaps more imporartant, she explains WHY the system can not care. It is a very interesting story. It goes back to the early 20th century when the Progressive Movement was fighting urban corruption, and scientific management was all the rage. The bottom line, however, is that our large systems have fundamental, systematic problems that make it astonishing that they teach as well as they do. As Segal makes very clear, tinkering around the edges with curriculum reform and such like will do next to nothing, until the organizations are fundamentally retooled so that basic efficiency and educational quality become a focus again. As things stand, there is so much red tape, so much administrative ho-ha and general bureaucratic nightmares that there is no possible way that the system can deliver a quality product at a reasonable price.

Very important book.

As a mother of two, facing the tough choice between public and private schools, I found this book full of critical insights as to how the public schools really work. Segal's analysis of the perverse incentives, corruption, and overwhelming bureaucracy that are dragging down our schools is compelling and persuasive. Her suggestions for what should be done to fix the system are intelligent and long overdue. Everyone with school-age kids should read this book now!

A real eye-opener, this very well-written and powerfully argued book finally helped me understand why
urban public schools never seem to have enough money
to educate our children despite repeated national and local efforts to change that. Ms. Segal contends that waste and abuse are the primary culprits and offers thorough and persuavie doumentaion that this is indeed true.
Because she concludes that the problem is with
pathological systems, not people, she spends a good quarter of the book discussing how to overhaul the systems.
The suggestions are overwhelmingly intelligent, inspiring, and above all, realistic.
This book is a must-read for anyone looking for concrete and specific ways to improve our educational system.

A real eye-opener, this very well-written and powerfully argued book finally helped me understand why
urban public schools never seem to have enough money
to educate our children despite repeated national and local efforts to change that. Ms. Segal contends that waste and abuse are the primary culprits and offers thorough and persuasive documentation that this is indeed true.
Because she concludes that the problem is with
pathological systems, not people, she spends a good quarter of the book discussing how to overhaul the systems.
The suggestions are overwhelmingly intelligent, inspiring, and above all, realistic.
This book is a must-read for anyone looking for concrete and specific ways to improve our educational system.

Jacquelyn Small writes about the natural work of being a helper. She writes for both the professional community of counselors and social workers as well as the real world of families. Some of her skills are directed at working with those with problems of chemical dependency and alcoholism, but she covers the aspects of toxic ways of relating and looking at how to come from the heart. She covers, in plain English, the skills of empathy, genuineness, respect, self-disclosure, warmth, immediacy, concreteness, confrontation, potency and self-actualization. In each section she gives clear examples of how the skill will look in real life, and how it should not be done.

I needed this book for school, someone stole my first book so I needed to buy a new one. I have delt with Amazon before so I knew I was in good hands, with quality service, and fast shipping before my next class.

This book is written in plain English and is easy to read. I enjoyed it so much that I purchased several copies a had them sent to my friends.

Ms. Small's book is considered a "classic" in the field of counseling persons with addictive illness for very good reasons. Her writing is very clear, concise, jargon-free (a huge plus in a field where some books require a separate glossary to understand the terminology! ), and extremely practical. Her utilization of brief and to-the-point clinical excerpts from counseling sessions are always appropriate and are followed up by additional applications. Her chapter on "Confrontation," will, once and for all, help novice and experienced clinicians understand that it does not mean dealing with your or the client's anger, lying, transference, etc.; it is simply a way to directly help the other grasp the essence of their beliefs, communication(s) and behavior(s) in non-shaming ways. Highly recommended to anyone considering counseling on either side of the equation and/or significant others of persons with addictive issues. One of the best i've run across in my 20+ years in the field.Also recommended to anyone interested in the qualities of a healer/effective therapist.

Exceptional. Very practical. The author does a great job giving real examples for each of the therapeutic traits she espouses. I have worked with troubled youth for about 6 years and regularly refer to her book in my work with students and in coaching other staff. Very easy read, easily understandable, and right on the money! A great resource for anyone and everyone who fully engages in relationships with friends, lovers, clients.

Great book with solid references for parents raising their own children! Very positive, motivational book for mothers chosing the best career in their life-raising their own children.

The author demonstrates the process of bonding that occurs between mother and child during the first year and how this affects future well-being. Author explains the necessity for security of bonding between child and one trusted person; not just any person, the parent. Author shows the vital, major difference between parental care and care by other loving adults. Especially convincing: even the "best" day-care centers present children with an ever-changing array of caregivers, preventing the most important task of a child; developing trust and bonding. Details the damage done by "caregiver roulette." Author explains how bonding is the most important aspect of early childhood development, not intellectual stimulation. However, early bonding improves future learning in school. The only weakness of this book is that the author focuses mostly on the impact of non-parental care for babies and toddlers with little emphasis on the ramifications for older children and teenagers. The reader will be convinced that caring for one's own child is the most important career a mother or father can pursue, and that there is no comparable substitute.

The book go on saying how important for a child to have a constistant caregiver. Not only that but how important it is for parents to spend time with their kids.

Thank you, Dr. Fox, for finally being courageous enough to expose the myth of "quality time." For so long, researchers and physicians have known that attachment parenting is the ideal situation for infants and children, but, haven't disseminated this information in the mainstream. Dr. Fox recognizes the reality that for some parents, e.g. single parents or the working poor, working is a necessity. But for many millions of parents, generally mothers, working provides an opportunity for intellectual stimulation, career growth, or to afford the luxury of a lifestyle maintained previous to having children. Dr. Fox encourages parents to understand the value of investing in our children (shouldn't this outweigh the value of investing in a career while our children are young?) and offers many valuable tips on how to financially manage with only one income. Furthermore, she offers extensive research on the ramifcations of inconsistent childcare and insecure bonding with parents. The studies on what happens to our kids when we don't give them our time are quite clear and it isn't positive. Thank you, Dr. Fox, for speaking up.

The author demonstrates the process of bonding that occurs between mother and child during the first year and how this affects future well-being. Author explains the necessity for security of bonding between child and one trusted person; not just any person, the parent. Author shows the vital, major difference between parental care and care by other loving adults. Especially convincing: even the "best" day-care centers present children with an ever-changing array of caregivers, preventing the most important task of a child; developing trust and bonding. Details the damage done by "caregiver roulette." Author explains how bonding is the most important aspect of early childhood development, not intellectual stimulation. However, early bonding improves future learning in school. The only weakness of this book is that the author focuses mostly on the impact of non-parental care for babies and toddlers with little emphasis on the ramifications for older children and teenagers. The reader will be convinced that caring for one's own child is the most important career a mother or father can pursue, and that there is no comparable substitute.

I read this book in one night, and while I may have not dealt with the same issues in my life, there were many parts of the book I could relate to. The chapter entitled "Faith," was particularly inspiring to me, containing feelings and advice that anyone can take to heart, even going through some of the more simple trials and let-downs in life. This is a fantastic book for anyone facing mental illness within their family, but is also a powerful read for everyone else. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who needs inspiration to help pick up the pieces and face life's problems.

Ms. Hertler shares a frightening part of her life with those readers who've experienced similiar episodes with unstable life partners in a desire to uplift spirits and ease them through stressing hospital procedures. Her writing style is superb in that she simplifies legal, hospital, and medical issues for the ordinary reader.

This is such a wonderful book. Eventhough it's a short read it is overflowing with detail and honesty...you can't help but put yourself in Gretchen's world and understand exactly how she was feeling...I know Gretchen and she is an amazing woman...she is so sweet and loving and has one of the kindest hearts of anyone I know. It's unbelieveable what she and her daughters have been through yet through it all she remains so positive...I admire that so much about her. I highly recommend this book.

The book describes a family's journey through tough times but provides insight on how to overcome difficult obstacles, like living with someone with a mental illness. The author describes her journey in a thought provoking and inspiring manner. It is a great read.

This book let's you gain insight into the pain of a family going through a terrible bout of mental illness and how they came out on the other side. Would recommend to anyone going through personal crisis.