Bell Books

The best part was when the man killed his wife and then he took out the eye of the cat.We like the ending because the cat took revenge. Good for the black cat!

An almost cryptic tale about an alcoholic who goes mad and attacks his cat, the start of several horrid events that happen in this short story. What makes this tale the more creepier; Poe himself was an alcoholic.

This book is about an alcoholic and what happens to his life after he gets hooked on "the drink." It's a very morbid and suspenseful story

This is a truly wonderful book. Todd describes the homes of many of the people who participated in the Bloomsbury group, in addition to the complex interrelationships of the people involved, their parties and their artwork. She is one of the most focused biographers I have read: always interesting, always to the point. Considering the number of people she has to write about, it is amazing that she never strays from her focus. The book is beautifully designed and illustrated. It is a book that I will go back to over and over.

Bloomsbury at Home is a welcome addition to the bibliography of titles about the very interesting, influential and eccentric group of artists who flourished in England and France during the early part of the twentieth century. These multitalented poets, writers, painters and thinkers lived life enthusiastically and shared ideas, activities and loves with each other and the world. Pamela Todd's extended essay on the Bloomsburyites, including Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant captures their individuality, and sometimes irrationality, while celebrating their devotion to freedom of thought. The really spectacular and original contribution of Bloomsbury at Home, however, comes with the reproduction of a number of paintings and drawings by the Bloomsbury group, which are otherwise difficult to find gathered in one place. This book is a treasured and inexpensive addition to my library of literary and artistic movements, and I highly recommend it to others interested in the relationship of the visual and literary arts to modern society before the Second World War.

Bloomsbury at Home is a welcome addition to the bibliography of titles about the very interesting, influential and eccentric group of artists who flourished in England and France during the early part of the twentieth century. These multitalented poets, writers, painters and thinkers lived life enthusiastically and shared ideas, activities and loves with each other and the world. Pamela Todd's extended essay on the Bloomsburyites, including Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant captures their individuality, and sometimes irrationality, while celebrating their devotion to freedom of thought. The really spectacular and original contribution of Bloomsbury at Home, however, comes with the reproduction of a number of paintings and drawings by the Bloomsbury group, which are otherwise difficult to find gathered in one place. This book is a treasured and inexpensive addition to my library of literary and artistic movements, and I highly recommend it to others interested in the relationship of the visual and literary arts to modern society before the Second World War.

The translation of Mary Stuart that you see when you "Look Inside" is not the same one that is being sold on this page!!!!

This is the play that was used in the 1987 (?) movie, "Anne of Avonlea." It's really neat!

A brilliant psychological drama. Schiller begins with presenting Mary as the epitome of passion and misguided sincerity, with Elizabeth as the epitome of rational calculation and statecraft. With superb plotting, he stages their confrontation to emphasize their common features and with elements of role reversal. The confrontation essentially purifies their original characters, heightening the contrast between passion and calculation. I don't read German but this translation contains a great deal of eloquent language and an appropriately Shakerspearean flavor.

Simple and funny book that my 3 year old daughter loves. The lesson is simple, it teaches a preschooler how to be patient. Very easy to follow as my little one tries to "read" along.

We got this out of the library for our 3-year-old, and he loved it so much he wanted to read it every night. He very quickly knew the story well enough that he was "reading" it himself on each page. We're buying this for him for Christmas, and I fully expect it to be one of the books that teaches him how to read. The repetition is great for that, and it enables us to read it in a silly way, and read the "so everyone has to wait" pages in an mockingly exasperated, impatient voice that he has learned to mimic as well. Highly recommend.

Kirkus Reviews
This enthusiastic read begins, "The Bridge is up! The bus can't go, so everyone has to wait." Following the bus and joining the queue come various modes of transport, from a bike to a bulldozer. Each vehicle is tacked on to the end of the refrain, building repetition. When the bridge finally descends, everything is repeated again, only this time, the bus can go! Hefferan's illustrations have cottony edges with an oil-base crayon vibrancy to the colors. The drivers and passengers, animals all, are expressive and charming. The font is expansive and jaunty, part and parcel with the artwork. Slightly bothersome, though, are the perspectives. Throughout the story the automobiles shift, inexplicably, from forming a line to sitting side by side. However, children will enjoy identifying the vehicles and watching the bicycle-riding monkey wander about before joining the motorcyclist. Whether to a crowd of one or many, this read-aloud is sure to be a pleaser. (Picture book. 3-6)

California's El Camino Real is the first book to document the growth of El Camino Real and the bells which have marked it for almost a century. Collections strong in California history won't want to miss this coverage: it includes numerous vintage black and white photos, maps, and a smooth coverage of the bells and the El Camino's changing history.

When you drive up the "left coast" in California, whether it be along Interstate 5 in the San Diego area, old U. S. Highway 101 or California State Highway 1, you see the familiar mission bells. This book tells the story behind those bells and one of America's great pathways. This road was originally blazed to connect California's mission system, and is a good reference point for a visit to any or all of the missions.

I've always loved el camino since I was a kid so I wasn't sure I had anything to learn about it--boy was I wrong! There is such a wealth of history that I knew nothing about, and this book has it all! Now I can appreciate the road's famous marker bells so much more, knowing how much hard work went into them. I bet a lot of hard work went into this book too, and I am grateful to Mr Kurillo and Ms Tuttle.

This textbook is awesome for serious students who would really like to graspe latin better. It contains the answer key to all the exercises as well as tips for teachers on presenting the material. If you own the student edition, consider the teacher's guide to help you along your way!

I bought this program for my 12 yr-old daughter, as a supplement to Henle latin. She had been studying Henle for a year, mostly on her own, and was getting bogged down in the monotony of exercise after exercise. Cambridge, with it's fun story-line and historical component, is a nice suppelement, and has gotten her interested in her Latin studies again. Sometimes, a different approach to the same material is just the ticket for better retention. Cambridge has done that for us.

As a Latin tutor with over three years experience with teaching this language, and several years of learning it, this text was a surprise. Not only did it offer me better ways to use the Cambridge readers with my pupils, it also provided me with new information that I found interesting for myself. This manual combines grammar with the easy learning tool of an ongoing storyline, as well as providing application skills and ideas, with some baitable history as well. It helps me not only teach my students better but keep them wanting to learn. Anyone looking forward to teaching, or even learning, this language, should most certainly have this book close at hand.

In other words, concludes this paraphrase of Brecht, that Sebald includes in the text on the lack of German literature on the bombing of German cities, survival of mankind would be purely accidental.
Sebald was a thorough pessimist. This book is a posthumous collection of travel texts on Corsica and literary essays, mostly on German language writers, but also on Chatwin (who could hardly have been German, thinks Sebald) and Nabokov (who most decidedly wasn't either, though his categorical statement that he did not learn German in 15 years living in Berlin has been doubted).
For me, the two key texts in the collection are Campo Santo and the one about the description of destruction. In addition there are essays on Handke's Kaspar Hauser (maybe you know Herzog's movie about this odd story; Handke is not my favorite writer, nor Herzog my favorite film maker; frankly speaking Sebald had little to say about them either); on Grass's and Hildesheimer's look back on the 3rd Reich; on Peter Weiss, the man who brought the Auschwitz trials to the stage (incidentally my selected writer for my Abitur exam, centuries ago); on Jean Amery, a victim; on Kafka with a nice little piece on his trip to Paris incl. an unappetizing visit to a bordello; on Nabokov, who explored the darkness on both ends of our lives and who saw butterflies as a subspecies of ghosts.
Campo Santo, the text that gave its title to the collection, is about the history and sociology of funerals in Corsica, with reference to the anthropological literature of the globe, and its lore of death and ghosts on this island, where Christianity has a hard time against the challenge of traditional superstitions. On a global scale, the megalopolis has no space for keeping the dead intact, they must move to cyberspace.
The main literary essay covers the strange fact that there was very little descriptive literature covering the destruction of German cities by bombing raids. Sole exception in the early years was Nossack's Untergang. What was written was generally drowned in mythical ruminations, as if the language of the fascist code had invaded the secret style of the 'inner emigration' and made it involuntarily identical. The debris of destruction are buried under the debris of a ruined culture. In the early years after the war, there was also no enquiry into the reason of the destruction; it was accepted like a destiny, a final judgment. However, more and more the blanket bombing of German cities during WW2 is seen as having been useless for the final victory, as useless as the blanket bombing of Vietnam later on.

Sebald fans should own this book. As it's a collection of disparate pieces, it hasn't quite the overwhelming impact of "The Rings of Saturn" or "Austerlitz," but every piece in the book rewards attention. The brief meditation on Bruce Chatwin is alone worth the price of the book.

WG Sebald whose too early accidental death in 2001 is a much-lamented loss to the literary world he so quietly entered briefly before his demise. He is a unique writer, one whose style includes ramblings and crude snapshots of incidental places that support his strange tales. For many he is an acquired taste and only time will tell whether his honored books will withstand the test of immortality. And that fact is very much in keeping with the worldview of this enormously gifted observer of the human condition and the plight of the individual played against the backdrop of history and melancholy.

CAMPO SANTO is not a completely successful book in the manner of this highly praised novels. But the very fact that his early departure from the writing stream impacted readers to the point of wanting more justifies this aggregation of four chapters of a novel based on Corsica and multiple lectures and essays and addresses. The book opens with a fine essay by editor Sven Meyer, a timetable that introduces Sebald to readers unfamiliar with his odd life. The subsequent works are translated from the German by Sebald's longtime translator Anthea Bell. And that fact introduces one of the many odd quirks in Sebald's career: why should a man who spent the better part of his expatriation from his native Germany teaching in England write in German instead of his adopted language English?

Perhaps one reason lies in the focus of each of Sebald's works. His stories are travels and meanderings through various locations that serve as his platform for posing the question of history as memory, the unresolved restitution of Germany after WW II (a period he only knew from seeing the disastrous postwar results and reading the reflective works of other writers coping with the crossfire of guilt and sadness/remorse and anger - he was born in 1944), an the driving need to understand the role of mankind in the flux of a globe at unrest.

Reading the first four chapters of CAMPO SANTO makes us wish he had completed this novel about Corsica and the fascination with the life of Napoleon who was born there. But the saved fragments of this novel interrupted by his award-winning AUSTERLITZ are savory and contain many eloquent passages to assuage the reader longing for more.

The remaining essays and lectures are dense and more cerebral but for those Sebald addicts there is much to digest about his thoughts and philosophy. And for those readers especially this final book is a must for the library. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, May 05

Peter Lewin is the only contemporary Austrian who has written at length on Lachmann's capital theory. This is almost ironic because, as Lewin himself notes, capital theory is probably the most important topic in Austrian economics and yet no Austrian since the 1970 revival has written about it.

Well for those who ever develop an interest in capital theory, the Austrian position can be found here in this short little book. Lachmann's book is a tour de force. It is important to remember that Lachmann is describing a world in perpetual disequilibrium (i.e., the real world). This means that the prices for goods are not yet equlibrium prices. Therefore, it makes no sense at all to speak of aggregate values of capital goods. We cannot add up all the capital goods (in monetary terms) and hope to get a reliable or meaningful measure of the value of capital. Now while it is clear that we cannot add computers and automobiles, Lachmann goes even further and argues that we cannot even add up their monetary values (prices) because these prices are disequilibrium prices. This is because all capital goods are used in some production plan. But not all production plans succeed. Business is about success AND failure. Therefore, the prices of these capital goods are not accurate because the use to which they are put will result in failure and error. Prices of capital goods in a disequilibrium world cannot serve as accurate indicators of value. This is why Lachmann spoke of capital as a "structure."

This is the theory of capital Lachmann employs in this book. He makes use of several illustrative examples throughout the book. This theory is also applied to financial markets and the Austrian business cycle theory, among other things. Austrian economists have yet to fully appreciate the implications of Lachmann's analysis. For example, how cogent is Mises' calculation argument if prices in a capitalist market are always inaccurate indicators of value? Kirznerian entrepreneurship cannot even rescue Mises' point because Lachmann challenged the very ability of prices (even in disequilibrium) to convey meaningful information in the second chapter of this book "On Expectations." There is must to be done with Lachmann's capital theory. I only hope that the silence of the contemporary Austrian school will not prevent future generations from developing Lachmann's theory further.

This is Ludwig Lachmann's best work on economics. Written in 1956, this small book made little to no impact upon the then dominant neo-classical paradigm, even though it should have. This can be explained because Lachmann was an advocate of Karl Menger's Austrian method and a pupil of Fredrick von Hayek at the London School of Economics. Both Hayek and the ideas of Menger were unfashionable during the publication of this work.

Lachmann dissects most neo-classical economic models for relying too heavily upon a homogeneous concept of capital. He reminds us in this small volume that capital goods are heterogeneous and valued as such through the eyes of the entrepreneur/individual actor.

In his own words:

"The generic concept of capital... has no measurable counterpart among material objects; it reflects the entrepreneurial appraisal of such objects. Beer barrels and blast-furnaces, harbour installations and hotel-room furniture are capital not by virtue of their physical properties but by virtue of their economic functions. Something is capital because the market, the consensus of entrepreneurial minds, regards it as capable of yielding an income (Lachmann 1956: xv)."

The impact of such a work is important, especially when thinking about business cycle theory. If integrated with other Austrian works, this idea solidifies the concept of Malinvestment, a distinctly Austrian term.

Lachmann is recognized (among Austrians at least) for stressing the importance of disequilibrium more so than most Austrians. Capital is always in disequilibrium, so we can only understand capital structure by thinking in terms of disequilibrium. While there is no doubt that Lachmann criticized neoclassical general equilibrium theory, there are other elements of his analysis that deserve attention.

Lachmann stressed the role of financial markets. Lachmann insisted that "When left free of political intervention, the market grows institutions in response to challenges ... Among these institutions forward markets and the stock exchange call for our particular attention" (p67). This is a critical point. Neoclassical economists never tire of pointing out that general equilibrium require a complete set of markets, including forward markets. Lachmann thought of capitalism as an evolutionary system, and certain financial markets evolve to solve coordination problems. Of course, financial markets are incomplete. But what is the alternative?

In my own interpretation, Lachmann's insight into how financial markets evolve to solve coordination problems is his most important contribution. His insight into financial markets explains his discontent with general equilibrium analysis, as well as the primary advantages of the capitalist system over its alternatives. Capital and its Structure is a short and insightful book. More economists should read it, including more Austrians.

John Newton, who wrote the famous hymn Amazing Grace, said that Gurnall's original volume would be the one book he would want in addition to his Bible. Bell's devotional edition captures some of the best illustations and insights of Gurnall in a way that is enoyable and that will introduce you to the writings of this great Puritan Pastor. His understanding on Spiritual warfare is soundly Biblical and contrary to a lot of current titles that purport to be Biblical but are based on experience. Gurnall will Bless You!

Absolutely the most challenging book I have read this year! It has made me evaluate how I look at the things around me and how I interpret events in my life. I have been more transformed into the image of Christ because of this book and I highly reccommend it to anyone who is serious about dying to flesh and living for Christ.

In this age of Harry Potter, feel-good gospels, barking in the Spirit, demon warfare, and other spiritual silliness within our churches and without, William Gurnall is a welcome return to Biblical seriousness and a call to arms against the actual enemy on the actual battlefield: sin, and our own flesh.

For a solid, Biblical discussion on sin and spiritual warfare, "The Christian in Complete Armour", from which this devotional is excerpted, is without compare. The daily portions lose the context of the full work, but stand well enough on their own. That makes this devotional an ideal, daily revisiting for those who have read the full set. But for those new to Gurnall, or those ready to move from milk to meat, but wanting small, savory morsels, this devotional is perfect.

Though Mr. Gurnall's work is for everyone, his combat and military style will have particular appeal to men. (If you approach this book with that in mind, and you've been reading John Eldridge's books on "Christian manliness", repent and forget everything he said. Read this instead.)

This is absolute 6-star material compared to other devotionals, but I give it 4 stars compared to his full work, for an average of 5 stars. :)

Tiny Kline spent her entire life doing stunts. From youth to middle age, she worked with the circus, her love for which is apparent throughout the pages of her memoir. She continued doing iron jaw stunts, descending inclines at ridiculous speeds suspended only by her teeth, into old age and performed as Tinker Bell at Disneyland when she was in her 70s. By all accounts, Tiny Kline had a fascinating life. She really wrote two memoirs in an attempt to share that life with us. One contained mainly personal anecdotes, related to her work on the circus. The second mainly contained circus history and was stripped of these more intimate details. The editor, Janet M. Davis, combined the two to produce a memoir that is still Tiny's but in a form readers will be more eager to consume.

This book was a very educational experience. Circus history, while an interesting topic, is not something that I've ever learned in school and there don't seem to be many accessible books written on it. There is the fiction bestseller, Water for Elephants, which I read and loved earlier this year, but that's about all I've seen on my book radar. When this popped up on LT Early Reviewers, I knew that I simply must read it. And good choice by me; this is a terrific memoir. The combination of memoirs is brilliantly done and I never noticed a gap between Tiny's two styles of writing. It's fascinating to see how the circus changed over time, the insider's view of circus politics, and just how some performers climbed the career ladder faster than others. Tiny's ambition was tremendous and it's easy to see why she advances so quickly.

The book does read precisely as someone's account of their life. Tiny was not the best writer and it's evident at times that she had little training, but it never hampers this book, just makes the author more real, if that is possible. It reads like a letter written by a friend; conversational, easy tone. There were some nice touches put in by the editor, such as including photographs with Tiny's descriptions of some of her fellow performers, all bringing the circus to life. Tiny admits one lapse in her introduction; she included some fictional romances to make the book more "exciting", even though she never had a romantic interlude after her husband died shortly after their wedding. The fictional parts are obvious and only in one part of the book; I don't count this against it, especially as she admits their existence before the book even begins.

I'd definitely be recommending this book and if you're interested in circus history, you shouldn't miss it. I'm glad that I didn't!

These memoirs, brilliantly edited by Janet M. Davis, Ph.D are a wonderful seldom seen view of circus life, and the important roll that circus played in the 19th and 20th centuries in providing entertainment to the masses. I remember my dad talking about Tiny Kline when she made history in 1932 by crossing Times Square on a strung wire from the Edison Hotel (still there) to the roof of the Palace Theater, suspended by a fine wire with a bite plate attached. Such was her "Iron Jaw" act that she performed up to her 70's. For such a tiny little girl and woman, she proved to be a brave and wonderful athelete as she did so many other things in the circus. This book whetted my appetite and I subsequently ordered Dr. Davis's book, The Circus Age. Wonderful and interesting reading.

Norman L. Rosenberg

This is a really fascinating book..with great detail..on the circus life..gets below the surface.and takes you into the corners of this amazing underworld..Simply written..it rings with truth..