Owens Books

I find this book to be one of the best I have ever seen on the topic of building robots. Why?
The author covers all the basics of just what a robot is and how to build 5 different ones including a rare gantry type.
The real strengths of this book other than its clarity is the programming of the PICs-his microntroller of choice. Excellent, excellent, excellent. He shows you how and why-even if you don't have a lot of experience
Also-and this is the real gem part-he shows you how to interface the different active electronic components that make up a robot. This is rare in any robot book and Mr. Bishop does it well with lucid explanations and very good diagrams.

Not often does one find a book that gives an outstanding overview of the subject but also goes into the specific nuts and bolts.

Refreshingly different and not easy to categorize, this well-paced novel was a very enjoyable and quick read. A 50-something English professor (with more than her fair share of personal troubles in recent years), Georgia returns to her small-town North Carolina home with son and pregnant girlfriend in tow. She soon finds herself investigating the death of an elderly cousin, finding romance with a family friend, and exploring her own feelings about family, responsibility, and community. I have not yet read Littlejohn, the author's earlier novel that involved some of the same people and places, but was still able to quickly become involved with the characters and story.

Would their father take the job? Eavesdropping as the offer was made, Clare and Richard were at first sure he would not. His long illness made it necessary that he find a job less tiring than the one he had in the city. But, to be an accountant for a large, privately-owned estate would be against all his principles. He had grown up as the son of a poor farm laborer, and he remembered the oppression and hardships endured by estate tenants. Yet when he was told that Romansgrove was different, out of need, he accepted.

Romansgrove was different. It was idyllic. Clare and Richard, wandered about, hardly believing their good luck. Yet, only two days after they arrived, they discovered that Romansgrove hadn't always been the place it was now. A path through the lovely old wood led to an old manor house, and by some strange chance, to th year 1902. There Emily Roman and her family lived in almost feudal grandeur. Clare and Richard were appalled.

Day after day they went back to meet with Emily Roman, to tell her of the future and pass on some of their father's views - which came as a shock to the patrician Miss Roman. And it wasn't until this strange tie with the past was broken that Clare and Richard learned how much impact they made, not only on Emily, but on their own lives.
--- from book's dustjacket

Romanticism Comes of Age was a very personal collection of essays for Owen Barfield, most originally directed to fellow Anthroposophists, an audience with whom he felt familiar and comfortable. Several of those essays were originally delivered in person. Also, in roughly three-quarters of these essays, Barfield covered ground and explicated what was dear and close to him: literature, specifically English literature. Shakespeare, Blake, Coleridge, and others comprise Barfield's materials. His self-professed specialty and special joy was English Romantic literature.

These essays are personal in another way. In the introduction to the 1966 edition -- of which this new Barfield Press edition is a reprint -- he answers the question, "What is my debt to Rudolf Steiner, and how did that come about?" In that introduction, he describes his own reading of Romantic literature, his contemporaneous introduction to Rudolf Steiner's work, the movement Steiner founded called Anthroposophy, and Barfield's discovery that anthroposophy was "nothing less than Romanticism grown up" (14).

This 1966 edition is an expansion -- and contraction -- of the original 1944 edition: several essays were removed, and the last five essays added. Almost exactly coincident with the chronological and editorial break is a shift in focus, from heavily literary to distinctly philosophical, separating the last four essays from the preceding ones. Those preceding essays take Romantic literature as the subject of analysis, together with some ideas from Romantic theory suggested by the Romantics themselves. These show that indeed those Romantics' insights were not carried further since their time -- until Rudolf Steiner's work, and Barfield's own studies expressed in Barfield's book Poetic Diction: A Study of Meaning, published in 1927.

So what was it that constituted the maturity of Romanticism? Barfield argued that the Romantics brought forward human imagination as a worthy and trustworthy organ of perception of reality, expressed most directly in the appreciation of nature. What the original Romantics did not and maybe could not work out in detail was just how imagination was true.

To make Romanticism into a self-sufficient organic being, able to stand on its own legs and face the rest of the world, there ought to have been added to the new concept, beauty, to the renewed conception of freedom, a new idea also of the nature of truth.... The point is that no satisfactory critique of Romance ever arose. (28)

In that essay, "From East to West," as an answer to the lack of critique of Romance, Barfield stated that his purpose was" to introduce you to this very thing, anthroposophy" (38).

Some who are interested in Romantic literature may not at all be interested in a critique of Romance. Maybe even fewer of those are interested in a new idea of the truth; but that was Barfield's concern. He claimed that imagination apprehended truth -- apprehended nature -- as well as did the senses, as well as did reason. Further, Barfield claimed that anthroposophy advanced the practice and theory of imagination to the level of science: that is, to the level of a mature epistemology.

In Romanticism Comes of Age, Barfield attempted to take his readers from here:

Imagination is still accepted, but it is accepted for the most part, as a kind of conscious make-believe or personal masquerade. (29)

to here:

The thinking on which our experience of nature depends, really is in -- objectively in -- nature -- and is not a kind of searchlight-beam proceeding from a magic-lantern in the human skull.... (227-228)

Through these essays, to argue his point, Barfield studied language very closely: its history, the mechanisms of change (contraction and expansion of meaning), specific structures (metaphor and myth), and what all this implied about human consciousness.

One interesting consequence of Barfield's beliefs and intentions is that he takes his subjects -- the Romantic poets and their work -- so seriously. He assumes, unless arguing it specifically, that William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Butler Yeats, Wolfgang von Goethe, were all serious thinkers whose poetry expressed that serious thinking, especially regarding the truth of the imagination. Barfield goes further and says,

People can no longer say, with Keats, "I am certain of the truth of the imagination." No. They must know in what way imagination is true! Otherwise they cannot feel its truth. (100)

I think that impulse to know in what way imagination is true is still very much alive. We are struggling against the belief that imagination is a personal masquerade, an "entirely inner, subjective activity" (101). Although we are still "apt to distinguish sharply between our consciousness of nature and nature herself ... such a distinction is not wholly valid" (238). What Barfield pointed out, in the course of his essays, was the degree of falseness of that distinction, where to observe the typical spots or moments of distinction, and how to understand them rightly. In light of Barfield's work, to argue for the (absolute) contingent nature of meaning, of the contingent nature of authorial intention, of the centrality of convention, are all symptoms of a refusal to grow up, to unfold the potential of romanticism from adolescence into the agility and strength and stamina of young adulthood, and then beyond to the experience of a wise and humble middle age.

I had trouble finding this item for an aged aunt. I appreciate being able to ship it so quickly to her house.

I have just finished a reading of the book, curious what other readers might had written about it. Strangely I find no review yet. Hell, how is it possible with the book which has made me almost crying?

Beautiful story of valor, friendship, loyalty and foremost of love. But do not expect any happyend as life alone never provides any.

Thank you Mr. Covington for this book. I am looking forward to read all of your others.

The story of Ruth is the story of Ruth's love for the true God, of her unflinching loyalty to an aging and embittered mother-in-law, and of the godly union the Lord used to move history one step closer to fulfillment in the promised Messiah. This book also clearly explains some of the customs that underlie Ruth's story. This book is from the "God's People" series. Papercover. Size, 6 x 8 inches. 42 pages. Published 2003.

This is undoubtedly the finest collection of work on religion and international politics. I could not put it down. The writing was excellent, but what really MADE the book a classic was the editing. Carlson and Owens have done an unbelievable job. The collection and sequencing of the articles allowed the book to be a purely seemless read, even while offering different viewpoints and perspectives. Plus, all 290 pages were perfect, with no smudges, typos, or printing errors.

Five stars. Joe Bob sez check it out.

This was a great book. Will there be #3.
I could not put it down,until I finished it.
This book and Red Sky in the Morning would make a great movie

Great way to learn about the Diaconate and its growing place in the world of ministry.