Bernstein Books

Becky Bernstein touches upon a couple topics- the central of which is love and the search for it, and the second, falling in love with a foreign country and making it your home. Expat women, especially those in Germany, grab this book. Her feelings for Berlin and how her childhood in New York never once hinted at a a future in Europe are something that any woman sitting in an apartment from far the country of her birth will understand, much like her frustrations in attemtping to navigate relationships with foreign men. The writing is fresh, funny, and personable, but the backstory is not nearly as developed as I would've liked- give me more details of her devling into the brave new world she found. All that aside though, this is a hip, funny, and charming book.

The story is happening a million times a day to everyone. Everyone could be Kirsten, Janett, Mary or you. The fun of those knowing Berlin and New York is guaranteed. So jump in the live of Becky Bernstein and share her efforts of diet and finding her true love. How would you have acted?

I only get to hike in the Trinity alps once a year, usuallyin August, and this is one of my favorite guides. Heck, I even read it in the dead of winter because it's so entertaining and well written. Bernstein has a keen sense of humor and an eye for the ridiculous and you'll find yourself laughing aloud at some of his more pithy commentary. There are a number of hiking guides relating to this region of California, but few that exceed this one in entertainment value alone. It's small enough to carry in your back, but meaty enough to read in your Lazy Boy in front of the fire.

I've traveled all over the world and one of the most beautiful natural settings I've seen is the Trinity alps. The mountains, the vegetation, flowers and mild summer climate make this a unique paradise. Hiking here is a sublime experience! If you're a dedicated hiker and have missed these mountains, please try and remedy this. You'll spend some of the best hours of your life hiking in this incredible place.

If you're a beginner, there are plenty of short treks for you, mostly clustered in the first one-third of the book. There are also a dozen moderate hikes and quite a few trail descriptions for streunous jaunts, all of these in the mountain areas. The descriptions of each trail is quite good and the driving desriptions to the trailheads is adequate (I haven't gotten lost yet from following their directions). I recommend this guide for everyone fortunate to hike in this beautiful locale.

Okay, here it is: if you're actually planning to get out and thoroughly explore the Trinity Alps, you want the most complete source of information, and refuse to buy more than one book, check out Wayne Moss's "The Trinity Alps Companion" instead. It's better organized, and more detailed in its road and trail descriptions. However, if you're like me, and enjoy "armchair hiking" almost as much as the real thing, you should really grab Mr. Bernstein's volume as well. Why, you say? Well, while Art's trail guide ain't perfect, it's more fun to read. His waggish sense of humor and eye for interesting if somewhat obscure facts (deer is the only native source of kosher food in the Alps, for example) spice up the trail narratives nicely. What the heck, if cost isn't an obstacle, buy both Moss's and Bernstein's guides. They complement each other nicely.

For diet club leader Ellie Bernstein life is just a bowl of cherries -- low calorie, of course, and occasionally with pits.

Ellie and her significant other, homicide detective Peter Miller, make a likeable couple. Among the off-center characters percolating through this story Peter is a tower of strength and good sense. Ellie is a walking, talking database of pop culture -- movies made, songs sung, books written. Peter listens with one ear, although nothing really gets past him.

The one time he leaves Ellie on her own, through no fault of his, she falls into the clutches of someone with murder in mind. How she saves herself is both endearing and funny, blood spatters notwithstanding

The story begins at a reception in Colorado Springs for artist Garrett Halliday whose wife, Heather, is a recluse due to facial disfigurement suffered in a fire. Halliday has made his reputation by painting her again and again, but with her face unmarred.

Center of attention at the reception is Dessert Song, a painting of a lion ogling a woman in a bathtub. And a killer lurks ...

Trouble follows Peter and Ellie to a ranch near Aspen where they hope for a stress-free week's vacation and a lot of quality romantic time. Fat chance. The story takes off in half a dozen directions.

There's a lot going on in this novel. It's like a cocktail party, with sexual overtones and dark undercurrents below a bubbly, shiny surface as people come and go, each with a private agenda.

By the time Ellie and Peter got settled in at the ranch, I could have used a Cast of Characters. Absent that, I designed my own hub-and-spoke wheel to keep track of events.

In Colorado Springs, Ellie Bernstein heads Weight Winners, a support group for people trying to lose the pounds. She and her lover homicide detective Peter Miller attend an art show displaying the works of renowned local artist Garrett Halliday, who Ellie posed for when she was kindly put Rubenesque. At the gala, Ellie learns that Garrett's wife Heather was badly burned in a suspicious fire that destroyed some of his paintings three years ago and rarely makes public appearances anymore.

Peter takes Ellie to the almost empty Snowmass Dude Ranch in Aspen for a week of R&R. However, their vacation is disturbed when the corpse of Garrett is found and Heather is missing. Unable to believe that Heather would kill her beloved spouse, Ellie gets involved only to learn that Rudy Kessler, who advertised the selling of a Halliday masterpiece, has been killed. If the culprit learns she is the model of one drawing that she also owns, she could be the next victim but she advertises anyway in the hope of baiting the killer.

CHAIN A LAMB CHOP TO THE BED is an intriguing amateur sleuth tale with elements of a police procedural to enhance the who-done-it. Ellie ignores Peter's advice, which is why he calls her Norrie short for Eleanor as much as she "ignores his advice". She cannot ignore the murder-disappearance of her friends because she cares too much so she decides to investigate, a character trait that is as endearing as it is dangerous. Readers gain some insight into the heroine especially her careful diet as she reflects back to her days of being much heavier. Though the mystery is slow to develop, fans will appreciate Ellie's escapades before, during and after her investigation.

Harriet Klausner

Bernstein is the author of a good many books and a good many scientific profiles for the New Yorker, a literary form that he claims to have invented. I'm not sure that I'd completely accept that- Berton Rouche's "Annals of Medicine" series for that magazine seem to have predated him- but that aside, Bernstein is still one of the best popular science writers around. He is a master of the New Yorker style, having been trained by that magazine's great editor William Shawn.

Bernstein also has a deep understanding of modern science missing from some of the modern writers of popular accounts, and he lets the story tell itself, rather than taking the lazy route of adding stylistic affectations to add interest to a poorly told story. His profiles of some of the greatest physicists of the modern era, like Mach, Bohr and Schroedinger, really clarify for the lay reader what it was about the accomplishments of these men that gave them their place in history.

Bernstein is one of that small set of people who are both scientists and have written for the New Yorker. This books is a collection of essays on scientists. In addition to to more 'regular' ones about Bohr, Einstein, Mach and Turing, there are stories about Edwin Land and Sonya Kowalewsky. The tale of how Tom Lehrer, Harvard math graduate student, actually got his songs to market caught me by surprise. And I had no idea Primo Levi had been in a concentration camp.

This book's focus is more on the people who make science than the actual science itself. It is not a flippant biography or collection of anecdotes by any means, but a solid (well --- as solid as you can be in twenty pages per person) well balanced description of various scientists. The author's science/writing experience allows him to avoid being condescending, bloated or abstruse. More than mere journalism, this book gives a real flavor of the lives of scientists.

We used this set to fulfill homeschool high school Health requirement. It was easy to read and follow. I recommend this for a student who merely needs the health requirement, and is not interested in a health industries career. I would say the reading level is at about 6th grade.

I previewed this book while substituting in an elementary class. Neither too elementary nor too difficult, can be tailored to children from eight to fifteen years. My own second grade class will be doing a unit on nutrition and I also wanted to introduce the idea of good hygiene. This book has units on all the necessary practices to ensure a healthy body and mind, plus there are test questions at the end of each chapter. A must for elementary teachers and great for parents.

Great survey of tax ideas for 2002. None better.

This guide is simply great and very helpful. Complete and precise includes all the needed tips and tools for saving a max.

Drucker is undeniably THE authority on how the visual word gets displayed and used within the book form today. Thus this collection of interviews, essays, poetic reflections, etc is broad-reaching in its reflections both on others work and her own origins as a poet and printbook-maker. It is a book which makes her reflections palpable, personable and inspires and invites the reader to participate in the process of asking "where now?" concerning our next step in Figuring the Word withing the book's frame. A great pair to her much headier, scholarly book The Visible Word.

I really enjoyed these essays, which range from theory to personal reflection. When discussing specific projects that she has been involved with, it's fascinating they way you are drawn in to feel like you're seeing the behind-the-scenes of the creation process. The treatments of issues of theory were cogent, and well presented. I confess that I dog-eared many a page. The moments of personal reflection were at times almost too personal to bear...not what you might expect from a collection of essays, but welcome to this reader, nonetheless.

It is somewhat a morose sense of timing that a new edition of this book just came out. The authors write what is probably the definitive study of the monetary factors behind the great depression, and hopefully, provide enough information to avoid a repeat. As should be evident by the subject, a highly technical book, even for someone with a background in economics, not light bedtime reading, but well worth reading for someone with an interest in the subject.

In these days, in which we are discussing and fighting over the issue of the financial crisis, nothing is better than this chapter of Milton Friedman "Banking History" which reviews carefully and seriously the causes resulting in The Great Contraction 1929-1933, and sent the world into the greatest depression of modern times. Men who do not know history are bound to repete the errors of the past. We hope it will not happen due to Dr. Friedman excelente study

Spending time in Arlene Bernstein's garden is an act of love. Her journey through love,pain,planting,marriage,immense grief and joy conspire to make the reader at once more in touch with both the earth and themselves. Her book nourishes and heals.. Her visual imagery of the gorgeous Napa Valley hills is matched by a nurturing insight into our most basic selves. I was moved and awed by her journey. This is time well spent.

This little book--its 200 pages, in an attractive format, take at most two hours to read--is about surviving and growing as a healthy adult, in spite of--or perhaps because of--the obstacles, even tragedies, that occur in ordinary lives.

It is written by a woman who bore and lost two children, and who describes coming to terms not only with her childlessness, but also with the challenges of maintaining a loving relationship with her partner,whose ways of being and of coping with grief are different from hers.

She is a gardener, and her descriptions of working in a garden, and learning from vegetables and flowers about how to cooperate with nature instead of fighting it, and how to live in the present and feel the joy of the moment, are vivid and direct. Her account of creating a garden and of simultaneously learning self-acceptance are often beautiful, and always convincing. The tone is of simplicity and candor; of a voice which is always honest, unpretentious and generous.Here is a typical example, about pruning old grape vines:

" . . . the shapes of the older plants are unorthodox. There is no way to use pruning rules on them. This gives me great freedom, with no judgements attached of right or wrong, too much wood or too little. I give myself permission to stand before each plant, quiet and empty of thought, until I get a visceral sensation, almost an invitation to join in a dance. Then,slowly at first, I'll cut out the fruiting canes from last year . . . I wait for a quickening, as I and the vine communicate, as one shoot or another catches my eye and I accept the invitation or not . . ."

The overdone term "grounded" applies here, and is not intended as a pun. It is because the author really has worked hard in the garden, and because her carrots and grapevines are so solidly known and described, that the undertone of mysticism which runs through the book never runs away with it. She seems to have learned, from meditation and study combined with hard physical work, an acceptance of what is and an appreciation of what can be that, in its modest way, succeeds for the reader in showing how, in an ordinary life, the spiritual and the material can be fused.

I found this book to be quite interesting. I especially like the survey that defines what 'color' you are, in terms of one's potential career interests and styles. I was a BLUE-BLUE. It seemed accurate for myself, but others that have taken the test, have not always agreed.

Anyhow, I didn't give the book a 5, because I don't think a book can really tell you what you should do. Career books are at most, good guides. Mostly, you'll need to do a lot of research and soul searching before you can find a job that is suited to you. But, I can say that this book helped to put more perspective on the job hunt. As a recent entrant to the workforce and still discovering what I "want to be," this book helped me to better understand the things that I should be looking for in my next job/career: organizational culture, level of interaction with others, types of skills, etc.

The color analysis is based on a tool developed by Birkman. You can basically find everything in this book on the Princeton Review's site, www.review.com. If you have access to the Internet, this is probably the better and cheaper route. The information is almost the same, with the exception with exercises on recalling some past memories (this is the same exercise that is touted in "What Color is your Parachute?").

One thing that I did not like about the book was that it was too restrictive. Although the colors are guides, it's easy to get stuck into thinking that because you're a certain color, you should stay away from certain jobs. Also, I had hoped that there would be more job profiles. But, I guess you can just about find more job profiles on other websites like.

Happy hunting!

I am a big fan of the Princeton Review guides on colleges. I own several of them. And, I refer to them constantly. My daughter is in high school, and we use this college information almost on a daily basis. Now, she is looking one step beyond and considering different career paths.

I spent an hour doing research on career guides at Amazon. I also did more research by browsing in the best physical bookstore I know off (Stacey's in San Francisco). After conducting this data gathering, I came up with a clear winner, this Princeton Review book. There is just so much more information, more concisely, and clearly presented than in any of the other career guides I browsed through.

This career guide answered all the basics questions we had on this vast subject. The Birkman Career test as outlined near the introduction is excellent. Just to verify the accuracy of this test I took it myself. And, it was spot on. I know it will be a great help for my daughter too.

The book describes in detail about 230 different professions or careers. For each profession, the 2004 edition discloses detailed salary information (at the start, after 5 years, after 10 years). It indicates what kind of journals such professionals read. It describes the requirements to enter the field, what it takes to build a foundation in a small section called "Paying Your Dues." It also discloses what kind of careers you can easily transfer your skills into. For instance, an economist can become a statistician, banker, financial analyst, or journalist, among other professions.

At the top of each right-handed page, the book also has four little icons that quickly let you know info about: pay, working hours, educational requirement, and contribution to society associated with a given profession. The book also gives you realistic lifestyle expectation over the next two, five, and ten years for each profession.

Just as its college guides, the Princeton Review packs in an amazing amount of information in just two pages. This time it is not about a specific college, but instead a specific profession. I would think that be more difficult. But, Princeton Review handled it just as elegantly. I strongly recommend this book for any one interested in the subject.