Encyclopedias Books

This book has been in my wish list for years, I have been working with leather for the past 3 decades,and
I find this book to be the treasure for those working in the leathercraft world.I am glad that I have this book
in my library of leathercrafting. I am going to study and utilize this book for the years to come. Etsuo Fuwa

A wonderful informative book to help you learn the skills required to do any leather braiding...

This book explains everything you could possibly need to know to get started. It can be a little hard to follow in places but with a little patience it really can be a big help, and has all the answers I was looking for.

For lovers of leather braiding, this work is the Bible. Grant exhaustively covers a wide range of braiding techniques. His attention to detail and step-by-step instructions are superb. Sometimes his drawings are a bit primitive but they serve the purpose intended. His book covers how to make and work with rawhide, tools of the trade for leather braiding, various braid techniques such as twist braids, the Conquistador Braid (a fabulous and intricate braid for making belts, wrist bands, etc.), flat braids, round braids (for whips, etc.), various knots, and a wide range of horse tack (saddle and bridle).

Excellent book for an incredible number of different braids. Lots of pictures and diagrams, (thank goodness) to better teach the techniques. The author throws in a little history education on the use of many braids. The only downer is that it is in black/grey/white, no color. Most of the diagrams are hand drawn (nicely) so it may take a second, third, seventh look to see which direction to go. In this day of CAD and graphics, I guess I expected a better visual. But then, the information that is handed down to the author from long, long ago, may call for this style of visuals? In the end, fantastic book, I'm glad I bought it and I'll keep it, and use it for many years to come.
ab designs LLC

With this book I belive I will improve my sewing! Lots and lots of information and different tecniques.

Seems like a thorough book. I haven't had the time to get to all of it. I will use it as a reference for my sewing projects.

I would recommend this book. I bought two copies, one for myself and one for a sewing friend. We have both been happily browsing the book. It has so many great techniques and ideas that will complement our sewing. This will definitely be a good reference book to keep.

EXACT information on how to achieve various effects with my sewing machine. Techniques up the kazoo with suggestions on how to apply. This one book is worth more than a hundred project type books. EXCELLENT!

i really like this book. it has such a wide range of techniques, everything from button holes to lace making. definitely a good buy.

We read this book in our friends' apartment in Paris. It is the most wonderful and comprehensive book for cheese lovers and foodies. Looked through many book stores in Paris and were told it is out of print.
Most spectacular find at Amazon. Thanks.

This is great. Shows cheeses at different ages which is one of the most interesting points and makes this very unique as a reference book. If your in the business its a must have.

Living in France, I am always making the acquaintance of cheeses I had never before known existed. I always scurry to find this book, and look up the tasty morcel I've just consumed. It's great for learning the basics about various cheeses -- and, as noted by other reviewers -- the photos are divine, but it's not the sort of book one takes into the bath to pore over for hours at a time. Put it on your shelf next to your dictionary and thesaurus; it's that useful!

I collect field guides and what attracts me to some is the clever layout and design. This volume is in a class by itself and unlike some guides, the text was so informative that i could not put it dowm.
Should receive 6 stars out of 5.

As mentioned in previous reviews, this book does a great job of referencing hundreds of cheeses from France, providing photographs, descriptions, and wine recommendations. In these areas, it does a fantastic job. I've learned a lot reading it and I can't wait to take it with me on my next trip to France.

I wish the book gave more guidance on the tastes of the different cheeses and how you might select them. For example, if I like Brie and wanted to try a different nice mellow soft cheese, what might be recommended? This book isn't organized to help answer questions like that.

Overall, an important book for anybody serious about cheese.

This book is a must, I fell in love with it from the moment I opened it. Not being a great reader myself..I needed help with getting in to the bible, this book I believe was god sent.I found it soo helpful, a great guide for getting into the scripts.
Just one negative point though, because my husband and I use it on a regular basis, we find that that because the book is a paper back it tends to get tatty very quickly . we had to replace it at one point because the pages came away within months...the second one was the same and I had to stick the pages back down with super glue We are hoping that Steve M Miller will eventually get the book published in hard back , being such a fantastic book it would be worthwhile for us to pay the extra cost ..which I am sure others would agree.
Against the odds ,the book is still worth buying for its contents.

Wow, I've been wanting a book - In plain easy to read format- that could help me in my understanding of the Old Testamant. I knew about the New Testament, but didn't quite grasp the why's, where's, and what's of the Old Testament. This easy to read format is wonderful for anyone who wants a straight approach with no mumbo-jumbo. The history of the Old Testament is just as beautiful as the treasures of the New Testament. This book is broken down and covers every book of the Bible. Each chapter gives the plot, starring roles, what to look for, and author and date. It also ends the chapter with "Big Scenes from"...that particular book of the Bible. It's about time after all my hunting that I finally found, or more truthfully, that the Lord led me to this valuable, insightful book.

I originally bought How to Get the Bible into your Life. I liked it a lot. It made the Bible seem practical in a way I didn't know it could be. This book may be a bit redundant, but well worth owning for the historical aspects. Both very well written. This book is well-researched and unbiased--when two interpretations are possible, he gives you a choice to decide which one to believe.

This is a wonderful text, incredibly useful.

However, what I most enjoy are the fantastic illustrations. So often in Christian publishing, the graphics are dull and insipid. But in this book, the artist captured period details with strong realism and fluid movement. It is obvious that he did a tremendous amount of research and I feel like my understanding of Scripture grew not only through the author's work, but also through the work of the artist.

This is a really good intro to the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. Clear, simple, and biblically solid.

But I like the sequel even better because it not only gives you the short course on each book in the Bible, it helps you put it to practice.

The first book--How to Get into the Bible--is history. The second book--How to Get the Bible into My Life--is history applied to our lives today.

Both are helpful, well-written, and insightful.

What I luv about this book is that it tells you what to expect from traditional medicine and what you can do for yourself through herbal and homeopathy. Very thorough and easy to find information in the index.

Great book with lots of choices on how proactive you want to be with your health. Good information to read before going to the doctors, or making alternative lifestyle choices for your well being. Doesn't push one method over another, just the facts. Great reference book for any home.

This book is a wonderful guide to maintaining good health. It embraces Western Medicine, Chinese Medicine, Natural Remedies, and Nutrition.

This book is great. It gives you a variety of solutions to your health issues that fits you individually. It helps you make informative decisions regarding your health. I originally bought Smart Medicine for a Healthier Child. I was happy to find the same version for adults. Great Buy - Helps you determine if your condition merits your own personal care or a physicians.

I got this book and the one for our kids, my husband woke up with a stye in his eye a couple of days after receiving this book. He wanted to run to the Dr., I asked him to wait and followed the instructions the book provided, i like how it gave us many different ways to treat it. I used the homeopathic way and in a day and a half it was gone, it went from this horrible red, bloodshot eye to normal!!Amamzing, my mainstrean husband was very impressed. I really enjoy this book it gives me the power to heal our aliments in a healthy way and I save on the co-pays at the dr. office:)

Dan Poynter's book is a virtual gold mine for authors and publishers. He shares his years of experience in the publishing business with a dictionary of every aspect of publishing, promoting and sales of books. Dan shares the secrets of e-books, audio-books and where to go to get the author's books changed to digital copies for mass marketing on the internet. This is his best book yet.

Poynter's Encyclopedia and Shepards' Aiming at Amazon are both perfect manuals for anybody interested in self-publishing. Brief, informative, and easy to use - what else is needed? Highly recommended.

Yuval Lirov, Practicing Profitability - Billing Network Effect for Revenue Cycle Control in Healthcare Clinics and Chiropractic Offices: Collections, Audit Risk, SOAP Notes, Scheduling, Care Plans, and Coding

Poynter, as always, knows his subject: Self-publishing. This book hits all the high points in an easy-to-access format.

If you have questions about the publishing industry, you will be hard-pressed to find a better resource than Dan Poynter's book, The Book Publishing Encyclopedia. This alphabetical resource guide is filled with facts, figures, tips, and tactics.

Any resource guide filled with so much information is bound to motivate a writer to continue striving for the exciting status of publication. It becomes a matter of absorbing enough information and doing enough research about all the available publishing options to make the right decision. Not all authors are destined for Random House, but that doesn't mean they have to remain unpublished. There are alternatives! Whether you are seeking an independent press, a mainstream publisher, or the convenience of a turn-key publisher, this book defines the terms you should know. - Brent Sampson, author of Self-Publishing Simplified

Loads of useful information for the self-publisher/author. I would have
preferred to have it in chapter form. That would have made it more readable.

My discovery of Edward Bach's Flower Therapy came on me suddenly. In the midst of writing a novel, my lead character decided to enhance her floral shoppe inventory with self-sewn natural plants and seeds. Within twenty-four hours of beginning my search for herbal practices, I ran into Bach's 38 key plants employed for prevention and cure of a multitude of ailments. This book is a beautiful reference and has been an endless reference for me while developing plant and human characters. I'd absolutely recommend it to anyone who wishes to discover how your personality quirks might be tamed by God's wildflowers.

I am a Reiki person, A massage person, An Herb person, A Gardner, So Bach just seem to be the next natural course of events. This is a good Starter book. It talks about each indiviuial flower. The basics. The foundation. This will be a reference book for the future. I am intending on buying other books about Bach.

This book truly is an "encyclopedia."
Everything you could want or need about the Bach Flower Therapy system.

This is an excellent companion for anyone who uses bach flower therapy. It is very informative providing in depth information on each flower, history, photos, the negative as well as positive side aspects the particular flower is used for and what I find particularly helpful are the focus ideas at the end of each chapter for refocusing your thoughts. Extensive questionairre, index, glossary.

It may be a bit more than a person needs if you are just curious or have not begun using bach flowers.

I found this a difficult read. There was never anything to really get excited about and no new amazing insights. It simply repeated the accepted wisdom on Bach flowers. Her description of each flower remedy was a long discussion of the negative state given in the Bach Flower brochure. It's her opinion that it is the separation from the higher self and not listening to your inner voice that causes this negative state.

For instance, when it comes to Chestnut Bud she focuses on the fact that they make repetitive mistakes. Chestnut Bud people have laser like focus, and can obsess on a tiny area of the universe. This makes them brilliant, but they miss many things outside of their field of interest, hence the mistakes. They are like the classic "absent minded professor". They have extreme talent in one area, but very little common sense. Many people with Asperger's will benefit from this remedy.

If you ask a Chestnut Bud if he makes repetitive mistakes, he will answer with an emphatic "No!" because if he makes a mistake in his area of focus, he learns from it, and does not make the same mistake twice. Where he makes repeated mistakes is outside his area of focus, which he doesn't see, and often doesn't care about. But if you ask him "Can you focus intensely on something you're interested in, finding answers that no one else can think of?" He will answer, "Absolutely!" So yes, he makes repeated mistakes, but that's not how you need to approach him. Instead focus on his intelligence and problem solving capabilities, and show him how to balance it.

She is very picky about how many drops to use, what kind of alcohol, and how to drink the water. They are flower remedies. They're an energy medicine. Finding the right remedy is much more important than how many drops to use.

When it comes to selecting the correct remedy she treats it like a homeopathic consultation, with a long interview process, and questionnaires that once again focus on the simplistic negative states given in the brochure. She off handedly dismisses any type of energy testing, saying that people new to Bach Flowers use this approach. I have used Bach Flower remedies for years, and I find energy testing to be quite important. Just because somebody has Asperger's does not mean they need Chestnut Bud. Contrary to popular belief, a flower remedy can be wrong, and can stress a person.

Frequently energy testing will point to a remedy that I dismissed, and when I look at it more closely I think, "Oh, I hadn't thought of it that way." Energy testing has actually taught me more about the remedies because I've learned what types of people can benefit from certain remedies outside of the simple issues in the brochure. It's fun to meet a client for the first time, with basically no knowledge of their personality, and be able to describe their most pressing issue. They say "Wow, how did you know that?" It also increases their faith in your ability to help them.

The focus on the negative aspects also felt over emphasized. Natural leaders will often test for Vine, which does not mean they are tyrants. It means they are natural leaders and it strengthens those qualities.

If you are interested in the Bach Flowers, I recommend Advanced Bach Flower Therapy: A Scientific Approach to Diagnosis and Treatment. I also really like Practical Uses and Applications of the Bach Flower Emotional Remedies.

Excellent book. I have many water gardening books, but this one is one of my favorites. It has detailed descriptions of many different types of aquatic plants along with color photos.

Very complete source, but extensive use of latin names made it somewhat difficult to use.

I purchased this book for my son who is attending college to be a Landscape Architect. He was interested in learning more about water plants as we live in the south and there is a lot of time to enjoy a water garden. The book is BEAUTIFUL. It has everything you would need to know to make your water garden more user friendly. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in making a home resemble an oasis...

I have had a pond for 30+ years. This is one of the best and most detailed resouces that I have come across. It is one of the few that details the type of waterlily corms that each variety has. This is extremely helpful in identifying plants that have spread naturally and are not blooming. Great photographs. Uses both common names and scientific names.

I love this book. I am new to the pond world and have found my passion. This book is the water gardener's bible. It is extensive in the coverage of all water plants and gives practical information on their care. It is suitable to ponds in any climate. Also, photos are lovely and are great for plant identification.

My child wants me to read this book each night as a bed time story. She is six and loves this book.

This is a great book for kids about the human body. My four year old loves reading and looking at this book and she has retained more information than I thought about the human body. It has been a great starting place for many discussions about the body - how blood works really fascinates her. The pictures are great and it has enough information on each page to be informative but not too boring. A great resource for young children about how the body works.

Great resource for young children! My 3-year-old is into skeletons, and the digestive process, so this book was good for his little curious mind. Obviously, some of the concepts are a little advanced, but he'll get there one day! I even learned a lot! Some of the pages in my book were a little off-print, but my fault for not exchanging it.

I got this book for my 6 year old son. I have a few books about the body and I have found that most are not descriptive enough when going through the body systems. They were fine when my son was younger, but now he asks many more questions and I find myself having a harder time explaining how the body works. So, I got this book along with a real working stethascope for children. Every night he loves reading through a few pages at time of this book. He really enjoys telling others what he has learned the night before... Sometimes the infomation is a little too descript, and other times not enough. But, overall, it is an excellent book to help your child understand the wonders of the human body. I would highly recommend this for children 5 years old and up.

I bought this book for my 9 year old daughter who loves science. She enjoys it because it is easy to read, but still very informative. She will use some of the information for her science project at school this year. She saw the book at a friend's house, and I personally thought it was a little advanced for the 4 year old boy who owned it.

James Baldwin is a tortured soul. He pours his whole soul onto every page. This makes him one of America's greatest writers. His word pictures take you into the church, on a picnic, into a country farm house and into the lives of all his characters. Long Live James Baldwin. In our hearts.

James Baldwin is one of the best writers
of all time. This semi-autobiographical
collection of short stories about different
male protagonists going to meet "the man"
which is different in every story is one
of the best story collections of all time.

Even today, after reading it, I could see
where there was a lesson to be learned from
each story. I wish James Baldwin was still
alive so I could tell him how much I love his
work. If you don't read anything else by James
Baldwin (although Giovanni's Room, Tell me how
long the train's been gone and Another Country
are also brilliant) read this, particularly Sonny's Blues.

The first story I read in this was "Sonny's Blues" and I realized there was more to it than just a story- and that the blues is more than just b5ths but a greater understanding of life - highly recommended.

James Baldwin is known primarily for his essays and his first two novels ("Go Tell It on the Mountain" and "Giovanni's Room"), but I often tell readers that the place to start is with his first story collection, "Going to Meet the Man." Baldwin's short fiction is more straightforward and accessible than are his essays (which are indeed excellent); each of the eight stories presents a different aspect of Baldwin's worldview; and unlike his early novels, where racism is treated as one aspect in the lives of characters, several of these stories confront the "racial issue" full on.

Baldwin's short fiction may be easier to read, but it does not avoid uncomfortable truths. In fact, some of Baldwin's most heated writing can be found in this volume, which was first published in 1965. It contains work written over a 20-year-period, including "Previous Condition," the first piece of fiction he ever published (in Commentary Magazine in 1948). A fledgling actor is torn between the black world of Harlem ("perfectly in his element, in his place, as the saying goes") and the white neighborhoods downtown. He stays at a friend's apartment in lower Manhattan, but has to hide from the landlord and leave the building at odd hours to avoid being seen by the other residents ("Why don't you go uptown, where you belong?").

Each of the other stories is unforgettable in its own way, but my two favorites open and close the volume. "The Rockpile" is an early (yet different) version of an episode in "Go Tell It on the Mountain"; two of Baldwin's strengths are his ability to capture the memories of youth and to present the complexities of family life. The incendiary title story that ends the volume depicts a white police officer whose racial attitudes were formed by a lynching he witnessed as a child. Baldwin pits the very real horror of the police brutality experienced by a young man who attempts to register to vote against the officer's wholly imagined fear of the oversexed black stereotype.

This last story--indeed, much of Baldwin's later fiction--has been criticized (by biographer James Campbell, for example) for lacking "a neutrality which Baldwin was finding harder than ever to maintain" and an unwillingness to "concede that somewhere, somehow, this corrupted man might incorporate genuine goodness." Such comments seem unfair on two counts: the actions of some racists, while "pitiable," are still beyond redemption or "goodness," and (more to the point) I don't agree that it's a storyteller's responsibility to make lemonade out of every lemon.

So ignore the critics who argue that Baldwin's fiction lost its shine as he grew older and more cynical and less "neutral," and pick up this excellent collection of stories. I think you'll find that their bluntness and honesty and gritty realism make up for whatever stylistic faults the critics might point to.

I am slowly understanding why Mr. Baldwin elected to leave the United States for more than a decade in the 1940s and 1950s. He apparently is on record as saying that he needed to flee because his anger was going to destroy him if he did not seek a respite from American injustice.

Upon reading this collection, I think I am really beginning to understand what must have been going through his mind. Read "Previous Condition" where a young African American man keeps being thrown out of hotels and denied jobs simply because of the color of his skin. There is nowhere he can go without meeting the hostile glances and conspiratorial whispers of people on the street simply because of his skin color. And there is a moment where it all came into focus for me, standing in the kitchen of his Jewish friend's Jules' apartment. And I quote:

"Oh," I cried, "I know you think I'm making it dramatic, that I'm paranoiac and just inventing trouble! Maybe I think so sometimes, how can I tell? You get so used to being hit you find you're always waiting for it. Oh, I know, you're Jewish, you get kicked around, too, but you can walk into a bar and nobody knows you're Jewish and if you go looking for job you'll get a better job than mine!" (78)

It is deeply disturbing to think that a person has the suspicion and rage of the world cocked against their temple, but that was how it was (and still is). I have read much about the Civil Rights struggle and as a Jew myself, have listened to many stories from members of my family about prejudice but these stories, they uncover something. After seeing what happened in New Orleans with Katrina and listening to the empty discussions of "good schools", No Child Left Behind and test score mania, it opens your eyes to the fact that performance, optimism and opportunity are perceptions that, when absent, can ruin lives in ways that are hard to qualify.

I highly recommend these stories but be prepared to become deeply uncomfortable because Baldwin had a powerful case to make about American hypocrisy and he makes it.