Richardson Books

Like the wise woman she is, Jan Richardson brings to the Christmas story her own luminous words and images, inviting the reader to journey with her into the central mystery of the story - the Word becoming flesh - and to discover what meaning this can have for one's own life. This beautifully crafted book will be a treasured companion to take with me as I travel through this holy season each year.

Jan L. Richardson's The Luminous Word: Entering the Mysteries of Advent & Christmas has given me a long, long awaited for Sacred and all-inclusive experience of the peculiar Advent Season. When I read in The Luminous Word that Mary chose, "to bear the Word, before agreeing to become the mother of God," as Rev. Richardson invites readers to ponder, that, "Mary had been [immersed]"in the ancient texts, letting the prayers and stories that had spiraled through the generations unwind in her. . . .", I felt, for the first time, that I actually can participate in what, for so many years, had been simply an inaccessible experience told in inaccessible words on the pages of an exclusive book, the Bible. Oh, I thought, Mary chose to open her life in this way; she was not required. Richardson also calls readers to consider the choice that Joseph made, Joseph, whom I had so marginalized in this strange story, Joseph, who chose to not only believe but to also act on his sacred dream. By weaving in her own present-day personal experiences, as well as making reference to texts such as the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels, Richardson takes this ancient mystical story into the 21st century world and suggests that readers of The Luminous Word open their minds and lives to an ancient mysterious story. This story does invite mental struggle and spiritual wrestling, but ultimately serves hope that as Rev. Richardson says about her life, "As with Jacob who struggled with the nighttime angel in the wilderness, the wrestling helps me know my true name." The Luminous Word allows me, now, to choose my "true name."

Jan's work is amazing. Her style easily invites the reader to an intimate encounter with both her words and her illustrations. Particularly welcome with this book is the experience of holding the hand-bound pages, blessed and signed by Jan. This unusually creative expression has found a place on my "read it every year" shelf.

One of the great, tho surprisingly little known, classics of french lit. I don't believe it's ever been filmed and it would make such a wonderfully modern comedy of manners and sexual politics. Written in the 19th century and surprisingly nouveau. It is possibly my own personal favorite novel, I have several editions and have read it many times. A woman masquerades as a man, in the grand, Shakespearean classic tradition and finds herself drawn to both men and women as they to her. Much homosexual panic and confusion ensues, esp. for the man who finds this intriguing young 'boy' so fascinating. His lover, an older woman, is equally attracted to the disguised girl. Where will it all end? The french invented the menage afterall. Intricately written with lots of social satire and commentary. An interesting footnote: this is the book that Mary is reading in "The Children's Hr." that 'inspires' her imagination which leads to her ratting out her teachers as lesbians.

This book is an unequivocal celebration of Beauty--not the sentimental, middle-class idea of beauty, but the all-encompassing beauty to which the Aesthetic writers were enslaved. The prologue sets forth Gautier's cult of pure aesthetics, and the book is a fulfillment of every sublime principle delineated in the prologue.

The plot is relatively simple: Magdalene is a woman who is discontented with the traditional role of a woman, so she dresses as a man and ventures forth as "Theodore." An aesthete, D'albert, falls in love with her despite her male persona, and Magdalene in turn falls in love with his mistress Rosette. But it is much more complex than that. It is a meditation on the nature of the muse, on the subject-object relations in art, on the implications of gender politics, on the eternal Aesthetic in both life and art.

I am sixty years old, and although Gautier became one of my favorite writers when I was around eighteen years old, I never got around to reading his masterpiece until now. The long preface of this novel is more famous than the novel itself, but let us talk about the novel. It is not clear just when the action takes place, somewhere between 1650 and 1835, but it doesn't really take place in a particular period, nor does it take place in the real world. It is a sort of fantasy in spite of not having any supernatural elements. It is based in part on Shakespeare's As You Like It, with Rosalind and Orlando being replaced by Maupin and D'Albert. It is somewhat confusing, as the author switches viewpoints from chapter to chapter without warning. Sometimes it is Maupin speaking, sometimes D'Albert, sometimes the author. Gautier worshipped the beauty of the physical and artistic worlds, which is the whole point of the novel. He tends to identify beauty with female beauty, but there are also swans and roses and nightingales and the moon and so much else. It is the most romantic novel ever written. Some readers may be annoyed by Gautier's penchant for description. In one passage, he takes two whole pages just to describe an old tapestry which has nothing to do with the plot. One needs some footnotes if one is not perfectly familiar with all of the learned references that are scattered throughout the novel. In one passage, Gautier mentions a seraglio and a handkerchief being dropped. This refers to the habit of the Turkish sultan of going to his seraglio or harem and dropping a handkerchief in front of the bed partner he has chosen for the night. But Gautier assumes that the reader knows about this and doesn't explain it. There is a lot of what might be called pseudo-homosexuality in the novel, men and women falling in love with women who are disguised as men, only to find out in the end their true sexual identity. The anguish of D'Albert upon thinking that he is in love with a man reads awfully silly to modern audiences that find nothing wrong with this. But it turns out that everybody in the novel is really heterosexual. There is a sex scene at the end, but this novel is far from being pornographic. It used to have a reputation of being a Dirty French Novel, but faded from popularity in the United States after real pornography made people realize how tame Gautier is in comparison. He seems to have been more interested in art than life. He can think of nothing better to compare a beautiful woman to than a statue or painting of a woman. There is not the slightest vulgarity or lapse of taste anywhere in the novel. Some passages are breathtaking. It is a shame that this novel failed to catch fire when Joanna Richardson translated it for Penguin Classics in the early 1980s. It had previously been in Random House's Modern Library series with a dust jacket showing two pairs of shoes, one male and one female, left outside a hotel room door to be cleaned. Gautier's humor is dry and charming. I love this book, but don't expect to find hordes buying it. It is for the few.

Surprisingly I found a most interesting and captivating piece of work hidden beneath a rather bland exterior, the author most surely knows his skunk.

Surprisingly I found a most interesting and captivating piece of work hidden beneath a rather bland exterior, the author most surely knows his skunk.

I was baffled; swirling, witty writing style, thorough research methods, persuasive conclusions - this guy is a genius.

This is the first and only study that gives a solid account of the life and work of this important early 19th century African-American writer. Stewart was a radical abolitionist, a feminist activist and a powerful public speaker. She was the first American-born woman of any race to lecture in public on political themes and leave extant copies of her texts. She preceded the better known Grimke sisters by five years. Before Frederick Douglass, before Sojourner Truth, Stewart, who lived in Boston in the 1830s, was arguing for black rights, North, and South. Her collected lectures are published here for the first time in this century, along with fascinating research on the life and career of this extraordinary woman.

Maria Stewart was not as well-remembered as Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass, but she is an important person nonetheless. Fortunately, she left behind a lot of written materials of her own life and there also exist other accounts form her contemporaries. There are all well edited by Marilyn Richardson into a concise volume that tells a pretty good story of Maria Stewart and what she was all about. Great job and an inspiring read.

The life and writings of Maria W. Stewart are a testament to the power of faith. Against all odds and against all cultural probability, Maria Stewart arose to become the first women, Black or White, to address a mixed gendered crowd on a political topic.

The essays and sketches, introduced and edited by Marilyn Richardson, provide firsthand accounts of Stewart's wisdom and courage. Given the era in which Stewart spoke and wrote, it is remarkable that a young (age 28), black woman could so lucidly and bravely address both Whites and Blacks.

Though addressed to people living under very different conditions, her words still speak courage and confrontation to all readers today. Thus this book is well worth reading both for its historical insights as well as for its modern implications.

Reviewer: Dr. Robert W. Kellemen is the author of "Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction." He has also authored "Soul Physicians" and "Spiritual Friends."

Great book! Excellent examples... Use it regularly for batch file processing. Helps tremendously with my reports writing and data archiving tasks. I bought the book in '91 and love it...

I'm looking at this book in 2001 and learning a lot that I had always wondered about. Using this book as a springboard to explore the new features of the Windows 2000 batch commands is eye-popping! Very useful....recommended.

There are some parts of this book that are outdated but most of it is still applicable in todays environment. I am currently using it as a reference to write batch files to administer a large NT network.

This is a wonderful book for serious practitioners and students of negotiation. It covers the negotiation waterfront so completely that this reader -- who is also a writer and negotiation prof -- is left wondering what more can be said on the subject. Unlike most pop negotiation books, this tome drills deep into qualitative and quantitative approaches to structuring and analyzing simple and complex negotiation situations. The quality of the writing is superb. The author's insights are profound, informed by years of experience in the field. The quantitative discussion can be a bit intimidating, especially to math-challenged readers. But even without the quantitiave material, it's well worth the price of admission.

This book has a real wow factor. I was amazed at how much ground it covers - game theory, pscyhology, decision analysis, negotiation stuff. There's a great balance of technical help with easy-to-read conversations between hypothetical negotiators making the tricky concepts easier to understand. You probably won't want to read it from cover-to-cover but every chapter has really useful insights on how to negotiate better with positive or negative counterparts.

This is a rich and complete book that touches all aspects of negotiation. The subtitle "The science and art of collaborative decision making" is might be even a better descriptor of the contents. The book has a certain scholar touch and is with 600 pages really comprehensive and more to be used as a reference than to be read in one sitting. For those that are more interested in a shorter book, "Co-opetition" might be a faster to read alternative that is quite in line with this book.

Professor Raiffa shows that negotiations and how to approach them depend mainly in how the structure of the negatiation is eg. integrative vs distributive. He proposes a very structured way to approach negotiations, being good prepared and looking for alternatives to an agreement before to have the freedom to forfeit the negotiation. Once meeting being creative working together with the other party helps to find those spots that are valued differently by the parties and offer possibility of common gains. Whether always the described Full Open Truthfull Exchange (FOTE) is possible might be doubted but it gives at least the yardstick how things could be. The author compares often diverse solutions and how the merit of each of them varies depending the criteria used, and what fairness in each case might be.

The book is divided in major themes that are gone through in detail, any of those can be read in an almost independent manner, without following the order in the book.
Part I. Fundamentals describes the basics of the books and what is the approach followed to structure negotiations. The Game Theory chapter is in itself an excellent summary on the theme and a nice introduction for those that never have been exposed earlier to the subject.
Part II. Two Party Distributive (Win-Lose) Negotiations. The type of negotiation we all think about as example is explained with plenty of details and examples, including a chapter on the particular case which are auctions.
Part III. Two Party Integrative (Win-Win) Negotiations. This is the second type of negotiation we think of. There are several exmaples of different problem types one can find, some as the repartition of goods has many practical applications for the majority of people in rela life situations and gives very practical insights.
Part IV. External Help. Describes what professional help can do for you in a negotiation, and what you ahould take into account before asking for help.
Part V. Many parties. Shows the complexity of negotiations of any type when a major number and how in that occasion agreements can be drafted.

In all chapters there are plenty of examples and information how people react in laboratory situations coming from the which gives the best approximation of real situations develop. Each chapter is closed with a summary of the core concepts which helps when one wants to review the book.

With the comprehensiveness of the book few things are missing or could have been mentioned additionally. The book has plenty of examples but I missed some exercises for the reader to prepare for the diverse points in each chapter. Two small misses that could be easily arranged are how to use decision trees to help finding alternatives and to mention some of the nice software packages that help to simulate random variables that affect decisions, eg Crystallball.

This is one of the best books for exploring the rich and fertile images of darkness. So often we have negative thoughts about darkness - fearful, sad, angry, but this book shows that it is also lifegiving, nurturing, and a place of rest. Sorry to see so few copies available.

Every page of this book is filled with rich spiritual nurishment. I can't help but touch the pictures wanting to feel the collages and images of the book. The language is clear and easy to read, not the stuff of heady theology. When I read this book during the Advent Season or any other liturgical season it invites me to reconnect with the gift of the Christ Child. I come back to this book and other books by Rev. Richardson whenever I need to fill my well.

She has written the single most helpful book of mediations, prayers and poems for Advent that I've ever encountered. I have used her book extensively for writing liturgy to fit our congregation for Advent, Christmas and into Epiphany. I'd like to read more of her stuff

I have used this book (and its sequel) for many years to supply writing prompts for my low intermediate ELL students in an American high school. They love the stories, and the more confident they become as writers, the more creative their writing becomes.

I have found this book incredibly useful in all of my classes. I give private classes to one or two students, but I'm sure a creative teacher will be able to use it for larger groups.

There are six pages for each chapter, though it's not essential to use all of them. I only use three of them - quick and effective.

The book professes itself to be for beginners, but I use it for all of my classes. Each student gives to it what s/he is able, which means I encourage my most beginner learners to at least form basic sentences and the more advanced will add background information and get very creative - give feelings and relatives and such to the characters!

I do recommend one thing before teaching each chapter: I have printed out a little card with the most important vocabulary in each chapter and before reading we review what words they will see. This helps all levels.

There's a "More Picture Stories" that I'm also about to purchase that I'm confident will be just as useful.

I strongly recommend the book. My students really enjoy it and feel good about whatever they are able to say, and what better recommendation can there be!

This book has been a great resource for me! I use it for intermediate levels as well and give them more difficult tasks. The pictures are simple but allow the students to use their creativity to fill in the stories. Great for life skills training too.

When women share their lives we find a rich blend of joy, pain, and discovery. The biggest discovery is that we are more alike than different. While we may feel alone with our stories, we quickly learn that our stories are much more global. What a glorius discovery to accept while reading the everyday moments of six women who are willing to tell all with clarity, and honesty. I highly recommend this book for any woman who is seeking fulfillment and the need to feel connected with other women.

[...]

Pink Jasper is a must read for all women. Each and every page is filled with a deep honesty, sometimes brutal and sometimes comedic, but always filled with deep-set feelings that all of us have experienced at one time or another. Georgia Richardson uses her comedic talent to discuss everything from compulsive disorders to dieting in such a frank and light-hearted way that she's like a breath of fresh air, while Pamela June Kimmell's story of discovering herself out of the ashes of a failed marriage and cancer treatment will grip at your heartstrings. Jackie S. Brooks' story, Stroke, should be required reading for anyone working with, living with, or loving a stroke victim. Carolyn Horton's touching story regarding the loss of her son, Eveline Maedel's beautifully written spiritual poetry and essays, and Dana Smith-Mansell's reflective and insightful stories and poems round out this collection of work. These six women have provided a myriad of emotions in the form of short stories and poetry that will live with you long after you've put this book down. My hat is off to every one of them!

THIS IS THE IDEAL HOLIDAY GIFT FOR A FRIEND, SISTER, MOTHER, MOTHER-IN-LAW, AUNT OR ANY OTHER WOMAN ON YOUR HOLIDAY LIST!
I ENJOYED EACH AND EVERY WORD OF THIS BOOK AND FELT CONNECTED TO EACH AND EVERY AUTHOR WHO SHARED THEIR PERSONAL STORIES IN THIS TERRIFIC COLLABORATION! I WAS LUCKY ENOUGH TO BE ASKED TO DO A FORMAL REVIEW FOR THE BACK OF THE BOOK AND IT IS MY PLEASURE TO SHARE IT WITH YOU HERE:
"Pink Jasper easily ranks as one the best books I've ever read! It is a tightly organized collection of poetry and essays chronicling the personal journeys of six outstanding authors. From the loss of a child- to surviving cancer- to the discovery of God, this book grabs one by the hand and draws one through a wide variety of emotions and challenges. There is deep grief here, illness- and yet laughter and divine celebration. The material is superbly balanced and superbly written. Pink Jasper is a spiritual breeze- and yet a hardy gemstone- that lands on one's lap and sparkles like no other."

- Anastasia Clark
Poet and Author

One of the best sources for the amateur and professional alike, Douglas Richardson's books rank as the be all and end all along with John Dorman's Adventurers of Purse and Person for those wishing to tie their American genealogical lines with the petty nobility and royalty of Europe. A must-have for every genealogist. Extremely well sourced.

Exceptionally well-sourced and well-indexed. One can tell at a glance which immigrants are descendants of each person listed. Where possible, the author has listed both parents for each person, along with all possible siblings. A must-have for anyone doing research on American colonial ancestry.

Even though I do not, to my knowledge, have a single drop of royal blood in my veins, I have a longstanding interest in peerage genealogy -- if only because the earliest surviving records concern the lineages of European society's movers and shakers, not the yeoman farmers and small tradesmen whose genes I carry. Richardson is well known and widely respected in this field, having published numerous peerage articles in the most respected journals and having been a contributor to the last couple of editions of Weis. Those of us who hang out on the soc.genealogy.medieval newsgroup have watched for years as this massive work took shape (always keeping in mind that the level of discourse in that venue often verges on the sophomoric). The final result is close to being a masterpiece not only of genealogy of the traditional sort but of comparative historiography. His purpose is to document the lines of descent for about 190 individuals who immigrated to the North American colonies before 1700 from the Plantagenet dynasty who ruled England from 1154 (the accession of Henry II, Duke of Anjou) to 1485 (the defeat and death of Richard III at Bosworth Field at the hands of Henry Tudor). He notes that his work is an expansion and major revision of David Faris's _Plantagenet Ancestry of Seventeenth-Century Colonists,_ but the new work is so very extensive, this must really be regarded as an entirely new work; Faris considered only the descendants of Henry III (who died in 1272), where Richardson traces the progeny of all sixteen of Geoffrey's great-grandchildren who left descendants, both legitimate and illegitimate. Further volumes are planned to cover descents from Magna Carta sureties, the early feudal barons, and the Emperor Charlemagne. (Remember that anyone who descends from a single royal house in Britain or on the Continent will also have descents from most of the others.)

The plan of organization is reminiscent of that devised by Frederick Weis, with each family's listed lineage beginning at the point of bifurcation from the previous, earlier lines; all generations are numbered from Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, the first "Plantagenet." Citations are very, very full, which is sure to make this a heavily cited secondary source itself. In fact, Richardson seems to have read everything (the bibliography is the most complete I have ever seen, running to more than seventy-seven pages!) and obviously has thought very carefully about what he read. A number of important discoveries and changes to previous scholarship are included, such as the proven parentage of both Margery de Bohun and Joan Hastings (both major problems for decades), and the maiden name of Margaret de Mowbray (important for descendants of Mayflower passengers). Even more important is the discovery that the "Fair Rosamond" Clifford, mistress of Henry II, was not the mother of William Longspée (created Earl of Salisbury); that dubious honor now goes instead to "Countess Ida," wife of Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk. Nor does he consider his work to be complete: His snail-mail and e-mail addresses are included, as well as a website address, with the plea that new discoveries, additions, and corrections will be submitted by readers. This oversized volume was my birthday gift to myself this year and it already has two dozen bookmarks tucked into it.