Reed Books

Tom Massey explores sound, unchanging principles of behavior in this simple, understandable guidebook for enriching your life. He leads the reader step by step to inner strength and achievement. The format of the book takes each letter of the alphabet represented by two words. Each short chapter is made up of a succinct inspirational challenge, an activity, and an affirmation. It is made up of 52 words or chapters designed to be read, reviewed, and assimilated for a week.

Topics include principles of acceptance, attitude, exercise, hope, humor, joy, knowledge, music, sleep, tolerance, virtue, youthfulness, and forty other tips for personal and professional benefit and growth.

I was reminded of the importance of offering validation and encouragement to those I care about, as well as looking for opportunities to commit random acts of thoughtfulness, and caring to others, sometimes perfect strangers, knowing that what I give away will come back to me.

Tom also gave practical suggestions for confiding your feelings to a daily journal. By journaling these thoughts and cares daily I am growing personally as well as enhancing my total health.

Through application of these workable, practical, suggestions you will experience enrichment, enlightenment, and empowerment for abundant living. From "Acceptance" through "Zest" you, will benefit from these stimulating, practical tips.

Practical Tips for Abundant Living is a fabulous resource. Clearly written, easy to read and grasp, and so very insightful, this book should be included in everyone's personal library.

All That's Left to You is a sad reminder of all that was lost by the Palestinian people in 1948. Families were separated, yet a nation was born from their sorrow. This novella is the second in what became a trilogy of the evolution of Palestinian consciousness. It is here that their anger erupts. It is here that a nation begins to hear the plea of the author himself - salvation comes through actions, not through memories. A most interesting and important aspect of the novella is Kanafani's accurate portrayal of a woman's heart. This story must be recognized as a contribution to feminist literature. The main female character struggles within the parameters of a deeply paternalistic society under military occupation to come to terms with her sexuality and her shattered dreams. It is through her that the nation will be reborn. Kanafani utilizes excellent literary devices and the translation by Kirkpatrick is superb. The reader is advised to read Men in the Sun first if possible.

Like all other Kanafani works, this book was a tremendous pleasure to read and at the same time intensely thought-provoking. "All that's left to you" contains, in addition to the title novella, a selection of Kanafani's short stories. All the stories in this anthology share the feature for which Kanafani has no contestant: the seamless changes of voice within a story, often from paragraph to paragraph, sometimes from sentence to sentence. Thus we explore the trials and tribulations of the five main characters in "All that's left to you", not as outsiders or even as one of the characters, but as each one of the characters in turn. The reader is made to travel invisibly from the mind of one of the characters to that of another, miles away, to learn what they are both thinking at the same instant. This is as close to a drama or a movie as one can get in a short story, or perhaps even better. It is also interesting to see how certain threads unify the narrative. Time, for instance, whom Kanafani even declared at the start to be actually a character, is one such thread. The layers of symbolism in the story destine it to be very deep reading for decades to come. Yet the novella is so fascinating, it is very difficult to put the book down. The short stories in the anthology are equally fascinating, each in its own right. They don't lack from the changes in voice that is present in "All that's left to you", and they also have their share of critical plot twists right at the end of the story. Thus be prepared to completely change your perspective after reading the last sentence of each story.

This book is fantastic for those who love FOLK ART,
good overview of American variety. Enjoy!

Folk art is of ongoing interest, and American Folk accompanies a major ongoing exhibition of folk art at the Museum of Fine Arts, gathering over 50 objects from across the country and adding background history and enough biography for even newcomers to appreciate their significance. A gorgeous presentation.

Few texts boast completeness as this book can. It is so well written that it is hard to put down. What is amazing is that as useful, informative, and complete as this book is, no one has bothered to arrange with the Reed family to republish it. It is a standard work by this time yet almost impossible to own...a sad state of affairs.

When I became interested in calligraphy and illumination (and leather history), I went looking for books at the local library. That's where I found Reed's Ancient Skins... I believed that a good part of the fun of recreating illuminations was researching historical methods, and understanding the science behind making parchment. Since finding Ancient Skins..., I keep running into Reeds book as references and in bibliographies of papers on topics of leatherwork, ancient / medieval books and parchment making. It is a standard text in leather and parchment circles. This book would also be a handy reference to any librarian who deals with the care and preservation of older books.

As a landscaper and stoneworker I have found this book inspirational and informative. Full of new ideas and the full color photos present works of art that can be followed just by viewing their example.

Probably the best book I own on stone masonry. I bought a lot of stone-masonry/stone-scaping books over the past 5 years and most of them do not come anywhere close. These books have a good chapter or two, or maybe some good photography, but most of them fail in one respect or another. Reed's book is very good throughout and is very suitable for both beginners and pros. An excellent section on tools and basic techniques. Detailed chapters on free-standing walls, retaining walls, single/two-faced walls, dry-stack/mortared, hidden-joint/visible-joint, dry/wet paving. The author could probably improve the book (for the beginners) by adding a chapter on stone types with good pictures illustrating the various types of stone as well as examples of walls with different stone/technique combinations.
Anyway, I own most of the other books listed on the "Customers who bought this book also bought..." page and this is the one to get. Overall, if you plan on getting involved with stone you should own this book.

I ordered this book to use in my women's studies class. I know TV Reed and I knew it would be good. But I didn't realize how extraordinary this book was. I am reading it now along side my students, haven't even finished it yet, but I am so excited by it I just have to talk about it!

At one point Reed describes the pleasure that politics must have in various forms -- the book is full of the power and meaning of a range of arts, especially in community and popular culture. He refers to Hannah Arendt and the idea of public happiness, that sense of exhilaration that suffuses one's being in moments of political engagement and collective action. Reading this book is some kind of public/private happiness too. One feels taken up through his appraisals of arts into his histories of various movements. Murals, poetry, drama, music, graphic arts, movies -- they shape our creative politics and the possibilities of our attachments and engagements with each other and through and about political culture. All these connections are inspirational in their detail and for emulation.

Thus it is also a handbook for activists, full of wise counsel for how to do cultural work and how to participate in and care about mobilization, organizing and direct action.

I also love its great heart and intellectual breadth: activist honor, dignity and integrity. Reed's generous spirit combined with sharp analysis clarifies strengths and limitations within particular movement histories, things we have to know to do good political work and to be active beings creating social justice.

This is a history of social movements, a set of tools for cultural workers, an intervention into the way we critique each other's political practices, and a sharing of spirit among activisms and arts.

And I haven't even finished it yet! Now I want all my students to read it or to have read it! I want to give it to everyone I know!

Imagine the civil rights movement without freedom songs or the politics of women's movements without poetry. More difficult yet, imagine an America unaffected by the cultural expressions of the twentieth-century social movements that have shaped our nation. The first broad overview of social movements and the distinctive cultural forms that helped shape them, The Art of Protest shows the vital importance of these movements to American culture.

In comparative accounts of movements beginning with the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and running through the Internet-driven movement for global justice of the twenty-first century ("Will the revolution be cybercast?"), T. V. Reed enriches our understanding of protest and its cultural expression. Reed explores the street drama of the Black Panthers, the revolutionary murals of the Chicano movement, the American Indian Movement's use of film and video, rock music and the struggles against famine and apartheid, ACT UP's use of visual art in the campaign against AIDS, and the literature of environmental justice. Throughout, Reed employs the concept of culture in three interrelated ways: by examining social movements as sub- or countercultures; by looking at poetry, painting, music, murals, film, and fiction in and around social movements; and by considering the ways in which the cultural texts generated by resistance movements have reshaped the contours of the wider American culture.

The United States is a nation that began with a protest. Through the kaleidoscopic lens of artistic and cultural expression, Reed reveals how activism continues to remake our world.

If you never read any other book about birds, read this one.

Author Mark Jones has produced an incredible story that delivers what it promises ... and more. The accolades on the book's dust jacket promise a roller coaster ride of emotion and the book does not disappoint.

I cannot recall any book moving me as emotionally as does this one.

The book uses two different storylines, set in two different time frames, one in modern times, the other at the time-line transition between the Cretaceous and Tertiary Eras of pre-historic Earth. The two stories paralell each other throughout the book.

The story is fictional, but it is "real-life" fiction, in that the types of incidents and situations described do occur every day. It involves several characters and occurrences that begin as separate, apparently unrelated stories. By the end of the book Jones has weaved them all together masterfully, integrating all the characters and storylines into one creation, producing an incredible story of love, courage, hope and joy.

The two main characters are parrots: Yellow Streak, a pre-historic parrot whose descendants are the parrots with whom we share our planet today; and, Angel, a descendant (or perhaps an even closer relative?) of Yellow Streak. Both face daunting challenges, the former in a world turned upside by the collision of a comet with Earth, the latter in the form of abuse and neglect heaped upon her by some of the humans she encounters in her life.

Although the characters are fictional, the incidents that take place in the modern era setting are not, and that is why it is so powerfully moving. Angel suffers treatment no different from that experienced by many real-life parrots. She is passed around from human to human, punished, ignored, abused, neglected and left to die.

The book paints a very vivid picture of what can happen when people - some well-meaning, some not - decide to include birds in their lives without really understanding what that involves.

In that sense, the book is as educational as many non-fiction books about parrots.

If you have spent any time with companion parrots, this book will move you deeply. There were times I had to put it down and compose myself before continuing to read. These moments of great anguish were complimented by moments of great joy, mirroring the cycle of Universal Life.

There is a twist to the ending (or not, depending on how well your intuition works), an ending that reminds us that there is always hope, always something better awaiting us.

"The Awakening" is an inspiration, not just for bird lovers, not just for the human and avian races, but for Life everywhere.

Millions of years ago dinosaurs ruled the subtropical forests of Northeastern Canada. Imagine trying to survive in that hostile environment with nothing more than your innate intelligence and the ability to fly. The Awakening: A Tale of Avian Evolution, by Mark W. Jones, takes us on such imaginary flights of fancy where we see through the eyes of two protagonists, both parrots. Why parrots? Because these highly intelligent and popular birds were on the planet long before man's primitive ancestors first swung down from the trees. Perhaps also because millions of people are choosing to live with these beautiful, friendly, and clever creatures as pets. The two main characters, Yellow Streak and Angel, are parrots that lived millions of years apart and yet they are inextricably linked by bonds stronger than the advance of time. Yellow Streak is born to a primitive parrot species living a marginal existence in an isolated mountain range near the Hudson Bay at the end of the Cretaceous period sixty-five million years ago. She witnesses the demise of the dinosaurs. Yellow Streak's gifted intellect and unique abilities help her flock to survive planet-wide devastation by a comet impact. Yellow Streak is the "genetic Eve" for all modern parrot species that populate the earth today. Angel, a Moluccan cockatoo, is born into an equally frightening and unpredictable world populated by humans. She learns how to reach out to two people, bringing them together, sharing with them her companionship and love. Yellow Streak and Angel confront similar challenges and suffer through dark, dangerous periods. In the end, the two parrots are brought together in a surprising way. Angel discovers her reason for existence. Angel is Yellow Streak, returned to earth to carry out a special mission.

The Awakening is a powerful tale of struggle, hope, and ultimate triumph that will captivate the seventeen million parrot lovers in this country, the hundreds of millions of animal lovers, and anyone who loves a strong, inspiring story. This heartwarming book is written with love and respect for animals and for the earth. Jones is a member of the Tucson Aviculture Society and an environmentalist who is committed to the preservation of wildlife habitat.

I am a big fan of airplane especially this one. Although British aircraft of world war II is the most favourite in design but that also the same with this serie of Axis aircrafts.
Good references for my cartoon comic art and yet it's affordable.

This author's list of credits is quite impressive. He is an internationally recognised air historian, has over 20 books published and contributes to "Jane's All the World's Aircraft." In this book he has concentrated on all those aircraft employed by the Axis Powers of WW2 and, in short, he has made an excellent job of it too.

Laid out in strict alphabetical order by make, each aircraft commences with a text headed "History and Notes" in which all the relevant history is covered and the numerous variations of different aircraft explained. To this is added plans and the occasional photograph. Most interestingly, instead of treating the reader to an artist's impression of a single profile example, we get several different profiles of each aircraft showing their numerous variations and livery. In the case of the Focke-Wulf Fw 190, for example, there are 10 such profiles.

In my own work I frequently find myself researching whatever aircraft was involved with the sinking of a particular ship and this book gives me all the historical and technical details I could ever want.

An excellent choice for those with a deeper interest in the subject.

NM.

Reviewed by Debra Gaynor for Reader Views, 12/06

"This generation has collectively faced almost all the challenges that the human experience can offer, and is now fifty-ish." But we're not finished; we now face aging and dying. We never thought we would get "older." That was for someone else, like our grandparents. The fact is we don't have to become ill and incapacitated. We can stay active, vital and mentally alert, according to Bob Murphy the author of "Baby Boomers' Guide to Healthy Aging."

"The fact that we do tend to degenerate during our aging is largely connected with our difficulty dealing with the highly reactive element oxygen." "Aging is a progressive loss of function, which seems to be inevitable. The sad truth is that as we progress through adulthood toward old age most of our physiological functions gradually decline." Mr. Murphy takes us back to the beginning of life, back before we evolved from a single cell and explains why oxygen and its relatives cause problems for humans.

I was particularly interested in the chapter called "The Aging Brain." Alzheimer's is prevalent in my family. My father is one of seven children and four have had diagnoses of the dreaded disease. "Neurodegenerative disorders are increasing in the general population, and not only amongst the aged, and it is becoming obvious that they are caused by other, probably environmental factors, as well as by aging." I fear neurological deterioration most of all about aging. If I am blessed I will not live long enough to suffer through what I have seen others in my family go through, years in a nursing home living in their past and not recognizing anyone that they love. My family tends to live to be in their mid-nineties; I've always thought their body just outlived their brain.

Mr. Murphy explains that the brain shrinks or neurons die, as we age. "A significant contributor to the symptoms of brain aging and dementia is this oxidant damage. Brain aging may be slowed to some extent by antioxidant-therapy, in particular those that are especially effective in this neural environment, reduced glutathione, vitamin E, melatonin and a Chinese herb called Gingko Biloba."

We've all heard that a picture paints a thousand words; well the cover of this book says it all. It illustrates what we all want, to age gracefully. "Baby Boomers' Guide to Healthy Aging" contains a glossary. It is written in terms simple enough for the layman to understand. This a wonderful book, it is well written. The subject matter is timely. In this age when we baby-boomers are facing aging and we may as well age gracefully. Thank you Mr. Murphy. Job well done. I highly recommend this book to all Baby Boomers and anyone else that cares about their health!

I could not put this book down.

I am a dedicated reader of health books
because I like to be as well as I can
possibly be.

The problem, I find, with books in genre,
is twofold. Either they make claims without
an evidentiary base, or they do not explain
how it all works. This book is different in
both respects.

Why do we feel lacking in energy as we grow
older? It is explained here! What can we do
about that? It is explained here! What diet
should we be on to avoid heart disease, or,
cervical cancer, or breast cancer, or dementia?
It is all explained here.

This book explains in a way I have never seen
before, from an evolutionary point of view, why
it is that oxygen and its relatives are so dangerous,
and how it is that the can contribute to the diseases
most of us worry about in aging.

I can not recommend this book highly enough.
It is all the health book you are ever going to
need if you are a normally aging person...

I am only the purchaser of the book. I will not use it.

A must read for educators of emergent readers. Marie makes it clear how young readers learn and how they need to be guided through the process. She does not promote any specific program but outlines the components of a balanced approach to teaching reading. Thank you Marie!