Bates Books

Mary Ellen, or MEB, is the online broker I turn to when I can't solve something in-house. Her book is a working desktop reference, covering the main commercial online services as well as major Internet channels.

I've used this for a parent program at the end of the year with my kindergarten students. There is the familiar story, a cute song that changes for each new number/animal from the meadow, and an easy repeat format for the children to easily learn.

I have each child wear a baseball hat adorned with a crow, a frog, whatever their animal is in the verse. It makes a very appealing year-end program for families to enjoy.

I rarely find a work of this level of excellence. Every single essay in this book is necessary, accessible, illluminating, compelling, and fulfilling. There are times where I read a compilation such as this one and find one or more of the parts to be lacking, superfluous, or just plain boring. Not this book. Bate and Jackson even had the foresight to include an essay by an actor - Judi Dench. Foakes and Wiggins don't just gloss over what is known about his contemporaries, but challenge and engage new ideas about Shakespeare's first performances. Holland offers a fascinating glimpse at the first superstar reviver of his work, Garrick. Thomson covers subsidized Shakespeare and Smallwood incisively explores the current approaches towards his work, Director's Shakespeare. I could go and on and on, but this book has it all. Recommended for academics and students, professionals and amateurs, life-long devotees and the novice who merely wants to learn more about Shakespearean performance.

This book is a collection of items from The Geologic Column, a feature that has appeared in Geotimes every month since May-June 1966. I haven't counted the items but there must be a couple of hundred. My purpose in selecting them from the columnar total has been to choose material that will be of interest and amusement to nongeologists as well as to specialists in the various fields of earth science. The items range from a line or two to a page or two; people with a short attention span should feel at home. Those who consider the geological sciences sacred and immune to humor will be happier reading the I.U.G.S. classification of igneous rocks or the Stratigraphic Code.

In true geological fashion, I've arranged the material in chronological order, oldest to youngest. In a few instances where material on one topic has appeared in several columns, the entries are grouped together. Most of the subject matter is so variable as to resist rational classification. A word of advice might be, Don't read for plot.
--- excerpt from book's Preface

This book is one of the best I have ever read.

It's about Larkin family. Pop and Ma, as everybody calls them, are the head of the family. They have 6 or 7 (even they don't know how many) very interesting children that have already started to follow their own steps.
The story begins when Mariette (the oldest) thinks that she's pregnant and has to find someone to marry. And who might be better then the shy, a little confused young tax collector that was sent their house by his office to hand them the written order for tax assessment.

This is a strange concept but it works.

It is very comprehensive and covers up to the 18 series and deals with both assembly and high level programming.

Most PIC books are very badly written, by experts, for experts. They go on about advanced detail before telling us how to write the first part of a program, the header and configuration

Here the editors seem to have got a grip at last and have not let the authors waste the reader's time and patience. They deal with things in the order we need to know them and have kept the language readable.

One complaint. They use the Picstart Plus as a programmer. It will not work with laptops, which do not have a serial RS232 output. They should use the ICD2, which is now recommended by Microchip. It has both USB and RS232 input and does programming and debug.

Up to now I have always used the D.W. Smith book, but now I am also using this one for more advanced work.

This brings the trilogy to a satisfying end. My daughter listens to it over and over.

An excellent book, but American children may have difficulty with some of the British phrases. My daughter likes the character even better than Beverly Cleary's Ramona Quimby, whom she also loves. The plot in "Posy Bates Again" is funnier and more satisfying than "Meet Posy Bates" even though the ending merely leads you to read "Posy Bates and the Bag Lady." Highly recommended for girls aged 8-10, though some of the vocabulary may be challenging for the younger ones. As a read aloud, it's perfect for 7 and 8 year olds.

I feel that joint writers Judith Bloom Fradin and Dennis Brindell Fradin did an excellent job with the writing and pictures exhibited in The Power of One: Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine. It's hard to believe that the demand for integrated schools occurred less than a century ago. The novel depicts civil rights activist Daisy Bates and her quest to integrate the public schools of Arkansas during the late 1950s and early 1960s. She stood behind the nine African American students who our nation dubbed the "Little Rock Nine." The book provides pictures of Daisy's life including eye opening shots of the abuse the nine students as well as Diasy herself endured from Little Rock's public just to gain equal opportunity to education. Readers will become inspired by and appreciative of Daisy's work.

Have questions about prayer and how to do it more effectively? You need to get this book! Inside is a powerful yet easy to understand description of "Scientific Prayer," a concise method anyone can use to improve their life through positive prayer and reflect more of God in our experiences. Want to gain a better understanding of our relationship to the Infinite? Rev. Bates shows how we are not hopeless or helpless before adversity but have the power to improve any condition. By putting more into life through the ideas in this book, we can get far more out of life than we can now imagine. The book will help you the moment you open it and inspire you to learn more, have more, and be more. I recommend it!