Butler Books

Beautifully written about a young girl's life during the Depression. Meg is a wee bit lazy working in the fields, but inside the house she finds a mystery. Her Papa left a trunk and its contents draw Meg like a magnet. Does she find a way for the family to rise above the devastation of the Great Depression or a treasure for the family's soul? Her determination to find out, pushes the reader forward to the last page, hoping this little girl and her family find the gold at the end of the rainbow.

Meg and her brother, Pod, capture hearts and minds, bringing joy in the middle of one of America's darkest hours.

This was required reading for a graduate course in medieval history.
"The Divine Comedy" describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso), guided first by the Roman epic poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, the subject of his love and another of his works, "La Vita Nuova." While the vision of Hell, the Inferno, is vivid for modern readers, the theological niceties presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and scholarship to understand. Purgatorio, the most lyrical and human of the three, also has the most poets in it; Paradiso, the most heavily theological, has the most beautiful and ecstatic mystic passages in which Dante tries to describe what he confesses he is unable to convey (e.g., when Dante looks into the face of God: "all'alta fantasia qui mancò possa" - "at this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe," Paradiso, XXXIII, 142).

Dante wrote the Comedy in his regional dialect. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression, and simultaneously established the Tuscan dialect as the standard for Italian. In French, Italian is nicknamed la langue de Dante. Publishing in the vernacular language marked Dante as one of the first (among others such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio) to break from standards of publishing in only Latin or Greek (the languages of Church and antiquity). This break allowed more literature to be published for a wider audience - setting the stage for greater levels of literacy in the future.

Readers often cannot understand how such a serious work may be called a "comedy". In Dante's time, all serious scholarly works were written in Latin (a tradition that would persist for several hundred years more, until the waning years of the Enlightenment) and works written in any other language were assumed to be comedic in nature. Furthermore, the word "comedy," in the classical sense, refers to works which reflect belief in an ordered universe, in which events not only tended towards a happy or "amusing" ending, but an ending influenced by a Providential will that orders all things to an ultimate good. By this meaning of the word, the progression of Dante's pilgrim from Hell to Paradise is the paradigmatic expression of comedy, since the work begins with the pilgrim's moral confusion and ends with the vision of God.

The Divine Comedy can be described simply as an allegory: Each canto, and the episodes therein, can contain many alternate meanings. Dante's allegory, however, is more complex, and, in explaining how to read the poem (see the "Letter to Can Grande della Scala"), he outlines other levels of meaning besides the allegory (the historical, the moral, the literal, and the anagogical). The structure of the poem, likewise, is quite complex, with mathematical and numerological patterns arching throughout the work, particularly threes and nines. The poem is often lauded for its particularly human qualities: Dante's skillful delineation of the characters he encounters in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise; his bitter denunciations of Florentine and Italian politics; and his powerful poetic imagination. Dante's use of real characters, according to Dorothy Sayers in her introduction to her translation of "L'Inferno", allows Dante the freedom of not having to involve the reader in description, and allows him to "[make] room in his poem for the discussion of a great many subjects of the utmost importance, thus widening its range and increasing its variety."

Dante called the poem "Comedy" (the adjective "Divine" added later in the 16th century) because poems in the ancient world were classified as High ("Tragedy") or Low ("Comedy"). Low poems had happy endings and were of everyday or vulgar subjects, while High poems were for more serious matters. Dante was one of the first in the Middle Ages to write of a serious subject, the Redemption of man, in the low and vulgar Italian language and not the Latin language as one might expect for such a serious topic.

Paradiso
After an initial ascension (Canto I), Beatrice guides Dante through the nine spheres of Heaven. These are concentric and spherical, similar to Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology. Dante admits that the vision of heaven he receives is the one that his human eyes permit him to see. Thus, the vision of heaven found in the Cantos is Dante's own personal vision, ambiguous in its true construction. The addition of a moral dimension means that a soul that has reached Paradise stops at the level applicable to it. Souls are allotted to the point of heaven that fits with their human ability to love God. Thus, there is a heavenly hierarchy. All parts of heaven are accessible to the heavenly soul. That is to say all experience God but there is a hierarchy in the sense that some souls are more spiritually developed than others. This is not determined by time or learning as such but by their proximity to God (how much they allow themselves to experience him above other things). It must be remembered in Dante's schema that all souls in Heaven are on some level always in contact with God.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in literature and medieval history.

This book is great at introducing reading and vocabulary in an engaging way and making it easy for students to keep reading. The focus is on learning words in context first and then getting definitions, with plenty of reinforcement and "recycling" of words in later chapters. There are tons of activties for each chapter, so it works with lots of teaaching styles (by the book vs. more open-resource). This book was so good that the community college where I teach adopted the rest of the series for our ESL reading program. Definitely worth the money!

I loved reading this book to my little girls, as we are cat lovers. Not only does this book teach a bit of history, but it also makes you have more of an appreciation for our beloved cats. very sweet.

Pigs is Pigs, the title story is a hilarious account of a country station master determined to do things "by the book" when a consignment of guinea pigs arrives. The wheels of bureaucracy and the life cycle of guinea pigs lead to a hilarious story for young and old. You will never look at a guinea pig (hamster?) the same way again.

Geil Evans Butler has captured the chaos and joy that comes from moving around the world and building a life in a different country. But what is special here is the country, Japan -- less than 10 years after WWII -- Geil, her daughter Bonnie and husband Bill, move to Tokyo and begin daunting task of having a life.

Butler is candid about her fears, her homesickness, and the plain brutal truth that she was half way around the world with a 10 year old daughter. She doesn't pull many punches and we are left to wonder how she coped.

But Butler eventually comes to terms with her life in Japan, learning about the culture, the people, and ultimately -- as the reader hopes -- about herself. The story is plainly told in a matter-of-fact way without over stating the experience. Through the narrative we become involved in her life and her adventures.

I had the privilege of being part of this book. My mother, Jeanne Ley, was Butler's best friend --and remains so to this day. I remember many of the family outings even though I was a small boy at the time. This story rings true 50 years after the fact, reading it was deva vu. Bravo to Geil Butler for sharing this wonderful journey. I hope she got her medal.

I cannot rave enough about this work. This is THE definitive work on the Plymouth and DeSoto divisions of Chrysler Corporation. The historical accounts pre-date both marques up into their inception, following them through the demise of DeSoto in the fall of 1960 and into the very dark and troubled waters of 1978 (when this book was published).

Written by the late Don Butler (who was not only a talented author, but a very gifted artist as well), this textbook has it all. Extensive research over years must have been behind this project as countless productions numbers and other important info about models and sub-models are recorded.

Since I received this as a gift on Christmas 1982, I have referred back to it many, many times. An excellent work by which I have measured ALL other auto books by. Bravo, Mr. Butler!

I cannot think of a better way to introduce the poetry of William Butler Yeats than this small volume. The selection is excellent and of interest you the young reader. The commentary is quite relevant as are the pictures which accompany it. I find that often now, our young people go all the way through the early grades in school and many of them have never heard of Yeats,much less read his poetry. This was the sort of stuff my generation and the generation before it grew up on and cut our teeth on. I do not feel I am any worse for the wear. I am fearful that we are bringing up an entire generation (rightfully or wrong, although I feel it is the later) of young folks who will have no appreciation to this great art form and will miss a lot. This book helps. This entire series helps, as a matter of fact and I certainly recommend you add this one and the others to your library. Actually, it is rather fun reading these with the young folk and then talking about them. Not only do you get to enjoy the work your self and perhaps bring back some great memories, but you have the opportunity to interact with your child or student. It is actually rather surprising what some of the kids come up with. I read these to my grandchildren and to the kids in my classes at school. For the most part, when I really get to discussing the work with them, they enjoy it. Recommend this one highly.

This is a treatment of Group Theory applications to problems in quantum chemistry and physics, especially spectroscopy, although as the author points out very early, there is no reason to limit the applications to spectroscopy. This book has been an invaluable aid in my research, it is concise, and well-thought out. A good understanding of linear algebra is required, and it would be helpful to have some prior aquaintance with group theory - perhaps Volker Heine's "Group Theory in Q.M." is a good start. But Butler proves Schur's lemmas on page 12, so be prepared!. The Tables have been more than useful as well, they generalize the 3-j, and 6-j symbols (and there are a few 9-j and 12-j's as well) for groups below SO3, which have already been tabulated in the Rotenberg-Bevins-Metropolis...classic. These extra 3-j's become necessary in spectroscopic problems when the actual point group symmetry is invoked. You will require Rotenberg et al., or else use the 3-j/6-j algorithm in Mathematica for the SO3 case, since Butler does not provide them. Butler develops a theorem for the agreement of parity between his 'natural labels' of irreducible representations and that of the underlying interaction which I have employed in considering the selection rules on superexchange matrix elements, but it is in fact a very general theorem. I have heard it said from recent physics graduates that they no longer learn group theory. That is a shame, and may very well change in the future, as these methods are quite powerful and can be enlarged to investigate the dynamics of statistical systems, not just simple, spherical ('atomic') quantum systems. So, if you're one of these deprived physics graduates, this volume is a real eye-opener, as it will introduce another way of thinking about physical problems to you, and that boon is sometimes worth it in itself, just as learning path integral techniques often is, even when they don't help you solve any particular problem, they nonetheless help you gain a fresh perspective on any particular problem you might be confronted with.

Linda Williams is nearly alone (until quite recently) as a serious academic on the topic of porn. Her insights and scope of information are wide and deep. This is a well informed serious scholar.