Bowles Books

Mizejewski's Divine Decadence hails itself as a sort of history of the character developement of Sally Bowles through her many incarnations. It is an accurate analysis, but the book is also a valuable resource for information on Weimar culture in general, and it's chapter-by-chapter sections on each Sally Bowles may be taken one by one as individual "essays". For anyone reading Divine Decadence, I would highly recommend first familiarizing oneself with the works Mizejewski focuses on, such as Isherwood's Berlin Stories, Van Druten's I Am A Camera, and the Broadway musical (and film adaptation) Cabaret. Divine Decadence begins by establishing a sense of Weimar Germany and the sociopolitical origins of Isherwood's Berlin, as well as aquainting the reader with an understanding of the Nazi Party's rise to power within the context of Weimar culture. Mizejewski then begins a direct analysis of the original Sally Bowles of the Isherwood stories and also explores Isherwood's motivations for creating her in th 1930s. The following two sections are focused on the Van Druten play and subsequent film adaptation of Isherwood's Sally Bowles, I Am A Camera, evaluating the evolution of Sally, and also the story in general, as it was tailored for audiences of the 1950s. Next, Mizejewski analyzes the 1966 Broadway musical Cabaret and its 1972 film adaptation, discussing them in delicious depth as the Sally character is displaced by other forces in the stage musical, and then returned in campy splendour by Liza Minelli in the film. Mizejewski's prose tends to be highly dense and academic; like wading through treacle. Novices beware. But what do you expect from Princeton University Press? With the new revival of the musical Cabaret taking Broadway by storm, many readers may want to explore its literary history and its sociopolitical evolution. If you are up for a mental exercise, practicing your cencentration skills, seriously devoted to the subject matter, or just plain driven, I wholeheartedly recommend Divine Decadence.

This short but cute book is a great bibliotherapy book to use in the classroom or at home for any child starting a new school. Many great discussions about feelings one has as a new student can be generated from this book. This book will be a hit in any 2nd - 4th grade classroom, and even more popular in multiple copies when available in paperback.

Dubbed "The Great Unknown" of contemporary literature, expatriate writer Paul Bowles continues to intrigue. The author of "The Sheltering Sky" and "The Delicate Prey" described himself as an outsider, yet almost indiscriminately opened his home in Tangier to all who tracked him down there.

Apparently Bowles liked to think of himself as a recluse, yet in 1931, he said, "As you know I like to meet everyone in the world at least once."

Paired with the indefatigable Jane Bowles in one of literature's most famous marriages, he alternately admired and provoked his fellow author. Her death at the age of 56 was surely one of the great traumas of his life.

Long curious about Bowles, Gena Dagel Caponi has crafted a telling biography by drawing on correspondence and interviews with the subject himself as well as many of his contemporaries, friends and editors. She is also the editor of "Conversations with Paul Bowles."

- Gail Cooke

Building an instrument that will go into space is a very specialised discipline that is well described by this book. Typically, you face requirements, the combination of which is quite unlike anything on Earth. The instrument must usually be able to withstand low temperatures, on the Kelvin scale, as well as survive direct unfiltered sunlight. If parts of the instrument cannot tolerate this, then you might design suitable shielding.

Also, will the instrument be orbiting Earth or will it go further out into space? If the former, then will it be inside the van Allen belts, or above? This dictates the amount of radiation shielding needed to prevent latchup in the electronics. Whereas, if the instrument is part of a spacecraft that will go into space, but not around a planet with a magnetosphere, then less shielding might be needed.

Oh, the instrument needs to survive the launch, of course. Depending on whether it is launched from a rocket or from the bays of a space shuttle, the mechanical requirements for this can vary.

The book goes into the above issues in detail; and many more. The overriding consideration is that repairs are usually impossible or prohibitively expensive and rare. Vital reading for anyone in the field.

Bowles and Gintis argue that schooling is designed to prepare students for to be dominated by the system of industrial capitalism. The authors argue that schooling has more to do with disciplining the workforce than it does with anything like critical thinking or creativity. This is a landmark book that has had a wide influence on the field of education. Its findings are still quite relevant today.
Unfortunately, Bowles and Gintis have moved on to another set of projects, but both thinkers deserve to be thought of as innovators in the fields of education and political economy.

This book published in January 2006 by NASA as NASA Special Publication NASA SP-2006-4317 examines the history of one of the most powerful nuclear test reactors in the US and the only nuclear facility ever built by NASA, the Plum Brook Station near Sandusky, Ohio. When it became operational in 1963, this facility supported basic research for NASA's nuclear rocket program (NERVA). After only a decade of research, the government shut down the Plum Brook station before many of its experiments could be completed. Even the valiant attempt to use the reactor as an environmental analysis tool failed, and the facility was eventually closed. The reactors were unused for nearly 25 years at great cost to the taxpayers until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission decommissioned the reactors and cleaned up the site.

As of May 2007, this book is still available from NASA for 27$

The artwork by Carol Bowles is incredibly wonderful. It is what brings the story to life. The written word is at times boring. My children love the paintings so very much and can now tell the story just by seeing the illustrations. I hope we can see more of Ms. Bowles work in other story books. She is a very imaginative illustrator with a sense of spirit.

I found this book to be very insightful in all things foundations; shallow, deep, etc. Joseph Bowles does an excellent job of bringing a very technical subject to novice engineers seeking to increase their knowledge base on such a complex subject. My preference would have been English units but the SI calculations throughout the book do not detract from its thoroughness of content coverage.

Its a very good source, and considered a bible by some, but is strictly in metric and also relies on software instead of thorough calculations at certain points. I dont have a hatred of metric, but I wasnt raised on trained in the system so it'll make you feel quite left out if youre not an SI guy/girl. As to the software comment, its very true and sometimes examples skip steps at which point the author jumps from A to D to M to Z with little or no explanation.

This book is an excellent working reference for any civil/geotechnical engineer. The example problems are very well written. The charts and graphs are easily read and very clearly printed. Excellent section on the design and analysis of segmental retaining walls. Beware of some other sites selling versions of this book printed overseas and sold here.

I'm a civil engineer involved in the design of large hydraulic structures.

We still use Bowles in our firm for designing many structures including retaining walls of different kinds, cellular cofferdams, buildings foundations, etc.

It includes many examples, easy to understand, and many charts and tables very useful for the designer.

I regret this purchase. If you want to know how to do these calculations...do not buy this book. If you would like to blindly use a diskette to solve problems...well by all means purchase now.

This is a terribly written book written by a well-to-do who really knows nothing about life as you and I know it.

Save your dinero.

At first, eating elvers seems a little exotic. Eating adult eels seems unpalatable here in the US, and eating their babies seems even more so, but what's dangerous about it? Well, fishing for them can get you killed by other fishermen.

By the time I had finished reading that first chapter, I was hooked. Writing about food is impossible. You can't convey the smell, the taste, the texture, and although Tom does his best, that's not really why this book is so compelling. It's really an adventure book, about not drowning while trying to harvest pink penis barnacles in the wild waters off celtic Spain, about dining with the Mafia in Sicily without doing something that will get you killed, about a disappointing fugu, followed by an exquisite fugu, about trying - and failing - to choke down dog stew that reeks of wet dog, of dining on a version of pho that is even tastier than the Vietnamese version.

This is the kind of book you'll want to have five extra copies of to give away, so you can talk about it with your friends.

I have gotten to page 120 before in disgust I felt the urge to write the publisher about the non-factual errors in the book. First, Parker Bowles blows up Osaka with an A-bomb when he is talking about Los Alamos in New Mexico. Then he calls himself a foreign in Japanese while in China and finally he has Bush Senior puking in a president's lap in Beijing where he actually disgraced himself in Tokyo, Japan with the Japanese Prime Minister. The question here is did he really go to China? How can we trust he even visited the places with these obvious errors cropping up. What has he written that is just pure fiction of the places I don't know much about?

He prattles on and winges about like a public school brat--wait that IS what he is. His editor responded quickly saying that errors crept in because she was out on materity leave and any further editions would be parsed of these errors. Are we to assume that the accuracy of all other books from Ebury publishing is subject to the vagaries of one person's health. To get back to the further editions bit, the UK edition was published in 2006 and the Random House US edition in 2007. So isn't the edition that I am reading a further edition?

Tom Parker-Bowles tried hard, but his book leaves one less than satisfied. He's a likeable guy, but not enthralling, a satisfactory writer, but not outstanding. The book often plods along with too many irrelevant references to his childhood, and the details of his time spent traveling are often pedantic overkill.

Ultimately, the book turns on its own premise. He promises you that he'll be "eating dangerously". He starts off with eels in his native England, an interesting insight to a world few will ever see. But what's dangerous about it? What's even so exotic? It's like writing about going to Louisiana to eat boudin. Not many of us do it, but it's nothing outlandish either. The idea of traveling the globe eating outrageously is hardly original, and is often hardly complimentary toward his destinations.

The exotic stuff comes in only as (1) bugs in Asia, and (2) dog in Korea. The only truly life-threatening food to eat is fugu, pufferfish, in Japan, a fish that can be fatally poisonous if not prepared correctly. But fugu is hardly a new and novel find; people have been writing about it for decades. Fugu is the only topic of the Japan chapter. Is there nothing else interesting in Japan? Other chapters deal with things such as chili sauce and American BBQ, hardly dangerous or exotic.

The worst chapter is about Korea, and it's another one-note song, about eating dog. Here he's done some research, telling us all about the horrific conditions in which the dogs are raised, and the even more horrific and cruel way they are slaughtered. He freely admits that he hates the whole idea, that it's wrong, wrong, wrong. And yet, he's going to eat it. He's not in denial; he recognizes the cognitive dissidence. But he's going to eat it. Appartantly he didn't do his research in-country, for he can't find any place to see dogs being raised and can only find one clandestine restaurant there in which to eat it. He has a bowl of dog soup, which he at first finds good, then finds disgusting, and then he flees. That's it. It's inconceivable that he flew all the way to Korea for this and could not find any more first-hand experiences to report to us.

Other chapter's foundations can be even weaker. He goes to Spain to try to join the people gathering barnacles, a practice that is horribly dangerous and requires years of skill. He announces his intention in a café, and the locals there think him imbecilic to do this just for thrill-seeking reasons. You will too. He goes to Sicily to try to have diner with a member of the Mafia. He doesn't know any Mafia people, mind you, he want to find some, with the idea that doing this stunt would be a neat thing. It's such a sophomoric scheme that you can't take him seriously at all afterwards.

Another irritant is his string of factual errors. He states that Osaka was destroyed by an atom bomb in WWII. He calls himself a gai-jin in Hong Kong (gai-jin does mean foreigner, but in Japanese, not Cantonese). And so forth. All these mistakes are small, and all could be understood and forgiven. It's just that they keep coming.

It's not all bad. His descriptions of Laos come from someone who truly appreciates the place, even if his preconceptions come off as naïve. He leaves few details out of any chapter, which is sometimes sophistic, but is often illuminating. This is a book from someone who's off to a decent start, and who should keep writing and who will probably improve, but who still has a way to go.

The problem with this book, and with the idea behind it, is that the author seems to have no self control. He gets himself appointed a judge at a barbeque contest, then gorges himself so that he can't do justice to the second half of the event. He continually gets himself so drunk on the evening before an appointment that he can't appreciate what he's doing or eating the next day because of his raging hangover. If he's going to report on the experiences for his readers, he should be a little bit responsible about it. I guess he thinks we'll feel sorry for him, and forgive him his youthful indiscretions, but not when we're paying this much for his book.

The subject has been treated better by other authors. Try Bourdain's book, and skip this one.

Brought back a lot of memories as I grew up with Strawberry Shortcake. Has lots of cool pictures, but wished there was more printed information to read - basically it's just a picture and title of each item.

Well, she's getting there. This book contains a great background section and tribute to the doll collector who has been providing all the information and items shown in the books photos (Jennifer of Strawberry Shortcake Central). Dolls, minis, and toys are not included in this collector's rendition. Instead, Schiffler focuses on pretty much every other SSC item that was created. I thought this book was amazing and didn't realize how many other creations there were bearing the Strawberry Shortcake logo and theme; everything from clock radios, purses, ornaments, the many books and comic books, furniture, and much more.

This book is a waste of money. Not all dolls are pictured. The pictures which are included are usually wrong (Party Pleaser pet with non-PP doll). It's a collector's nightmare. There are pictures of a lot of non-doll items, but not too many rare items. Anyone just getting into SSC collecting can gain more knowledge by checking out the auction sites.

i think the book was very helpful to me on the prices
and the pictures. this way i have an idea of there is out there to collect yet

... *** This is an excellent book for the serious Strawberry Shortcake collector of ornaments, musicals, jewelry & hair accessories, books, puzzles, cards & gift wrap, party supplies and more. There were 3 Strawberry Shortcake books produced, there is one for dolls called "More Strawberry Shortcake" if you are looking for doll information. This book has 'no' doll information but was not intended to, it is called the "Cream" of Strawberry Shortcake because it is the cream of the crop when it comes to these special items. This book does in fact have many rare items in it, I have been a serious collector for years and use this book as a great guide for ebay almost daily. Would very highly recommend it if you are interested in those type of items that I listed above would be in it. It has wonderful photos of these highly collectible items. Good luck with your collecting!