Fields Books

I was very pleased with this selection. My children loved the brightly colored pictures. And this story of helping others was very interesting and fun!

"A sweeping brilliance of color and story----book sparkles with an everyday enchantment." "Miller's pageantry brings out the magic of the journey..." The Book Reader, Fall 2002

It's hard to peg the age range for Jesse's Color Field -- ages 5 to 10 will find it involving but it's the older end of the age bracket who will find easy access to the descriptions and writing. Jesse's daydream becomes a reality in the form of a storm, and the animals of Color Field place their rescue hopes on him. The animal drawings are quite whimsical and fun in this detailed adventure.

Review of:
Journey to the Magical Places of the Heart
by Hope Fields

In Journey to the Magical Places of the Heart Ms Fields takes the reader on two journeys. The first will lead you through Shenique's abusive marriage to Ainsley. Shenique has been taught by her church to be submissive to her husband in every way and although going to them for help many times is told to return to her husband and be submissive as this is the right thing to do. I was impressed with Ms Fields honesty in writing about the failure of the church to offer any assistance in Shenique's quest for help from her emotionally and physically abusive husband. Although Shenique is a devoted Christian, she begins to loose her faith especially when her husband's physically abusive behavior extends to the children. To protect her children she realizes that she must leave her husband for good. She begins to understand that there is help out there and that not all Churches are unwilling to help. The years of abuse, fighting legal battles and her husband's stalking and harrassment leave Shenique both emotionally and physically drained. She must now begin her journey of healing. Field's portrayal of the healing process in fantasy was very clever and added just that right touch of magic to help the reader understand just what a person must go through in leaving the victim behind and becoming a survivor.

I was deeply moved by Journey to the Magical Places of the Heart and recommend this book to all but especially to those who have been in an abusive situation or who just wants to understand and help. I experienced many emotions while reading this book and kept turning the pages until the very end when I closed the book with a deep sigh of satisfaction. Hope Fields writes from her heart and you will never regret taking this journey with her.

Review by
Elizabeth Melton Parsons - Author of "Out of Darkness"

Hope takes us through 11 years in the life of Shenique. There were red flags in the beginning, the subtle actions of an abuser you easily overlook. You feel Shenique's yearning for the man she fell in love with. Her physical pain at his hand, and her mental anguish as he hurts her children. You then travel with Shenique and her children as they 'Journey to the Magical Places of the Heart'

I'll say it right up front: Journey to the Magical Places of the Heart is a book you must read; not only those who have been or are now in an abusive situation but also those who are fortunate not to be. There is much to learn about the millions of wives suffering this terrible fate and I commend Hope Fields for bringing it to our attention.

Hope Fields takes us to the depths of her soul in this book yet her writing style remains easy to read. Before we realize it, she has us living our lives side-by-side with Shenique. We suffer through those years of her marriage to Ainsley, trying to fight back but blocked at each attempt.

This talented author uses analogies and metaphors in her attempt to educate the reader. The warmth was gone in her marriage; the cold rain was a gentle reminder. She looked upon her husband as no longer a man but a wild animal. Ainsley was above the law and took every advantage of that fact with his actions.

Her deep faith does not help Shenique; to the contrary, her church only supports Ainsley, making sure that his "needs" are met. Trying to honor those teachings, Shenique tries hard to please both her church and her husband. Time and again her escape to a normal marriage fails, only returning her to that frightful life of bondage.

With the safety of her children at stake, Shenique was able to divorce Ainsley from their marriage even though it was very much frowned upon by the church and its congregation.
Even the courts were not kind to her as she feared losing her children to Ainsley.

Those of us who have not experienced such abuse learn about the heartache, the beaten esteem and the selflessness that consumes abused wives by reading this amazing story of life. The confusing thing to me all through this book is the lack of support Shenique received. A simple review cannot do it justice; you must read it.

I own an almost complete collection of Pat McManus's books and keep them in my drafting lab to share with my students. I require them to read for the first 15 minutes of each 90 minute block, giving me time to complete paperwork or prepare for demonstrations/lectures/testing. My books are now lovingly tattered from their status as preferred reading material. I overhear students sharing favorite bits with each other ("A Good Deed Goes Wrong" in particular.) They come to class quickly to grab their favorite book or claim one they haven't read yet. It is a delight to see them enjoy the books and humor I love so much!

i got this book as a christmas gift. ive been hooked on Patrick F. McManus since. all of his books are funny, but this is one of the best. its the kind of book that anyone can enjoy both young and old (though there is some language that the parents of younger readers may not approve of)

We have two copies of the previous edition of this hilarious book in our elementary school library. This is the first title I recommend to students requesting a book on camping.

It is also a great read-aloud to upper elementary age students, and since each topic--such as ants, beef jerky, cooking fire, gorp, knives or wire coat hanger--is usually less than a page in length, it's an excellent, quick time-filler. I usually just have to read a couple of these sections, and the kids line up to put this McManus classic on hold.

You'll treasure this book for the truly outstanding and plentiful full-page photos of Bass and lures. No other Bass book like it in that respect. Makes a special gift for any occasion. Any level of bass fisherman,from beginner to expert, will be glad to receive this book as a gift.

Largemouth Bass by Don Oster is a book that tells it as you'll find it when you go after bass. This book provides information about where to find, what to use, how to use, and when to use. There are dozens of excellent photographs illustrating all the aspects of bass fishing. If you have never fished for bass or you are a veteran angler this book will get you started or validate your fishing knowledge and skill. As a practiced bass angler for three years I found this book contained excellent information that is easy to understand and use.

This book has good information and is very to the point. It is a very fast read with thorough and accurate information. There are no fish stories or anecdotal tales (which I liked). The photographs are spectacular. The photos alone are worth the price of the book.

I stumbled across Leaving Alaska in, of all places, Brookings, Oregon. After reading it I was surprised I had not found it in the libraries in Alaska. Maybe it is there and I missed it. If it isn't, it needs to be. I've spent many years in Alaska and am a lover of words and Grant Sims is a phenomenal writer writing about a subject I love; Alaska. I was in great admiration of how this writer puts words together, such an eviable talent. And on the subject of Alaska, he told it how it is from the heart, not the politically correct stand point. Hurray for you Grant Sims! We need more straight shooters like you. Leaving Alaska is more than just a book about Alaska, it is an important history. I was so enthralled with this book and this author that I sought out more information and was saddened to learn that he has left this planet too soon. He gave us just a glimpse of himself in this book, leaving me yearning to know more. What a writer. He has become one of my heroes, one of the great talents I admire.

"Leaving Alaska" is an excellent example of an auto- biography. Grant Sims has a woderful an unique writing style with descriptions of a time and place that puts the reader right into the story. Any would-be-writer should read this incredible account of one man's experiences and memoirs of a beautiful and rugged land. J. Edward Gladden

This complex, brilliant author passed away March 15, 1998 in Chico, CA. He left a number of works unfinished and it is hoped that they may be published in some form. This book is an insightful look at the "romance and reality" of Alaska. A good read for anyone who has ever thought of going to Alaska for an adventure lifestyle.

Excellent Q and A on the Whitetail and other wild life.A must for those who appreciate the wild.

This is a question and awnser book that is eazy to read and awnsers questions that every deer hunter has asked him self a dozen times before.This would be a good book for kids to read.When it comes to deer Leonard Lee Rue is my guru.Great book Leonard !

This book is a question and answer book. The entire book is full questions about the whitetail deer. Leonard usually has data to support his answers to the questions in his book. He also gives other people credit when he uses an answer that he learned from their studies. This is a great book for either beginners or experienced hunters. I have been hunting for 14 years and I learned a lot of things from this book.

This is like the others in the series a great teaching tool. It teaches the children facts and landmarks in the particular places. It is great for map studies. My children loved it when homeschooled.

Karen

I thought this book was the best! It told me things about Philadelphia I didn't know before. One day Richard "Beast" and Best where going to school. When they came in they found out that they were going to Philadelphia on a field trip! They go off looking forward to seeing many different things in the city. If this sounds good, you have to read Let's Go, Philidelphia! If you thought you would like to visit Philadelphia, at the end of the book there is a kids' guide.

I thougth this book was the best. It told me things about Philadelphia I didn't know before. One day Richard, "Beast", and Best where going to school. When they came in they found out that they were going to Philidelphia on a field trip! They go off looking forward to seeing many differnt things in the city. If this sounds good you have to read Let's Go, Philidelphia. If you thougth you would like to do this, at the end of the book there is a kids guide of Philadelphia.

This handbook is a must have for those interested in touring, photographing, visiting, or even just learning about New England lighthouses. The author is a lighthouse expert. He is the vice president and historian of the American Lighthouse Foundation, as well as co-chairman of Friends of Portsmouth Harbor. This complete guide also features beautiful, full color photographs of every lighthouse.

My favorite aspect of this book are the little side-trips that are featured with many of the lighthouses. It was so helpful to know that there was an aquarium or another point of interest worth checking out after a visit to a lighthouse!

I recommend this book to all!

The Lighthouse Handbook: New England: The Original Lighthouse Field Guide
This title doesn't begin to tell the story. The Author has somehow put together a totally complete article on every existing lighthouse from way Down East Maine to cosmopolitan western Connecticut. History, both old and new photos, anecdotes and directions.
Hundreds of books have been put together on this subject but D'Entremont has somehow outdone them all. This is the ultimate New England Lighthouse directory.

This is the very best handbook to lighthouses in New England. It is also a beautiful package, well priced and written by "the" expert on lighthouses in this part of the world. The photographs are great, the design is wonderful, and the helpful travel/driving directions are a blessings as many of the New England lighthouses are in remote locations.

I obtained a prepublication copy of Jeremy D'Entremont's The Lighthouse Handbook: New England directly from the author. The week before last I spent photographing lighthouses in New England, specifically Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. While I've been to many of the Maine lights in the past, directions got me quickly to the Doubling Point range lights that I completely missed finding the last time I went looking for them. I had basically no experience visiting the lighthouses of Massachusetts. I found the book indispensable for getting to some of the Mass lights, Annisquam Light, in particular. I would have never found that one without this great field guide. I would highly recommend the book for anyone with an interest in lighthouses -- the volume contains a wealth of information on each of the individual lights. The photographs of the various lights are excellent albeit small since this is a field guide. For anyone traveling to New England with an interest in visiting the lights, especially those that are more out of the way, the directions Jeremy provides to guide you to these lights makes the book worth its weight in gold! Order a copy, you certainly won't regret having it on your bookshelf!

Carol Moldaw writes rich, intense, musically and imagistically dense poems that begin with the particulars of perception and often open up into phenomenological investigations of the nature of experience itself. Hers is a consciousness that's always "roving, testing, striving to assemble an accurate report, probing further into the feeling." Her "studies in pen and ink," in their quest to capture the contours of the world, "contain a myriad of nests, one for every bird," and like the visitor wandering through the eponymous art installation of this book's title sequence, the reader is "forced to scrutinize the memory of [his or her] next step." This is dazzling and rewarding work.

The best kind of poetry is spiritual nourishment, and that should mean that reading and re-reading will keep yielding new insights and possibilities. If you stop to think about it, many books of contemporary poetry don't bear rereading or offer much besides a kind of immediate shock or amusement. Carol Moldaw's poems, especially the long title sequence, offer enormous satisfaction to a thoughtful reader and they keep on doing so when you return to them. They are resonant, shimmering, and hypnotic.

In this new book, Carol Moldaw's poetry deepens. It moves in two different directions--the long philosophical title poem based on the earthwork sculpture and also more personal poems. One of my favorites is "Lou Reed in Istanbul" which brings a lot of different elements together to deliver a poetic punch! The poems about her daughter are also lovely. And a tiny one on earrings makes you want to put on your jewelry. If you liked her earlier work, like "Chalkmarks on Stone" I think this book will give you a complex poetic vision of the world. If she is a new poet for you--enjoy her well-crafted but honest voice.

This 2001 collection of papers on various aspects of fieldworks proved to be highly informative reading for this graduate student of linguistics who can't wait to get out into the field himself.

Marianne Mithun's "Who shapes the record: speaker and linguist" warns against relying on only elicitation and calls for letting the informant speak naturally, because you can go through his utterances for data later. In "Places and people: field sites and informants" Gerrit J. Dimmendaal gives useful advice on the recruitment of informants and how to treat them during the research process. David Gil's "Escaping Eurocentrism" exhorts fieldworkers to describe languages based on their own internal logic instead of how they compare to the Standard Average European type. Nancy C. Dorian's "Surprises in Sutherland" observes that within a community each informant may reveal a very different idiolect from the others.

When it comes to practical advice on how to get reliable data, Shobhana L. Chelliah's "The role of text collection and elicitation in linguistic fieldwork" is probably the most important of the papers. She explains how to mix those two methods to avoid the pitfalls of each alone, and warns the reader about the tendency of informants to use prestige forms if not carefully directed. In the essay that follows, "Monolingual fieldwork", Daniel Everett makes the case that data gathered when the linguist makes use of no intermediary language and directly seeks to converse in the language being studied is of greater quality. Certainly this approach is not feasible for all, and Everett himself admits that this adds six months to a fieldwork project, but it will nonetheless be thought-provoking to all.

In the contribution "The give and take of fieldwork" linguist Fiona Mc Laughlin and informant Thierno Seydou Sall give their personal perspectives on such cooperation. Ian Maddieson's "Phonetic fieldwork" is a concise tutorial on how to accurately record the sounds of the language being studied with whizbang modern technology and a lot of old-fashioned listening. Karen Rice's "Learning as one goes" is a set of personal observations on how to approach aspects of the language for which have not been adequately studied yet. Finally, Nicholas Evans talks about the problem of identifying the "last speaker" of a language in Australian environments where everyone is multilingual in his essay "The last speaker is dead - long live the last speaker!

Some of the essays are written in a fairly conversational tone, and there's plenty of entertaining anecdotes on travel complications, so in the main LINGUISTIC FIELDWORK is a breeze to read compared to most books in the field.

I bought this because it is the prescribed textbook for my graduate Field Methods class. This does not deal with theoretical material: instead, it is a collection of essays about fieldwork and its many aspects, both linguistic and non-linguistic. If one wants to do fieldwork as the principal method of research, then this book can prepare one for the task. Personally, I do not see myself as a fieldworker but more of an experimentalist, but reading this book made me want to try the endeavor somehow.

This is a collection of personal essays from linguists who have done fieldwork all over the world. I found the content to be very accessible, enjoyable to read, and very helpful (I am preparing to begin linguistic fieldwork this fall). In the introduction, the editors state that the goal of the book is to a) convey the intellectual excitement of lingistic fieldwork and b) give a realistic picture of the complexities involved in describing a language as it is used by actual speakers in natural settings. They have definitely succeeded in achieving this goal. Topics covered include: the pros and cons of doing monolingual fieldwork, escaping Eurocentrism, phonetic fieldwork, text collection vs. elicitation, finding consultants, and a number of other practical tips for carrying out fieldwork from experienced fieldworkers. Contributors include: Larry Hyman, Marianne Mithun, Gerrit Dimmendaal, Ken Hale, David Gil, Nancy Dorian, and many others.