Departments Books

An excellant publication that tells of the struggles and proud history of a well known American City fire department. You won't be disappointed in this very professional book!

Firehouse Company Number 1 is a very clever little book that my kids never get tired of. It's a very sturdy, thick board book that has been dy-cut into the shape of a little building. Each "page" opens to an interior scene of the firehouse, then later to views of the firemen rushing to a call and saving the day. There are 12 "pages" in all.
Details that make this a true gem are the people and animals that have been cut to fit so that they stick out through the "windows" on the side of the book, chimneys with little surprises and the cute illustration style. Amazingly, this book has yet to fall apart despite the abuse dished out by a few years of preschoolers handling it. Recommended!
-Andrea, aka Merribelle

This is an excellent book with elements that will grab a child's interest--a loving dog and a fireman's life. The story is told using photos of actual activities at a fire station and the Dalmatian they keep as a pet. The photos give a vivid account of a fireman's lifestyle. It first explains the equipment they use then it shows some of their activities when not at a fire. I particularly liked the sequence beginning with the firemen sitting down at a table ready to enjoy dinner. They're relaxed and chatting away in idle conversation when the firebell rings. In the next photo you see them rushing away from the table with stern looks, all business. The following photo shows them sliding down the pole and diving into their gear. Then they're racing away to the fire. Threaded throughout the story is the lovingly treated dalmatian who also has his responsibilities at the station. The book is interesting, educational, action-oriented, and real.

An essential guidebook for California marine studies, covering immediate coastal-littoral to coastal deep-water Isaac's Kid level fishes. While working on a research ship in SoCal we constantly referred to this text- it's inexpensive, so there is little concern from salt-water damage; yet it is also highly accurate and systematic in it's coverage of marine fishes. Though the lack of color can hinder identification on occasion, the key identification features make up for any confusion. The text follows a scientific dichotomous key which allows for identification and comparison of closely-related fishes- helpful when trying to identify just what species you might be holding at the moment- and if it might be poisonous or not. Extremely useful for those of a scientific bent, with its use of terminology and scientific nomenclature, it is also usable by the layman because of the intricate drawings and clear, concise information.

"Fishweirs: A World Perspective With Emphasis On The Fishweirs Of Mississippi" by John M. Connaway is a 564-page compendium of descriptive, archeological, and historical information on a form of trap used to catch fish. Called a 'Fishweir', these traps come in many forms and (accordingly to the archaeological record0 have been utilized in steams, rivers, lakes, and oceans for thousands of years. An impressive and seminal work of exhaustive, comprehensive scholarship, "Fishweirs" is organized into two main sections. 'Fishweirs in a Global and Regional Context' describes what fishweirs are, provides a global perspective into their uses and designs, and the development of fishweir law in North American waters. 'Fishweirs in Mississippi' draws a tighter focus into the use and design of fishweirs in the Mississippi from prehistory and in Native American cultures down to the present day. A third section is devoted to four appendices: an 'Annotated Bibliography: Worldwide Archaeological and Historical Source Material on Fishweirs'; 'Fishweirs Listed in or Being Nominated to the National Register of Historic Places'; 'Fishweir Questionnaire'; and 'Glossary of Selected Terms Related to Fishweirs and Mass Fish Procurement'. Enhanced further occasional illustrations and maps, as well as the inclusion of an extensive bibliography and a comprehensive index, "Fishweirs" is a unique and valued contribution that should be a part of professional and academic library reference collections.

This pamphlet is one in a series of FREE pamphlets (Educational Leaflets) offered by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Geological Survey. Please see their website, [...], to see those that are offered and how to receive them. Some are available as PDFs.

Flowers are messengers and teachers from the higher worlds of astral light, beauty and devotion. They reflect the soul's stirrings in physical matter and provide us a window to realms of vision far beyond this mortal travail. Each flower inspires our soul in a certain way and directs us to higher knowledge, experience and realization.
Flowers and Their Messages unfolds the spiritual secrets of many of the world's most important flowers, both of temperate and tropical regions. As a practitioner in the field of yogic and Ayurvedic healing, I find the book particularly helpful for showing us how flowers work on the mind and soul.
The author, Mother Mira of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram was one of the most remarkable women teachers of the twentieth century. No other western woman residing in India has ever received the degree of adulation and respect that she gained, to whom even Indira Gandhi came for guidance. Mother Mira was the spiritual partner of Sri Aurobindo, one of the towering figures of modern India's spiritual renaissance, and carried on his mission through the Sri Aurobindo Ashram that she directed.
The Mother, as she is called, was an accomplished yogini, mystic and occultist. This book reflects not only her understanding of plants but of the psychic realms to which they are connected. It contains drawings, pictures and relevant quotes from Sri Aurobindo. It is not just a book about flowers but shows how flowers symbolize the unfoldment of the Divine consciousness within us. It shows us how to read the Divine language of form and color, not only in flowers but in the unfoldment of our own inner being.

Daniel Opler's sharp, focused study of the rise and collapse of New York City department store unions insists on the primacy of particularity and local context in writing history, but in the process provides an insightful answer (or partial answer) to a big question: why the failure of a white collar labor movement? This absence becomes ever more glaring in the twenty-first century United States as industrial work moves offshore and income disparity widens between corporate cogs and major executives. In supplying an answer, Opler looks in some expected places - the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act that reversed many of labor's hard-won Depression-era gains, the postwar Red Scare that all but neutered many of the unions that had drawn on radicals' organizing skills. But he also weaves in the postwar flight to the suburbs, where both a rising middle class and their retail suppliers decamped after the war, producing both a new kind of shopper, a new kind of worker, and a new kind of public space. His analysis distinguishes between an institutionalized Communist party, whose strategies sometimes cloaked specific political goals, and individual Communists, who adapted these strategies to local needs. He considers the role of gender in a union with a heavily male hierarchy and a predominantly female workforce - and suggests the effect of this gender composition on the unions' virtual erasure from history. Altogether this is a penetrating analysis that mines a largely unexplored field to sparkling effect.

For All White Collar Workers raises the curtain on a vanished world when department stores served very specific customer bases in downtown neighborhoods rather than supplying standardized goods through national chains operating in suburban malls. Opler's first scene is the Union Square shopping district, where in the 1930s stores like Klein's and Ohrbach's offered troughs of cheap knock-offs - and nothing in the way of service - to Lower East Side housewives. Here both clerk and customer came from the same social milieu, which was generally immigrant working class. Across the square were the offices of the Daily Worker. The Square itself was contested terrain, sometimes co-opted by neighborhood merchants producing sanitized celebrations, sometimes taken over by workers or radicals for protests or as a staging ground for May Day marches.

When working conditions for clerks worsened during the Depression, the AFL, which had a charter to organize retail workers under the Retail Clerks International Protection Association (RCIPA), showed little interest in the women and girls who worked at Klein's and Ohrbach's. Instead in 1934 these workers approached the Communist-affiliated Office Workers Union, which assigned an organizer and sponsored a strike. Opler clearly relishes the tactics of these free-wheeling years, when workers disrupted store operations by setting white mice loose in the stores and organizing themed protests that promoted class solidarity among both strikers and customers. Members of the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians provided expertise and assistance for some of these operations. Klein's and Ohrbach's settled the strike in 1935, acceding to some of the union demands but neither recognizing the union nor keeping the strike leaders on the payroll. The infant union ended up allying with the AFL but continued to benefit from the organizational skills and protest skills of the radical leaders.

In the second chapter Opler's scene shifts to May's, on Brooklyn's Fulton Street - like Klein's and Ohrbach's, a cut-rate department store. May's workers formed a union under RCIPA which, more typical of AFL style, eschewed provocation but benefited from institutional legitimacy and won the support of middle-class sympathizers in the League of Women Shoppers. RCIPA's tepid support for strikes led in early 1937 to a rejection of the national union's leadership, as local leaders formed the New Era Committee. Freed from AFL restraints, unions at F&W Grand and Woolworth's - two five-and-ten-cent variety stores - benefited from radical leadership that imported the sit-down strike from Detroit's auto industry. With radicalism carrying the day, the New Era Committee applied for a CIO charter in mid-1937.

In Chapter 3 Opler turns to the quite different retail territory centered on Thirty-Fourth Street, anchored by Macy's and Gimbel's, where goods were kept under glass and extracted for customer inspection by seasoned salespeople. No class consciousness here - shoppers expected to be waited on by clerks of a lower social stratum. Under the CIO, New York's retail unions, now gathered into the United Retail and Wholesale Employees Association, managed to retain the legitimacy they had enjoyed with the AFL. Swayed by the conciliatory Samuel Wolchok, managers at Macy's signed a union contract in February 1938 and at Gimbel's the next month. But at the stores the local leaders still tended to have Communist connections, and locals proved far more willing to resort to strikes than the national leadership, which saw benefits in stability.

Stability was a necessity during the fraught war years, the subject of Opler's fourth chapter. In a curious reversal of roles, Communists within the unions sought to prove their loyalty by keeping their heads down, and liberals became more militant. Samuel Wolchok, for example, spoke out for the rights of women and blacks, both of whom were being given more responsibility during the war but neither of which group had received strong advocacy from Communists.

The postwar period would be the testing ground for white-collar unionism. Would the unions' growing legitimacy lead to their expansion even as they shed their radical past? Would the support of workers in other fields add to their power? As Opler demonstrates in his fifth and sixth chapters, events both within and outside of the unions led to collapse and defeat. Early prognostications were positive: radicals and liberals both supported a full employment bill, and Wolchok assiduously avoided branding local leaders Communists. Locals maintained their hold on the operations of their unions. But a provision in the Taft-Hartley Act effectively forcing a purge of Communists destroyed the possibility of continued reconciliation. Local leaders in the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (as it was now called) refused to sign noncommunist affidavits, but national leaders like Wolchok ultimately knuckled under and then called for cooperation among the locals. Once again the locals bolted the national union, although they had maintained their local autonomy and had managed to construct both an administrative structure and a social culture that boded well for the future.

But besides the anticommunist hysteria of the late 1940s and early '50s, the suburban diaspora of the postwar years threatened solidarity. A house and garage encouraged the typical member of the white collar class to think of himself or herself as middle class professional rather than a "worker." And suburban shopping - the self-service paradigm that worked so successfully in the neighborhood supermarket - made the full service model of Macy's and Gimbel's increasingly obsolete, leading to mass layoffs. Unions tried to represent themselves as bastions of democratic decision making. After the break with the CIO, many local leaders did sign noncommunist affidavits anyhow. Opler suggests that this emphasis on consensus stifled the little interest that locals had previously demonstrated in women's issues or opportunities for people of color. And the strategy of allying with liberals rather than keeping the lines of communication open with Communists proved fatal. In a 1952 strike at Hearn's in which managers attempted to brand strikers as Communists, strikers effectively turned the tables on the store, calling Hearn's un-American for firing veterans and Gold-Star Mothers and refusing to negotiate. In the process, strikers won the support of politicians and the NAACP. But anticommunism was equated with a respect for government rulings, and the government of this era was a stranger to the labor camp. When injunctions were called to end the strike, the union suddenly found itself painted into a corner.

For All White Collar Workers tells this story compactly but with considerable subtlety. Typical of Opler's nuance and evenhandedness is his treatment of Communists as protagonists: to be sure, they were more forward-looking than anyone else in evidence, grasping the possibilities of white collar organizing when other unionists were locked in outdated assumptions of who constitutes a worker that still hinder the labor movement. But despite the verve of their radicalism, they shared the prejudices of their time about the potential role of women and people of color.

Opler also avoids the kind of narrative that writers of labor history often fall back on - chapter-long disquisitions on the mechanics of negotiating sessions, union elections, and the mergers of locals, leaving the reader to flip back through endless pages to answer the question "What was the ABCD again?" Instead, because he keeps emphasizing the importance of context in making sense of the situation, he draws from a real variety of sources, from the newspaper ads placed by stores to little-known novels, from the inescapable 1939 World's Fair to the Christmas movie Miracle on 34th Street. Yet far from seeming gratuitous, the introduction of these references has a remarkable inevitability, and they lend tremendous liveliness to the story.

The one context that is left somewhat unexplored is the relation of the department store unions to other white collar unions, either in New York or nationally. How did the challenges of organizing retail workers reflect or differ from the unionization of, say, teachers or actors? Were there any unions of retail employees outside New York during this period? As it is, the New York retail unions exist in a kind of vacuum. But to have covered these issues in any depth would have resulted in a very different kind of work. Within the constraints of the case study, For All White Collar Workers successfully explores of one of history's intriguing dead ends with trenchant implications for the present.

Get this book.

If you have it, or an extra copy, know that there is a market for those who are willing to sell.

The sites listed in the book are good. But even better, the descriptions of the basic elements of the activity are such so that a novice can handle the instruction and grab hold of fossil collecting as a hobby.

I bought an edition that did not turn out to be the latest, and was thrilled to actually learn more about 'old' (read 'lost') sites for fossil collecting.

The best for PA, and I have not found a comparable guide for any other state.

Sri Aurobindo wrote this book when the British occupied India and sought to project the country as heathen, pagan, primitive in its art and culture.He opens up for western eyes what really governs Indian art in all its manifest glory.