Baker Books

The previous review of THE DARWIN LEGEND written by Brad Krone of Reno praises Mark Noll for doing an excellent job writing this book. The problem is that Noll is not the author. James Moore is the author of this book and deserves the credit.

As a life-long Christian who has heard over and over the famous story of Darwin's deathbed confession of Christianity and denial of evolution, I was overjoyed to find a book on this very topic. Noll is unbelievably objective -- a true reporter doing his job. He never lets his own biases and opinions cloud his presentation of the facts. The insights contained in this book priceless. I have a better understanding of who Darwin was, why so many Christians love to tell the story of his deathbed conversion, and whether or not it is probable that such an event took place. Get this book and read for yourself. The amount of research which Noll has conducted is almost unfathomable. You will not be disappointed!

I was impressed by this book and am not surprised that it won the Pultizer Prize. It was a well written telling of the struggles of the German Jews.

I had heard about Rabbi Baeck several years ago but had never read about his life. He was a brilliant scholar and very influential in Reformed Judaism. I'd have liked to know more about his wife. She was an essential companion in his life.

He refused to go to the Gestapo office on his Holy days even when commanded. He remained a great source of courage to the Jewish community and refused to leave them even when offered safe emigration.

He is a great example of a man of peace. I once read in a magazine his moving and controversial prayer for the forgiveness of the Nazis. This is an excellent and readable book.

Leonard Baker's Pulitzer Prize winning biography is an compilation of the life of one of history's greatest unknowns. In addition to taking the reader through the life of the "seelsorger" known as Leo Baeck, Baker shows the changes in Germany from the beginning of the twentieth century through the horrors of the Second World War. One can see first hand how the bitterness losing in World War I evolved into the greatest and most frightening regimes to ever take power. This book is perfect for those interested in German history, the Holocaust, and anyone who loves biographies. By the end of this book, you will answer Patrick Dolan's question of, "Who the Hell is Leo Baeck?"

This book is an extremely valuable discovery. It does have plenty of material that cannot be rushed through, though my temptation is to fly through it to see what's next. One should already have some sort of background in Greek (as well as Latin, German, and French) to get through it. That being said, my thoughts as I scanned through the book were, "Aha! Just as I thought!" And then, "I wish I had picked up more on this 20 years ago." If you are studying any period of Greek literature, especially the New Testament, get this information and run with it. Learn Greek the proper way and throw out the Erasmian pronunciation and the ancient versus modern dichotomy that have been forced on us.

The scope of this work is breathtaking. The seminal point of the book follows that the Greek language is unique in human history. It has remained fairly similar throughout its 3500 years of written documentation. It was splintered into dialects and coalesced three different times into a prominent dialect. Because of this unique aspect, the study of Modern Greek (Middle Ages/Byzantine-Modern) can shed light on the Ancient/Koine. Because of a false Ancient/Modern dichotomy it has not been studied in the West, who became the keepers of the tradition after the fall of Byzantium. This willfull ignorance of Modern Greek by Continental Scholarship has led to errors in pronunciation, syntactical understanding, textual criticism and exegesis. He deals with each at length. Particularly amusing is Caragounis' dismantling of Stanley Porter's view of verbal aspect. The book is also meant to serve as a reference work. It contains much valuable information which is difficult to come by. If you are a student of New Testament Greek this book is worth every penny just for the reference material. The book also references much scholarship from Greece which is lacking in most Western scholarship. The author possesses expertise in areas which are lacking in much of New Testament scholarship, which particularly qualifies him to write such a work as this. Much of the book is a shot across the bow to the status quo, so aspects of the material will continue to be debated. Although I must say, the scholarly reviews I have read of this work, several seemed to be very negative, yet they did not attack the main points of the book. The reason for this is probably that most scholars are not knowledgeable enough to weigh the evidence from such a diachronic approach. As you have gathered by now this is a technical scholarly work. However, if the above information piques your curiosity this tome is worth owning.

Dick Sing's book on how to make miniature bird houses is a great learning resource. It does focus on bird houses but it also teaches the person how to make and use small jigs so you can turn the piece around and finish the bottom. It's step by step method is easy to follow. For the money you will find yourself in the workshop spending hour after hour making these. It's fun.

He writes an easy to follow book on turning miniature bird houses. A good book for those in wood lathe turnings...

Greetings! This book is a must read for any administrator, faculty, or staff personnel looking to survive or thrive in the increasingly important but competitive market of delivering distance learning in higher education. The author's, professors experienced with various facets of online education, succinctly address essential components needed to design, deliver, and evaluate an effective online degree program. In addition, the author's outline the theoretical foundation for distance learning, include considerations to address the challenges of diverse learners', provide useful information to both assess student learning and increase student engagement, and identify issues and red flags for accreditation or reaffirmation of accreditation.

What makes the book special and sets it apart from others on the market is that it considers distance learning at the college and university levels from the program level rather than the course level. There are numerous books on how to design and deliver an effective online course, but far fewer which consider how to design and deliver an effective online degree program.

To borrow from the book's description: "This useful resource describes best practices for designing online programs and courses. Providing a roadmap for those wishing to design and implement a distance learning program, this up-to-date volume explains how to facilitate and moderate interactions using a constructivist approach, presents strategies that respond to race- and gender-related challenges, provides a model for evaluating distance education programs, identifies strategies that promote valid and reliable evaluations of online teaching, and addresses institution and distance education program accreditation issues." The book is divided as follows.

Chapter 1 - Concepts of Distance Learning: theoretical foundations of distance learning including constructivism, adult teaching and learning, computer-mediated communication, sense of community, presence, self-directed and autonomous learning, and social equity; and communication tools and conferencing tools

Chapter 2 - Gender: gendered impacts of online technologies, gender-specific teaching roles, gender-specific learning differences, and strategies for overcoming gender challenges to online learning

Chapter 3 - Culture: situational challenges (e.g., digital divide, personal costs, computer-mediated communication, and racism), dispositional challenges (e.g., field dependency, high/low context communication, and collectivism/individualism), and multicultural education

Chapter 4 - Strategic Planning: identification of program need, the strategic planning process, distance education planning challenges and strategies

Chapter 5 - Program and Course Design: program and course design models, instructional design approaches, online learning technologies, copyright and fair use standards, and accessibility in distance education

Chapter 6 - Assessment of Student Learning: types of assessments (e.g., independent work and group work) and academic dishonesty (e.g., identity fraud and plagiarism)

Chapter 7 - Online Discussions: planning student engagement (e.g., socioemotional interactions, task-oriented interactions, feedback, burnout, and participation rubrics) and conducting online (i.e., facilitating and moderating discussions) discussions

Chapter 8 - Program Evaluation: evaluability assessment, types of evaluation, standards and benchmarks

Chapter 9 - Institution and Program Accreditation: accreditation process and distance education

Chapter 10 - Course Evaluation: multistage course evaluation model

Chapter 11 - Summary and Conclusion

Appendix A - Example Extract from a Strategic Plan

Appendix B - Analytic Participation Rubric

Appendix C - Evidence of Quality Distance Learning Programs
Glossary

References

Index

About the Authors

An excellent text on International Tax Law. This book is a must have for studying the subject. The book is written in a easy to understand manner.

This book is best of commentaries we see. The author is well known tax professor/practitioner in the world.

Brings in many interesting characters, settings, etc., including good worldview/Christian values.

Highly recommended for young Christian boys who like auto racing. :-)

This was great for auto racing fans and Chistians. I highly recommed this book.

I always want a time frame on the characters to estimate their maturity.
Well Cindy Wagner is a rich, spoiled little daddy's girl and is now 21 and walking down the isle and getting cold feet. She doesn't really love Paul and she keeps remembering her mother telling her that Paul would not make her happy. He is too work orientated.

Native American Ethan Stormwalker, is 24 years old, and loves his way of life. It will not allow many luxeries but is sufficient for him. He is following his ancestor's teachings and beliefs. He was born and raised on the Rez.

When the two met, Cindy was 16 and Ethan was 19. I can see how Cindy had a lot of growing up to do. Now Ethan is portrayed as very much the masculine male. And his dancing just adds to his mystique.
Add his wolf dog and the buckskin stallion and we see the Alpha male who is her hero.

He works on his aunt, Dorothea's Dude Ranch, where he has acquired quite a female gathering, including a 16 year old customer, Linda and a waitress, Millie who would willingly offer Ethan most anything.

Paul's flaws became more evident when he came to the ranch to take Cindy home. Man, he just won't listen when she tells him they were no longer an item.

Then it seemed that history was repeating itself when he went off to a Pow Wow to dance and comes back to find Cindy gone. Five years ago it was the same thing [almost].

There is so much more to the story - You will love finding out how Cindy and Ethan [he has to rescue her] resolve their bitterness and fall in love all over again.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED -- Definitely a keeper [just too short]

When I began to read "Each Mind a Kingdom", I soon realized that it was that dreaded genre--the doctoral dissertation made flesh.
I expected the worst sort of academic exercise, in both senses of the word, and read on only because the book had a great cover and I am fascinated with New Thought ideas.

But "Each Mind a Kingdom" is anything but a dry academic tome.
It's as alive as a novel, and full of ideas and opinions. It's rather like going to a movie like "My Dinner with Andre", in which the author sets up ideas with scenarios, and then allows the ideas to subtly hover.

I'm not saying that I found everything in "Each Mind a Kingdom" to be a plethora of positions with which I agreed. Indeed, in many cases, I felt that Dr. Satter over-eggs the pudding, and draws conclusions beyond her citations, and, in some cases, dismisses as "ambiguous" or "unclear" those authorities which do not fit her premise. I found the omission of Elizabeth Delvine King's work, whose "purity new thought" ideas would not fit the author's "chronology" of the rise and fall of the "purity" movement, to be puzzling, and the near-dismissal of the Unity School and Religious Science to be curious in light of the far greater mainstream impact each movement had upon the culture than many of the people whom the author covers in detail.

Still, this book merits reading because it is a narrative voice making important points from fascinating subject matter. She introduced me to thinkers with whose work I was less familiar. More importantly, she tackles the gender rhetoric of early New Thought writings, particularly that by women, and examines the impact of the competing ways of looking at things on the broad culture.

Dr. Satter has three to five books of material in this work, and it is in some senses a shame that she tries to do so much.
Her conclusory points about Freud and modern self-help,each interesting, appear to be "toss ins" to try to "add relevance" to a work which needs no such effort.

But this is a fundamentally satisfying work, even though it is not free of flaws, because it has a rich sweep of ideas and characters better suited to a wonderful set of novels than to a single tome about gender imagery in New Thought. One might wish (as I do) that Dr. Satter adopted a style a little less quick to jump to conclusions and a little more willing to consider the rhetorical and metaphoric value of gender terminology (rather than the more mechanical, if fascinating,angle she takes).
But nonetheless, the work simply fascinates--it's a good read, with many troubling and promising lines of analysis.

Dr. Satter's explorations all prove quite interesting, and well worth reading, although some of her conclusions are notions with which I could not disagree more. This is perhaps a mark of a good book, though--you can dissent from the author's point of view, and yet still like the work.

I encourage anyone who wishes to understand the turn of the 20th Century to read this work, which offers ideas which will be both controversial, sometimes perhaps even unacceptable, but always fascinating. Well done. I wish that every dissertation read so well.

This is a great book. I have not been able to stop reading. It does indeed read like a good novel. You will find that it explains a great deal about our Victorian heritage and some of the ideas that have shaped the present. Fascinating!

As a college professor, I have always tried to memorize important benchmarks in my field. One set of benchmarks that is critical in teaching geology are dates such as the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. I soon discovered that this task was going to be far more difficult then I first expected because for many dates, such as the age of the universe, many different estimates exist (in this case from around 5 to 25 billion years). It soon became apparent the many of the dates in geology are estimates at best and more often gestimates. Whitcomb in this excellent work does a much needed job critiquing many of the modern dating methods used in science today. He shows why many are not as accurate as commonly believed. Now when I teach geology or earth science I always stress that no one in science knows, for example, how old the earth or universe is, and therefore when providing dates one must not say that something is so many years old, but must say "according to carbon 14 or another dating method, some animal is estimated to have died 5730 years ago, and this date is based on the many assumptions of this method." Unfortunately, most texts and sources often dogmatically state that something is so many millions of years old when this cannot be known to be the case. This must read book will go a long way toward reducing the dogmatism now very common in geological dating and will help the dating process to be more scientific and less dogmatic. In short The Early Earth is an antidote to dogmatism

This expanded and revised edition of "The Early Earth," by Dr. John C. Whitcomb, Biblical professor of Old Testament for 38 years at Grace Theological Seminary, Winona Lake, Indiana, startles the reader with an excellent in-depth examination of the earth as created rather than evolved.

Bracing his position with the first and second laws of Thermodynamics, Dr. Whitcomb thus handily develops his stance for Biblical Creationism while dismantling many of the foundational suppositions of evolutionary conjecture.

In addition, he establishes the suddenness of creation as scientifically supported by many such as Dr. Carl Baugh, Creation Evidence Museum, while proving the instantaneity of earth's beginning over the provably unscientific spontaneity professed by evolutionists.

Written as a scholarly textbook, yet formed in lucid prose, Dr. Whitcomb's work is an excellent primer for any seeking an introduction to the main questions demanded of earth's beginnings.

Perhaps the only surprise is the wonder remaining at the end of the book as to why any would continue to pursue the theory of evolution when even the laws of thermodynamics obliterate all reason for valuing Darwin's hypothesis.

Genesis thus excelled clearly enhances the Psalmist's prophetic utterance, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows His handiwork." {Psalm 19:1, The New King James}

A hearty 'Amen' must be added to the exhortation that 'The Early Earth' is indeed a "must read."

TL Farley,
Author,
When Now Becomes Too Late,
Distant Reaches

When Now Becomes Too Late
{ Prophecy : The Rapture in Brief : Inside The Twinkle ! }

Distant Reaches
{ True Life Adventure in Ireland, Boston and on the North Atlantic }