Owens Books

I was given the original hard back by my father Richard W. Walton Sr. (Great Grandson of Col. J.B. Walton, Commander in Chief of the Washington Artillery). Once I started reading the book, I could not put it down, finished it in the same afternoon. I would have enjoyed reading it over and over through the years, but could not due to the age and condition of the original (copyright, 1885) I have read everything that I could get my hands on involving the American Civil War. After reading this book, I feel that I owe thanks to William Miller Owen for taking me back in time. I felt the experience as if I were there. As I came to know the men of the Battalion from day one upon their depature from New Orleans enroute to Richmond VA., I felt remorse in reading of the death of so many of them.

Very well written account of the Washington Artllery's engagements during the Civil War. Describes all major actions from the First Battle of Bull Run to the final surrender at Appomatox. You feel so close to the lives of the troops; makes you marvel at all the struggles and hardships that were endured. A must read for all Civil War buffs. First published in 1885 by Ticknor and Company of Boston. Reissued in a limited edition that is an exact reproduction of the original, with a few additions (an Introduction by Kenneth Urquhart, three additional illustrations, and the list of present-day officers) by The Pelican Publishing Company of New Orleans, June 1964.

At times both poignant and prescient, "In the Shadow of Islam" is the revelation of a brilliant mind. The book is, as one would expect from a trade paperback, well printed and bound.

This volume of Isabelle Eberhardt's original Dans L'ombre Chaude de Islam "In the Warm Shadow of Islam" was penned in 1904. As a big Eberhardt fan I still enjoyed reading this slim 1993 edition although it's lamely billed "In the Shadow of Islam". Translated by Sharon Bangert, the omission of this single word from the title, "Warm", quite neatly reverses its meaning. Thus the translator or publishers (Peter Owen Publishers) chose to slyly sabotage Eberhardt's empathic sympathetic message about her chosen faith Sufism/Islam with a beckoning yet ominous tang. I suppose her original title, 'In the Warm Shadow of Islam', (emphasis mine) was too long and Islam-friendly for today's market?

Thus, the publisher's choice perpetrates the ever popular anti-Islamic bent. That said, it's the brilliance of Eberhart's work that manages to shine through even a biased translation.
Without ado, let me provide some of my favorite quotes from In the Shadow of Islam:

"To the extent that I feel myself saturated by ancient, unshaken Islam, which here seems to be the very breathing of the earth...And I understand that one could end one's days in the peace and silence of some southern zawiya, end in ecstasy, free of yearnings, confronting only radiant horizons. " pg 114

"I have jotted these reflections in the margin of a letter...Having written them, I relapse into my feeling of exile, wishing to bury myself even deeper in this hostile south, without any desire for the Paris I have known, where the newspaper's lip-service to feminism was even more repugnant to me than the Parisian coquettes.

I have said nothing in my response worth reading. Why bother? One day paths separate, destinies crystallize. And this is so much more than having made a few friends. When they are good enough to invite us to share their foreign happiness, let's show them what's possible to a true fraternity of minds.

Let's regret nothing, since our happiness and theirs will consist in letting ourselves go one day, into mysterious currents which will carry our souls adrift towards impossible shores. Then we'll enjoy the intoxication of decadence and shipwreck; and wandering over the immense beaches of the night, we'll feel within us the seeds of suffering begin to germinate." pg 70

"...forgetting the principals of tolerance propounded by Islam at its purest..." pg 49

It strikes me that prayer, and dreams, too, should never end." pg 60-61


Please enjoy this timeless piece of writing...still relevant and convincing.

This book offers a curious combination of wide generalizations about managing projects overseas, and extremely detailed guidance in the shape of project-management forms and checklists. Owen Jay Murphy explains obvious information - people pursue international projects to make money and folks in other countries have different customs. Yet he also provides sophisticated information, like detailed, complex data on some Six Sigma techniques, and project evaluation and review templates such as Gantt, PERT and WBS charts. At its best, getAbstract finds that this book provides a reasonably easy-to-read summary of some crucial steps and useful tools for managing international projects.

I am a marketing consultant, and when I found it necessary to learn about international project management, I found the prospect intimidating. But Murphy's "International Project Management" is both comprehensive *and* accessible without wasting my time. Particularly helpful is the section on cultural issues with regards to women. The author devotes several pages to advising women project managers--with very specific pointers!

The book spends two chapters putting international project management into perspective before diving into the nuts and bolts of it. Perhaps the most helpful is chapter 3, "Difficulties and Risks of International Projects"...things any company needs to know *before* bidding a project.

Along the way, simple checklists, flowcharts, and sample worksheets enable a project manager to be fully prepared in each stage of the process. The author is obviously highly experienced in this field with extensive (intriguing?) experience.

I highly recommend this book for project managers and those who advise them!

Lloyd Reynolds was a successful professor of calligraphy at Reed College where he was admired by professional calligraphers as well as his students. The book reflects his classroom practice and experience. The success of his students is testimony to his worldwide reputation.
As a teacher of art, including calligraphy, "Italic Calligraphy and Handwriting: Exercises and Text," has been my choice since 1970. The principle reason is its succinct text and focus on only Italic style.
Presentation is classic: left page directions, opposing page examples. Point by point, the logic of simple to complex takes the reader through workspace, comfort, tools, materials, and patiently leads to writing. Letters appear according to related construction, not alphabetically. For example, the letter O is made with two inked strokes and the letters a,e,d,g,q,b,p use the first or second stroke of O. Lower case letters are covered before upper case letters are addressed. Helpful excercises and reminders lead through the letters individually to the related subject of personal handwriting.
Low cost and convenient size are added benefits to the beginner
In short, the text works. Students learn and like it. They can and do succeed. That, to me, is its highest value.
David E. Marsters, Poulsbo, Washington. (Husband of Tommie L. Marsters)

This book distills the life-work and teaching of one of the most influential calligraphers and better-handwriting crusaders of of our century into a manual small enough to enter a jacket pocket without bulging. Brief text -- with a wealth of hand-calligraphed illustrations -- takes the budding pen-person from the basics of the ABC on to easy (yet elegant) handwriting, fun projects, and even the essentials of professional book-design. The work surpasses many others in the care taken with its letter-forms; also in the instructions for practice, which are clear and "do-able" without being over-simplified. Buyers of this book might like to know that information on a companion video-tape series (taken from a TV course, based on the book, which aired during the author's lifetime) is available from Oregon Public Broadcasting (www.opb.org) -- I hope that AMAZON will soon carry this as well! The only ways in which this book falls short of perfection: /1/ some of the additional resources the text and bibliography mention are no longer available from the sources he gives, and /2/ there is perhaps not enough attention given to solving a few of the calligraphy-pen "snags" that cause problems for many beginners.

This isn't just a book about an athlete. Sure, it's a book about a man who defeated poverty and overcame adversity to become one of the greatest Olympic gold medalists.

But Jesse Owens is honest about the turbulent times he endured after the Olympics were over. Just as importantly, he also tells the story about how he almost let his faith in God fall along the wayside. Faith, family, and school are all important given important places in this book.

Anne M. Marble Reviewer, All About Romance

This is the best book i have ever read about Jesse Owens. It tells you about the tradegy of his childhood and how he was almost killed in a freak farming ancident. Then it tells you about his glourious triomph in the olympics. Then tells of his quick glory and how he was robbed of all his money. Jesse Owens and Steve Prefontaine are the greatest runners ever.

I had to use this book for a college course. It was an excellent resource. I hope to read more about this author.

This book has everything you wanted to know about John Owens and more.

I'm sure that it's a fairly select demographic that buys books by this guy, or has ever heard of him for that matter. He's not necessarily one of those authors that's going to win over a lot of people nowadays even if they do "rediscover" him. Oprah's not going to feature Gerard de Nerval in her little book club. He is just simply too bizarre, too occult and obscure, too "rococo" for the average reader, and I guess he always was. But for those very reasons, there are certain people who will think he's the best thing before or since sliced bread.

Evidently fond of exotic locales, customs, women, drugs, etc, it only follows that this nineteenth-century Frenchman would find himself magnetically drawn to the "Orient," to the fabled meccas of Beirut, Cairo, and of course the "font of drug-taking" itself, Constantinople, where he could liberally sample the world-renowned hashish and slave-girls without fear of reprimand from neurotic Europeans obsessed with "propriety." (Indeed his descriptions of such phenomena are just as offensive to the ultra-PC postmodernist of today as they were to his bourgeois contemporaries - and for essentially identical reasons.) He is very much the chauvinist white guy who feels entitled to indulge when among "inferiors."

The pedantic intricacy of his descriptions is surely a literary reflection of the action of the drug. "Journey to the Orient" is no ordinary travel-journal; it may be doubted whether half the events recounted ever actually transpired; but the details are consistently rendered with hallucinogenic clarity. In fact, only a few fragments of the original massive tome are included in this translation, but the entire second portion consists of a tale supposedly overheard in a Constantinopolitan coffee-and-hash house, a re-telling, with florid embellishments, of the Masonic legend of the building of Soliman's (Solomon's) Temple and the murder of the architect Adoniram (Hiram Abiff) - yet the narrative never looses the conviction of first-hand experience. I picked the following passage at random - it gives an idea of the baroque style of the book:

"Darkness suddenly falls and the sky is muffled by black specks which grow bigger as they approach; flocks of birds tumble into the temple, divide into groups, form circles, jostle together, arranging themselves finally into a sumptuous, shimmering foliage; while their wings unfold into opulent bouquets of green, scarlet, jet-black and azure."

It's easy to see why Gerard de Nerval was such an icon for Surrealists like Joseph Cornell. One can open the book to any page and find such immediately visceral passages; the context is almost unimportant. Life is a dream, a sequence of fantastic images, and the best literature can do is to embody the existential experience. If this sounds like your cup of hashish-paste, then dig in.

The reader ought be warned that this is a very small portion of the book, although I see nothing about it having been abridged. My copy in French runs to 944 pages, so any reader should know that reading this small selection will be nothing like reading the entire work.

A fittingly huge tribute to the man who captured Modernism in western America and especially in California. I thought the beauty of these three large books (check out the weight and dimensions in the Product Details section) was the way they are organized: historically using Shulman's own job reference numbers. Obviously there is not going to be a photo of every commission because a lot of his time was spent on what he calls 'bread and butter work'. So book 1 starts with #0003 in 1939 with Gregory Ain's Scheyer residence in LA and book 3 ends in 1981 with #5976 Augustin Hernandez's studio in Mexico City. Although Shulman is working again, with German photographer Juergen Nogai, the contents of the three books are based on the 250,000 negatives he presented to the Getty Research Institute upon retiring in 2004.

I get the impression looking through the pages that there maybe more interior photos than exteriors but what a visual treat these interiors are. In photo after photo, there is a sense of spaciousness so typical of most modernist houses and many of the shots show how rooms extend into other living areas.

The interiors from the Forties to the late Seventies also yield a fascinating opportunity to study the furniture and fittings the owners thought would work well in a modern home. Owing to the large page size some of these domestic interior photos are twenty-three inches wide on a spread so the detail is amazing. Another interesting point about a Shulman photo is the addition of people in his work. Apparently frowned upon at the time by architects but he took the view that it was an opportunity to reduce the purity (and possibly elitism) of Modernism in a domestic setting.

Among all the great home photos commercial work covers corporate headquarters of large companies, schools, research facilities, banks, retail units and restaurants. The same sense of space and depth comes across in these images and I think you'll come to the same conclusion as I did about Shulman's photography: that he always managed to frame his compositions to captured the spatial essence of a building.

The production of the three books is exemplary as you would expect from Taschen. The hundreds of photos are printed on quality paper with a 200dpi screen and presented in an elegant but simple layout. Each featured commission has between one and six photos with a short piece of background copy. All of this is a wonderful tribute to a remarkable architectural photographer. I know I'll be enjoying these three books for a long, long time.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

These books were my birthday present to myself, and I can't imagine a better gift! They are GORGEOUS and huge, with full-page photos (some in color) on heavy paper, and text for each spread. The architecture is inspired, and, as always, Shulman's photographs capture the spirit, innovation, and excitement of the times. Too bad such individualism has given way to cookie-cutter McMansions and, with few exceptions, lackluster design seen everywhere in today's architecture.

The only criticism I have of these books is that, as with most mid century architectural tomes, most of the photos in the book are from locations in California by architects we've already heard of. I would like to see photos of buildings in other parts of the country by lesser known, but equally inspired, architects.

Finally, I hope that, with the abundance of photos in Shulman's archive, this Modernism Rediscovered series continues with more books in the future. I know that I will be first in line to buy future volumes if they are as well done as the original Modernism Rediscovered book and these three follow-up books.

This book is very well written. It provides factual information, in a very interesting context. It is history made interesting. The book is a valuable resource tool as well as being enjoyable reading. Kudos to the authors of this worthwhile book.

If you are a kid in grade 6 and learning about explorers in school then you should read this book. It has a lot of interesting information about lots of explorers of Canada to help you do a history project. It was pretty interesting to read and has good pictures and maps to help you see what it was like to be an explorer back then. There is a timeline at the back of the book so you can figure out when different explorers were exploring Canada and it tells you stuff that isn't even in your textbook. Tell your teacher about it. by Kevin

Even though this is called The Kindergarten Book, many primary teachers will find so many helpful suggestions for making a good classroom even better! A perfect primer for how assessment truly can drive instruction in an engaging way for teachers and their students. The vignettes from the classroom ring with authenticity and purpose.

I love how this book offers concrete and authentic ways to manage learning in Kindergarten. The examples of the assessments used during writing conferences and reading groups are clear and managable. It was easy for me to take her examples and utilize them in my own classroom to monitor and boost student achievement. Above all, the author's genuine love for children and belief that all children can have success shines through. You can see your own classroom being as fun and inviting as the author describes. Every Kindergarten teacher should read this book!