Research Books

This little gem is insightful, profound, and funny.

Each page relates a scripture to contemporary quotes or cultural ideas. I love to browse it, and it often leaves me meditating on the topic covered. Other pages make me laugh my head off. Easy to carry and enjoy when traveling or waiting somewhere. Also quite useful to provoke interest in a topical study.

The scriptures lead us to the higher Christian life-real meat here-without preaching or someone elses interpretion. Great for the office, attache case, or waiting in airport terminals.

Powerful, fun, and inspires. Applicable to all denominatins and ages. I think this will make a fantastic gift ror any occasion, for both Christians and non-Christians. This is an undiscovered gem. You must check it out.

Thanks for considering my review-if it influences you to purchase the book, I would love to hear feedback! One of the best (if not the best) devotional I have ever found. Also highly recommend the devotionals in this series for teens and kids.

This little gem is insightful, profound, and funny.

Each page relates a scripture to contemporary quotes or cultural ideas. I love to browse it, and it often leaves me meditating on the topic covered. Other pages make me laugh my head off. Easy to carry and enjoy when traveling or waiting somewhere. Also quite useful to provoke interest in a topical study.

The scriptures lead us to the higher Christian life-real meat here-without preaching or someone elses interpretion. Great for the office, attache case, or waiting in airport terminals.

Powerful, fun, and inspires. Applicable to all denominatins and ages. I think this will make a fantastic gift ror any occasion, for both Christians and non-Christians. This is an undiscovered gem. You must check it out.

Thanks for considering my review-if it influences you to purchase the book, I would love to hear feedback! One of the best (if not the best) devotional I have ever found. Also highly recommend the devotionals in this series for teens and kids.

This little gem is insightful, profound, and funny.

Each page relates a scripture to contemporary quotes or cultural ideas. I love to browse it, and it often leaves me meditating on the topic covered. Other pages make me laugh my head off. Easy to carry and enjoy when traveling or waiting somewhere. Also quite useful to provoke interest in a topical study.

The scriptures lead us to the higher Christian life-real meat here-without preaching or someone elses interpretion. Great for the office, attache case, or waiting in airport terminals.

Powerful, fun, and inspires. Applicable to all denominatins and ages. I think this will make a fantastic gift ror any occasion, for both Christians and non-Christians. This is an undiscovered gem. You must check it out.

Thanks for considering my review-if it influences you to purchase the book, I would love to hear feedback! One of the best (if not the best) devotional I have ever found. Also highly recommend the devotionals in this series for teens and kids.

This little gem is insightful, profound, and funny.

Each page relates a scripture to contemporary quotes or cultural ideas. I love to browse it, and it often leaves me meditating on the topic covered. Other pages make me laugh my head off. Easy to carry and enjoy when traveling or waiting somewhere. Also quite useful to provoke interest in a topical study.

The scriptures lead us to the higher Christian life-real meat here-without preaching or someone elses interpretion. Great for the office, attache case, or waiting in airport terminals.

Powerful, fun, and inspires. Applicable to all denominatins and ages. I think this will make a fantastic gift ror any occasion, for both Christians and non-Christians. This is an undiscovered gem. You must check it out.

Thanks for considering my review-if it influences you to purchase the book, I would love to hear feedback! One of the best (if not the best) devotional I have ever found. Also highly recommend the devotionals in this series for teens and kids.

This little gem is insightful, profound, and funny.

Each page relates a scripture to contemporary quotes or cultural ideas. I love to browse it, and it often leaves me meditating on the topic covered. Other pages make me laugh my head off. Easy to carry and enjoy when traveling or waiting somewhere. Also quite useful to provoke interest in a topical study.

The scriptures lead us to the higher Christian life-real meat here-without preaching or someone elses interpretion. Great for the office, attache case, or waiting in airport terminals.

Powerful, fun, and inspires-one of the best (if not the best) devotional I have ever found. Also highly recommend the devotionals in this series for teens and kids.

... then buy, borrow or steal a copy! Never before have I read such a good exploration of Irish exile. Stranded in a dismal flat in England, the protagonist remembers his happy childhood in Ireland, the rough living and working conditions in England, and his only love. The language is quite simple and often Hiberno Irish, but deeply imaginative and so lyrical, that the line between prose and poetry gets blurred. The beautiful black/white pictures added to this book, and the author's ability to portray Irish music help to give an insight into Irish culture. Sometimes it's like watching a documentary, and suddenly you can't help but feeling you're listening to a song; a song of heartache and terrible longing. Despite far from being soppy the book is very moving in the end; you actually hope for a happy ending. But that wouldn't be Irish.

Tim O'Grady creates exquisitely wrought, archetypal prose that could even overpower Pyke's perfect documentary photos. (Without offense to Walker Evans, now I'm wishing Pyke had been around to collaborate with James Agee).

Amazingly, requires very little interest in Ireland or the Irish - O'Grady is from Chicago anyway and this book is more about experiences of all mankind. His crystalline narrative is hardly bound by ethnicity.

Extraordinary and inspiring new use of the verb, can. If you read poetry, you couldn't regret buying this experimental novel.

This book is beautiful and tragic and joyful and moving, all at the same time and independently over the course of the story. Through the poetic language of the text and the poetic imagery of the photos, the drama of every day life in Ireland is brought across as quietly epic, if such a thing can be.

... then buy, borrow or steal a copy! Never before have I read such a good exploration of Irish exile. Stranded in a dismal flat in England, the protagonist remembers his happy childhood in Ireland, the rough living and working conditions in England, and his only love. The language is quite simple and often Hiberno Irish, but deeply imaginative and so lyrical, that the line between prose and poetry gets blurred. The beautiful black/white pictures added to this book, and the author's ability to portray Irish music help to give an insight into Irish culture. Sometimes it's like watching a documentary, and suddenly you can't help but feeling you're listening to a song; a song of heartache and terrible longing. Despite far from being soppy the book is very moving in the end; you actually hope for a happy ending. But that wouldn't be Irish.

I am very familiar with the works of old time Irish writers including the works of James Joyce who wrote about Ireland in exile. I still don't know much about modern Irish novelists until I had the opportunity of meeting and listening to parts of Timothy O'Grady's novel at Perth Writer's Festival early this year. Immediately afterwards I bought a copy and later talked to Timothy briefly about writers in exile and their struggle with dislocation. This story is not only about dislocation and exile. This is the story of a man coming of age and following a journey during which he struggles to make sense of his life, dislocation, loss of love and loneliness.

This lyrically crafted novel is a great collaboration between O'Grady and photographer Steve Pyke. They collectively create a visual journey of a musical Irishman, his journey from one location to another, looking for work and the love of his life. O'Grady's begins his novel with a description of the protagonist's life back at home as a child:

"This room is dark, as dark as it ever gets - the hour before dawn in winter. I have sounds and pictures but they flit and crash before I can get them..."

For me, it is a metaphor of not been able to recreate the places and the people he left behind as a result of his journey.

O'Grady ends his novel with a similar narrative:

"In the room now a breeze comes in through the window and on it there is the smell of spring. Downstairs the girl turns on her radio... There is a time after long work when you can look for strength and there is nothing there....

In the morning light I let go."

In between, we learn about his journey, his recollection of Irish landscapes, the places left behind, the music he played and his love. But this is not just a mere description of a nostalgic mental journey of an Irishman in exile. This can happen anywhere, anytime, and to anyone.

Reading this novel is like watching a visually crafted documentary embedded with voice and music that we can see and hear.

I'm glad that I met O'Grady and read his novel as my introduction to modern Irish novelists. But this novel had another positive effect on me. When I met O'Grady I was writing a novel about my own dislocation. This novel inspired me to look at my private journey again and again, and continue my writing in exile!

I recommend this book to anyone interested in the beauty and tragic of moving from one place to another.

This book is a must if you are studying healing touch. It has all the pictures and instructions that other workbooks have. I loved the research about HT, it makes so much sense and it is easy to understand the case studies.

This book is so full of great information that it is a definite keeper in my reference library. After only 1/3 of the way though, I've gotten my money's worth!

I'm new at reading about energy healing modalities, so I have little to compare it to. I found this book to be a really nice book to learn more about Healing Touch and how to be a practitioner. It has some wonderful stories, some that even made me cry. I still have a long way to go to make this work for me, but it's the beginning of a new awareness in my life.

An excellent, readable, knowledgeable text book that will be referred to again and again. It contains so much information, and is indexed accurately so that you can find the relevant answers quickly. Diagrams are informative and useful.
To me this book is recommended for those already practicing H.T., or for those interested in gaining insight into Healing Touch with a view to entering the H.T. program. The Healing Touch program encourages people to participate in continued, life-long learning, and this book is a valuable resource.

No need for 1,000 more words. The above says it all. I loaned my copy to a client, forgot which one, and now must buy another. Can't practice without it.

I was employed at the Linwood Children's Center from 1985-1990. I currently work with a developmentally disabled population, but Linwood was my first job in this field. I can imagine no finer training ground than Linwood, and virtually every clinical skill I now have was first honed at Linwood. Jeanne Simons, who as a young social worker in the 1940s learned her craft from Leo Kanner, (the psychiatrist who first identified autism as a distinct syndrome in the late 30s), is one of the true pioneers in the field of autism, and this book represents the distillation of her lifetime's wisdom and knowledge. Buy this book if you've a child diagnosed with autism; and if you're interested in working with autistic children/adults, buy this book, and call Linwood for a job application.

This book is terrific! As a speech therapist who has always followed this approach on my own, it was incredible to read about others who also felt that these children are special for who they are not what their diagnosis is. To hear the author describe the importance of respecting these children and their individuality and why using their own motivators is the key to allowing them to feel comfortable joining our world reinforces the ultimate difference between being a therapist and being therapeutic. A must read for those who truly want to open their minds to an approach that works!

I am very very intrested in autisum. i hope to teach autistic kids somday anyhow this was the frist book on it I read. it is one of the best if you want o start your bacsi understanding of autism

A few years ago, I found this book in the library. My son has autism and I have read this book and used some of the things in this book. They worked and he now can talk and answer my questions and he has come along ways. I will order this book and I hope to share some of this in my clubs in Yahoo. You that have autism in your life and work withit, you should get this great book.

I have read too many books and articles on autism to count but this is the book I go back to time and again and recommend it to anyone with an autistic child. I even share it with teachers and paraprofessionals. The approach is common sense and unlike many books the therapy does not degrade the child but shows you ways to get around their behaviors or use their own obsessions to their and your benefit! The author is very creative in the way she individualizes each childs strengths and needs. Excellent source! It's right on the money! I can't say enough about this book! You can tell that the author actually lived with autistic children. It's a big difference than those that only observe for a few hours. She covers it all!

This is a truly unbelievable book for Grades 6 through 12. Great stuff for biology and earth sciences. It helps me out in the classroom so much. Check out kaganonline.com for more great higher-level thinking question books, especially the newest of them which is just about Biology.

Integrate higher-level thinking into your language arts curriculum with this powerful collection of ready-to-use questions. You will find hundreds of use-again questions to promote thinking, writing, and discussion about: Adventure Stories, Book Review, Poetry, Story Characters, Story Plot, Story Setting, Story Structure, Vocabulary, and many more! Questions are provided in convenient, reproducible, question card format, perfect for the engaging, cooperative questioning activities provided. Watch in awe as your students lead themselves through carefully crafted questions guaranteed to promote critical and creative thinking. Also includes reproducible prompts for journal writing and activities for student-generated questions. Mind-stretching questions will transform your language arts class into poetry in motion.

Stretch your students' interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences with these ready-to-use questions and activities. This book is brimming with questions on topics such as: All About Me, All About School, Esteem Building, Emotional Intelligence, Lying, Manners, Multiple Intelligences, My Favorites, Sticky Situations and more! Questions are designed to promote higher-level thinking and interaction on a range of personal and social skills issues: "If you could be anyone else for a day, who would you be? Why? Who is your favorite musical group? If you were going to write a magazine article about the band, what would you say? Attitudes are contagious. Do your friends drag you down or bring you up?" Questions are provided in convenient reproducible question card format, perfect for a variety of engaging cooperative discussions formats provided and journal writing. Boost your students' EQ with these provocative questions and activities.

Use the hundreds of open-ended higher-level thinking question in this book to venture beyond the basic facts of social studies. Watch as your students voyage into a whole new realm of thinking and learning. Includes intriguing questions for sixteen of the most popular social studies topics and themes including: Culture, Current Events, Explorers, Government, Historical Characters, Historical Events, Native Americans and more! Stretch the many facets of your students' minds with these thought-provoking questions: "What do you think would happen if Congress tried to establish an official religion? What does your culture have in common with this culture? America wasn't discovered, it was stolen from the Native Americans. Do you agree or disagree?" Questions are provided in convenient reproducible question card format, perfect for the engaging cooperative questioning activities provided. Also includes reproducible prompts for journal writing and activities for student-generated questions. Simultaneously explore social studies in depth and promote higher-level thinking!

Watch your students "dig into" life and earth science with this collection of higher-level thinking questions. Includes sixteen popular topics and themes: Animals, Bugs, Environment, Health and Nutrition, Human Body, Oceans, and many more! Create a natural environment to nurture the development of your students' budding thinking skills with hundreds of questions such as: "Should cosmetic testing and medical research be done on animals? Why or why not? Why are people living longer today than ever before? What impact does civilization have on nature? If you could have one sense be super strong, which sense would you choose? How would you use it?" Questions are provided in convenient reproducible question card format, perfect for the engaging cooperative questioning activities provided. Also includes reproducible prompts for journal writing and activities for student-generated questions. Bring science to life with this whole world of questions guaranteed to get your students thinking!

The Hoop & The Tree: A Compass For Finding A Deeper Relationship With All Life is a ground breaking treatise offer the reader a practical integration of psychology, spirituality, and ecology. Chris Hoffman draws from world mythology and scared traditions that include elements of Native American teachings, Taoism, Kabbalism, Sufism, Druidism, Buddhism, and contemporary psychology. Highly recommended reading for students of metaphysics, spirituality, psychology, and personal growth, The Hoop And The Tree makes clear that there is a direct relationship between human psychology and environmental ecology, and that the mature self is necessarily ecological in nature.

Chris Hoffman takes a poet's care with language and a scholar's care with information. The Hoop and the Tree is indeed a compass, pointing toward powerful truths of human experience and growth. For the seasoned practitioner of a spiritual life this book is a wonderful reminder of the universality of our need to connect and to stretch. For someone who is just beginning to explore a deeper meaning in life, this book will be a wonderful way to get started. The stories and examples balance out the ideas nicely.

Joe Campbell taught us the "journey" underlies most myths. Chris Hoffman is teaching us that not only stories but whole cultures are spun on one of two images. Students in my seminars say "It's a unified field! We can hang everything on this structure." They also find hope for themselves and the future in the book, with comments like "It's not about duality. We're not forced to make a choice between, for example, hierarchy and community, or ambition and friendship, or a life of action or one of contemplation. It's both Hoop and Tree." The payback for reading this book - an easy read compared to Campbell - is a simple structure for organizing immense amounts of information, and for living your life.

I tend to be put off by organized religions because each faith generally claims a monopoly on "the truth" while ignoring the wisdom of other traditions. In The Hoop and the Tree, Chris Hoffman reveals a remarkable commonality in major world religions. Using Black Elk's sacred hoop and tree as a takeoff point, Chris shows how our natural desires for community, connection with nature, and personal growth can lead to an enduring and inclusive spirituality. If you liked the Dalai Lama's Ethics for the New Millennium, I think you'll love The Hoop and the Tree.

Chris Hoffman's eloquent book makes the case that the model of the Hoop and the Tree, an image that can be found throughout the world's wisdom traditions, could well be the key that opens our lives to the deepest spiritual possibilities. Hoffman's book is beautifully written and well grounded in scholarship, but its greatest value lies in its accessibility and the many examples Hoffman gives of how he has used the healing pattern of the Hoop and Tree in his own counseling practice. This is a book that could change your life.

Excellent introductory book on the acquisition of knowledge, with special emphasis on the reliability and utility of the scientific method. A must read for children. I would also recommend it to older adults who are lacking in knowledge concerning the scientific method and how sound logic and reasoning is applied.

Great book on teaching children how to think using logic and reason before coming to a conclusion. I think that this book or one just like it should be required for grade school kids. There are too many people seduced by superstitions, scams, and supernatural beings. Critical thinking classes are usually required in college, but not many people are given the chance to learn about the subject before that age. Most people hear about things like fortune telling, ghosts, and religions in childhood. Grade school is usually way before kids can make an educated conclusion about those topics unless they were taught to think critically early on in their education. The book has great true examples to illustrate how believing that supernatural things like demons or witches really exist can be dangerous.

This is a wonderful book about scientific thinking for kids older than 10. Warning to parents: this book does a number on Santa! My son (younger and not yet de-mythed) enjoyed the book immensely. I read it to him and skipped the offending paragraphs. Had the author skipped the Santa stuff this book would be great for gifted/talented kids who are much younger -- the writing is that clear and engaging!

This is an excellent book. It really does a number on superstition! I can't imagine anyone reading this book would still be superstitious. And since far too many people waste time and money on superstition (I couldn't believe one of our PRESIDENTS would change his schedule based on superstition), putting the axe in this kind of thinking at a young age, would benefit everybody (as the book so well explains).

My 8 year old was very curious about this book. I could let her read some of it, but since she has not yet learned division and multiplication, the section on probability would be completely lost on her, which is a shame, since the probability theory so well explains unusual events. This is important, since so many superstitious people would attribute the unusual events to something superstitious; using probability to explain these events defuses their so-called "proofs".

My daughter will have to wait for a while, but she will definitely read it when she is older (and so will my other - younger - daughters). This is a must for every schoolkid 10 or older (actually, it's a must for just about anybody with any superstitious tendencies, including those who believe in horoscopes).

HOW DO WE KNOW IT'S TRUE by Hy Ruchlis. Far and away the best of the best of new releases for teaching critical thinking to young people. Actually, this is for anybody, young or old, who still has a tendency to flirt with any form of superstition or fairy-tale thinking or is curious why other people do so. Ruchlis patiently leads the reader through an appreciation of science as a way of thinking about the world we live in. A short history of superstitions and the occasional horrors attributed to magical thinking (e.g., fear and persecution of "witches)" are provided, along with a delightful and entertaining commentary on astrology as an example of worseness tendencies in contemporary mental processes. Highlights include an explanation of science as a way of thinking critically, with examples of how facts are discovered. Vital to an understanding of why there is so much superstition and other forms of magical thinking is to know the history of religious repression of free thought, with stories about the struggles of such heroes of science as Nicolas Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei and the framers of our own Bill of Rights in 1789. By the way, the photos and illustrations are also terrific. But, it's words like the following that lead me to urge that you check this one out if you want to incorporate CT into wellness: "All of us stand on the shoulders of giants. Every bit of food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in and anything else we know how to make or do today would not be possible without the knowledge given to us by people who lived in the past. We must be ever grateful to the many thousands of people, past and present, who made it all possible. What part of these great accomplishments has been contributed by the superstitious way of thinking? Absolutely nothing. The belief in fairy-tale magichas blocked attempts to explain how and why things happen. Today it is a lazy person's excuse to avoid thinking about why things happen."

As Marc Abrahams, founding father of the Ig Nobel Prizes, explains them, they are awarded to scholarly (or at least pseudo-scholarly) "achievements" that first make us laugh, then make us think. This book and its predecessor are samplings of the awards over the years, a greatest hits collection, so to speak.

Have you ever wondered about the efficacy of one-nostril breathing? Have you longed for a spiceless jalapeno pepper? Have you considered that water might have an IQ? Have you long believed that karaoke might be the key to world peace? Have you wondered if you could rent the nation of Liechtenstein for your daughter's wedding? You haven't?! Well, fortunately, other people have wondered about such things, and they're very serious about them. The Ig Nobels honor them, and this book explains them for all of us lay-people.


My personal favorite is the study "Chicken Plucking and Tornado Wind Speed," done by Bernard Vonnegut, a noted physicist at SUNY-Albany, co-inventor of effective cloud seeding, and Kurt Vonnegut's older brother. His study debunked the conventional wisdom that tornado wind speed could be accurately estimated by examining the degree to which chickens swept up in the storms were denuded. Vonnegut's research pointed out that there are numerous variables involved in chicken feather attachment strength, the most important of which is that when chickens are frightened, their feathers loosen. Thus, naked chickens aren't a good measure of tornado intensity. Who would have thought it?

This book is a wonderful collection of such research results, all described with irreverent humor. It's an absolutely outstanding entertainment value, as measured in terms of laughs per dollar spent on the book. Maybe I should nominate myself for an Ig Nobel for having devised that measurement of entertainment value...

Buy this book; you'll laugh a lot, and you'll think, too.

Back at the height of the Dot-Com boom, just before George Bush became president, billions of dollars were spent to attract viewers to specific web sites.

Since everyone was encouraged to stampede to specific sites, Larry and Sergey decidede to do just the opposite; they invented a web site to make it easier for people to look elsewhere. Thus Google was born.

It's what this book is all about: People who think different. Granted, Google isn't mentioned. Instead, it's a fun romp through the delightful imaginations of people who didn't come close to inventing Google, or much of anything else that might be of use to someone, somewhere, sometime for some unimaginable reason.

Like Google, Ig Noble Prizes are based on a simple criteria; they must make people THINK (that used to be the one-word slogan of IBM). Unlike Google, it must also make people laugh. In other words, Ig Noble honors apparently impractical new ideas on the basis that curiosity, originality and investigation are truly the basis of the human spirit.

Consider, for example, the virtually spiceless NuMex Primavera jalapeno chile pepper, developed by Professor Paul Bosland at the Chile Pepper Institute of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. New Mexico is famous for its Hatch chiles, which are flaming hot; so a "cool chile" may strike some as tasteless. Not true; the Primavera has lots of taste, just none of the usual hot spice. The goal is to gradually introduce people to chiles until they become addicted (it's a health food, after all) and everafter eat lots of New Mexico chiles.

This "wacky" idea may improve livelihoods for thousands of New Mexicans in the agricultural business, which is one of the goals of a land grant state college.

But what of the study showing the more radio stations broadcast country music, the greater the white suicide rate? The original study listed Nashville, Tenn., with the highest white suicide rate. It prompted ongoing studies about suicide, including a 2002 report, ". . . opera fans are 2.37 times more accepting of suicide because of dishonour than nonfans." There is a sneakily serious side to the Ig Noble awards.

My favourite, though, is the scientific study of the 'Five Second Rule' about whether it's safe to eat food that's been dropped on the floor. Sixteen-year-old Jillian Clarke did the research using environmental scanning electron microscopy to examine floor tiles, cookies and gummy bears. She came up with the perfect answer: It depends.

As the youngest recipient, she was the center of attention at Harvard when, "For courageously, meticulously, and scientifically playing with food, Jillian Clarke was awarded the 2004 Ig Noble Public Health Prize."

Anyone who cannot understand the fuss over Clarke n eed not buy this book; it's way above their understanding, intelligence and sense of humour. For the rest of us, it's a delightful reminder of the endless vistas of imagination, curiosity and originality. Abrahams has again come up with a gem to tickle the imagination of the curious everywhere.

This is another collection of what can only be described as very unique scientific research. The Ig Nobel Awards are handed out every October during an awards show at Harvard University. Presented by real Nobel Prize winners, they show just how far some people will go for knowledge.

Here are some titles of winning papers, some of appeared in real scientific journals: "The Effect of Country Music on Suicide," "Compliance With the Item Limit of the Food Supermarket Express Checkout Lane: An Informal Look," "Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans," "Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture," "Patient Preference for Waxed or Unwaxed Dental Floss," and "Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed."

Other winners include a man from Ontario who developed and personally tested a suit that is impervious to grizzly bears; the inventor of karaoke; the entire nation of Liechtenstein, which can be rented for conventions, weddings and other gatherings; a pair of Japanese researchers who invented a computer-based dog-to-human language translation device; the inventors of tamagotchi; a man who investigated why shower curtains billow inwards, and the inventors of Spam and Beano.

The only "requirement" for anyone to win an Ig Nobel award is that the research makes a person laugh, then think. This hilarious book certainly accomplishes that. It can be picked up and read starting at any point, and read anywhere, and shows that science can be funny.

Self-importance isn't the worst of crimes, but it can be annoying. This is the perfect cure for that ailment. It's an annual celebration of weird and wonderful in science, medicine, economics, literature, and whatever else appeals to the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research.

[dis]Honorees of the annual Ig Nobel awards include:
-- the inventor of karaoke (a Peace prize),
-- the developers of anti-flatulent Beano,
-- the teenage researcher who brought the full force of microbiology and electron microscopy to bear on the Five Second Rule of dropped food, and
-- the doctors who developed a protocol for dislodging sensitive manly tissues caught in zippers.

But, if there's goofing to be done in science, it will be done seriously. The annual award ceremony is hosted by Harvard University, and is always attended by actual Nobel winners. Ig Nobel winners vary in their response to the award, but most seem willing to see the light side of, for example, a medical study of foot odor. Or "Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and Ancient Sculpture."

//wiredweird

The Ig Nobel prizes are awarded annually to scholars in extremely diverse and unusual fields. This book is a compendium of some of the best examples of extreme scholarship that you are likely to ever encounter. In this book you will find out how to rent the entire country of Liechtenstein, you will be totally unsurprised that politicians are extremely simple humans, and you will learn the cause and effect relationship of country music on suicide.

Many even stranger pieces of research are likewise discussed from a discussion of poultry aerodynamics in "Chicken Plucking and Tornado Wind Speed," to brain efficiency manipulation in "The Intelligence of Single-Nostril Breathing." Without doubt, though, my absolutely favorite piece of scholarship begins on page 212, and is a piece originally published as "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," which originally appeared in "Social Text" (Spring/Summer 1996.) The author, Professor Alan Sokol, believes that academics use enormously complex language to describe the simplest of things, and as such decided to write a paper that was completely and utterly incoherent, that meant nothing, but that was cloaked in obscure jargon. Of course, the editors of "Social Text" didn't know this and found it brilliant and insightful. The joke was on them and they ran it and became the academic laughingstocks they so richly deserved to be. The book excerpts the article, which I have read in full elsewhere.
(I highly recommend that you do the same.) Readers of bigheaded nonsense will adore this work, a random excerpt of which follows: "Lacan's 'topologie du sujet' has been applied fruitfully to cinema criticism and to the psychoanalysis of AIDS. In mathematical terms, Lacan is here pointing out that the first homology group of the sphere is trivial, while those of the other surfaces are profound...."

Utterly brilliant, and highly recommended.

Easily read and understood book. Kids don't like being bad and this book explains why, because of their reactions to their environment, they can't help it. It addresses the reasons, not the symptoms, of poor performance. Great book for parents who care to give their children the best possible chance in life. Not for parents who just want to give their child a pill. This book's content will become common knowledge in the future as parents demand more out of the medical field.

This guidebook is an essential reference for teachers, parents, and anyone who deals with kids on a regular basis. The prevalence of ADD diagnoses should lead us all to question what the bigger picture is. Allergy problems are one of the most important consequences of our modern world. This guidebook is designed to help laypeople spot allergies in kids, especially the kids who act up. It's a shame to drug kids with Ritalin when dietary or environmental changes can give better results without turning children into zombies. To ignore the accomplishments of Environmental Medicine would be foolish.

There is a lot of detail packed into this small book to help parents and teachers understand food, environmental, and chemical allergies, and to spot them on their own. Helpful advice is provided for different diets that can reveal a lot about a troubled child's behavior. Diagnostic diets (elimination diets) are detailed as well as rotation diets to minimize food reactions. Descriptions of children's allergic responses are detailed and accurate, making it easier for you to know how to spot allergies in kids.

Though this low-budget publication is written by a doctor and not a writer, it is not overly technical in style. The writing is to-the-point, a how-to manual for your potentially allergic kid, full of suggestions, case studies, and references. Dr. Rapp is an expert in the field of pediatric environmental medicine in the tradition of Theron Randolph MD, and her experience is apparent. Though I know there are better treatments than extracts for allergies (her recommendation, in addition to dietary and/or environmental changes), it is still a vast improvement over drugs and allergy shots. Her diagnostic methods are also not the best known, but still better than the more mainstream methods she also details in this guide. To be critical, this is not a guide to the most cutting-edge diagnosis or treatment in modern allergy medicine, but it's a vast improvement over more mainstream approaches of Ritalin, steroids, and other drugs. Every parent of an ADD-type child needs this book!

Don't drug 'em first, see if there is another way to deal with the problems - this book offers alternative reasons for poor behavior and alternative methods to help or cure them. Take a look before you reach for heavy drugs.

I have asthma and allergies ,I'm 16 yrs. old. I also have reflex sympathetic dystrophy. I did one of the allergy testing diets and it helped me to identify my allergies.

This guidebook is an essential reference for teachers, parents, and anyone who deals with kids on a regular basis. The prevalence of ADD diagnoses should lead us all to question what the bigger picture is. Allergy problems are one of the most important consequences of our modern world. This guidebook is designed to help laypeople spot allergies in kids, especially the kids who act up. It's a shame to drug kids with Ritalin when dietary or environmental changes can give better results without turning children into zombies. To ignore the accomplishments of Environmental Medicine would be foolish.

There is a lot of detail packed into this small book to help parents and teachers understand food, environmental, and chemical allergies, and to spot them on their own. Helpful advice is provided for different diets that can reveal a lot about a troubled child's behavior. Diagnostic diets (elimination diets) are detailed as well as rotation diets to minimize food reactions. Descriptions of children's allergic responses are detailed and accurate, making it easier for you to know how to spot allergies in kids.

Though this low-budget publication is written by a doctor and not a writer, it is not overly technical in style. The writing is to-the-point, a how-to manual for your potentially allergic kid, full of suggestions, case studies, and references. Dr. Rapp is an expert in the field of pediatric environmental medicine in the tradition of Theron Randolph MD, and her experience is apparent. Though I know there are better treatments than extracts for allergies (her recommendation, in addition to dietary and/or environmental changes), it is still a vast improvement over drugs and allergy shots. Her diagnostic methods are also not the best known, but still better than the more mainstream methods she also details in this guide. To be critical, this is not a guide to the most cutting-edge diagnosis or treatment in modern allergy medicine, but it's a vast improvement over more mainstream approaches of Ritalin, steroids, and other drugs. Every parent of an ADD-type child needs this book!

Writing about race, specifically about the black race, in American entertainment is a dicey business--at best.

Then, not unlike a latter-day Alexis de Tocqueville or even Gunnar Myrdal, along comes Melvin Patrick Ely. Mr. Ely has written a well researched, passionately dispassionate analysis of the origins of the entertainment industry's racial miasma.

He takes us back to minstrelsy; on to the advent of radio before networks; then into the networks' formative years when an iconic show ruled the ether: "Amos'n'Andy". He informs us that even in 1930 blacks vigorously, if ineffectually, protested the show.

Mr. Ely has deconstructed more than a few of the racial myths that even today swirl around the "Amos 'n' Andy" radio program. He has eloquently put into context the television episodes and the NAACP's reaction to them.

He is objective and he is clear. Be forewarned, however, that this is not a coffee table book. It is written at 2nd to 3rd year undergraduate level, ie the book is not unlike a history text book, and all that that implies.

But it is, above all, lucid. And highly recommended.

History, well-researched and engagingly written, is as fascinating as the greatest fiction, if not more so. Melvin Ely combines a professor's concern for factualness with thorough, ground-breaking research and a novelist's way with narrative into an unfailingly entertaining work that is also of great and lasting academic, social and cultural importance. Ely has delivered a fascinating show business yarn with absorbing insight into human nature, sometimes noble, often naive, and occasionally downright repugnant. While not afraid to add an edge of attitude or a clear point of view when he chooses, the author still eschews easy answers and the predictable pedantics and prejudice of an ideologue of any political persuasion. With subtle surety, and never a trace of condescension, Ely ultimately shows us ourselves--good, bad and ugly--in an absorbing saga of American life and culture.

At a basic level, this book is a detailed, well-researched history of America's longest running (1929-1960 on both radio and television) comedy show. Ely does a fine job of describing the factors that led to the show's great popularity and the successful efforts of its creators, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, to maintain that popularity.

At a more sophisticated level, however, the book provides an intimate view of one of the great political events of this century, the American Civil Rights movement. Because Amos `N Andy was the only nationally popular series prior to 1960 featuring black characters, and because its creators and principal actors were both white, the show repeatedly drew both praise and criticism from the press and various organizations seeking to promote their own political agendas.

Ely describes in detail how Gosden and Correll went to great lengths to keep the show from being viewed as racist, yet in the long run they failed. As he points out,! that failure may have caused the major networks to shy away from shows featuring black performers and delay their introduction into television for another 20 years.

Having listened to Amos `N Andy on the radio as a child and subsequently watched it on TV, I like many other white Americans, was dumbfounded when the NAACP decided to attack it for being racist. For me at least, Gosden and Correll succeeded in their objective of establishing their characters as human types, not racial types. Sapphire was the spitting image of my best friend's mother, and Algonquin J. Calhoun came to typify every crooked lawyer (Is that redundant?) I later had the misfortune to meet.

Unfortunately, Ely touches only peripherally on the black sitcoms of the 80s and 90s (e.g., "The Jeffersons" and "In Living Color") which I (and many other Americans) personally found to be racist.

Despite dealing with a highly emotional topic, Ely has produced a lucid, objective and thought-provoking work! . His shortcomings consist of his failure to take into consideration the effects of the other great events of the period (the Great Depression, World War II, etc.) and his seeming assumption that all Americans cared about the Civil Rights movement. In fact, I think that more people (both black and white) cared more about putting food on the table and raising their families well.

There are few phrases in the English language as divisive as "Amos 'n' Andy." It is frequently a euphamism for humor at its most racist and simplistic. Yet could a program based on little more than a handful of stereotypes be able to thrive on radio for more than 30 years? This book answers that question by putting "Amos 'n' Andy" into perspective, through the evolution of the program, its roots in the minstrel shows, and its context within its own time. Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, the white creators of the program, are portrayed quite fairly in this book, and their motives are also presented in a fair way. Their goal was not to offend, though inevitably they did, but rather to entertain. This book shows how the core characters were portrayed in their own circle, the mythical Mystic Knights of the Sea lodge, and how they were portrayed beyond that inner circle, as the characters would intermingle with other blacks, and also whites. Also worth reading is the efforts by the Pittsburgh Courier and a few other black newspapers to boycott the show as early as 1931. More interesting, is how those attempts stalled, only to regain momentum 20 years later, with the advent of the television version. The phenomenon of "Amos 'n' Andy" is more complex than it would seem, as it tells us more about American society and racial relations than perhaps any othe program ever. This book is not just about "Amos 'n' Andy," but rather about ourselves. And for that, it should be a must-read. I was able to finish this book in two days it was so engrossing.

As the title indicates Ely's work is frankly a work of social history, not a performance biography, and is less interested in exploring "Amos 'n' Andy's" significant impact on the broadcasting medium than in viewing it as window into mid-20th Century American racial attitudes. Analysis of the program's content focuses on that perspective to the exclusion of all others, and detailed examination of the original scripts is confined primarily to the first two years of "Amos 'n' Andy."

Ely therefore fails to discuss in any detail the evolution of the characters and their relationships beyond 1929 -- and this is perhaps the book's greatest flaw, given that the characterizations and the dramatic sophistication of the program evolved substantially between 1929 and the mid-1930s It's unfortunate that Ely shortchanges this period of the program's history, as it in fact coincided with the peak of the program's popularity, and in my view an understanding of the evolution of the characters during the 1929-35 period is essential to an understanding of the series' appeal. (I have, in fact, read all of the scripts for the first decade of the series as part of my own research into "Amos 'n' Andy's" history.)

While Ely occasionally draws conclusions regarding the program's content that are contradicted by a detailed reading of the original 1930s scripts, and sometimes tends to over-interpret in his examination of public reaction to the program, in general his account is balanced and thoughtful, and his research into the African-American response to "Amos 'n' Andy" presents the definitive study of this aspect of the series.

Ely also deserves much praise for avoiding the self-indulgent deconstructionist jargon which tends to dominate current academic studies of popular culture -- his book is a rare example of an academic work which is both scholarly and extremely well-written. I'm very pleased to see the book is back in print.