Anderson Books

This book is a series of papers initially presented at a symposium during the Southeastern Archaeological Conference. It summarizes what was known at that time (1993) about the Paleoindian and early Archaic periods in the Southeast; that is, the time when the first ancestors of later Native American cultures first settled in what is now southeastern North America.

The book covers the entire southeastern region, with site reports and syntheses from Florida out to Arkansas and north to Virginia. It presents a good picture of what we know of the first human settlers in this region, including their believed use of "staging areas" - that is, places the first settlers could learn about their new environments before moving outward into more marginal territory - as well as the environmental factors, such as stone outcrops and plant and animal communities, that would have affected patterns of human settlement.

My only complaint against the book, like so many others in archaeology, is that it does not address what is known or what could be known of the cultures themselves beyond the merely physical. That is, there is far too much attention paid to environmental and technological factors at the expense of attempts to understand what these first settlers may have been thinking, or what their cultural systems or worldviews may have been. However, this alone does not mar what otherwise is a well-written and comprehensive synthesis.

I enjoyed the book, and recommend it to anyone interested in Native American cultures and archaeology.

If you have ever wondered about your ancestors, whether or not you have Native blood, this is a worthy read. I have been hunting for and collecting American Indian artifacts for many years and studying the material discussed in this book. It not only informs but leads the reader to think. I also highly recommend another book: Walking the Trail by Cherokee author, Jerry Ellis. He was the first person in modern history to walk the 900 mile route of the Trail of Tears and the book was nominated for a Pulitzer and National Book Award.

Very useful collection of papers and summaries of papers on paleo and early archaic Americans in this region. The thought provoking theories on settlement and hunting practices that evolved along with the changing climate make this well worth reading. I keep my copy handy and refer back to it often.

Better than Huckelberry Finn, or Tom Sawyer. Several short stories, that should be required reading in every school! "The War Prayer" is outstanding. This book shows a side of Twain, that is not mentioned in most school classes. Because it is not politically correct, and never was, it was nearly banned on at least one occasion. This is the main reason that it is hard to locate, and why few people have heard of it. A Must REad!

The short anthology of some of Mark Twain's(1835-1910)essays written in protest of hypocrisy, mean spirtedness, and unbridled power are a reminder that while Mark Twain had a splendid sense of humor, he also had a profound sense of compassion. These essays show a serious side of Mark Twain and his keen awareness of powerful men ruining the unfortunate and the "underdog."

Some of these essays were scathing denounciations of U.S. imperialism which started in the 1890s. Twain's bitter attack on U.S. forces destroying men, innocent women, and children during attempts to suppress a Philopino rebellion against U.S. annexation of the the Philipines after promises of political independence in 1898 are a sarcastic attack on what media liars called a battle which was actually a wanton massacre. Twain's caustic attack on this battle is a lesson on holding media accounts suspect.

One reviewer commented on Mark Twain's "War Prayer" which is thoughtful essay on the actual costs of war and what war does the morality of the "victors." This essay alone is worth the price of the book.

Similiar to the above mentioned essay is Twain's excerpt from his novel titled THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER. This short excerpt informs readers of how war is used to take advantage of the uninformed who are foolish enough to beleive that their rulers actually care for them when in fact political leaders despise those ruled and and hold them in contempt. This short piece is a classic because it describes war, the hypocrisy associated with war, and too the often the dismal results of war for both the vanquished and the victors.

Some self appointed do-gooders have tried to censor this book. The fact is that A PEN WARMED UP IN HELL is so poignent and clear that any reasonable individual would pause and reflect on these essays. Twain did not pander to superficial respectability, and this has angered those too lazy to think or those who are too apprehensively conventional to appreciate the blunt truth.

The one essay titled "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" is a depressing piece of writing indicating that of the "underdog" is so isolated that his or her status is ignored. This essay should inspire some compassionate person to take notice of those who are shamelessly ignored and at least publisize their plight especially if their plight is the result of legal and politcal injustice.

The title of this anthology caught this reviewer's attention, and the essays reflect both the title of the book and Mark Twain's indignation. Readers who appreciate A PEN WARMED UP IN HELL should read Mark Twain's THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER for a more comprehensive view of Mark Twain "in protest."

of this book I have only read "The War Prayer," and it is one of the finest works of art that I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing. It is truly something that every intellectual should read.

This book has the most information that a paleontologist can find about North American mammals in one place. It is an exhaustive text book chock full of facts about all the mammals from that continent that have lived in the last 3 million years. As a layman interested in paleontology I found the book fascinating and easy to read. The book is seperated into two main parts: first chronology of faunas, and then than a discusion of all the orders of mammals , species by species. The book also discusses possible reasons for extinction. The only flaw in the book are some of the reasons given for extinction are contradictary. For example the extinction for the giant beaver was supposedly caused by competition with the modern day beaver, yet they coexisted for 2 million years, and the dental patterns suggest that they didn't have the same habits. Modern day beavers probably even created habitat that was favourable to prehistoric giant beavers.

If you are serious at all on the mammals of Pleistocene North America, whether extinct or still with us, then you have to purchase this book. A great resource, it exhaustively and authoritatively chronicles all known mammals preserved as fossils from that period of earth's history. In addition to the well known megafauna such as mammoths, mastodons, dire wolves, ground sloths, and giant bison, Kurten and Anderson detail animals nearly always ignored in popular works, such as rodents, bats, and insectivores.

The book begins with a thorough listing of all known sites of Blancan, Irvingtonian, and Rancholabrean faunas throught the United States and Canada, with each site sorted by state or province, its location noted on a map (and in detail in the text), and notes included on general nature of the site, species recovered there, and often notes on its general importance. Nice black and white illustrations of some of the faunas are interspersed in this section of the tome.

The bulk of the book though is the exhaustive listing of fossil mammals, each chapter organized around a particular order, and the chapter subdivided by family. Each species has common, alternate common, genus, species, and alternate (and no longer valid) genus and species names (such as in the case with the Jefferson's Mammoth, Mammuthus jeffersoni; it has also been called the Columbian Mammoth and the Imperial Mammoth, and seven other scientific names have been ascribed to it).

Entries vary in the detail to which the species is described, though many are given several paragraphs devoted to description, life habits, and speculation as to the reason for extinction. Black and white illustrations of fossils are included in each chapter, and a small number of extinct mammals are shown as how they appeared in life. Occasional maps illustrate sites of major finds.

Though not really a book one can sit down in a nice chair and read, it is interesting to flip through. Though more of a scholarly resource, it gives one pause to consider just how many mammals are no longer present on this continent. North America not only had the infamous "sabretooth," the dire wolf, the mastodon, mammoths, tank-like glyptodonts, and the exotic ground sloth, but it once had scores of camels and llamas, a bewildering variety of horses, as well as giant beavers, yaks, cheetah, giant marmots, and possibly even pandas.

As one fascinated by the Ice Age, especially vanished megafauna, I looked for a long time for a comprehensive book on vanished Ice Age animals of North America. This is it.
The treatise is exhaustive in terms of what was known up to the publishing date. If it is read carefully, it will impart a knowledge of these interesting animals and also give the reader an excellent backgound on the Pleistocene ice advances. The authors' discussion regarding the breakdown of time periods is excellent.
Even though the passage of time and new findings, particularly in Florida, have lessened the value of some of the data presented, the book remains a peerless review of a dynamic part of Earth's history.
Caveat: The reader should have some background in zoology and anatomy, otherwise constant recourse to a dictionary may be required.

For the collector of well-written, beautifully-bound, hard-cover books, this is a gem. I recommend that, after reading it, you place it on your nicest bookshelf.

This wonderful volume immediately found a prominent place on my mantel, not only for its beautiful cover artwork, but for its uplifting, whimsical and "relate-able" content. Each day I lift it from its spot and choose a diffent poem to read aloud. With my two cats sitting at my feet, they each listen intently as I read - seemingly knowing that I am reading to them, about them and for them. Each piece makes me smile knowingly, laugh, (or sometimes sigh sadly), as vivid images of cats in all their unique and fascinating aspects come alive. It is truly a wonderful book for anyone who has ever loved or lived with cats!

This charming, beautifully compiled collection of cat poetry spanning centuries is a delightful read. A true celebration of the mysterious feline!

The craft of this book is as enhancing as many other that have won awards over the past decades. I personally have been trained to view things at the tectonic level and the technical pages coordinate wonderfully with the graphic pages. The Andersons have a very nice way of depicting there key elements within each project.

If you're looking for some precedents of Pre-Fabrication projects that literally are site specific, modular, green and even custom this is a perfect book and you will be very happy with your investment. From the choice of colors to how they label the diagrams makes understanding the project very nice.

Good job and thanks

This book is gorgeous. Excellently written with amazing axonometric drawings of provocative projects. In a word, the drawings are luscious. It's no wonder these guys are winning competitions left and right.

This book goes above and beyond the typical prefab picture book. The images are not only compelling but are informative in a way that brings clarity to someone who wants to have a better understanding of how prefabrication actually works. The Andreson's passion for design, experimentation, and progress is truly inspiring. As a young professional it is good to see a smaller firm doing interesting work. The book is very detailed, and provides clear diagrams of connections and materials. You can see very easily how it all comes together. The one thing I would have liked to know more about is (on a project by project basis) how exactly the prefabrication process takes place. It is not clear how the architect and prefabricators interact as far as collaborating on a set of documents that gets the building or project built. Perhaps that is thier proprietary secret, or perhaps it is too boring for a handsome architecture book. You can only put so much information in one book, and this one is filled to the brim.

The merchandise arrived in a timely fashion the overall was a good experience.

Principles of Accounting - 7th Edition is a very elaborate book introducing accounting guidelines. Over 1000 pages of all levels of learning from begginer to advanced. It includes transparencies in some portions to make understanding statements very easy!

I liked reading this book for my accounting 101 class. The text is clear, well organized and well written. The typography makes liberal use of color, which makes reading _much_ easier when compared to a monochrome textbook. There are copious examples, illustrations and exercises. The book comes with a workbook (purchased separately) which contains template pages to write in your answers (trust me, you will need it). All chapters are grounded in current reality -- the authors make a point of tying the concepts to real-life situations.

On the cons, the 2002 edition deals with 2000 data -- their production process needs to be speeded up.

I think that a thorough review of this text will give the reader an excellent start in basic accounting.

At first I was a bit perplexed by a CDROM that's more an interactive objet-d'art than a game; and in the first night I played with this for like eight hours, until I thought I'd played it to death and would never touch it again. But I found its strange imagery coming back to me, and I tinker with it more and more now, sometimes just to hear the interesting background music, of which there is a LOT.

The packaging for this CD says it contains over two hours of instrumental music or spoken word performance, and it's true. Some of the music I recognize from "Ugly One With The Jewels", and some of it was even background music that Laurie Anderson did for Spalding Grey's movie "Swimming to Cambodia" (and as far as I know, no soundtrack CD was ever released of that).

If you find yourself wanting to hear the music on its own, it's straightforward to sift thru the CDROM's directories, find the AIFC files (*.AIF), decompress them (easy on a Mac with SoundApp -- I don't know what you'd use for handling AIFCs on other platforms), and burn them to audio CD for your personal listening fun. Now, there's not many CDROMs where the music is so good that you'd want to do that! But this is sure one of them.

I would love to be able to review this CD-ROM, but 2 1/2 months
after placing my order, Amazon wrote that they could not supply
it.

So why does Amazon still have it for sale?

Clicking the "used and new" link, I find some used versions for
more than the "new" price". It seems there was originally a
Macintosh only version, and then a Windows/Mac version.
A "new" Mac/Windows version is available from Amazon seller
"amana2" for USD$225.

Googling indicates that the Voyager company which produced
"Puppet Motel" no longer exists. I can't find a mention of it at
Laurie Anderson's site, though apparently in the past there was
a reference, pointing to Amazon as the place to purchase the
CD-ROM.

"Puppet Motel" is highly regarded, so I gave it five stars in
absentia. But Amazon deserves a negative number of stars for
pretending to be able to supply it.

When I bought this I was a little worried it would be out of date because it is a few years old, but WOW! Incredible, awesome, always surprising, entertaining. I love it more than her CDs!

In PX! Book One: A Girl and Her Panda, we are taken for a roller-coaster ride through terrain unfamiliar yet eerily pink. The metaphor of Panda as Property (hence the possessive "Her" in the title) reflects the suppression of Nature by Not-Nature. Our Earth-hugging ways are tossed out the window, however, when it is revealed that the Panda is nuclear-powered - can solar panels be far behind? The grunting visage of Pollo apparently clarifies the authors' intent: This is a clarion call to avert the innocent rush toward a mechanized, dehumanized world, where roller skates become the primary form of bipedal locomotion. The coolness of Wikkity is perfectly balanced by the primness of Weatherby, the primordial innocence of Dahlia at the core of the triumvirate giving them the strength to ward off the constant onslaught of ninjas and robots that bedevil their quest. This is tale telling of an epic, Homerific scale, not to be seen again in our lifetime - or until Book Two appears!!

As has been noted, this comic started out on the web. I like the print format better because you don't have to wait 3 1/2 days just to read the next page. But at the same time, not having to wait does make the comic seem a bit rushed. (Which is the only conceivable draw back to this book.)

The characters are crazy enough to be extremely entertaining, but complex enough to touch your heart. The art work is amazing, and fits the writing brilliantly. The two together definitely hooked me the moment I saw them.

The plot is fairly predictable, (I think it was intended to be that way), but the storytelling makes it readable time and time again.

PX! is an incredibly fun ride from start to finish. The biggest complement that I can give this book is the fact I bought it in print when I could read it on the web for free!

PX! was originally presented as a webcomic. There's no reason to hold this against it. If anything, as it was in my case, viewing the comic online should be the very first motivation for new readers to purchase this book. You will instantly fall in love with it. The characters, including Wikkity Jones, Weatherby, Dahlia and her panda, and Pollo, since this first book spends so much time introducing them, become instant classics, a set of future Pixar digital creations in printed form who both understand the importance of personality and the need to move a story along. Dahlia, the girl in the title, is searching for her father, who's been kidnapped by Pollo, the evil goat mastermind, the Johnny Come Lately bent on world domination. His defeat is easy to foresee and a pleasure to follow, and it's all the better because he really doesn't seem to mind, a villain with another plan visible in his back pocket, fodder for a sequel you won't see coming but will be more than willing to embrace. All the knowing nods to familiar story devices are completely disarmed by Manny Trembley and Eric Anderson's command of their, in the end, very original creation, a journey through a landscape where there seems to be nothing new under the sun. And yet, you've read nothing like this before, and it will be impossible to forget.

Our children love this. I love this. Gorgeous illustrations, wonderful story, great life lessons ... what more can I say? Appealing to both boys and s.

My grandmother had the Queen Crosspatch/ Queen Silverbell storis at her home and I dearly loved Racketty Packetty House as a child. It's a timeless story, beautifully told by Frances Hodgeson Burnett, and now I'm reading it with my own daughter.


I have seen the new edition, and the illustrations are pretty. However, they do not compare to the original breathtaking illustrations by Harrison Cady, a turn of the century master of children's illustrations.

This is really the second in a series of 4 stories, and I wonder why the others have not been re-issued. The premise is that the fairy queen "Queen Silverbell" has lost her "temper". This is actually a tiny elf that should live inside a silver cage dangling from a belt. It seems that too many children do not believe in fairies- an upsetting situation for a fairy queen. When she got angry, the cage burst open, and she lost her temper- who then transformed to a black imp and ran away. A sad state for a fairy queen, and now she is known as Queen Crosspatch, or sometimes Queen Silverbell-patch.

To regain her temper, the Fairy queen has a plan to tell 4 stories to convince children of the existence of fairies and the good works they do. The first story is How Winnie hatched the Little Rooks, the next is the Racketty Packetty house, the third is The Spring Cleaning (a fabulous tale of spring and garden fairies) and the last is The Cozy Lion.

I truly hope that interest in Racketty Packetty House will eventually lead to the reintroduction of the other stories too.

Read it, and enjoy the best of children's literature. If you love it, let the publisher know that this is only a fragment of the real series.

I liked the message that nothing is disposable. When a child is given a new toy, she almost discards the used one, but it is not willing to give up.

1st grader can almost read it. Very English vocabulary!

...And these lectures, delivered initially to a class Marius taught at Harvard, present a fascinating take on one of the great writers of the American South.

Marius concludes his fine collection of essays on Faulkner by asserting, "In 1942 [Faulkner] could look back on sixteen years of the most productive greatness in American literary history." If you consider that four of the thirteen novels authored in this period -- THE SOUND AND THE FURY, AS I LAY DYING, LIGHT IN AUGUST, and ABSALOM! ABSALOM! -- would be on anyone's list of best 100 American novels of all time or best English-language novels of the 20th century, it is indeed an awesome accomplishment. If you consider the hardship Faulkner worked under during this period (always close to bankruptcy, doing degrading script work in Hollywood, enduring a bad marriage, surviving the deaths of a daughter and brother, and manifesting what was surely clinical alcoholism), the achievement is even more awesome.

The sense of the greatness of Faulkner's mind pervades Marius's analyses of the texts. In spite of Faulkner's great experimentalism, Marius always assumes the author knew what he was doing and that Faulkner's ultimate choices (about point of view, character, narration, dialect, vocabulary choice) can be trusted as essential to the great storyteller's craft and intentions. The novels FLAGS IN THE DUST, THE WILD PALMS and GO DOWN, MOSES are good examples of times when editorial intervention did more harm than good. Marius also does a good job of sorting out the influences that are key to understanding and appreciating Faulkner: Darwin, Freud, Frazer, Eliot, Joyce, and Proust; and he gives teasing insights into the rivalry between Faulkner and Hemingway. (For instance, Hemingway often seems coy on sexual matters that wouldn't raise an eyebrow in mainstream fiction today; this is mostly because of the prudishness of his editor at Scribners', Max Perkins. Faulkner's freedom from such censorship stirred Hemingway's envy; Hemingway's runaway sales stirred Faulkner's.) In addition to the chapters on Faulkner's thirteen first novels, the book includes insightful essays on "Faulkner and Blacks: The Endemic Problem of Race and Racism in American Society" and "Faulkner an the Mythological World." Understood as class lectures, this book is best read from beginning to end, as much in the later chapters assumes the reader is familiar with concepts introduced earlier. Marius is clearly a gifted teacher--one who coaxes as well as instructs--and I would have loved to have sat in his class. I would also love to know what he thought of Faulkner's later work, the novels that most critics consider inferior but which to me still show sparks of greatness (and in some cases are as easy to read as Hemingway or any other bestselling author.)

Richard Marius (1933-1999) was the author of four novels: The Coming of Rain (1969), Bound for the Promised Land (1976), After the War (1992), and An Affair of Honor, published posthumously. He also wrote two works of non-fiction: Thomas More: A Biography (1984) and Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death (1999).

Reading Faulkner is a collection of delightful lectures delivered by Marius at Harvard Univ. in 1996 and 1997. These lectures are introductions to Faulkner's first 13 novels: Soldier's Pay, Mosquitoes, Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Pylon, Absalom, Absalom!, The Unvanquished, The Wild Palms, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses.

What a remarkable period of creativity Faulkner enjoyed, stretching from his first novel, Soldier's Pay (1926) to the last of his great novels, Go Down, Moses (1942). "In 1942," Marius comments, "[Faulkner] could look back on sixteen years of the most productive greatness in American literary history."

Faulkner grew up in Oxford, Miss. (one can visit there his beloved home, Rowan Oak), which was the prototype of the town of Jefferson, in mythical Yoknapatawpha County. It was a narrow, circumscribed world, full of various passions and prejudices, a world of conflicting issues of sex, class, and race. But out of this particular time and place Faulkner created a body of literature that has universal relevance and timeless appeal. The characters created by his fertile imagination reveal the human condition and, as Shakespeare put it, throws up the mirror of nature to ourselves. His work reveals "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself."

"[I] discovered," wrote Faulkner, "that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and that by sublimating the actual into the apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top. It opened up a gold mine of other people, so I created a cosmos of my own."

Marius points out various influences on the development of Faulkner's dark and tragic art: Greek and Roman mythology, especially as chronicled in Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough;the plays of Shakespeare (whom he loved); and the writings of depth psychologists.

According to Marius, however, the two greatest influences on Faulkner were the poetry of T. S. Eliot ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Hollow Men," "The Waste Land" and so forth) and the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin.

"I think a strong case can be made," writes Marius, "for Faulkner as someone deeply interested in the implications of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwinism is inherently pessimistic. Darwin did not believe in God and did not believe in any ultimate purpose to the life of the individual, the nation, or the human race."

In another place, Marius writes, "Darwin held that human beings are a higher form of animal--higher only in that our brains give us a superior capacity to survive. I believe it is demonstrable from the text that Faulkner was enormously influenced by the teaching of Charles Darwin, that human beings evolved from lower forms of life, and that the most important feature of any species is that it adapt itself sufficiently to its environment to survive....I see a Darwinian impulse that I find constant in Faulkner from the beginning."

Faulkner is often difficult to "read," that is, to understand. Like James Joyce's Ulysses, many of his works exhibit a stream-of-consciousness dislocation of time. Marius: "Faulkner plays with time, happy to break up, indeed to shatter the traditional idea of chronology in the novel, a tradition where we have a linear progression of plot with occasional clearly marked flashbacks." There is a curious interplay of consciousness and memory in Faulkner that often disorients and confuses the reader.

Like Shakespeare, Faulkner features characters who are puzzling mixtures of good and evil, light and darkness. Nor does Faulkner give us much help in understanding his characters. Again like Shakespeare, he maintains a distance or detachment from them, letting their deeds speak for them and putting the burden of interpretation of the readers.

A persistent theme in Faulkner's novels is the hypocrisy of those who attempt, at all costs, to keep up appearances, which to them is more important than reality. So long as a code or custom is ostensibly upheld and honored, the true state of affairs is relatively unimportant. Thus, incest may be winked at while miscegenation may become a capital offense (often by lynching). One doubts that such an obsession with appearances is peculiar to the South, but Faulkner certainly seems to think that such hypocrisy is an endemic Southern problem.

Faulkner's world is a tragic world, and his art is a tragic art. Death is the end of life, and life is filled with pride, prejudice, lust, greed, deceit, hypocrisy, and violence. One begins to wonder if Darwin is correct in saying that human beings are higher than the other animals. Perhaps labeling some human act as "bestial" is a vile and vicious slander of the beasts.

Reading Faulkner is so rewarding that one despairs of doing it justice in a review. It inspires one to reread Faulkner's novels and short stories, for such a rereading, using Marius' excellent literary compass will doubtless help one see things missed on first reading.