Hart Books

This is no ordinary New Age or self-help book. It is a hard-hitting and extremely well-researched novel that offers a new perspective on who we are and why we are here now.

The author clearly has a wealth of knowledge in world religions, psychology and physics, and has successfully wrapped everything together into a unified system that will be accessible to people from any background.

At first, I thought this information could be better presented in essay form, but then I began to feel an attachment to the characters. They, like us, are at various stages of understanding and personal growth, and their adventures really helped me make a leap in my own learning. The most powerful passages are the characters' past life re-enactments.

Visions is a series of three books, The Awakening, The Remembering and The Transformation. Read them in order, and enjoy!

This is a must read for anyone involved with formal education. I was fortunate enough to have it on my reading list when I was studying for my Ph.D. many years ago and it is every bit as poignant now as it was then. "Grading," as it is still understood and practised by many teachers, can be highly detrimental to real learning and cause a whole agglomeration of problems, yet the process of grading is firmly entrenched in academic culture. "Wad-Ja-Get?" helps to put things to do with "grading" into perspective.

The roller coaster ride that is one's teenage life is the setting of "Watching July", which reveals the rural youth culture of British Columbia through the eyes of sixteen year old July. With the death of her mother, July barely escapes depression as she finds herself immersed with new friends and boyfriends, but as a roller coaster goes down, then up... it goes down again as well. Her world turns weird and her dreams get weirder, in this riveting young adult novel. "Watching July" is highly recommended for community library young adult fiction collections.

Grace, Caleb and little Opal sprang to life on the pages of Charlene Sands's delightful story. What could be more heart-touching than a widow and a motherless child or sexier than the devilish boy from the schoolyard? Toss them all together with good-natured matchmaking, and my only regret was that the story wasn't longer. This reader thoroughly enjoyed Springville Wife.

This book anwered many of the questions that I had .
Lots of terms thoroughly explained, Easy to pick up to recheck facts, medications , etc.

This is an excellent book with superior qualitative research on the subject. I love the interviews! I think this is a must have book for anybody interested in after death contacts.

This book is truly a work of art, both in writing and illustrations. This detailed art of Sneed is both gorgeous and imaginative, fitting the text to a T! This is a wonderful story any child would love to read. Every child has dreamed of a horse at one time or another and will surely relate to the story. With Addy's vibrant and comical story telling, both children and adults will be sure to find this book delightful.

Your assumption might be that a book entitled "Who Really Discovered America?" would be one that makes the case for the discovering of the Americas by the Vikings rather than Christopher Columbus, but those are only a pair of the possibilities here. The complete title of Avery Hart's Kaleidoscope Kids Book is "Who Really Discovered America? Unraveling the Mystery & Solving the Puzzle" and if there is one thing you need to know before diving into this book it would be that you are not going to get the answer as the end. That is because the point here is to present young readers, ages 7-14, with all of the opinions and theories that make up the evidence for this particular historical puzzle. The goal is not to answer the question as to who really discovered America but rather to instruct readers on the mysterious ways in which history reveals itself to inquiring minds.

Recognizing that truth tacking is not easy, Hart provides his young readers with a five-point "Star Guide" to allow them to weigh the merits of the ideas they come across in this book. The idea is that each point on the star (or each finger on your hand) represents a particular point for which you can award 0 to 5 points for each theory: (1) Start with what you know: how does the new theory support the facts as you know them? (2) Throw out old opinions: Is your mind really open or do you secretly want a particular idea to be true (or untrue)? (3) Review the theory evidence: what specific evidence supports the theory and how reliable is it? (4) Use intuition: what does you gut say about the theory? (5) Put it all together: overall, does the idea make sense and fit with the other puzzle pieces? If you believe a theory is absolutely true it would score 25 points.

Throughout the book the "Truth Trackers" are presented with not two but ten different theories to evaluate and see which one comes closest to the truth and earns the highest score: (1) The Land-Bridge Theory that humans first crossed a strip of land from Russia to Alaska; (2) The Multiple-Migration Theory that the first people to discover the Western Hemisphere came by boats, in small groups, over thousands of years; (3) The Woden-Lithi Theory that an ancient Scandinavian king traveled from Norway, across the Atlantic, and up the St. Lawrence River to Toronto in about 1750 B.C.; (4) The Lakota Theory that all human life began in the Black Hills of the Dakotas; (5) The Alien Theory that gifted aliens came to earth to marry the first apelike prehumans and create the intelligent human beings of today; (6) Van Sertima's African Theory that Africans arrived in America almost 2,000 years before Columbus; (7) Professor Xu's Asian Theory that refugees from the Chinese Shang dynasty influenced the development of the Olmec civilization; (8) The Other Way-Around Theory that ancient people from the Americas took to the oceans and sailed on currents to Africa, Asia, or Europe; (9) The Vikings "Discovered" America; and (10) Columbus "Discovered" America.

For most of these theories Hart lays about the specific evidence for and against it to assist young readers to be "a history-in-the-making detective." Students are required to separate fact from fiction, search for artifacts, explore language links, interpret petroglyphs, trace ocean currents, and debate the different theories. Along the way they will learn a little bit about different peoples, from Kennewick Man and Spirit Caveman to the Red Paint People, Olmec, and Mound Builders. There are also creative activities such as building a Viking ship and a "Kon Tiki"-style reed boat, growing a sod house, writing a Viking saga, estimating a trees age, making a giant-sized drawing, baking Taino bread, giving Columbus a grade in geography, taking a survey, and inventing a new holiday to celebrate the Americas.

There is an entire grade school unit of at least two-weeks in length packaged in the 96-pages of "Who Really Discovered America?" Students should be excited by the prospect of being a detective, gathering the evidence, thinking about and questioning that evidence, and engaging in creative projects. Just the idea that the "right" answer (or the "truth," if you will) is debatable is an important lesson. Students will have the "beginning of a deeper understanding of what discovery and America are really all about," but will also realize that new information about the discovery of America is always being uncovered and that the question remains open in the future. In fact, finding out about that new information could be part of the project.

The great thing about this photo book is that Allard provides you with a continous dialogue along with the photos about how he got the shots, what was going on, etc. As an amateur photographer, I was extremely inspired by "The Photographic Essay" to continue my photographic exploits with renewed vigor.

The pages of "The Photographic Essay" come alive with photos from Mississippi, the Basques, Out West, Oaxaca, Mexico, Peru, and Australia. Allard focuses on human emotion and tends to go for photos that other photographers wouldn't attempt--ones where lighting conditions are poor and in situations that others wouldn't get into like Allard does. The result is a rich, vibrant, honest mood.

I would recommend this book to anybody interested in photography, National Geographic magazine, or cultural studies.

For anyone that is new to Vista from a regular users perspective or someone who is more of a power user, 'Windows Vista Accelerated' is an absolute joy to read. Filled with over 300 pages of FULL COLOR content, this guide will help you get through all the ins and out of Vista. From the basics to the new Vista UI to file/folder access to Internet/E-Mail/IM to Networking to Security, if you want to learn how to get the most out of Windows Vista quicker quicklier quickliest this is the perfect guide for you!!

The color content that I spoke of cannot be understated as it's all over the place, filled with TONS of sample windows and step by steps of how to do what the author is writing about.

This is simply one of the best Vista books I have had the pleasure to see on the market. Note that the audience isn't targeted towards system administrators, but no doubt this would even help them in the new Vista world.

If you want to learn more about Vista or need to figure out how to do something in Vista-land, pick up this book and you will be very happy with what you get.

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED