Vans Books

Focused Synergy is an easy read, written in a conversational style with astute observations and analogies that drive you to think about your relationships. The result is a move to action and ignition to make things happen, whatever `it" is! It is music to the eyes!

This book was not only helpful but insightful and engaging. I felt I was part of a secret club learning concrete methods to take my life and my business to the next level. Read it, pass it on and then ask for it back for a second read!

Robert Van Arlan has created a unique approach for personal development - through music! If you are a leader and go through life beating to your own drum, or WANT to be a leader and still "beat to your own drum", this book will help you deliver a personal "tune" that all will listen to. I love music and his approach is brilliant!

In college I took Howard Van Till's course in Advanced Astronomy and observed first-hand some of the research that went into this book. In person, Van Till is one of the most committed physicists and christians that I know. He takes a substantial amount of talent, integrity and faith and spreads the light for all. The Christian world has given him mixed reviews because many of them are strict "six day" creationists, which Van Till is not. You will be hard pressed to question his physics and he shows the flaws in many simple-faith approaches. I have read dozens of books on creation and cosmology -- this is one of the best.

It's a shame this book is out of print. The book is divided into three parts: The first describes what the Bible tells us about Creation and the Cosmos. The second details evidences gleaned from the study of the Cosmos, in particular, astronomy. The third section offers a new perspective on the relationship between science and religion, in constrast to a traditional young-earth creationist perspective.

Like the German Green's motto " neither Right nor Left but OUT IN FRONT" this book takes on both sides of the CED debate.
and in doing so moves the whole discussion into a new higher level:
---quote---
"It is my contention that neither the scriptural nor the scientific view of the cosmos is complete in itself, despite the fact that each view contributes an essential perspective on the complete reality. Through the spectacles of scriptual exegesis, we Christians see the cosmos as Creation: we see where it stands in relationship to God the Creator,who is its Originator, Preserver, Governor, and Provider. Through the lens of scientific investigation, natural scientists are able to observe the internal affairs of the material world--its coherent properties, its lawful behavior, and its authentic history. Both views are integral parts of what I call the 'creationomic perspective,' the view of the cosmos that is gained when natural science is place in the framework of the biblical doctrine of creation." preface pg ix
---end of quote---

The take home message is simple enough:

God is Creator, Sustainer, Law-Giver, and Provider.

The best way to read the book is to xerox the chart on pg 198 and keep it at your elbow. It summarizes the entire book!!!

To Scripture you address questions of external relationships:
Status Origin Goverance Value Purpose
To Science you address questions of internal affairs:
Properties Behavior History

This in a single table is the argument of the book, but to understand the critical component: the categories of questions you need to hear the example he uses.
Holding up a piece of paper, he asks you to describe it, one voice answers GREEN, another offers SQUARE. pg 204-5 The paper is in fact, both. Is these two pieces of information contradictory, of course not, it is complementary, coming from two different viewpoints. The extend the example in a way that the author does not, to which person do you address the questions concerning shape, to which do you address questions concerning color?

The first part concerns Scripture and how to build a correct hermeneutic to interpret it by. Again he introduces a good illustration, i suspect from his years of teaching this has proven to be a good memory technic and organizing principle: good illustrations. It is the vehicle model of Scripture, pg 14ff, a caravan of vehicles carrying packages with things inside the packages, think a bunch of UPS brown vans. (looks remarkably like the compiler theory train) The vehicle is the cultural historical context as expressed in the literary genre the passage is written in. The packages are the specific story, particular symbolism in a poem, specific cultural patterns. The contents are God's message to His people, in all places, throughout all time. And from pg 83, "In either case, if we attempt to consume both the content and the packaging, we may encounter significant difficulty in chewing, swallowing, and digesting the combination. Those who want to feed on the truths of Scripture must take care to differentiate between food and packaging." The two cases to distinguish are a journalistic account of the actual events of creation(think video tape) from the primeval history account that we have in Genesis.(think metaphorical origins story- mythos)

Scientism and YEC(young earth creationists)- chapter 11, " more heat than light, the creation/evolution debate" and the real battle with unbelieving scientific naturalism as a religious doctrine. Van Till makes it clear throughout the book that the YEC position of apparent age is nothing more than bad science and bad theology, for it denies the coherence of creation. It denies that God created the universe with sufficent thought to have inside it the things it needs to build up the complexity we see around us. By more importantly it denies the value of creation as an arena for the providence of God, to operate through the use of physical means.

I finished the book with a touch of sadness. For the time, energy, and people the false debate of CED is consuming in the Christian community. While good frameworks like Van Till's are neglected for want of people to work on them. If AiG or ICR did not exist, and that energy and talent was used to advance Van Tills type of arguments the Church would be far along the way to competing with the real enemy. Scientism, the world and life view that we are nothing more than sophisticated machines, the result of mindless and random meanderings through the genetic space of living beings. This is a religious, a metaphysical battle, not scientific. For science rightfully limits itself to the things of this creation, the things we see and the forces we can theorize behind them. The YEC have diverted an enormous amount of energy into bad science, trying to fight a battle at the level of facts, denying the clear evidence for an old earth, while misinterpreting the preamble of the Great KIng of Genesis One as a scientific how-to-do book on the manufacture of us. Sadly we are all the weaker knowing that good ideas like this book have been around since 1986 and are yet to be discovered.

I hope you discover this book as a result of my review. It will well worth the time to read, and i didn't even try to tell you the gems in the astronomy section--part 2.

If you have ever studied FLW's architecture, you soon learn to see intuitively that he had to be influenced by Japan's art and architecture. Kevin Nute does an excellent job analyzing the connections between Japan and FLW's organic architecture. Connections range from the Ho-o-den of Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition to Ando Hiroshige's wood block prints. I enjoyed seeing the connections to FLW's renderings and the wood block prints. The analysis includes many photos (some color) and diagrams that are used to support the written text. The text itself is very easy to follow and very clear. One example that was very interesting to me was the illustration of how the Unity Temple floor plan was derived from one of Arthur Dow's two dimensional graphic interpretation of the internally purposive organic whole in the form of aesthetic `line ideas' from his book `Composition'. Nute goes on to graphically show how FLW not only used this `line idea' to create the floor plan but how he did it 3-dimentionally. While Nute did a very thorough job of analyzing Japan's influence on FLW, there were some areas that I thought he was stretching it a bit. It would have been nice to get more analysis on Wright's Imperial Hotel. While the Imperial Hotel was analyzed, the analysis was "thin". This is an expensive book but if you are interested in Japan's influence, this book will clear a lot of things up for you.......and you will want to keep it. In fact, this would be an excellent text book for any thesis project in architectural graduate school. A detailed analysis of the Imperial Hotel itself would be a great thesis project.

This book answered a lot more questions on Wright's (denied) influences than I expected. It is a remarkable look into how Japanese woodblock prints and traditional architecture (initially presented by American interpreters) may have helped shape Wright's development, creativity, and specific building designs. Nute has reviewed numerous obscure contemporary sources to help make the case that Wright probably knew a lot more about Japanese art before his first trip there in 1905, when he was already well into his Prairie style phase, than he would later admit. I found this book extremely helpful in clarifying Wright's ambiguities and obfuscations by drawing analogies to concepts clearly expressed by others, who were in effect his mentors.

Nute structures his book around the possible early influence upon Wright of four authors, members of the Boston orientalists. Wright may have learned of the abstruse meanings of "organic" art (part to whole) as practiced in the Orient from Fenollosa (1892), who was instrumental in introducing Japanese art to Americans. Fenollosa's associate, Dow (1899), explicated a theory of pattern drawing as the realization of permutations upon kernal line-ideas, rather like some of Wright's house plans. From Morse (1886), and the 1893 Chicago Fair's Japanese pavilion (Ho-o-den), he could have learned of modular design, the expression of natural materials, lack of clutter, and the flow of space in Japanese houses. And from Okakura (1893, 1906) could have come Wright's references to Lao Tzu, Taoism, and the key Void or space at the heart of buildings--as well as an Artist's rationale for the scandalous breakup of his first marriage.

Nute also explicates the geometric abstraction Wright imbibed from his enormous and early collection of Japanese woodblock prints. The only color pictures are nine of Hiroshige's lovely prints. This spare use of color reinforces Nute's argument regarding Fenollosa's and Dow's influence on Wright in the matter of "line" as his preferred mode of visualization. Although generously illustrated with old photographs and drawings, the many insights presented here will be more revealing the more familiar you already are with Wright's buildings and writings.

A reader looking for proof that Wright was derivative and an imitator will be disappointed. Nute does not find any smoking guns, but makes numerous convincing circumstantial arguments from a carefully calculated timeline that compares Wright's known movements and associates with publications, lectures, meetings, and buildings that Wright COULD have known. Strangely, it appears (from a lack of citation here) that no one knows what was in Wright's own library.

For example, what Wright was doing in his oriental pursuit of "elimination of the insignificant," was to subordinate other programmatic demands to the creation of works of art (for which others happened to be paying)--hence the irrrelevancy of owners' complaints about leaky roofs, low ceilings, or lack of closets. The difference, then, between an early Prairie and a late Usonian house Idea, is, I suspect, the change in his core Form-Idea of womens' roles from social ornament in the parlor to the director of the family from her now open kitchen workspace.

However correct Nute (or others he voluminously cites) may be in ferreting out possible sources for Wright's concepts, Nute does a clear and excellent job setting forth a significant part of the intellectual and aesthetic world of 1880-1910 in which Wright developed. Nute mentions, but does not disprove, alternative antecedents and sources in Arts and Crafts, the Aesthetic Movement, Pure Design, and other Euro-American design currents of the period. He does powerfully demonstrate that Wright abstracted and transformed any Japanese (or other) inspirations in Form (principally plan and section), and arguably transcended them in the Hegelian sense of revealing the Idea in his buildings.

Nute's book ends with some extremely useful and well-organized appendices, if you want to learn more of the fin-de-siecle period from which Wright emerged.

Kevin Nute's book, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, is written with an unusual depth of inquiry. Thorough and clearly labeled illustrations and descriptive text identify connections between real Japanese buildings and works of art and Wright's architecture and design motifs. By examining the influence of Japanese art & architecture on Wright's work, Dr. Nute also has described the manner in which any designer might be influenced by built and natural environments.

It's great that this book now is available in paperback, as it will prove inspiring to practitioners and students of architecture - as well as the general public. A must buy for everyone interested in the development of ideas who are searching for a fascinating story about creativity at its best!

This is a translated version of the book "Livre de recettes d' un Compagnon du Tour de France". The book is organized in sections according to the type of dough used. At the end of the book the author included the basic recipes for items such creams and batters. That is the only disadvantage of the book - you need to flip back and forth to different sections of the book, and sometimes a single recipe involves 4 sub-recipes in different sections. While this prevents repetition, it does make the book harder to use. The quantities listed usually make 3-4 full-size items (4 loaves, 4 cakes, etc.). Scaling down is not complicated, since all quantities are given in both metric and imperial measurements, but it is hard to figure out how much to prepare of everything if you only want to cook for a family and not for sale. I suggest to make a summary card of the whole recipe you are trying to make... before you break the first egg!. The recipes are very detailed and most items include drawings of the inner layers and a picture of the final product. I have tested about 20 recipes and the results are always impressive, although it always takes 2-3 times longer than I thought. An almond meringue cake with 4 components took a whole day to prepare. Similarly, the Saint-Honoré cake takes a whole day of work. I do recommend this book for people wanting to start a business in cake-making, as well as those like me that cook at home for a single family, but enjoys challenging cooking projects.

The Classic and Contemporary Recipes of Yves Thuries: French Pastry is without a doubt my favorate source for pastries. I am a 1984 graduate of the Culinary Institue of America and I currently own my own restaurant in Grand Lake Colorado. I only wish that Chef Thuries' book hadn't taken so long to become recognized in the states. This book has been long awaited in its translation.

Yves THURIES has put on paper an incredible study of the pastry arts! He has presented an organized, detailed and interesting study . His text is easy to follow and it captures you to move on to the next skill. Every possible detail is explained allowing one to move through the recipes without culinary stress. I have met Yves THURIES and found him to be a genuine master of the culinary arts. I found this book to be a life long reference book on the level of an encyclopaedia. I recommend this book for those that understand that it is not just pastry but it is an art form to be enjoyed and respected. Chef R. Sebastian-Young

This book is about the Mitchells. The Mitchells are a family of perfect (well almost perfect) children. The oldest, Joan, is always perfect, saving up for a dress, and trying to fit in with the adults. Patsy is next. She is perfect too. Peter is always getting in fights with the school bully because he is American. Angela is always showing off her blonde curls. Timmy is six. His hobbies include screaming "Good news!" through the neighborhood, pulling Angela's curls, and setting his little sister Catherine on fire. Catherine is the youngest and is like any little kid, selfish, yet sweet. I liked it because the whole family, even Timmy, helped each other out of their problems. It just goes to show, ten heads are better than one.

I have been a Hilda Van Stockum fan since elementary school. I loved the Mitchell series, especially "Canadian Summer." This is vintage Van Stockum -- rich, realistic characters one can recognize, sympathize with and love. One's heart goes out to little Catherine, the pre-schooler who feels upstaged by her twin brothers and taken for granted by an impersonal caregiver. One laughs with Peter and Patsy, who seem more like twins than siblings 2 years apart and I like the way they formed their own unit. Joan brought a voice of "youthful maturity" which certainly brought a smile to my face. This is really a wonderful book. I'm glad I have it. (I was lucky that it was available when my town library was having a book sale a few years ago. This book is a timeless classic).

Friendly Gables is the third and final book in the Mitchell family series. I loved this book because all the children are sweet, kind, and loving, to their siblings. Twins have just been born, making eight Mitchell children. The nurse, who helps Mrs. Mitchell, presents a challenge to the six other Mitchell children, by being difficult to get along with. The children create a hide-out in the attic called Homework, to escape the nurse, Miss Thorpe. The Mitchells have much fun and adventure during the month following the twin's birth.

Quine traces the path from rudimentary particles impinging on human sensory organs to man's most highly evolved behavior, the construction of strip malls. For those not familiar with postmodernist synchrocyclotron engineering, the going will be virtually impossible, but a basic knowledge of addition and subtraction will go a long way toward helping the reading become totally confused. The ideas are both painful and tasty, but it's important to floss your teeth carefully after reading in order to grasp the full ramifications of Quine's point. For those who were driven psychotic by Quine's other work, this book will prove immensely helpful in whiling away the hours while waiting for the nurse to bring your Haldol.

Faster than a speeding bullet and able to leap corporate bodies of theories in a single bound, Quine stands up for the American way by showing the reader just how silly and utterly unconnected from reality modern analytic philosophy has become. True to form, Quine has cut and pasted a number of Martha Stewart's hors d'oeurve recipes into his text, disguising them in clever formal logic symbolism. But it is easy to see through this and one can hardly put the book down without musing on how Quine would have made a great chef instead of an incomprehensible Harvard philosopher. Indeterminacy of translation? Right. But when one thinks through Quine's latest reflections on this matter it becomes clear that Quine is really describing a very palatable salad dressing with just the right amount of balsamic vineager. Finally, one puts the text down with the clear understanding that Hilary Putnam's Representation and Reality is really the confession of a closet pastry chef who took a wrong turn in life and ended up on the Harvard philosophy faculty. Nice going, Quine.

Quine traces the path from simple stimulus to man's most advanced response to his environment, the pursuit of science. For those not familiar with mathematical logic, the going will be almost impossible, but a knowledge of the predicate calculus and standard symbolism will carry you through. The ideas are brilliant and entrancing, but you have to work through them carefully to catch the full implication. While this is mostly for those familiar with Quine's other work, the general reader can still get quite a lot from it.

This book is out of print, but you can get it used through amazon and others. It's a great collection of Lincoln's speeches, correspondence and other writings, and it includes an approx. 200 page biography. The bio was written around 1940, and no doubt there's more recent scholarship missing, but we're spared the fashionable speculation about whether Lincoln was gay or some other insignifica which seem to be focal points for so many contemporary biographers and historians. Stern, as the reviewer on amazon says, "wisely respects the mysterious alchemy by which a plain man became a statesman; this respectful anthology seeks only to present Lincoln, not to explain him." The bio's a useful bonus, but the real matter belongs to Lincoln, and there's 700 pages of it beyond the bio. Hopefully Modern Library will reissue this book, and it would be great if the bio were to be updated while maintaining the same cautious and sober approach.

I have a large Civil War library, and if there was a fire, this is the one Lincoln book I would try to rescue. Despite being written almost 50 years ago, the book's strong point is not its selection of Lincoln's writings (although that is quite good), but its masterful biographical sketch of Lincoln by Stern. Almost seven score since Lincoln's death, there is still no other satisfying BRIEF biography. In about 200 pages, Stern has managed to capture, in skilfull prose, all the important facts while still having room for some less-wordy, interesting comments. Each important event is succinctly captured in a couple paragraphs. I like that Stern actually calls Lincoln "neurotic" in certain personal aspects. I also like his passages on Willie Lincoln's death, emancipation, and the war's closing. There's really not enough room for any heavy politically-influenced interpretations of issues like those in modern long biographies,and that's why Stern's sketch can't be considered outdated. Some people may not like the short description of Lincoln's assassination, and I thought Stern spent too much ink on Lincoln's final attempts to compensate the South. Since the book predates the most comprehensive, closely-inspected collection of Lincoln's letters, there may be some inaccuracies in the writings reproduced here. However, the selection is an excellent one, linked together well with intros by Stern. I can't imagine this was an easy job for Stern and I'm lost why it's been virtually ignored. But all in all, I can only repeat, if you want to know the most about Lincoln in the fewest words, and have your interest held throughout, just buy this book and you're set!

This is a great book. I think the introduction is the best. It is interesting plus you really feel Lincoln was a man of the people. My favorite part was when Lincoln had one of his sons in a wagon. Lincoln was so much in his thoughts that the child fell out and was crying loudly and Lincoln kept walking dragging an empty wagon behind him.

I had a glance at this book some fithteen years ago in o book-store and... I didn't buy it! My interest in garden design was fairly recent I thought "I can't buy every book on the topic". But the name and the images keept haunting me as other writers referred to Mr Page and pictures of some of his gardens flickered by. By then the book was out of print and unavailable alas. So one snowy day I went to a second-hand book-seller and there it was in the window! I got it instantly and spent the next weeks travelling to England, Italy, USA and his other places of work over and over again, slowly turning the pages of this book. If you have an interest in classical gardens of the Renaissance and Baroque - here is the modern version of their ideals to make you gasp. But it doesn't stop there; wood-lands, ponds and pools, Arab-style and more are to be found in excellent photos. The Italian projects (La Landriana, Villa Silvio Pellico, La Mortella e.g.) are perhaps the most famous ones. They are showed of course, along with the best kept of the many places he designed (far from all his gardens have survived to the present). This is actually the only book on a single designer that I've felt I've had to own. But then I am a lover of classical art and design...

No words to describe this genius!.How as a landscape gardener,could I have taken ten years to discover his works!!.He is obviously and sadly unknown for his contribution to timeless gardening.This is the "Bible" of landscape gardening,and he is the Van Gogh of gardeners.How can such a valuble and essential book be unavailable!?

I hadn't even heard of Russell page until I perchanced upon this book in my local bookstore some 5 years ago. I was moved to tears by some of the photographs, and that doesn't happen easily to me. The man was a genius, clear and simple, and his designs reached out and spoke to me in a way very few designers ever have. In my own landscapes, I have been immensely influenced by Russell Page, both through this wonderful book, and his own 'Education of a gardener'. This book is superbly illustrated with colour photographs throughout. The photography is excellent, and the written descriptions are well penned, informative, decriptive but not too long-winded. My copy of this book would be on my list of my top ten material possessions.

For anyone interested in the vegetation of Sonora, Mexico this book is a must! Back in the early 1980s I was very fortunate to be able to buy a copy of the original Smithsonian book published in 1942 and this current version is a wonderful update of that earlier work. The new book includes additional plant accounts from years of plant collecting in southeast Sonora by botanists at the University of Arizona in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The authors are careful to keep Gentry's original accounts in parentheses.

Gentry spent a considerable amount of time traveling in the Alamos region of southeast Sonora during the late 1930s and during these travels he collected interesting information concerning the local names and medicinal uses of the plants of southern Sonora. In reading the plant descriptions and associated plant habitats you can almost envision the plant growing and flowering in its native habitat. This book is nicely complimented by "Sonoran Desert Plants" and "The Trees of Sonora, Mexico" which look with greater depth into the larger plants and trees of Sonora.

I was given the opportunity to catalog Dr. Gentry's herbarium collection at the Desert Botanical Garden in 1987-88. I haven't seen the new edition mentioned here, but read the original work at the time I was cataloging his herbarium specimens. Through it, I was able to share his experience as an explorer in the spirit of John Wesley Powell, someone who knew that the American southwest is best delineated by watersheds, not along false lat/long lines. I met Dr. Gentry a couple of times, and remember the occasions well. Last time I saw him, when I was cataloging his collection, I overheard a conversation between him and a consultant for the Fort McDowell Indian Community. The consultant was asking about desert-adapted crop plants. Dr. Gentry went into great detail describing many desert plants suited to agriculture - tepary beans, jojoba, Lippia (Mexican oregano), agave, chiltepines, gum arabic, etc. I learned a lot just by eavesdropping. The consultant listened, but did not hear the words. He recommended that the Fort McDowell people plant cotton. Not because it was best suited to desert agriculture - far from that. They planted cotton because it needs vast quantities of water. They did not want the best desert-adapted crops. What they wanted, instead, was the best crop for wasting water, so that they could establish valid rights to the water. Worse, I watched them clear off vast acreages of mesquite forests to make room for the water-wasting cotton crop. The Hopi call this koyaanisqatsi. This book should help folks in southwestern north America realize that we have a bounteous resource, if we can only learn to use it.

Located in a transition zone between the Sonoran Desert and the tropics,this region is well known for its biodiversity, thanks to a 1942 study by botanist Howard Scott Gentry. Revision of his classic work began before his death in 1993. For researchers, this is a must-read book. It provides a clear overview of botanical studies of the Rio Mayo, a contemporary view of the vegatation, excerpts from the original text and an annotated list of plants.

As a descendant of Gerrit Van Duyne I found this book to be very interesting.

The book is interesting, well written, very readable, historically accurate, and useful to those interested in the van Duyn family and New Netherland families in general. Although the dialog is necessarily fictional, it is quite plausible, and the descriptions of life in New Netherland are valid. I highly recommend this book.

Excellent Book. Easy to read. Flows well. Everyone that has purchased the book loves it. It combines history with people. Action is put into the dry history stories.

Good companion piece to Dutch History and story of Nieuw Netherlands