Clouds Books

After reading this book I realized no one had ever spoken of the atrocities that took place during the depression in Finland and in other parts of Europe. The book is factual and tends to move from place to place but if you can get past that it is very interesting. A good read for someone with Finnish ancestry.

Peter J. Robinson has written an excellent book on the diverse
and often extreme weather and climate of my beautiful state of
North Carolina.
Complete with maps,photos,and tables,the author does a fine
job in his coverage of our weather.
Robinson is careful not to omit some worthy regard to the
greatest of Tar Heel storms,including hurricanes Hazel,Fran,
and Floyd.The devastating tornadoes of 1984 and the white Christmas of 1989 are also given justice.
Most of the book is provided in a generalized form of writing,
yet it is done in a very interesting and professional manner.And
what could not be interesting about our weather? With temperatures that have ranged anywhere from -34 to as high as
110 degrees.We have suffered through several major hurricanes,
extreme heat waves and drought,as well as devastating floods.And
we lay claim to one of the widest tornadoes in history-2.5 miles!
Greg Fishel delivers a most intriguing foreward to this book.
This book is a great educational tool for anyone interested in our state`s weather and climate.Also,it serves as a nice keepsake for any weather enthusiasts who are native to our great state.

Gunnard Landers is a resident of Altoona, Wisconsin, and has written a series of novels about game wardens. His prior books include: THE DEER KILLER, THE VIOLATORS, THE HUNTING SHACK, and PIONEER VIGILANTE: THE LEGEND OF JOHN DIETZ. His story of John Dietz is interesting, because John Dietz stood alone against the lumber barons who razed the forests of Wisconsin. Landers writes of heroes who are rebels, who love nature, and who rail against big business and the law.

Favor Martin is an ex-cop from Minneapolis, originally from the Iron Range of Minnesota. After his partner is killed and Favor disfigured by a bullet to the face, his wife leaves him and he settles on the gorgeous North Shore of Minnesota. Favor has developed friendships, but blood is thicker than water. When the 20 year old skull of a young woman is found, it is Favor's job and his quest to find the murderer or murderers. Little does he know that every connection he has painstakingly developed over the past six years will be endangered as the people he loves are running scared:

"Irina drove fast, seventy miles per hour down to County Highway Three and then back up away from the lake. Grant and France had purchased a small, gray ranch set on five rocky acres of red clay that was covered with thickets of aspen, birch, and ash. France, tomahawk in hand, met her at the door. She wore blue-flowered pajamas and a worn blue bathrobe. Her hair was dull, uncombed. Her eyes were large, and she silently handed the tomahawk to her mother. The simple act, like a child giving his parents a wounded bird, seemed to relieve her of all responsibility."

Landers pulls no punches in his writing, which flows as beautifully as Lake Superior. His characters are so real that the reader feels like they are in the room, and the plot runs around in a complex labyrinth. His tone is plodding and mystifying, and his knowledge of human nature is uncanny. THE NORTH SHORE is a whodunit in which the end is as complex and tantalizing as the first chapter. Landers knows how to entertain, and he also knows how to shake up his reader. This is a beautiful and haunting tale.

Shelley Glodowski
Senior Reviewer

I am reviewing this book, published in 1988, in mid 2005, after having bought it at a small university town used book store. I had heard good comments about the text many years ago, but never got around to getting a copy. Now that I have, I can say that the book exceeded my preconceptions. There are a great many new findings and new interpretations since the book was first published. As it is now, the material is dated. I wish the author had written an update within the past 3 or so years to reflect advancements in geology and paleobiology. But he hasn't. However, dated or not, the book has a lot to offer -- one can still learn a great deal from the text.

With various related side issues interspersed throughout the discussion, the author takes the reader from the early Hadean to the Holocene. The emphasis is clearly on geology, but with the biology of the related periods discussed as well. Academics will be pleased with the comprehensive use of references; it's a wonderful source book.

The author stresses the earlier Eras, with aome 200 of the total 480 actual text pages dealing with Eras prior to the Paleozoic. That's some 42% of the text. The Paleozioc is given 40 pages, the Mesozoic a little over 30, and the Cenozoic about 70. Intermittent ancillary chapters discuss such topics as 1) the origin of the solar system, 2) radiometric, fossil, and paleomagnetic dating methods, and 3) evolution and causes of extinction. For those with a particular interest in PreCambrian geology, I know of no better second level text in the area.

I recommend reading the book together with current source materials. Anyone with an introductory geology course in his or her background will be prepared to read the book. It is useful to both the professional as well as the general scientifically literate commuinity. It will be well worth the effort.

You feel Terry Hauptman's roots are the ancestral communal fires of all people, the sacred texts and song lines, bursting into ecstatic dance and reverberating with the talking drums. Her rhythms hiss as well as roar against oppression, war, hunger and pain. Rhythms of powerful essences, rhythms of resonance pulse into the medium of the word. The gyratory dance gives power to the disinherited and the abused, the innocent victims of the world's bad karma. In these poems she spins out a hope that is found in the the stars for the lost and the dead.
In "Sidestepping," her own shamanistic aspects of Judaism are revealed: "You tell me it's my Jewish love for the hidden spriit in all things, the holy sparks, the spirit letters." Of war and the world's cruelty she chants the deep tragedy. In "Winter Hunger," she declares the power of the innter life to hold out against the most adverse of circumstances. "A inviolate light whirls inward," for Marina Tsvetaeva who was imprisioned in Stalin's gulag.
She paints her poems with colors of violet love and transcendence, with lapis lazuli and the gold of the moon- all with a background of obsidian depicting the deeptest night and its mysteries. In "Kira's Song," the Aztecs' describe poetry as "flower and song." The poems sing the joy of her having and holding her new daughter,

"The g-ds of music and beauty opened to us
And the ceremony of the birds sang to us
Like burning stars of love
And I heard spirit-child
The river returning to the lover's cradle
The somnambulist's azure of enchantment
Thundering through us"

One feels the presence of a chorus of voices resonating. When she performs her work as she does on the CD included with the book, she intensely sings and chants each poem.
I highly recommend this beautiful volume which also contains a color section of her painted scrolls which are the visual correspondence to her poetic work. Terry Hauptman's poetry is such a luminous rhythm.

This volume is a selection of the early work of the British poet John Wilkinson, whose work took its cue from J. H. Prynne--who, many would argue, is the most important living English poet. (See my review elsewhere on Amazon of the new edition of Prynne's collected poems.) Wilkinson is perhaps the most distinguished poet of the post-Prynne generation: what this volume shows is that the influence of Prynne, and of American poets like John Wieners, has never been an overwhelming one for Wilkinson: even the earliest poems collected here are startlingly assured. (In fact, it's the recent Wilkinson--in volumes like _Sarn Helen_ and _Flung Clear_--that has seemed most directly Prynnean. For instance, much of _Oort's Cloud_ can be read without the help of a dictionary.) The poems seem _wired_: despite their restlessness & disjunctiveness, their confusion gives a good sense of what it must have been to be young & bright & stylish in the 1970s: you can almost hear the punk & reggae soundtrack to some of the poems.

The significance of this book is partly that it reconstructs so many projects that never saw print: after the opening selections from published books like _Aquamarine_, _The Central Line_ & _Useful Reforms_, we get samples of quite a lot of projects which remained scattered in periodicals, like _Air Fleet Base_ and _Sweet Balsam Leaves_. It's a pity that the terrific _Tracts of the Country_ is only represented by one (long) section; & that _Swarf: a prophecy_ is omitted (an ominous poem from the first year of Margaret Thatcher's reign: the cover of the original edition shows an assemblage of razorblades). But this is an invaluable book--anyone interested in the experimental end of contemporary poetry will want it.

This is a very useful book if you ever need to carry out any kind of non-destructive / whole-field measurement! It covers enough basic optics but is not intimidating to an engineer. I happen to be in Prof. Cloud's class and it's fascinating just to see how much information an image, or light, for that matter, can convey. Indeed this could be the way future testing and measurement is heading!!!

It was so refreshing to read a book about the Vietnam War that didn't just focus on the conflict's atrocities and unpopularity in the U.S., but actually included a little romance and optimism. What I liked best about it was the story's unique blend of realistic descriptions of the Hmong people and the daily lives of soldiers and civilians, and the poetic, almost surreal narration of the protagonists' adventures in Jim's airplane, and of the events leading up to the end of the story.

Michael Dudok De Wit provides the appealing, simple drawings in Oscar And Hoo, a picturebook story of a boy who is a dreamer, and who sometimes loses track of the real world. His daydreaming one holiday leads him to become lost in a big desert. He's all alone until a magic, lonely little cloud finds him and they share their concerns about being lost.

Bryan Tomasovich grew up in Wisconsin and now lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington, where he teaches at Antioch University in Seattle. Ouisconsin: The Dead In Our Clouds is a poetic investigation by Tomasovich into the public history of his home state as revealed in the private lives of his people. His verse is fused with lyrical memories of his family's struggles to become American as they lived and worked in the upper Midwest. It's not often that you see a volume of poetry enhanced with a Bibliography of recommended readings by other writers. This is a collection of poems that grace the mind, stir the soul, and reveal small windows of insight into the human condition that is universal to us all. Skunk Frank Episodes: Skunk Frank's fishing hole on the Flambeau River is marked/by an alert pine draft/when standing in the ruins of the old Indian feller's shack./Go make yourselves at home/our Grandpa Frank'd say...log frame/tin billboard walls, tar paper/tumbled down and mossy/as the river but colder/home-canned jars, melted fork/bottles plenty, granite chimney shards/but not a feather.//Friends like this...our grandpa Frank is a real puzzle.