Bloom Books

I THINK THAT EVERYONE WOULD ENJOY THESE BOOKS IF YOU ARE A COMIC STRIP LOVER!!!! I LOVE THEM!!!!! THEY ARE FUNNY, AND VERY ENTERTAINING!!!!! I ONLY WISH THAT BILL WATTERSON WOULD PROBUCE MORE OF THESE COMIC STRIPS. CALVIN AND HOBBES ROCK!!!!!!

The Cat's Meow: Feline Answers To Life's Big Questions by journalist and author Bill Zimmerman is dedicated to showcasing the daily life of the cat. From stretching out in the sun, to demonstrating feline independence, to disappearing for a couple of hours each day, to pouncing with passion on what is wanted, The Cat's Meow is replete with a "cat wisdom" that would do their human companions a lot of good to emulate! Zimmerman's delightful and perceptive text is superbly illustrated throughout with the artwork of Tom Bloom. Also very highly recommended is Zimmerman and Bloom's companion volume: The God's Bark: Simple Truths From Wise Pets (157223685X, $$$)

This is a great book for anyone who loves chocolate. The author clearly explains how to choose and use chocolate to make great desserts. There are recipes from simple to sublime with something for everyone. If you love chocolate (and who doesn't???) this is a MUST have. Highly recommended!

This book tells the story of how the historic Los Angeles City Hall came to be renovated after an earthquake in 1994. The trajectory of the storytelling is interesting -- beginning with the capping off of the tower's beacon light (delivered by helicopter in 2001), then flashing back to 1926, when the Hall was first built.

This educational kids' book describes the glory of the original City Hall, and the heart and care with which it was designed and built. The same heart and care went into its maintenance during WWII and its eventual reconstruction during the 1990s.

The art work is lovely and bright, the designs on the page echoing the designs employed in the structure itself. The book is so pretty that it's easy to forget you're learning something -- ranging from how elevators work to the function of a base isolator (an architectural device used to stabilize foundations in the case of earthquakes).

I haven't been to the City Hall yet, but after reading this book, I plan to make a visit soon. The book reminds readers that people can care for their cities and the structures within them; this is a refreshing thought indeed!

There are hundreds of books on this era, and they all cover the same core topics -- Montgomery bus boycott, SCLC, SNCC, Black Power, ghetto revolts, etc. Bloom's book stands out from the rest, however, because of its razor-sharp class analysis in the first half of the book, called "The Changing Political Economy of Racism." Bloom begins after the Civil War, when the southern landowners need to replace the old slave-based economy with a new economy, and a new ruling class. From this vantage point he picks apart the shifting allegiances of ruling bodies, and the deliberate use of racist ideology to prevent political unrest.

In the book's second half, "The Black Movement," all the familiar events are there, but they flow more clearly because of Bloom's historical set-up. Bloom is not a Marxist, but this book is a marvelous example of how a materialist class analysis can be used to better understand history. The analysis is not shallow or deterministic, but it clearly shows that white workers have nothing to gain by clinging to racist prejudices.

Bloom isn't sure what kind of activism will bring black liberation, but his book helps us answer that question. It is essential reading for those who want to learn from the past and build the movements of the future.

Please check your summary. It is probably for another book by the prolific Prof. Bloom and Chelsea House, but it is NOT the summary for this book. Per the record in the OCLC WorldCat (38 million records for material in 37,000 libraries), CLASSIC SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS discusses Edward Bellamy, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, C. S. Lewis, Jack London, H. P. Lovecraft, George Orwell, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Olaf Stapledon, and H. G. Wells. /s/ Leslie, the Librarian

It is amazing how ignorant we are about Education. We have been losing more and more over the years and since we are not told, we keep letting the status quo "close our minds".

It is amazing how we realize that we need to stand up and demand that our education comes before the conflicts in other nations. Hopefully, the children of the future will do such.

CLU was developed around 1974-79, just a few years after Pascal but well before C++, Java, and the like. Although it never became popular in itself, it had remarkable influence on the next generation of languages.

It's an object based language, but not object oriented as we'd recognize the term today. It had classes (called 'clusters'), but lacked inheritance. It had generics (templates) in terms of data values or types, and ways to constrain the interfaces exported by the type parameters. C++, but especially Java derived their signalling mechanisms from CLU, down to Java's 'throws' declarations on methods. It also featured iterators as language primitives, something Java didn't catch up with until the version 1.5. CLU also anticipated 'const' declarations as flexible as those in C++. CLU's "immutable" constructs were even more flexible than the cint and cfloat types in the Cg shader language, and like Cg it relied on a special set of keywords rather than declaration modifiers. The automatically-generated accessor methods in C# also had their ancestors in this language. And, like modern languages, CLU use automatic garbage collection instead of manual resource management - and in doing so, defined whole worlds of programming errors out of existence.

The language itself is an historical oddity, these days. You might be hard pressed to find a compiler for it. The language design is a fascinating snapshot in time however, an intermediate point in the evolution of modern OO languages. This is a necessary reference for anyone serious about the fundamentals of OO language development.

//wiredweird

I read this book from cover to cover and found it to be so full of information that I could use in my everyday life. I have now changed the way I think of myself, and my appearance has also changed dramatically. It truly is a mind, body and soul makeover when you apply what you have read to your personal and professional life. I have never felt so beautiful or more confident than I do now...inside and out!!!!!!

Many thanks to Nancy Neary-Johnson for caring enough to write this book so that we all can feel that way!!!!!!!!

I'm ordering my own copy (now that it's back in print) after repeatedly checking it out of the library! This book features pictures (both individual and group) of selected conifers. It's a great reference book and one of my favorites!