School Time Books

This book is great for teaching second graders time. They each use a small clock to move the hands as time passes while the pigs are trying to get to the beach. I have tried this book with a second grade class and they loved it! Great way to integrate literature and mathematics.

This book talks about GETTING a potty chair, (and talks about "is it a boat? can i put my toys in it? etc), but it never talks about going potty, or what to do on the potty chair. At the very end of the book, it simply reads, "I know what to do with a potty chair... do you?"

This is a great book it is full of mystery and suspense! This book has alot of exciting parts where the hardys are in really tight or risky situations. There is lots of mystery in the book because othere racers in the cometition are trying to sabotage peoples equipment. The hardys have already been sabotaged once so they are trying to find out who is doing tis and but them. There is alot f mystery in this book and i sugest you read it!

The Worst of Times - A Story of the Great Depression by James Lincoln Collier is very sad. I think that if you have a strong stomach you would be able to read this. Amazon.com recommended the book for readers age 9 to 12. I am 9. I didn't like all the gory deaths but it was very well written. I'd give it 3 stars. Even though it was very well written, it was so sad that I couldn't really enjoy it.

Before I read this book, I thought that there weren't really poor people in America. I thought beggars were all con artists. This book really affected me. The story is told from a seventh-grade kid's point-of-view. After I read a chapter, I would have to watch a funny TV show to get the book off my mind, especially late at night so I could sleep.

The book is a good lesson about the Great Depression and Capitalism. It helped me understand about Social Security, Unions, and unemployment taxes. I think Capitalism is good but sometimes, when things start turning ugly, the government should get involved. That's what happened after the Great Depression.

The book made me appreciate what I have. It would be a good book for kids who are spoiled and have had everything that they needed. If they read this book, they will understand that poor kids really do exist.

The book spends a lot more time talking about Fleming and things going on around the time of his life and less on the specific topic of the creation and adoption of standard time - definitely not what I expected given the title.

Although Time Lord weighs in at fewer than 250 pages, this book took me a great deal of time to read in part because it constantly put me to sleep. Usually the combination of history/biography/science is favorite of mine, and finding out where our notion of time originated sounded like a fascinating topic to me. In the end, however, the story just isn't that exciting and it felt like the author was padding the book with unrelated filler material.

To be fair, Sir Sanford Fleming is an interesting and admirable character. Intelligent and hard working, he was a self-made man who emigrated from Scotland to North America to seek his fortunes. In addition to the creation of standard time, he was also largely responsible for the trans-Pacific cable and the trans-Canadian railway.

While Fleming's accomplishments are all duly noted by the author, much of the book felt like filler material. Entire chapters are spent waxing philosophical about the "nature of time" and how various notions of time affected everything from art to literature. If you happen to have done postgraduate study in art or literature, you may genuinely enjoy these distractions, but I found them to be a bit too much. Blaise spends as much time (one chapter) discussing Sherlock Holmes as he does discussing the actual Prime Meridian Conference.

Time Lord is not without its pleasures. It is truly fascinating to read how the world worked (or attempted to work) with an infinite number of local times, and how the advent of rail travel in particular created the need for time standardization. It was also interesting and, at times, amusing to study the role politics and national pride (particularly between the British and the French) played in the entire affair. Unfortunately such topics do not constitute the majority of the book, as they are what I was most looking for.

If you or the person you are shopping for enjoy this genre, you might first want to consider The Measure of All Things (which chronicles the creation of the meter) or Pendulum (on the life of Leon Foucault), both of which I found to be more enjoyable reading than Time Lord.

After he set out the initial scene and made narrative inroads, the author proceeded to regale us with his views on time and why they're important. These pseudo-science views could have all made a great short story but had no place interspersing with an actual narrative. It really screamed for a good editor to sit the poor man down and say "No."

Most of Time Lord should have been about Sir Sandford Fleming, about how he grew up, about why he left home (Scotland) and crossed the ocean to a new land (Canada), his trials and tribulations, the events of his life, great and small, that shaped this great but mostly forgotten man. Then after three or four hundred pages of this, an author can permit himself to give his personal views in a few pages.

Instead of doing this, Clark Blaise reverses the precepts and gives us 200 pages of his Views on Time and how Deep the Concept is. He gives us a mishmash of poetry and literature and badly thought out espresso philosophy. Nothing about Fleming. I would have loved a day-by-day account of the Prime Meridian conference, or of Fleming's days as chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. No such luck.

After finishing the book, I went to the shortish wikipedia entry on Fleming and found more facts there than in Blaise's book. Until someone writes a better book, that might be the best thing to do.

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

How could i possibly pass by such a title? As an avid fan of Doctor WHO, the original time lord, captured the eye firmly enough. But this is hardly a book of science fiction, although few novelists could adequately depict the subject. This book is the rendering of one of the 19th Century's most notable autodidacts. An almost penniless emigrant from rural Scotland, Sandford Fleming revolutionised the world's concept of time. In this fascinating, but rather disorganised, account, Blaise weaves numerous themes around Fleming's aim to make the world's time measurement coherent - and universal.

The prompt for Fleming's quest was a missed train in Ireland well into the era of the Industrial Revolution. Driven by steam, that age first used that power to raise water from coal mines. Applied to transportation of goods and people, one of steam's legacies was changing the nature of time. Factory workers now laboured to the clock, and travel speed increased dramatically. Rail travel quickly overtook animal prowess, but also revolutionised our lives. In North America, the spread of the land led to rail companies becoming the index of industry, and a force in politics and society. Each rail company kept time according to its head office. Its schedules granted it dominion over time, leading to such anomalies as the city of St Louis, which observed six different railroad times. This, in addition to the common practice of each town marking its own time by the sun's overhead passage.

Without question, Blaise' most eloquent chapter is "The Aesthetics of Time" in which he renders the influence of changing concepts on time on the arts, notably impressionism and literature. While the world was moving toward more uniform means of dealing with time, the arts recognised that the established "natural time" with its easy, regular flow - "time's arrow" - had been demolished. Readers and viewers came to accept disjointed time in stories and paintings. Blaise uses Cailllebotte's "Paris Street, Rainy Day", which was composed from a string of photographs, as the prime example. Nothing is still and the figures appear detached from "normal" concepts of time. In a similar manner, novelists could break up stories into disconnected parts, skipping about in the chronology to build new forms of narrative. Blaise' own narrative follows their pattern, forcing the reader to accept his irregular presentation. Given the quality of Blaise' insights and ability to discuss them, this book is half the size it might be.

Fleming's missed train kept him apart from most of this social upheaval. A tightly focussed engineer, his aim was standard time around the planet. He understood the desire for a "prime meridian", but wanted a mechanism that would transcend national or commercial interests. He devised a complex scheme with a time centred within the Earth. It would have obsoleted every clock and pocket watch in existence, but had the advantage of universality. Ocean shippers also favoured a standard scheme, with nearly all ships using Greenwich, England as their temporal starting point. Resistance from nations who'd already established their own primes obstructed Fleming's project, which came to a head in Washington, D.C., in 1884. A prolonged, three-week negotiation ultimately led to the standard time zones we live within today. In Blaise's view, Fleming is justifiably renowned for his contribution to this achievement. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Recent technological advances have made it easier for us to do more in less time. Regis McKenna, chairman of The McKenna Group, asserts that this technology has reset our business clocks to run on real time. Real time isn't just about doing things faster, says McKenna, it's about making decisions and responding to change and customer expectations in the smallest possible amount of time. Businesses cannot remain competitive unless management builds speed into strategic thinking at all levels of the organization. McKenna offers the following tips on managing your company in real time:

· Create a Real-Time organizational culture. Make sure employees at all levels of the organization are invested in operating the business in Real-Time.
· Offer customers choices, but make it easy for them to choose. Customers must be familiar with the options and the interface must be easy for them to use.
· Develop a marketing strategy based on dialogue. Talk with customers instead of at them. Find ways to include input from customers into your products and services.
· Give your customers what they want: Service. Use technology to give real time service to your customers. Often customers can use the Internet to service themselves better than you could.
· Create an internal network to connect your people. Make it possible for information flow freely and quickly between divisions in your company.
· Pay no attention to official productivity statistics. Conventional measures may not be able to capture the kinds of value that information technology has added to industry.
· Be prepared to handle anything. Increase your data gathering resources. Use software to synchronize divisions in your organization with one another. Be prepared to learn as you go.

Basically, it says that the world is moving fast, everyone is using the Internet, and that fast is more important than quality. Not worth wasting time with this book.

Real Time is really not so good. No new ideas or inspiring thoughts. Reading it is a waste of time basically. I gave it two because you always learn something from "getting into" the writers mind.

Edit of 22 Dec 07 to add links.

Below is my review as planned before reading all the negative reviews....everyone brings their own baggage to any book. Following this short review, which was originally written for national intelligence professionals, I have added an addendum with a specific experience in France that illustrates why this book is valuable to anyone willing to take the time to reflect on its fundamentals.

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This may be one of the top three books I've read in the last couple of years. It is simply packed with insights that are applicable to both the classified intelligence community as well as the larger national information community. The following is a tiny taste from this very deep pool: "Instead of fruitlessly trying to predict the future course of a competitive or market trend, customer behavior or demand, managers should be trying to find and deploy all the tools that will enable them, in some sense, to be ever-present, ever-vigilant, and ever-ready in the brave new marketplace in gestation, where information and knowledge are ceaselessly exchanged."

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ADDENDUM: In coming to post the above review I noted a number of negative reviews along the lines of "so 1970's", "no new ideas", etc. Naturally any book is going to strike people with different levels of intelligence and experience differently. Our advice to intelligence professionals and managers at any level is to dismiss those other opinions, spend $20 and 1-2 hours with this book, and judge for yourself. Among many reasons why we found this book meaningful, given our focus on global coverage, weak signals, and being effective in 29+ languages, is the following experience:

In 1994, attending the French national conference on information, we heard one of the leaders of the French steel industry discussing a multi-million dollar business intelligence endeavor (in France this includes business espionage and government espionage in support of business) against steel industries around the world. The punch line, however, was stunning. At the end of it all, he said, they failed because they focused only on the steel industry. In the end, the plastics industry ate their lunch because it was able to develop very good plastic substitutes for automobile parts, including automobile under-carriage parts, and this hurt the French steel industry badly. It was from this occasion that we crafted Rule 003 (Book 2, Chapter 15) on the importance of Global Coverage, whose sub-title could be "cast a wide net." McKenna has the basics right.

Fast forward to:
The Age of Speed: Learning to Thrive in a More-Faster-Now World
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

Real Time is a tremendous help in understanding that technology, speed, and customer satisfaction have brought a world where action and reaction are concurrent, and sequential actions outdated. Sequential actions are of the modern, 20th century age. Concurrent actions are of the postmodern, 21st century age.

It is a welcome addition to the collection of books that help us think about how our systems have to change in response to technology and speed. As a relatively short book it is a good one to give to people who need a basic understanding of the concepts, but do not need to know all the details.

It also adds to the collection of books that help us rethink our approach to customer service in terms of the use of technology and the speed of response. It helps raise the bar on how we provide solutions to our customers, and not just fixes.

It presses all organizations to anticipate future leaps in technology and relationships so that they are prepared to respond to new needs expressed by many of their customers. At the same time it forces organizations to think about whether they will run on two tracks or one track. The two tracks would be to run with people who demand real time and with people who do not see or participate in the real time transformation. Many organizations need to be prepared to run on one track and leave behind--for mediocre organizations--those customers who do not get it, understand real time, or go digital.

I found this book to be a great way to teach and discuss bullying. Several students in my class began religiously teasing one boy and it broke my heart. I read this book to the entire class in order to to open up discussion and hopefully create empathy. Immediately after reading this book, several students realized and openly discussed that they treated "John" like a bully. It was incredible. Then, we talked about how we can better treat each other, as well as, what we can do if we are being bullied. I used this book more like an introduction to bullying & then we discussed it more in depth - once the students made connections. I found this book to be an amazing tool (it worked!)for that purpose :)

If your child has ever had trouble with a bully, be sure to read this book with him/her. Sister gets beaten up by a new girl who has issues at home, which the book alludes to as borderline child abuse. When Sister tries to defend a baby bird from the bully, this bully tries to beat her up again but this time, after brother's training, Sister defends herself and punches this girl in the nose. There's nothing wrong with teaching a child to defend themselves and I'm very glad that this book does that. There are so very many aggressive children, abused children out there that kids really need to have some sort of defense. After working many years in a children's hospital, you wouldn't believe the things I've seen regarding child abuse. My only problem with this book is that they don't mention that anyone stepped up to care for that cub. The principal was right not to call the cub's parents because that would have instigated more abuse, but again, just sending her to the cub psychologist really isn't enough. This is a very deep book, not one to be taken lightly, but if your child has ever experienced this type of situation, it can be very, very vindicating and empower them not to feel as if they've been belittled, but that they do have an option to help themselves.

Bullying is a reality. Lots of kids get bullied everyday and it isn't always possible to get school or other authorities to deal with the problem. This happened with my own kids. Often schools just want to look the other way and not be bothered by the problem. In that situation, children have to be taught ways of coping for themselves. This book gives parents a good model for how to help their children defend themselves. Some of the other reviews posted say that Sister Bear is taught to be a bully, herself. This just isn't true! She is only taught how to defend herself if she is subject to a vicious and completely unprovoked attack. Let's be realistic, here, not all of us believe in strict pacifism!

We love the Berenstain Bears books - most of the time. This one, however, isn't worth the trouble. Not to mention that I'm not sure how to explain to my three-year-old what the school psychologist is! I think that the book has good intentions, but frankly it isn't as well-written as others and the message is garbled and ill-advised. In my experience, the older "classic" BB books are better than the newer ones, and this is no exception.

This book shows that beating up bullies is the way to solve the problem. That will only make it WORSE and revenge is no way to solve anything. Sister bear should have used her WORDS instead of her FISTS. She could have said, "That really hurts my feelings when you do that to me. Stop it!" If that didn't work, she could have told her principal or a trusted adult. However, to have her beat up this bully only teaches kids that it is ok to hurt others (deserved or not does not matter). What's next? It is ok to shoot kids dead because they are bullies? I do not recommend this book. No kid should be taught it is ok to hit others. In fact, Sister bear stooped down to this bullies level and became a bully herself. This teaches kids the way to solve problems is to HIT PUNCH HIT HIT PUNCH PUNCH HIT.

All of the "If you Lived at the Time of..." books are great for kids, and also a nice, quick read for adults! What I like about them is their layout, which is easy for readers to follow. Each page begins with a question, "Would you have seen a battle in the South?" for example. Nicely drawn illustrations accompany each answer. The book itself is small and lightweight enough to be handled easily by kids. Issues between the North and South are explained simply and, I believe, fairly.

on this book, unless you wish to follow the mindless politically correct rewritten version of history that you find pretty much everywhere these days. I am a teacher, a historian, and a woman whose ancestors fought proudly for the Union Army. That said, I recognize this book for what it is. If you're really looking for something historically accurate, then you would better spend your money on books which detail - even for this age group - the War Between the States in much more realistic and honest terms. They are out there. Though I'm not quite as passionate as some of the reviewers below, I agree with their sentiment entirely. This book is simply fluff with almost no historical value - actually, it's worse than that, because it does perpetuate false stereotypes. It's especially bad because it's done in the guise of educational fiction. Shame on Scholastic.

While I will concede that the book is an easy read, it does talk down to the child and the book constantly contradicts itself.
One example from the book:
Women and children in the South were not use to doing things for themselves. Then showing children with barefoot.
If a child is rich enough to not "do" for himself he would not be barefoot as only poor people were barefooted in those days.
Secondly very few people in the South actually owned slaves, something the book doesn't make clear.
The issue for many Southerners wasn't slavery as much as taxes.
Like a pervious reviewer I wish the book covered Sherman's march to Sea which an effort by the Union Army to just target the Southern Civilian population.
I also wish the book was be more accurate and stated that the Northern Army didn't treat former slaves well either.

The sad part that the book didn't bring out was the fact that during reconstruction there was little to no schooling allowed for children whose fathers served in the Rebel Army.

This book IF YOU does not give the actual facts of why the Civil War was fought, such as the South was tired of paying unfair taxes, coastal water monopolies (by the North) and tariffs.
The IF You book goes with the party line of the South fought to keep slaves. Slavery while an issue of the Civil War wasn't a major issue; in fact some of the largest slave holders in the South were against secession as they felt slavery would be held safer in the Union then outside the Union [Even Lincoln wrote that Slavery would be held safer in the Union then outside the Union where the states who seceded would lose all constitutional guarantees).
Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in hopes of starting slave revolts in the South (interesting note the Emancipation Proclamation was only for those slaves in the Confederate states it did not apply to the four Northern states that had slaves or to Southern states that were under Northern control).
The book makes the Southerners look like murdering thieves while the Union come across as the fighters for justice, it totally overlooks W.T.Sherman's march to the sea which was a war against the unarmed civilian population of the South particularly women and children who were thrown out of their houses in the dead of winter without their clothes on by the Northern troops, in many cases ganged raped and left without food to starve.
The justification of such treatment towards noncombantants was that the South started the war however, it leaves out the fact that women and children in that time era had no rights and were without a voice. Women couldn't vote, weren't allowed to work, could not serve on jury duty etc.
I found this book very uninformative and full of misleading information.

I would really like to know if Ms. Moore actually believes what she wrote, or simply did it for the money. Either way, the book is shameful and filled with inaccuracies, inuendo, half-truths and fabrications. If You Lived at the Time of the Civil War is a shining example of Political Correctness at its finest. Don't waste your money.

Next to the Vault.com MBA career website, I found the MBA Planet book to be the most critical resource for MBAs.

Also somewhat one-dimensional in its approach

If this book could be updated, with CURRENT industry and student remarks, I would give it a much better review. The MBA 'payback' and education approach is now currently under turmoil with the global downturn and the corporate scandals worldwide - this book of course is now too old to consider these aspects.
Be very careful, particularly if you expect an MBA in the current climate to 'spoonfeed' you a job with Morgan Stanley, to take this book too seriously. I am currently in the final term of a top-flight MBA in the Asia-Pacific region (which included a European exchange to a highly regarded school), and have had the time of my life, so can speak with a fair bit of authority about the book.
It is very well written and honest, so that's a good thing.
Unfortunately it was written right towards the end of the Internet bubble, and way before Sep. 11 and Iraq, so the book's advice in the second part in particular is now almost like reading a quaint history book of a bygone era.
It also at times takes too much credence from some of the studnent's comments, many of whom have a very US-centric/investment banking view of the MBA (ironically the region/sector that has been affected worst by the MBA downturn)
As a book telling you about the CURRENT situation of what you get out of the MBA, it is hopeless. It badly needs to be updated.
The MBA is still the most amazing experience of my life, but my current class have learnt to become 'optimistic realists'. The book needs to reflect this.
Have a look at the latest articles on [website](uk - education section) regarding the tough situation for current MBAs to see what I mean....

All good books can still be improved upon and this is no exception. That doesn't take away from it's value as a collection of photographs of the events surrounding the November 2, 1930 Coronation of His Imperial Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie I.

wadada,

Jah-Jim

This thinnest of books is nothing more than a handful of poorly captioned photos. Its price is beyond belief considering its paltry contents. Be warned.