Berry Books

I just finished Fireheart and it was very good! If you enjoy intelligent women, action, intrigue, and a little mystery thrown in for good measure, you will certainly love Fireheart. I especially loved the main character, Amanda, as she is a no-nonsense heroine who definitely doesn't need saving but instead saves just about everyone she meets. The peripheral characters are also very well drawn and everyone comes across as full-blooded and real - another very endearing trait of the book as you feel you know these people. I hope you will give Fireheart a try because if you do, you will be taking a wonderful ride through colonial history. I can't wait for the sequel either.

I bought this book because a friend wrote it and I felt obligated to help her out with the sales. Once I started reading the book, I could not put it down. It is well written, and very interesting. I read 2 to 3 books a week and I would put it up against any of the well known authors. I can't wait until the sequel comes out.

This story takes place in the Old South and in England at the time of the American Revolution. In this very well written novel, S.J. Berry, gives a vibrancy of life and identity to her characters in a fascinating period. The pages turn easily in Fireheart and there is never a good place to stop reading.

Rynn Berry's Food for the Gods does a remarkable job of tracing the vegetarian link in the major religions of Hindiusm, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam, and Catholicism, but also to the relatively small but intriguing non-violent religions of India's Jainism and the British Order of the Cross. The history of religion will never look the same after reading this book.

This book is a remarkable insight into dietary religious morals and philosophy.....it's a 'cookbook' for the inquisitive mind.

If you are a person of faith, this book gives an easy to understand history of how the history of your particular religious faith has been impacted by diet and moral choices of eating habits throughout the ages. Every person of faith restles with matters of principles and moral philosophy....that's why this book is important for you.

If you are not a person of faith but you are intrigued by the issue of a vegan / vegetarian diet and an ethically compassionate life and how this may effect others around you who do follow a religious lifestyle / belief, then it is a very worthwhile book to read and get familiar with. I constantly use this book as a resource in my writing.

How much do you know about world religions and veganism? How much do you know about your OWN religion and love of animals? This book will educate you quickly about most religions and the basic tenet of all which is to treat all life as sacred. Quite an interesting read...

A lovely yet disturbing record of endangered wildlife and habitats from Madagascar to Hawai'i. DePonte opted to shoot in black and white to starkly depict the fragility of these lands, toning the prints cappuccino to further suggest these worlds are disappearing into memory. Her pictures are accompanied by haunting poetic narratives by Berry, who joined DePonte on the trip.
There are images of great beauty - a tiny lemur, head in sharp focus, body blurred, depicting nature's fierce will to survive. A young woman floating in water through a track of sunlight, the reflection of a cottony cloud wafting towards her. But there are also photos that echo the ecological alarms of the text, such as a rancher marching skinny-haunched cattle across a burned-out Amazon landscape. Then there's DePonte's stylistic innovation - nudes who "are posed to blend into environment to show how small and vulnerable we are compared to Mother Nature, who will lash back at us." Women crouch in submission or emerge from the rocks. A male nude grasps a huge tree like a newborn clinging to its mother, to the words "Embrace this miracle, grow strong within earth." Image and verse suggest we are one with nature and in losing nature we destroy ourselves.

One of the most insightful, beautiful books I have ever seen. The photographs are haunting and captivating at the same time. This is a wonderful gift to help educate on the demise of the rainforest. Looking through this book, one journeys to places where scientist warn that civilized man may first comprehend the most tragic loss of living creatures since the demise of the dinosaurs. Images and verse strengthen our connection to Gaia, Earth's natural mantle, while the fate of that living fabric remains uncertain.

Global Art In Action, Inc. published this book to increase public-awareness of the current ecological crisis, to help re-establish human ties to the Earth, and to raise funds needed for Conservation International's "Campaign to save the Hotspots".

I'm glad that I bought this book and highly recommend it.

Although unpaginated, the book contains over 100 beautiful photographs from Brazil, Hawaii, and Madagascar.

Catches the feeling for the "primitive" peoples still existant in the world.

A touch of todays language somehow gets the point across a little more....and sometimes paints a better picture. I am a youth pastor and use it not only for my lessons (in addition to my NIV) but find that I like to read it for my own personal growth as well. It is a very appropriate and close translation. I bought a load for my youth group. I wish there was more of this translation around and still on the shelf.

This is a Bible written with youthful readers in mind. It is written in modern English and in paragraph form that kids are used to. It helps them to put their religious beliefs into action. There is an index that allows the kids to look up topics of interest (ie. dating, drinking, popularity) and to find out what the Word of God has to say about it.

The first thing a teenager sees when they look at a Bible is how long and boring it is. Actually, that is not true. I once thought the same thing until I bought the God's Word for Students Bible. This book inspires a close relationship with God by including 365 devotionals (one for everyday of the year). When I got the Bible and began to do the devotions, I found myself trusting Jesus more and more. Reading His word is a key to a successful walk with Him.

The translation is also extremely easy to read and is written clearly, so you arent' overwelmed by the looks of it. It is a "must-have" for any on-fire-for-God teen.

The book DOES NOT tell you how to operate the software that comes with it, it's more of a bible for ANY type astrophotography which happens to include the best darn software for image processing you could find. Just don't confuse the two. Even if you have image processing software now you NEED this book!

As others have mentioned, this is not a manual for the well-regarded AIP4WIN software. It is much more than that. It explains the theory behind the software in terms of the processing of astronomical images. In that respect you are going to run into much of the same material you would encounter in Gonzales and Woods' Digital Image Processing, just from a different perspective. It would probably be good if you already know the basics of image processing from a book like Gonzalez and Woods before reading this one. This book's primary aim is not explaining DIP, but explaining how it is used to perform the processing of astronomical images. The following is the table of contents of the book and each chapter's summary.

Basic imaging: How the light that falls on your CCD becomes an image. Covers image formation, cameras, telescopes, detectors, sensor geometry, image capture, field of view, and angluar coverage.

Counting Photons: "Astronomy is about counting photons...." Covers signal, noise, the signal-to-noise ratio, the Poisson and Gaussian distributions and why they matter, making better pictures by summing images, and how dark frames and flat frames effect the signal and noise in your images.

Digital Image Formats: Covers the file formats that astronomers use, including FITS, TIFF, BMP, and JPEG. Learn file format basics, how your image data is arranged inside the file on your computer's hard disk.

Imaging Tools: All about sensors, optics, cameras, and telescopes. Explains how to calculate the field of view and resolution of your system, telescope optics for imagers, auxiliary optics, mounts, drives, tracking, filters, and how to recognize and correct common equipment problems.

Imaging Techniques: Good equipment is just part of the story. Covers the techniques that experienced imagers use to obtain high-quality images. Includes polar alignment, good guiding, critical focus, correct exposure, darks and flats, light boxes, and special considerations for DSLR cameras.

Image Calibration: Examines the details of image calibration. All about bias, dark noise, flat-fielding, standard and scalable darks, cosmic rays, making master dark frames, flats, standard calibration protocols, and defect mapping and correction.

Image Analysis: Locked within the numerical values that make up a calibrated CCD image is a staggering amount of information. Covers pixel coordinates, pixel value, image statistics, the image histogram, feature analysis, the centroid, distances, and image profiles.

Measuring CCD Performance: How to measure the performance of your CCD camera. Discusses goals in measuring CCD performance, how to shoot test images, and the determination of bias level, dark current, gain, linearity, and readout noise.

Astrometry: Asteroid hunters measure the postions of new-found objects using astrometry. Covers the theory behind finding right ascension and declination from a CCD image, practical astrometry, and the uses of astrometry.

Photometry: Amateur observers now work side by side with professional astronomers to measure the variations of variable stars, supernovae, asteroids, and comets using the CCD to capture precise measures of brightness.

Spectroscopy: An emerging area for amateus astronomers brought to you by the CCD camera. Covers spectra and spectrographs, gratings, prisms, slit- and slitless systems, and the properties and meaning of stellar spectra.

Geometric Transforms: Covers translation, rotation, scaling, flipping, cropping, floating, and resampling. Demystifies the basic geometric operations used in astronomical image processing.

Point Operations: Learn how software converts the pixel values your CCD camera captures into the sparkling images you see in popular magazines and amateur websites. Remapping, transfer functions, linear, log, and exponential scalings explained. Covers endpoint specification and histogram specification.

Linear Operators: All about one of the most useful tools in the amateur astronomer's digital toolbox. Describes how digital convolution performs crispening, sharpening, smoothing. Learn about low-pass and high-pass kernels, Sobel, Kirsch, and Prewitt operators, and that most useful of linear tools: the unsharp mask.

Non-Linear Operators: Non-linear operators perform useful services like cleaning up noisy images. Cover rank-order processes, the median filter, local adaptive sharpening, noise filters, and morphological operators.

Image Operations: Multi-image operations are the basic tool for making superior astro-images. Covers image math, median-combine stacking, image registration, blinking, and track-and-stack image summing.

Images in Frequency Space: Unlocks the mysteries of the Fourier Transform and image processing in the spatial frequency domain. These powerful techniques used by profession astronomers are now accessible to amateurs

Wavelets: Explores the hottest new image processing and restoration techniques. Covers the wavelet transform, the inverse wavelet transform, spatial filtering, the wavelet noise filter, and iterative filtering techniques.

Deconvolution: Deconvolution attempts to restore images degraded by a turbulent atmosphere, poor telescope optics, and tracking errors. Discusses algorithms used to sharpen Hubble Space Telescope images, how they work, and how amateurs can use them.

Building Color Images: You've seen fantastic astro-images on the web and in popular magazines and books. Learn how astronomers capture and build color images from multiple exposures through different color filters. Covers the colors of astronomical objects, luminace, chrominance, color space, white balance, G2V stars, RGB and LRGB color image capture.

Processing Color Images: The digital SLR camera has done much to bring color imaging to the average amateur astronomer. Explains the Bayer array, color image bit depth, noise, dark current, vignetting, calibration, image stacking, and luminace enhancement techniques

I participated in a beta test of the photometry software program and proof-read a draft of this excellent book. The book alone is worth the price, but the amazing value is the powerful software package included, AIP4WIN. It does so many image processing tasks- photometry, astrometry, spectroscopy, color pictures, image sharpening - with several deconvolution routines. This is much more than a toy (but you certainly can have fun with it) as it supports routine image processing of hundreds of images per night. The software alone is worth several times the price of the book. Anyone interested in putting a CCD camera to serious work - or serious fun - will certainly get their money's worth with this package! Berry and Burnell have a really excellent effort here.

Wow, Wendell Berry wrote this book when he was only 34. At the Wisconsin Book Festival, Rick Bass said it was his favorite Wendell Berry book. It is an amazing chronicle of a man looking honestly at his beliefs and his culture regarding racism and trying to wipe away the cob webs and face the real life effects on blacks and whites alike.

This book was published in 1970 and I don't think our culture has yet faced the "wound" as Berry tries to in this book as illustrated by the reaction to Barack Obama's "Racism" speech. By chance the next book I picked up to read is a compilation of essays about the state of America, "These United States: Original Essays by Leading American Writers on Their State Within the Union" edited by John Leonard. The first essay is by Diane McWhorter as she discusses these same issues in present day Alabama. It is subtitled "The Past is Still Not Past". I highly recommend it as a continuation of the issues discussed in "The Hidden Wound".

It's hard to believe Berry first published this essay in 1970. It is still a cutting edge exploration of the way in which racism is a disaster for white people. He writes beautifully and movingly about the self interest of white people to end racism and the deep life changes necessary to do it.

Wendell Berry, English professor at the University of Kentucky and farmer of his family's farm in Kentucky, comes to grips with the burden of being the descendent of slave owners. Like so many white Americans, he wants racism to end and does not want to pass either the guilt or the racism on to the next generations. Here he tries to address the many complex issues of racism in this country. People of all races will be engaged by his fine writing and sensitivity. You might want to look at some of his other books as well. Fidelity is a series of gracious short stories exploring the relationships between individuals and families in a small Kentucky town called Port William. He has picked up this theme in several other books as well. He is well known for his poetry which is published in collections and in another one of my favorites, Sabbath.

This pleasingly- illustrated tale should be a staple for a kid's bookshelf. Nice break from Disney and Spongebob and a sweet, satisfying story.

A superbly illustrated and wonderfully written Romanian folk tale, worthy of a larger, international audience. A great hit with my 4 year old son!

Beginning with the middle word in its title, The Impudent Rooster contains language that challenges, entertains, and doesn't talk down to children. The rooster's poor master is "humiliated" by his poverty; the scolded rooster "lurched" through the gate; he meets a nobleman who had "amassed" his wealth dishonestly. The rich words are matched by detailed folk art which perfectly captures the beauty and flavor of rural Romania, a country I lived in for nine years. The rooster even crows in Romanian-"Cucurigu!" This book is a great cultural experience and a wholesome, fun read, and that's why I'm buying copies as gifts for friends and family.

I recently reread this delightful book and enjoyed it all over again. It was one of the first memoirs about Italy I read, but it has held its appeal. It is unique in that it is from an involved father's perspective--less romantic than others and more realistic. While it's lovely to swoon over the glowing descriptions of Tuscany from the patio of the finally restored abode, drinking homemade wine, it's also great to get the nitty-gritty of day-to-day life in the city. Tim Parks's slightly acerbic view is funny and down to earth and gives a crystal clear eyed interpretation of Italian life from an Englishman's perspective that makes you feel right at home there. Well worth the read, and reread.

This book was required reading for an Italian Culture course I'm taking. What wisdom my professor has shown in assigning this book! In addition to gaining valuable insight into contemporary Italian culture, I was also very moved by this story of an Englishman raising his half-Italian children in Italy. He observes how Italian his children are and how early they recognize that he is not one of them. He explores such features of Italian culture as Mother Worship (Mammismo) and the curious fact that this most Catholic country of Europe also has Western Europe's lowest birth rate. All Italians talk about the "sacrifice" of having children. To have more than one child is madness from their point of view because Italian children must have the best everything for the entire lives of their parents. The parents "sacrifice" so that their children can have the best schools, the best toys, the best clothing. The parents pretty much support them their entire lives, even buying their houses for them when they finally leave home and marry. He sees the blatant sexism of the Italian culture wherein gender roles are inculcated into the children from the cradle. The Italians see something wrong with his giving his son piano lessons and letting his daughter participate in "boys'" activities. (There is also a certain schadenfreude at a someone's having no male offspring, especially if that someone is your landlord.) But he endures it all good-humoredly and takes great delight in watching his children grow up "Italian." He takes them on walks and bike rides where they discover shrines to forgotten saints in the middle of the wilderness. He takes them to the beach where the kids get an unexpected introduction to the facts of life when they come upon the lifeguard and his girlfriend in flagrante delicto behind some rocks. The book is very funny as well as insightful. I laughed many times throughout the book and was unexpectedly moved in the oddest places, such as when their children find out that it's really their parents who bring their Christmas presents and not "Santa Lucia," the local version of Santa Claus.

But the real star of the book is gloriously beautiful and ageless Italy, so gorgeous you just want to gasp. I loved this book and would recommend it to anyone who is a parent and/or loves Italy. Four and a half stars rounded up to five.

This is the second time I've purchased this book. I enjoyed it so much (along with the sequel, Italian Neighbors) that I loaned it to my friends and it was never returned. An entertaining account of the experience of marrying into an Italian family, with all its internecine conflicts and quirks, and moving to Italy with all its governmental and religious idiosyncrasies. Well written and funny. It doesn't take an Italian to recognize the eternal struggle to find a place in a strange society....and the Italians can be very strange.

I bought the book as a gift for one of my daughter's classrooms. The teacher was so happy to get the book that I decided to read it before giving it to her. I loved it. My girls loved it. Its a great story about Michigan - where we live and where the author lives as well. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

This book has lovely pictures as well as a captivating story. It chronicles a mother and young daughter's summer of picking and canning wild berries to save money to buy a much needed coat for the little girl. It heralds education and hard work as something important, worth striving after. The pictures are very true to nature and it includes the names of plants, birds, and wildlife in the story. The metaphors are beautiful. Your children will learn about nature, grammar, and character while reading a fun story.

My granddaughter (a city girl) and I snuggled
on the couch to read Jam and Jelly ... it was
a precious time to see the beautiful illustrations
and read the story of a family working together
well. Their hard work was more like an adventure
than a chore, and encouraged exploration and
respect. My granddaughter and I will use this
book for years to come as part of our bonding
and love for God's beauty in creation. The
hype in today's world seemed to fade away as Trisha
and I shared some precious time together exploring
with the author (Gloria Whelan) and illustrator
(Gijsbert van Frankenhuysen).

It's funny how the mind works...I can't remember where I put my keys half the time but I still remember, over thirty years later, the first time I saw and issue of Kamandi. We were in my best friend Barry's loft, which we built in the rafters of his parent's garage. We were probably 11 or 12 years old and we generally spent our Saturday nights during the summer camping out in that loft and reading the comics we had just bought that week. Barry was mainly a DC guy while I was a Marvel fan. It worked great since we rarely spent our hard-earned quarters buying the same comic and would share each other's books. When I saw Kamandi, my first thought was that it looked like Thor with out the helmet. I wasn't a big fan then but with age comes maturity.

As I began collecting Silver Age Comics my appreciation for Jack Kirby's art grew. Today, I consider Kamandi to be Kirby's last GREAT work in comics. Jack worked for many years after leaving Kamandi but even the most ardent Kirby fan would have to admit that by the 80's, the "King" had lost a step or two. But Kamandi was Jack's baby...he wrote, penciled, and even edited the title, with Mike Royer and D. Bruce Berry handling the inking chores. Kamandi was a post apocalyptic title, heavily influenced by films such as Planet of the Apes. In this future, animals have become intelligent and humans are considered the wild beasts. Tribes of talking tigers, apes, lions, dogs, and more, all vie for supremacy while humans are not unlike cattle.

Kamandi is an oddity, intelligent, and able to use technology, he is feared and hunted by the intelligent animals. Kamandi Archives Volume 2 collects issues # 11 - 20 of the original series, all in glorious re-mastered color and looking better than ever. Kamandi's initial adventure has him found adrift in the sea by a band of leopard pirates and sold to the Sacker Corporation. Sacker run an arena that combines racing beasts with gladiatorial combat. Kamandi frees a giant insect known as "the devil' and looking like a mutated grasshopper. The devil will be his mount in the contest in a winner take all battle.

In issues #15 - 18, Kamandi and his tiger companions are captured by the Ape tribe who, in a twist of irony, perform scientific experiments on their human test subjects. Kamandi will have to somehow rally the humans to overthrow their captors and free themselves.

Crazy characters? You bet! Jack was letting his imagination run free. There's a lot of inside jokes in the book, such as references to Watergate that might be lost on younger readers but will evoke some chuckles from older fans. Jack was at his best with his dynamic action scenes and there's action aplenty in this book. Kamandi is a great piece of 1970's nostalgia and a book that is truly different than anything else produced during the era.

It is a great treat to see re-read this stories from my boyhood and incredible to see the concepts and ideas from Jack Kirby's mind. Some stories a little dated, but keeping in mind when they were written still a great ride.

One of the best of the DC Archives series, Kamandi is the crowing achievement of Jack Kirby during his 70s tenure at DC. As expected from Mr. Kirby, the stories are jam packed with action - but unlike Kirby's other DC work, there is plenty of time out for touching moments and character development. Volume 2 features stories which depart further from the Planet of the Apes like premise featured in Volume 1, though occasionaly borrowing from other period films.