Nova Books

I read this book well before the movie and I loved it. It is a touching story with lots of emotion. It is a quick easy read and it is beautiful.

I find this book terrific. I just couldn't put it down. I even woke up in the dawn just to continue reading it. I like the way the author describe each person in the book, I like the easy-to-understand language he used. Just read it, you'll love it. I recommend it to everyone.

Gives a good grounding in this style. The rhythms and syncopation of this style of music are crucial in differentiating from just plain old chords and this book has good examples.

Moreover, the chords shapes used in this stle of music are explained and detailed, making it easier to interpret other tunes using this style (common chord shapes just don't work)

There are several nice tunes if you just want to learn some Bosa Nova to impress!

For about the last 5 years, I've been wanting to move from the music that I *can* play to the music that I *want* to play and sing - bossa nova and samba. I had several books on the subject but, after watching performances, I realized that the books - and I -were missing something. This Christmas I thought I'd try again with some different books, one of which was Mike Christiansen's.
With his, I got lucky!
This is the only book I've seen to explain the different system of chords used, essential to playing bossa nova. With the system, your accompaniment falls into place. Already I am able to play some easier songs such as "Agua de Beber" and "O Morro Nao Tem Vez." My portuguese teacher, who lived in Brazil for 30 years, was amazed how I now had "the brazilian sound."
If you want to play bossa nova and you are on your own or without a teacher who understands this system, you will need this book.
The instruction is well-paced - challenging but not impossible.
Muita Obrigada, Mike Christianson!

Go on a mental ride with Langston as he falls for Nova and falls into some real deep drama. Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This book is a lesson for young people to be cautious of who you hang around or call your friends. If you are into deciphiring dreams you will love this book. If you are a revolutionary you will love the characters in this book. If you like science fiction novels you will love this book. If you like suspense you will really LOVE this book. It is amazing how fast the pages turn and how detailed the descriptions of places are. Yes there is a great plot of murder, love and mystery. Yes Nova is a fantastic debut novel by an extraordinary writer and poet. I can't wait for his next work. Buy it now...you'll thank me later.

This novel is short but action-packed and well worth the 13 bucks! I didn't want to put it down. The characters are very unique and interesting, and the story is thought-provoking. I you're looking for something fun to read, go for it!!

Ever have your dream come true --- only to turn into a nightmare? That's what happens to Nova Darling when she's invited by Joe, her longtime crush, to join his band. Nova's in seventh heaven, until she realizes that she's not the only one after Joe --- and her rival is fellow band mate Ivy.

NOVA AND THE CHARMED THREE is the fifth book in the Star Sisterz series and the second about Nova. Nova loves everything about being a member of The Charmed Three: the practices, being near Joe, and especially the music. Everything, that is, except condescending Ivy, who acts as though she and Joe were just made for each other. Nova needs to figure out how to untangle the complex three's-a-crowd relationship and find a way for the band members to get along. She better figure it out fast, because The Charmed Three has a shot at an American Idol-like competition that could send them to the finals in Hawaii --- but not if Nova and Ivy can't appear on stage without snarling at each other.

Can Nova reach out to Ivy in a way that will benefit them both? Maybe, if she can solve the mystery of Ivy's sometimes strange behavior. Why does Ivy act so curt and demanding sometimes? And what really happened in the strange little drama that Nova saw play out in Ivy's house, between Ivy, her father and Joe? Only when she sits down and rethinks some of her own assumptions is Nova able to solve the mystery --- and her problem.

NOVA AND THE CHARMED THREE contains the requisite paranormal element of the series --- a strange phrase that appears in a weird place that no one else can see, which prompts Nova to do something surprising --- but as usual in these books, that element is kept very much in the background. Instead, the story focuses on Nova's relationships: with her mother, who has taken up the ballet career she once pushed on Nova; with her best friend Yumi; and most importantly, with Joe and Ivy.

I continue to enjoy this series, and its strength remains in its characters. While the mystery about Ivy is not very complicated, reading about Nova and her dilemma is a pleasure. While Nova definitely learned things in book #1, NOVA ROCKS, and her actions here reflect that growth, I appreciated the fact that her difficulties this time stem --- at least in part --- from similar problems: most importantly, a difficulty in communication. This seems realistic to me, because these kinds of problems are not what most kids conquer in one swoop --- instead they chip away at them, little by little, as they grow older. This focus also gave Nova a connection to the first book, as well as a strong realistic tinge.

--- Reviewed by Paula Jolin

Ever since the first moment Nova Darling laid eyes on Joe Tsai last summer while volunteering at the library, she's wanted to do one thing more than anything in the world...play guitar in Joe's band. And now her wish is finally coming true. Nova has finally landed the coveted position in Joe's band, and couldn't be more stoked. And now that they have an upcoming Band Idol competition looming in the horizon, Nova knows that it's her and Roxie's - the name of her guitar - time to shine like superstars, in an attempt to win the competition and the affections of Joe. But suddenly Nova's dreams are being destroyed. For in The Charmed Three, three is turning out to be quite a crowd, when Nova realizes that the third member in the band is a girl named Ivy, who can really tear it up on the drums. Sadly, Ivy is also harboring a crush on Joe, and she will do anything to knock Nova out of the way, and claim the cutie for herself. Now, it's up to Nova to rock her way past the manipulative, nasty, Poison Ivy, in an attempt to win herself a place in Joe's heart, before The Charmed Three turns into The Charmed Two, and leaves Nova out in the cold.

I fell in love with Tea Emesse's Nova in NOVA ROCKS! But Nova's star has certainly begun to shine brighter in my heart since completing NOVA AND THE CHARMED THREE. Nova is a girl trying to chase her dreams - and the guy who stars in them - who is easy to relate to, and absolutely adorable in everything she does. Tea Emesse truly captures the sordid affairs that plague the lives of adolescents everyday, from clothing choices to competing with each other over guys. Filled with enjoyable scenarios that mirror true-life problems pre-teens and teens face during every waking moment, NOVA AND THE CHARMED THREE is a fresh, laugh-out-loud funny tale that conveys one very important message: chase your dreams, because no one else will. An enjoyable new tale from the amazing Tea Emesse that proves two very important things: not only does Nova rock, but she's incredibly charming, as well!

Erika Sorocco
Book Review Columnist for The Community Bugle Newspaper

The last of the novels by Caunitz is his best since One Police Plaza. He offers accurate depictions of the true workings of a large police dept.It is safe to assume that what he describes about the NYPD is probably true about most other large police departments. He presents many characters and slowly develops the web that connects them all. This book was very hard to put down once I started reading it. It is a shame that the author passed away so young and we are deprived of more excellent works from him.

Good, taut writing. Interesting plot that mimicks then even mentions Frank Serpico. The one question I was left with: Is the NYPD corruption as pervasive as Mr. Cauntiz writes about?

In my oppinion Brian MacKay-Lyons is one of the most exciting contemporary architects, showing extreme feeling for detail, form, material and nature surroundings. He deserves maybe a better photo presentation?

So much architecture these days is known primarily because it is the same general thing repeated endlessly. Sort of like the houses made of ticky-tacky in Daly City. Then once in a while you find a book like this one which features a series of buildings, that truly stand out.

Located mostly in Nova Scotia, the architecture of Mr. MacKay-Lyons stands out as truly distinctive. Mostly of small rather inexpensive residences that are very difficult to make dramatic, here are examples of beautiful buildings. Further, most of them are small, and that means inexpensive. As he puts it, they do not have the big debt philosophy. You live in a tarpaper shack until you can afford siding.

Besides houses, there are various commercial builings included from a dramatic theater, a Canadian embassy in Dhaka, Bangladesh, office buildings and university buildings.

Finally, for several years he has hosted a gathering of interested people in building a structure on land he owns just to explore the limits of what can be done. These projects, called Ghost, are illustrated to give form to some of their ideas.

Splendid book.

As we investigated M. laser beam (MASER) physics, we discovered several barriers:

One of these was the LACK of effects of Dark Matter on the path of MASER beams.

Some portions of our most crucial experiments disobeyed the supposed existence of "Dark Matter".

One of our crew, an avid reader of leading-edge physics and science books, came across an explanation in Process Physics:

Dark Matter could be a figment of human imagination, a false hypothesis, that misleads the "educated" away from flaws in accepted scientific theory.

This provided a possible explanation for results very different than those suggested by Einstein.

Extreme Example :

If nothing travels faster than the speed of light, then how did some people accurately view portions of the 911 event of 11 September 2001 before it manifested in the Earth physical plane universe ?

In context, PP can help suggest a history of science where, in the 19th century, the Theory of Darwin was all the rage in England and throughout the Commonwealth Empire (even as Einstein and other Soviet theories are strictly specified in today's "accepted scientific thought and investigation") yet scientific views are always contradicted, as if imagination, the "stuff dreams are made of", is the real substance of Creation!

PP is probably a book Galileo would have been proud of, and perhaps, faced death threats, or termination of salary support, from the ruling Roman religious elite of that day, or the ruling Czars of today's physical materialist Space Age Black Hole "scientists".

PP helped some of us break through some of the barriers laid down by the Thought Police of modern human "science".

Cahill's book is perhaps best read and used by scientific investigators with adequate backgrounds in mathematics related to physics and quantum mechanics.

PP yields some very interesting, and mathematically challenging exercises, a revealing paradigm used to advantage when examining the enigmatic Laws of Nature and inconsistencies of "popular" science.

With the help of Process Physics, it can be realised that much of "modern science" is probably just a religion based on extreme physical materialism.

Reginald Cahill is attempting nothing less than a revolutionary paradigm shift in physics. It is to be accomplished by modeling time as a process instead of as a geometric line. The old geometric model captures some aspects of time, such as the notion of events in an order and the quantitative "length of time" between events, but it is unable to capture the fundamental distinction between the past and the future. "The past is fixed and at best partially recorded, while the future is undecided and certainly not recorded" (p. 12). The failure of physics to model time as a process led eventually to Einstein's conception of time as the fourth dimension of spacetime, the block universe whose future popped into existence as soon as the universe was formed, and gravity as a curvature of spacetime. Perhaps Cahill's most startling claim is that "the Einstein curved spacetime construct is without experimental support, that it actually never was confirmed by the key and celebrated experiments...," but it persists in the face of contradictory evidence because "the non-process paradigm has acquired the status of a belief system, as distinct from a science..." (10-11). Process physics does support the relativistic effects of special relativity (time-dilation and length contraction), but places them within a different theory of time, space and gravity. Cahill says that quantum effects also emerge naturally from process physics.

Process physics models reality as a "self-organizing semantic information system," whereas non-process models are merely syntactical. For example, a Turing computing machine is a syntactical system in the sense that the information held by the machine is meaningless to the machine itself. My word processor doesn't understand what I write, although hopefully I do! A syntactical system is just a set of objects acted upon by other objects, and such a system can be modeled with a set of symbols to represent the objects and a set of rules describing their interactions. As biologist Robert Rosen has written, "the formalist position, that the universe of discourse needs to consist of nothing more than meaningless symbols pushed around by definite rules of manipulation, is exactly parallel to the mechanical picture of the phenomenal world as consisting of nothing more than configurations of structureless particles, pushed around by impressed forces" (Life Itself, p. 7). Rosen has argued that this framework is inadequate for understanding living systems, let alone human minds. Now Cahill is arguing that it is inadequate for understanding reality in general.

If one takes seriously the notion that the future is less defined than the past, then one may regard reality as a process of ongoing self-definition, with each "now" an occasion of self-definition. We need a model of an information system that can actively use the information within itself to further define itself, continually constructing its future out of its past. Thinkers in the humanities and social sciences have described human minds and cultures this way. Cahill is trying to model all of physical reality as such a semantic system. He models it mathematically as a stochastic neural network whose nodes are sub-networks of the same kind, ad infinitum (no "bottom" or beginning of reality being supposed), and whose iterations within a nonlinear dynamic process capture the notion of process time. The fundamental equation describing the matrix iterations includes a noise factor that "limits the self-referential relational information but, significantly, also acts in such a way that the network is innovative in the sense of generating semantic information...." (p. 24). So the system never stops defining itself. From this mathematical foundation, he proceeds to reformulate and extend fundamental physics, including a new theory of quantum gravity.

I am not a physicist, so I can't evaluate Cahill's physics as such. I am a sociologist interested in paradigm shifts, and I give Cahill high marks for addressing the problems with the prevailing scientific paradigm. How well his work will stand up to scientific scrutiny remains to be seen. Time (what else?) will tell.

Came in very handy on a recent trip to Nova Scotia. Was detailed enough for the country side. Cities required a more detailed city map (obtained locally from tourist information centers).

Just came back from a 2500 mile car safari around the Maritime Provinces. This map was useful and up to date. Note that the map includes all of Prince Edward Island and much of New Brunswick as well as Nova Scotia which makes it extremely handy.

Dr.H has seen first hand what the health care industry is and what it could be. His no nonsence approach is refreshing. It's about time some one said it.

I found this book to be written with great concern for the patient and strong insight into how the system works but shouldn't. Dr. "H" seems to know the ins and outs of the medical profession, which he demonstrates by his keen discription of the flaws of the health care process. We all need take a closer look at it and be more involved in our own health care.

I just saw a production of this play in Seattle, WA and was deeply moved. The play presents an emotional but balanced account of Scott's last expedition. The Amundsen character is especially interesting!

I saw the premiere stage presentation of this at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles years ago, and have never forgotten the impact it made on me. Incredibly well written, and deeply moving. It's an amazing dramatic telling of Scott's final voyage in Antarctica.

I was so moved by this story I even named one of my companies after it.