Bradley Books

A late 1980's general summary of the different types of gangs found in the San Diego area. There are 85 pages on street gangs organized by ethnic groups with brief explanations of gang culture. Also included are 15 pages on occult groups, involved with magic, and 35 pages about satanic cults. The last 100 pages are advertisements from local San Diego merchants.

Garden Harvest by Steven Bradley (columnist for "Garden Matters Magazine" is a reader friendly, how-to book enhanced with an astounding number of beautiful, full-color photographs that illustrate every step of a gardener's daily duty. Individual chapters address the basics of planning a garden, tools and equipment, pruning, maintenance, cultivation and much more. Featuring twenty-four fully illustrated, step-by-step projects, Garden Harvest is a superbly presented and organized introduction to gardening that is as practical as it is fun to just to "leaf" through for leisure reading.

If you have a sunny, shady, wet, sloped or dry location this book has plans for them all. It is useful in designing your own garden or simply use one of the many plans provided. The color photographs are extensive and include complete gardens so you can see how different plants look together. This book takes the guess work out by providing the size, color(s), bloom time and growing zones for each plant reviewed. There is also some information on annuals, bulbs and shrubs that work well in a prennial garden. There are even tips on attracting butterflies to your garden. Overall, this book is full of great ideas for any type of garden you may be planning.

Gary Gygax's Castle Zagyg, The East Mark Gazetteer shines as a perfect example of a classic setting of swords and sorcery. This folio pays homage to the early years of Gary Gygax's fantasy gaming career by resembling the long out of print Greyhawk Folio. While faithfulness to the original is evident, this folio is anything but a carbon copy of that older Dungeons & Dragons release.

The East Mark Gazetteer folio expertly presents many details of the East Mark camaign setting. The greater aspects of the setting are expressed in the forms of timelines, racial group breakdowns, social and economic class structure of the populace, languages and geographical features of the landscape. While these are important aspects to any campaign setting, the East Mark Gazetteer even gives details on the little elements that make the setting more visceral, like trees, weather, climate, etc.

Included within the folio are also five beautiful maps depicting the East Mark setting and the adventure locales included within. The first is the city of Yggsburgh, followed by two wilderness maps (one for the players and one for the Castle Keeper) of the area surrounding the infamous Castle Zagyg itself, as well as a map of some of the cave and dungeon complexes below Castle Zagyg.

Another book included in the folio is the Mouths of Madness adventure which is written in the ~classic~ fantasy adventure way. Lots of details for wilderness adventures, encounter charts, and a plethora of adventure ideas.

The East Mark Gazetteer is classic fantasy gaming, without being a venerable product for an out of print game. The authors (E. Gary Gygax and Jeffery P. Talanian) are concise in their writing, and remain tightly factual in their style. The layout is clean, and the flow of the material is broken up nicely by section headings. Gary Gygax's Castle Zagyg, The East Mark Folio is the perfect way to present a setting for the Castles & Crusades roleplaying game, or any swords and sorcery fantasy RPG.

Related Products in the Castle Zagyg & East Mark Setting:
Castle Zagyg Volume One: Yggsburgh
Castles & Crusades Castle Zagyg Dark Chateau

I'll say right now, that this work more than exceeded the goal that I had for it.

From the Author's Introduction on Page 5, "More than just a guide to a preconceived vision of a cosmology, this book actually gives you the tools to create your own multiverse."

What a statement. Meaning, this book is not "The Inner / Outer / Elemental Planes" as we know them from D&D (though it references those concepts), or a pre-generated setting such as that described in either editions of the Manual of the Planes (TSR, and WOTC); This book allows you to totally replace that setting with your own original creation (for any genre, not just fantasy) from the ground up, for those who don't want or need "The 666 Infernal Layers of the Abyss," who have a different vision of the Planes of Good, or who have their own vision of the Multiverse.

I found this book to be a refreshing eye-opener to "detailing" what I had formerly seen as "the way it was" as regarding the planes of existence for three decades of gaming.

Regarding the Contents:
From the beginning, this work is a paradigm-shifter. Urging the reader not to treat the Planes that they create with this work as yet another "dungeon in space," but instead to consider that "...you have the seeds of a mythology...every plane...every deity...in your setting says something about the cosmology."

You can use this book to build not only planes, but also what that means thematically in a creation much larger than that, of much vaster scope, with much greater implications.

The book is divided into three sections:
- A "cosmographer's mapping toolkit for the multiverse"
- The common types of these places as they are encountered
- "How metaphysical concepts are used to develop individual planes."

The language here is somewhat technical, and consists of physics-like jargon sprinkled with phrases like "dimensional matrices and space-time", "multidemensional metapysical tool" "matrices [are] formed where they meet some plane, sphere, or pocket universe," but with careful reading, I was able to comprehend it readily.

Certainly, the approach is from a person with at least some physics / cosmology background, with some (very brief) side trips into dimensional theory for the layman. Star Trek writers / gamers will eat this up. Certainly, anyone who has perused the D&D "Manual of the Planes" in any depth will "get" this.

Charts throughout the book, along with notes on how to implement this within a setting. There is no math, nor calculus involved, merely illustrating the concepts upon which the planes exist, and function. I got many, new ideas regarding my own game cosmology here, certainly.

This simple review cannot do especially Chapter 3 its deserved justice, with phrases in the Plane of Air section describing "a limitless expanse of sky...few places where one could rest...clouds, birds...a flying castle," or the Plane of Water, "islands of elemental spheres floating in the depthless ocean."

A final chapter of this section details the Aethereal Plane, connecting and binding the physical planes and metaphysical concepts. (I thought back the the Inner and Outer planes of D&D, the "force" from Star Wars, and other ideas.) Very well done, full of flavor and ideas.

Suggestions abound about what these Planes are for, how they work, what it means to your selected setting's story characters and mythology, along with traits and suggested names, with samples from real-world mythology "Hades" and "Heavenly", "accepted standard" fantasy gaming mythology, "The Abyss" and Gehenna", and others "Incarceratia - The Eternal Prison Sphere".

Again, many ideas are delivered here. Certainly, I found many sparkling gems which "Broke the Mold" of my prior thinking as regards the Outer Planes of traditional D&D, at least.

Regarding the Rest:
Finally, there is a real treasure trove here in some brief appendices in the back of the book, starting with p.111, Appendix A, Sample Planes, detailed enough in a little less than a page each, for a total of a little over 4 pages, with evocative descriptions, sufficient for a capsule description in your own "Manual of the Planes," or to use for a "flavor of the Plane" encounter.

Overall, I thought this work well worth the price of admission, for the vast number of new idea that it has already given me to spur my imagination, to delve into my subconscious, and thus reveal those thoughts, and concepts that make my creations truly mine, if I had the power to create a plane with some careful thought and consideration. With Cosmos Builder, that power can be yours, also.

Most definitely a valuable edition to any writer's / gamer's library for those who ponder and like to tinker with the concrete details of the construction of the planes of their own personal Multiverse, planning it out in detail, or exploring it as they go. I've added it to my growing library of tools/handbooks that I feel absolutely essential to game campaign creation.

This is an oversized coffee table book that does exactly as the title indicates. It begins with prehistory 20,00-1000 B.C. with cave paintings and concludes with the cultural renaissance and the "generation of '98." Consequently not much is covered of Spain in the 20th or let alone the 21st century. The text is pretty well written in a highlight USA Today fashion but the true beauty and reason to own this book is the art work dispalyed. Within you will see the works of Velasquez, Goya , Murillo, Miro,Sorolla, Picasso and other less known but almost equally impressive outside of Spain artists works. Interestingly enough Dali is absent. Most of the paintings are currently housed in The Prado, Museo de Bellas Artes, or some other museum in Spain . If the paintings are not in a museum than they are in palaces like the Palacio Real or El Escorial so they are quite rare and old. Besides famous paintings there also sculptures used to explain the history of Spain. Ancient codice are examined usually without any specifics other than saying it is an Archivo de Indias(Indian archives).The whirlwind detailed history lesson also goes through the Moslem and Christian Period, The Catholic Sovereigns, The Exploration of the New World and The House of Bourbon. Many aspects of Spanish history are looked at including literature and architecture. A nice book to look at anytime, good for high school reports and especially beneficial for a students knowledge of art and history.

an undeniably comprehensive understanding of what it is to be male, female, heterosexual, homosexual, peasant, dubliner, etc., in contemporary ireland, placed in historical, political, economic, and academic contexts as appropriate, this collection of essays grants the reader insight into the most engaging aspects of gender and sexuality in a country where they have historically been marginalized by an overriding theme of nationalism and religion. only in recent years have studies of gender and sexuality reached the irish, as a result of many factors, perhaps most noticably the entry into the EC and the influence of modern media that followed, and this book provides an absolutely comprehensive encapsulation of the different views and interpretations of literary forms that these studies have taken on in recent years.

Dermot Bradley has done another great job in covering the career of a German commander. Guderian was certainly a key figure in the German military of WW2 and Bradley has done his homework in exploring who Guderian was and what he contributed.

It is fashionable today to write off Guderian as a "myth maker" based on his "self-serving" biography, but few of those who take up these cliches actually do the spadework to back up their attacks. Bradley shows how serious biography is done.

One thing missing from this book is the later part of Guderian's career when he became the Army Chief of Staff. Bradley's title, however, shows that he has deliberately left this period for others to handle - either to have greater focus on the early years or to avoid some of the darker implications of Guderian's role in 44/45.

This book is not a complete biography, but it remains a key component of understanding Guderian. No other source covers Guderian as well from his own words in letters to his wife.

Wow! After my son used "Algebra to Go" as a reference when doing his 8th grade Algebra homework, he asked if we could get "Geometry to Go" before he even started his Geometry class. When a teenager asks for a reference book you know it's got to be easy to use and very helpful.

Expertly compiled and co-edited by the team of Sharan B. Merriam (Professor of Adult Education at the University of Georgia), Bradley C. Courtenay (Professor of Adult Education at the University of Georgia), and Ronald M. Cervero (Professor and head of the department of Lifelong Education, Administration, and Policy at the University of Georgia), Global Issues And Adult Education: Perspectives From Latin America, Southern Africa, And The United States is a 520-page compendium of well informed and knowledgeably written interpretations and investigations of modernization and the importance of adult education with the challenges faced daily with the innovations and technology, as well as world issues at hand. Introducing readers to the concept of global productivity and progression as result of proper adult education, Global Issues And Adult Education informatively guides its readers through the seven-year study and the works of nearly forty academic experts on the topic of worldly supportive and positive aspect of proper adult education. Global Issues And Adult Education is very highly recommended reading, especially for students of adult education for its invaluable and scholarly presentations of educating today's adults.