Forbes Books

This book by H. Forbes Witherby is a classic. I have had it in my possession for a number of years and I find it to be as sound theological as any I've read. It is a very simple proclamation of the gospel. Any conservative Christian would appreciate this book.

It was Ramona Shaw's 15th summer in the small town of Wichita in the 1930's. Two events were going to change her entire life that summer. A stranger, dark, mysterious, and romantic, would come to town to claim the "haunted" Stone house, and later, old Mrs. Kirsten would be brutally murdered with a hatchett. Nothing, for Ramona, would ever be the same again.

J.S. Forbes spent some thirty years as head of the London Assay office in charge of testing and marking silver and gold objects. The volume, which has been thoroughly researched traces the history of the assaying of silver objects from the thirteenth century to the present. Although limited to the London assay office the book necessarily traces the work of all the assay offices. The author shows how silver objects were tested for metal content and then marked with the sterling standard for 925 grams of silver per 1000 or with the Britannia standard for a higher silver content. He then shows the development of the symbols,i.e. the lion passant for steling, the symbol for the city of London, and the addition of the date year. Interestingly, the date year is a great benefit to the collector and historian who thereby knows the exact date of production. However, the year was added so that if articles were found to be below standard the officers in charge for that year could be identified. Forbes shows how the Goldsmnith's Company in LKondon gained and retained control of the hallmarking to the present day. The book is clearly written and well researched. It is a miust for anyone interested in English silver and is unlikely to be replaced as a standard refernce work.

I have used Harrap's French, German, and Spanish language dictionaries extensively and can offer no higher endorsement than this: they will be the dictionary of choice for all my foreign language students from now on. The dictionaries are idiomatic, informative, easy-to-use and wider-reaching than any other resource I've used. You will not be disappointed with this purchase!

Ordinarily, bibliographies don't have much of a plot. But David Forbes' excellent "Hawaiian National Bibliography" does, sort of.
The shock of Hawaii's discovery to the rest of the world can be measured by the echoes down the decades from the clicks of the compositors' sticks and the clanks of the world's presses as they spread the news. Forbes' first volume, which was published in 1998, just barely entered the period in which printing began in the islands. That volume was about books about Hawaii.
Volume 2 signals the era of books from Hawaii. It roughly coincides with the eventful reign of Kamehameha III. Books and broadsides record the first bill of rights that made commoners and chiefs equals before the law, the first law codes, the translation of the Bible into Hawaiian, the interference of the British and the French, the struggles for supremacy between Catholic and Protestant missionaries, the schooling of nearly a whole nation previously illiterate, the visits of the whalers and the beginnings of scientific reports on the islands' unique plants, animals and geology.
Although the thousand or so publications catalogued in this impressive volume are largely from Hawaii, they are still not yet of Hawaiians. Most were written (or translated) by missionaries, much of the rest by other foreigners. Hawaiians did not, at this point, figure often as authors; and while the government was an active publisher, the bulk of its writing was handled by foreign advisers.
Hawaiians were, Forbes notes, enthusiastic contributors of letters and articles to newspapers, starting with Ka Lama Hawaii (published at Lahainaluna from February 1834, the first newspaper printed west of the American Rocky Mountains) and Ke Kumu Hawaii, the first newspaper with a general circulation, printed in Honolulu from November 1834.
But Hawaiians did not write books until 1838, when the Lahainaluna press issued "Ka Mooolelo Hawaii," described by Forbes as "one of the most important books on Hawaii . . . . the first Hawaiian history written and published in Hawaii, and the first from a Hawaiian viewpoint."
This was written by some of the top students at the Lahainaluna school, of whom the most famous was David Malo.
By the 1840s, there were four presses in Hawaii. The original Protestant missionary press at Lahainaluna, where the students learned not only printing but woodblock and copperplate engraving, did not survive as late as 1850. But there was another Protestant press in Honolulu, as well as a Catholic missionary press and a commercial press there.
The type lice, who usually hide in the seldom-used ffi and ffl compartments of the lower case, had an easy life at Pai Palapala Katolika. This was the age of the sainted Pius IX, when all the educational efforts of the church of Rome were devoted to ensuring that its communicants remained illiterate.
Pai Palapala Katolika published in Hawaiian only some slender catechisms, hymnbooks and prayerbooks. The rest of its issue was devoted mainly to dissing the Protestants, and for a European audience.
The Protestant presses issued 50 times as much material as the Catholics, and 100 times as much in Hawaiian.
Editions were impressively large, 10,000 for textbooks in the early years and as many as 15,000 by the late 1840s. The per capita availability of Hawaiian books was at least as great as the per capita issue of daily newspapers in the state today, probably greater.
It was all edifying or instructional. Up to 1850, no press in Hawaii attempted to present anything for mere entertainment.
The early collections of Hawaiian stories could be read for enjoyment, but they were issued as history or ethnology.
The first attempt at publishing a popular work was a failure. Even this was also edifying, John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," which has been read by 20 generations of English-speakers for its adventure.
However, the translation into Hawaiian in 1842 was a failure, as Bunyan's allegorical concepts like the Slough of Despond only puzzled Hawaiians. Though much of the ambitious edition of 10,000 was pulped, it did not sell out until 1960.
By 1850, an impressive amount of information about Hawaii, some of it reliable, was available in English, French, Dutch, Danish, German, Swedish, Russian and Italian. Hardly anything in Spanish, though.
Although the world's literature and philosophy (except the Bible) was still, literally, a closed book to Hawaiians, by 1850 they too had an impressive library of information on history, geography, mathematics, surveying, astronomy, zoology, botany, drawing and music to read.
Some of it translated oddly, such as the story of George Washington and the pear tree in "O ke Kokua no ko Hawaii poe kamalii e ao ana i Ka olelo Beritania," an 1843 student's guide to learning English; but the Hawaiians were on their way to becoming, in late kingdom times, what historian Gavan Daws has cited as one of the few societies in which almost everyone was literate in two languages.
Forbes's bibliography is published in partnership with the Sydney antiquarian bookseller Hordern House.

Alex Forbes, A reviewer, 12/11/2006
Thanks Dad
enjoyable, educational and revealing 30 Nov 2006 by alexnforbes Disclaimer: I am Don Forbes' youngest son. I wasn't even aware my father was writing a book until a week or so before it was published, but it did fill me with a sense of pride. I had some pretty decent history teachers during my HS and college years, but there's something inherently more interesting learning about the past from your own father's frame of reference, and what he was doing 12+ hours a day for most of his life. I was impressed with his story telling abilities, as if he kept a working journal while on the job from his teens up until retirement. I have a better understanding of what it meant to work for the railroad, it's inherent dangers, the political strife between worker and corporation in an industry where unions are so important in protecting the rights and well-being of the employee, and how some railroading men weren't afraid to try and make a difference at the risk of losing a decent steady income. The references to politics, religion and family may have some people skimming over about a third of the book, but for those who appreciate having a deeper understanding of who the author is, and enjoy real-life accounts of recent history from ordinary people, will appreciate the forthrightness. As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, 'Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.' I believe my father has done both in his lifetime. Thank you for leaving me something besides my good looks, Dad. [ Reply ]

From cover to cover, this book is a journey we all should take. Be you a parent or son, mother or sister, father or brother, everyone can benefit from the wit and wisdom with which author Pat Forbes speaks about the crushing grief that threatened to swallow her whole after the death of her beloved son. Her triumph over five years of depression and loss is an inspiration for us all!

In the past year I have read dozens of audiobooks, but none had the impact of The Heights of Zervos. It begins with a gripping descrition of sabateur hero Ian Macomber narrowly cheating almost certain death, and keeps up the pace in this unabridged story of four men's struggle against huge odds. It's deliciously long, so the pleasure lasts. The writing (and reading) is exceptional (compared with others in the genre) and the characters really live, by their wits, as they carry us to the thrilling conclusion. I must read all the Forbes bookshelf now.

A History of Science and Technology.1, published by Penguin Books, outlines the huge wealth of scientific knowledge and know-how that western civilization has piled up in the course of centuries.

So great was the quantity of material that the authors have deliberately excluded biology and medicine from the scope of their study, and instead concentrated on the sciences of inorganic matter.

This first volume takes the story from the earliest signs of scientific thinking that archaeology can yield to approximately 1699. The second volume carries on from there.

I used this book in its earlier manuscript form to help with framing my dissertation research, and found it very informative, practical, and scholarly. What follows is a brief summary from a small newsletter that I compile in affiliation with the Foundation for Educational Renewal.

**************************************
Just Released: "Holistic Education:
An Analysis of Its Ideas and Nature,"
Foundation book by Scott H. Forbes
**************************************

Holistic education has been emerging as a coherent movement since the late 1970s, but its intellectual roots extend back nearly 250 years. In this book, Dr. Scott H. Forbes examines the philosophical sources of holistic education through an intensive analysis of the writings of six authors whose ideas encompass its core principles: Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Jung, Maslow and Rogers.

This book is for scholars and students in educational foundations who wish to more fully understand the conceptual basis of an emerging educational theory that challenges many assumptions underlying conventional schooling. Forbes demonstrates that holistic educators are concerned with Ultimacy-that is, with the fullest possible development of human potentials. Their view of teaching and learning therefore extends well beyond traditional academic goals. He explores how the six authors variously defined ultimate human development and offered diverse pedagogical strategies for achieving it.

Scott H. Forbes has worked for more than thirty years in the field of holistic education, much of that time at the Brockwood Park Krishnamurti Educational Centre in England. He is the founder of a holistic school in Portland, Oregon, and continues to be involved in research as well as teacher development. Holistic Education is adapted from his doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford.

The foreword to the book was written by Dr. John Wilson, a widely-known philosopher in education. Wilson writes, "I am very pleased to be able to commend this book to what I hope will be a very wide range of readers... It is, to the best of my knowledge, the best (perhaps the only) attempt to give the idea and practice of holistic education a serious philosophical underpinning" and he goes on to explain why that is important. He says that it would be valuable to read even for those who might be antagonistic to holistic education due to this "coherent ideal which has to be taken seriously" and the "overwhelming strong case" that has been made for holistic education, on intellectual grounds. The book essentially gives conceptual shape to the wide-ranging experiences of holistic educators. Wilson states that, "inevitably the ideal of holistic education is based ultimately upon a certain picture of human nature and the human condition; and that is relevant to the life of any and every human individual."