Blair Books

Lookout towers used to be places where rangers could view the forests and spot any problems. Today, they are open to anyone who wishes to visit them. "Hiking North Carolina's Lookout Towers" is a guide for hikers who want to put a destination into their hikes that ends with a great view of the surrounding landscape. An ideal pick for any hiking enthusiast, "Hiking North Carolina's Lookout Towers" is highly recommended for community library travel collections.

Peter Barr has done an outstanding job in combining fire lookout towers, their history, and their current status along with the traditional hiking information. Lots of maps and photos! Peter brings out the plight of the abandoned historic structures and makes a plea for help in saving them! This is a great book for anyone hiking in Western North Carolina or anyone wanting to go there. Even if you hadn't particularly wanted to go there, if you're interested in lookouts and hiking, "Hiking North Carolina's Lookout Towers" will make you want to! A must for fire lookout enthusiasts or anyone interested in learning more about them!

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

I just receiced a copy of Blair MacKenzie Blake's book IJYNX & am thoroughly impressed with it. It is a collection of hypnotic Burroughsesque poetry with a Thelemic tinge that opens with quotes from Crowley's Liber CCXX & Liber LI(the source for the title of the book)...the focus of the poems seem, for the most part, to concentrate on the use of sex magick to induce(or harness) endrogenous production of certain psychotropic alkaloids - of coarse, he could be using the obscure subject of 'sex magick' to explain the even more obscure techniques of engrogenous tryptamine production - either way, I highly recommend it.

L-L-L-L-L,

616

Love is the law, love under will.

Mr. Blakes IJYNX is as ingenious and as complex as the title of the book. A satanic sonnet filled mystery that is as engaging asit is thoughtful. Some lines are as beautiful as thoughts inthe rain. Others are as dark as a knife's promise.

Being a horror author myself with four novels under me,Im always perplxed by articulation of others words. Mr.Blake has truly opened my mind. I found out through the "TOOL" website ( best band in the world) that this book was available. Low and behold, not is this only available, but answers many riddles to the soul and skull.

I recomend this book to all my fans and friends....

In The Footsteps Of Robert E. Lee by Civil War history buff Clint Johnson is both a comprehensive travel guide to many historical sites connected to the Civil War Southern general Robert E. Lee, as well as a collection of stories that reveal the importance each site had with regard to Lee's character. From Harpers Ferry in West Virginia to the famous court house at Appomattox, In The Footsteps Of Robert E. Lee is a comprehensive, "user friendly" guidebook filled with the most fascinating bits of historical trivia. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in the career of this amazingly skilled Civil War general and memorable historical figure.

Armchair historians and civil war enthusiasts, it's again time to arise from your La-Z-Boy recliners and hit the Civil War trail. This time you will follow in the footsteps of Marse Roberts from his birth through his early days in the army to visiting the White House in 1869 when he payed a brief visit to President Grant.

With 11 states, Washington D.C. and the brief inclusion of sites in Mexico you will need to spend several weeks going from site to site. However, the author breaks down the trips by state and gives excellent directions that will keep even the novice historian from loosing his way. You will be taken to several larger, well-known sites in West Virginia and Virginia as well as many smaller sites within these states and distant states such as Texas, Missouri and Florida.

Many have been to Sharpsburg, Manassas or perhaps South Mountain but it's doubtful that few have made it Stratford Hall where Lee was born. Therefore, it's fitting that the book starts out at Stratford Hall and gives brief insight into the life and lack of homeownership by Lee. From his birth in 1807 to his death in 1870, he never owned a single place of residence. He slept at his parents' home, army barracks, his wife's inherited house, and several homes borrowed from individuals during and after the war. He never paid out of pocket for any property on which he resided.

The research within these pages is top notch and gives the reader some excellent side bar material to whet his or her appetite for more on Robert E. Lee. The descriptions are concise and to the point and give just enough detail to allow the reader to understand how the specific location played a key role in shaping young Lee or perhaps how it effected his overall battle strategy in his later years. The accounts are well done and not overly detailed giving the average reader a nice foundation for a beginning study on Lee. The chapters are well laid out, state by state, but in order to keep this data from filling several volumes it does not include every little site associated with Lee. Not to worry, the author chose wisely and the selected material flows quite nice.

In going through this work the reader will enjoy his or her journey into Lee's past with stops along the way at several key historic areas. This is not a paperback for the hard-nosed historian, but well-done research for those interested in following in "The Footsteps of Robert E. Lee". Mr. Johnson has done it again and I highly recommend this book!

Every college-level collection strong in either Middle Eastern Studies or Middle Eastern art must have ISLAMIC CALLIGRAPHY: it's a specialty item for the serious holding which offers the first reference work on Arabic script. Calligraphy is one of the foundation arts of Islamic culture and has been a primary method of artistic expression from the 7th century to modern times, so it well deserves its own book and is anything but the 'esoteric art' Westerners might believe. Over 150 color illustrations and over a hundred black and white details come from dated examples to provide insights on everything from construction and history to identifying forgeries and understanding differing styles. An essential key to understanding Islamic arts and civilization, this reference is not to be missed.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Table of Contents

PART I: INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1: Arabic Script: Its Role and Principles
A. The importance of writing in Islamic culture
B. Principles of Arabic script
C. The Koranic Text

Chapter 2: Materials
A. Supports
B. Special papers
C. Pens and pen cases
D. Inks and inkwells

PART II: THE DEVELOPMENT OF ARABIC SCRIPT IN EARLY ISLAMIC TIMES

Chapter 3: The Standardization of Arabic Script
A. The origins of Arabic script
B. The development of Arabic script
C. The evolution of a calligraphic style

Chapter 4: Early Manuscripts of the Koran
A. Physical characteristics
B. Methodologies for dating
C. Considerations for further study

PART III: THE PREEMINENCE OF ROUND SCRIPTS IN THE EARLY MIDDLE PERIOD

Chapter 5: The Adoption of Round Styles
A. Round book script
B. The new style of broken cursive
C. Broken cursive and Ibn Muqla
D. The standardization of naskh and thuluth under Ibn al-Bawwab
E. What caused the canonization of round scripts in the ninth century?

Chapter 6: The Diversification of Round Scripts
A. The stylization of broken cursive
B. Other round scripts
C. Towards a codification of round scripts
D. Pairs of text scripts
E. Maghribi script

PART IV: THE EMERGENCE OF REGIONAL STYLES IN THE LATER MIDDLE PERIOD

Chapter 7: Calligrpahy in Iran and its Environs under the Mongols and Turkomans
A. The Six Pens under the Ilkhanids and Jalayirids
B. The Six Pens under the Timurids and Turkomans
C. The Hanging Scripts

Chapter 8: Rectilinear and Curvilinear Scripts in Egypt and Syria under the Mamluks
A. Rectilinear scripts
B. Curvilinear scripts
C. Hybrid scripts

Chapter 9: Other Styles and Centers
A. Anatolia
B. India
C. The Maghrib

PART V: DYNASTIC STYLES IN THE AGE OF EMPIRES

Chapter 10: The Safavids, the Qajars, and their Contemporaries in Iran and Central Asia
A. Refinement of the Six Pens
B. Refinement of the hanging scripts
C. Pictorial writing

Chapter 11: The Ottomans in Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Eastern Mediterranean
A. The Canonization of naskh as text script Training, sources, and materials
B. The Canonization of thuluth as display script
C. The Hanging scripts

Chapter 12: Other styles and centers
A. The Mughals and their contemporaries in India
B. The Indian Ocean
C. The Maghrib
D. Sub-Saharan Africa

PART VI: THE MANY FACES OF ISLAMIC CALLIGRAPHY IN MODERN TIMES

Chapter 13: From traditional styles to calligraphic art and design
A. Traditional styles
B. Printing, typography, and computer graphics
C. Calligraphic art

Bibliography

... The recipes are grouped by chapter for each of the Jewish holidays. I've made many of the recipes in this book and they have all been outstanding. These are flavorful recipes that have been handed down in both of the author's families. This book is a treasure.

This book is an excellent guide for the newly married Jewish bride or groom. It is not only a cookbook, but it also explains the holidays and traditions. Besides recipes, it also provides sample menus to give you an idea what should be served at a particular holiday. I have had this book for many years and still refer to it every holiday. It would make a great shower present (along with pots and pans) to initiate the Jewish bride or groom (whoever does the cooking!) It's easy to understand and the recipes are very good!

This book was great! I bought it used from this site and the book was wonderful. Katie and Sabrina are my two favorites and this book didn't disappoint me. I recommend everyone should read it.

I liked this book very much. I love every Girl Talk book I have ever read. I am still trying to find more books. Well, this book was interesting. It was about Katie Campbell and her friends volunteering for a youth program. Katie, her crush, Scottie Silver, and her stepbrother, Michel, are teaching young kids the basics of playing ice hockey. Katie is looking forward to the team's first scrimage, but she ends up in the hospital due to a serious health problem.

I have a passion for Amazon's listamanias and so you'd-like-to-guides (lists and guides that suggest books or CD for people to check out) and it was on such a list that I first learned about this book. The person who wrote that listamania was so enthusiastic about it that I went to check out the product page, and the one review there was so good (written by the same person I suspect) that even though it sounded a bit like a romance novel I had to purchase this for myself and read it. At the time I did not notice it was a translated novel-had I, I probably would not have bought it, having had difficulty with them in the past.

From the very first sentence of this book I knew I would love it. This is a wonderful charming, funny and very cute, although it manages to be heavy and dramatic and historical at the same time, book. Just the way it is written is adorable and charming and almost reminded me of the way "The Princess Bride" is written. This is also in no way a romance novel.

This is a story about Lace. It starts out with Judy Perdriel, a nearly 17 year old lacemaker who has been having a romantic relationship with Louise-Guillaume, a minor nobleman who makes up songs about the glories of war and sings them in the market place of Alencon, France, where the novel takes place. Louise essentially is completely detached from everything in life except his music and going to war and cares nothing for Judy or his other mistresses. He doesn't care or even notice when Judy gives birth to a child. Because she violated one of the lacemaking rules she has to leave the country or be deported and so the child is taken by her blind mother and raised for a short time in the poorhouse in secret and then given to a foster mother. While Judy leaves the country for Germany she dies, and the rest of the book is devoted to her daughter, Gilonne.

Gilonne grows up with a foster mother, though her uncle Mathew helps raise her and she spends a lot of time with her four old women, the three friends of her grandmother and her grandmother who hid her in the poorhouse when she was a baby. At the age of five she begins her apprenticeship in lacemaking, and at the age of 14 she learns who her father is and heads over to his completely run-down estate with her best friends.

Though there are two romantic plots in this book, the first of which I did not like because it was one of those love at first sight things, this is not a romance novel. There are four themes to this novel and they are:

1. Lace: The history of it, the making of (it takes about a year to make a yard of lace and that's working 18 hour days!) the rules and laws surrounding it (you were only allowed to make certain kinds...) it's a fascinating subject.

2. The struggle the French Protestants faced in the 1600's. It's absolutely amazing. Their children were taken away from them, they were deported, or punished terribly they couldn't gather in large groups, or at all without being supervised by a catholic priest and they weren't allowed to own most kinds of businesses. And France was one of only two countries where both Catholicism and Protestantism were legal! It's comparable to what happened to Jews right before the Holocaust.

3. The struggle all classes, even minor nobility, such as Louise-Guillaume family were, had to make to have enough money to get by. It was a tough time.

4. Finding your true family, whatever shape it takes.

So that is the lacemaker. A wonderful, charming, and even educational novel. The only thing I didn't like about was the ending, which I felt was a bit abrupt, but other than that I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Five stars!

A very intricate book regarding the politics of Europe in the 1600's and the life of a lacemaker, Gilonne, including her forbidden marriage to a Protestant and her secret longing for a peasant turned Count, who for years is presumed dead. This book was very well written and was obviously well researched in the art of lacemaking and the present day situations of the characters. If you really like historical novels, you must read this book!

As a mother of two children with ADD and a teacher of LD/ADD students, I highly recommend it to anyone dealing with a child diagnosed with, or undergoing tests for, learning disabilities and/or Attention Deficit Disorder (with or without hyperactivity). Having read many books on the subject, I consider this one to be the best I've read. This book really helped me understand my kids' ADD problems. It addresses many topics in an easy to understand way, that I continue to refer to again and again. I keep a list of highlighted passages that I often bring to the attention of my fellow teachers, my students' parents, and friends struggling with their children's learning issues.

Over the last three years I have read through few and skimmed through many on the subject. This book is definitely one to read cover-to-cover, get out your highlighter and keep handy. I checked it out at the Library and now have bought a copy for my library. I am sure I will refer to it often, because it has very practical advice and doesn't over analyze, yet doesn't simplify either. I particularly liked the section dealing with what the schools will, might and probably won't do. The chapter on family life and LD children was a little short, but very informative.

Blair's "Local Economic Development: Analysis and Practice" is clearly written and gives good, practical examples. The graphs are carefully explained, and even an economics beginner can understand this book. It is also well edited and professional.

Blair's Local Economic Development is an undergraduate level text on regional economics. In this regard, it automatically fills a need left by the now out-of-print An Introduction to Regional Economics by Edgar M. Hoover and Frank Giarratani. (Frank Giarratani tells me that no future editions are in the offing.) The title difference from the Hoover and Giarratani volume lends a more contemporary flavor to Local Economic Development. Indeed, it adds brief treatments of the following topics: housing and neighborhood development, local public finance, and planning perspectives.

Having taught (and in all academic practicality weaned) from Hoover's book, I find Blair's approach to the same subject matter refreshing. In the first chapter, he starts with a sketch of general economic principles_assumptions behind the behavior of individuals and firms; efficiency versus equity; market forces; and some causes of market inefficiencies_and moves quickly through a discussion of the notion of "region." The second chapter briefly edifies some critical economic principles in regional analysis: unemployment and low wages, externalities, and public choice. All of this is achieved in a mere 40 pages. I find such brief introductions necessary for undergraduate urban and regional studies courses, and wish that such a handy text would have been available when I first prepared my lectures. After this theoretical but pragmatic introductory material, Blair immediately hits core material to local political economics_business development. Here he draws as much from his own research experience in "industry targeting" as from the vast literature on industry location. Names like Weber and Hotelling fail to appear here but their main ideas do, however briefly. Most of the chapter is appropriately devoted to explaining such notions as "quality of life," "political climate," "business climate," and other factors thought to influence business location decisions, as well as to explaining the nature of the business location decision process itself. Chapter 4 deals with market areas and central place theory. As he does throughout much of the book, Blair discusses this material with the ultimate goal of providing a means of affecting local economic development through public policy. Hence, he focuses the chapter toward strategies for expanding a center's hinterland. In Chapters 3 and 4, Blair covers (perhaps indirectly) material on inter- and intraregional competition; in Chapter 5 "Understanding Economic Structure," he switches to a discussion of intraregional cohesive forces_agglomeration economies_and their measurement. As in previous chapters Blair does a good job on the main principles first developed by the likes of Walter Isard and as well as Edgar M. Hoover. In this case, however, I found at least one chink in the book's armor-the subject of Marshallian industrial districts (industrial complexes) are not well handled. Why did Detroit develop as a center for the world's auto industry? Why is it dispersing southward toward Birmingham, Alabama? Why are financial districts still relatively strong in major national urban centers? In summary, Blair fails to discuss the dynamics of agglomeration, specifically localization economies. He does not answer or bring up the subject of why some industries still bent on localizing while other are dispersing in an age with declining transactions and shipping costs.

In Chapters 6 and 7, Blair takes on the topics of regional development and its measurement. In these chapters he touches on export base theory, shift-share analysis, econometric modeling, and regional input-output analysis. He also discusses region importance-strength analysis, a critical component of industry targeting. Here I found that he may have missed a perfect opportunity to provide some structure via Saaty's analytical hierarchy to a method void of academic rigor. The analytical hierarchy approach is also a good lead into sensitivity analysis for students. Sensitivity of business location decisions to changes in the importance of regional characteristics would be an ideal and pragmatic application of this tool.

After returning to terse theoretical economic treatments of welfare economics and factor mobility, Local Economic Development turns to topics of land use, housing, and neighborhood development in Chapters 10 and 11. The section on housing is one of the best in the book, evenly covering all of the basic requirements in a mere 25 pages. The organization and content of the section on land use is less well developed. For a book that is oriented to practitioners, Blair gets bogged down in defining economic theories of land rent. Consequently, sharp transitions are required to and from the section entitled "The Land Development Process," most of which deals with project feasibility. In addition both the transition to and the discussion of government's potential role in development planning are left wanting.

The chapter on government is almost strictly a lesson on public taxation and the allocation of public goods, and less on ways in which government can induce local economic development. For this reason Chapter 12 was the most disappointing of the lot, despite its quality discussion of the more theoretical aspects of government finance. The most pragmatic piece in the chapter was a discussion of cost/benefit analyses.

Despite my comments on the particular contents of some chapters, I found that Local Economic Development well fills a need for a combined treatment of regional economic and planning issues at the undergraduate level. Its greater depth on topics in economics-its main strength-lends it more for use in survey courses in regional economics. The book's weakest component is its coverage of government policy and planning tools. Planners will find the book particularly wanting at times, although unlike economists they are more likely to be aware of readings that fill its main gaps.

Blair Schulman's first-person narrator gives playful descriptions of the novel's other characters. He always seems at least vaguely amused by his surroundings, and by the people in those surroundings. Schulman utilizes the narrator's witty observations as a way of offering descriptions-as opposed to giving bland, static descriptions of the characters, action, and settings.

I kept looking forward not only to what would happen next but also to what the narrator would say about it. For example, the pretentious snobs he encounters generally lack any sense of decorum or self-control, making them fodder for more of his quips.

If you like witty, zany, fast-paced reading, this book will make you want to write love letters to author Blair Schulman!

I ride the N train in New York City daily, and in my backpack are my lunch, my notepad, and my copy of Love Letters to Myself.

This Blair Schulman can write a story! I have gotten my friends into this book and we have met a couple times in a group to talk about the book (I got an autographed copy!!). It's funny, exciting, jaw-dropping ... kinda reminds me of the stories I read in gossip columns. It is great company when I'm alone, a fun read with juicy passages, some of the most vivid writing I've read since undergrad.

I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in reading about the New York socialite lifestyle ... or anyone who's ridden the N train, really!