Simmons Books

This book addresses the spiritual needs of senior adults, a group of people often neglected both in churches and in society. If you are a senior, this book will help guide you through common issues faced by seniors in today's society. Topics range from spiritual growth to death and dying. This is a wonderful, much needed, easy to read book.

I just wanted to say that I think this calendar is wonderful. This will be my fifth year using this calendar, and my passion for it has not abated. It has helped me so very much in my continuing efforts to learn Spanish!

If you are a spinner this book is a must have, even if you own the first edition. That can not be said of many books. This book has been updated, featuring new spinning wheels that are currently available. Most of the spinning wheels in the earlier edition are no longer being made. It make a nice comparison book with the first version. If you are new to the craft of spinning wool this book is one that you MUST have in your collection. It will each you how to spin wool. If you have not yet purchased a wheel buy this book and take it with you when you go shopping. If I could only own 1 spinning book this would be it! I taught myself to spin using the earlier edition!

I originally purchased this book when I bought my spinning wheel in the early 80's. It provided me with a good information source and detailed equipment and processes for the working of fibers, in my case I was spinning collie hair and I used the diagrams to make some of my own equipment. Included are wheel makers and designs other than the traditional wheel. I'm sure some are no longer in business but you can see some of the options. If you can find this text it is well worth obtaining and gives tips and options that would be good to have before starting a spinning hobby.

If "architecture is frozen music" [Goethe] then the magnificent St Pancras buildings must constitute one of J.S.Bach's major concertos.

This is a book for anyone with an interest in world-class architecture, or history, or great engineering. It's probably quite interesting to railway enthusiasts too!

St. Pancras station and its Midland Grand Hotel manage to combine high art and design with a masterpiece of engineering in an incredible, exuberant, completely 'over-the-top' statement of Victorian company confidence. The book explains in an intelligent and entertaining way, why and how it was achieved by the brilliantly innovative engineer William Henry Barlow, and the eminent and sometimes insensitive architect Sir George Gilbert Scott.

"If the Directors and officers of the Midland company had pooled their collective experience with a view to securing a site for their London station that would combine the greatest possible number of difficulties, they could hardly have fixed on anything better than the one they chose at St. Pancras. It was occupied by a canal, a gas-works, an ancient church with a large and crowded graveyard, and some of the most atrocious slums in London; and through it all ran the Fleet River."

Sir John Betjeman reviewed the original, 1968, edition of this book as "readable, learned, and inspiring". More recently, the author and presenter Dan Cruickshank referred to it in his "Story of Britain's Best Buildings" (BBC Books) as "perceptive".

This new edition is revised and enhanced with interesting new photographs and plans, and an additional chapter by architectural historian Robert Thorne about the revival of St. Pancras. The changes somehow manage to make the book better-balanced than the original.

A classic book about a classic building.

This story is one of many about americans who have made a difference that touched everyone of us, yet they remain unrecognized. Jake Simmons helped American companies open up the Nigeria oil fields yet none of us have heard of him. I read this book several years ago and still recommend it to friends who should learn about real American role models. Those who have made great strides under difficult conditions and won. His successes and failures were accomplished with dignity, fortitude, dedicated work ethic and a quiet pride. They exemplify values that seem to have been lost in recent years. This book also tells an interesting story of the relationship between Native Americans and Blacks throughout the history of the country. A very good read.

'"A poem may only take a few minutes to read but it represents, as Susan Sontag said of a photograph, 'a lifetime of preparation.' A lifetime of walking around with one's eyes opened. Janice Fitzpatrick-Simmons has the eyes of a See-R. In love poems, in poems about people and place, belonging and exile, she sees into the innerness and hiddenness of things. These poems are experiences made vivid, flashes of awareness, shocks of recognition. By intensifying our perceptions, they help us to re-see the world. They restore us, enriched, I think, with new insights and knowledge, to the everyday of our lives.
Janice Fitzpatrick-Simmons is a poet of stature, a sounding, sifting intelligence, 'gaining strength with every song.'
Poems are active meditations according to Tomas Transtomer, a Swedish poet -- they want to wake us up not put us to sleep. With this compelling collection be prepared for a night of stimulating insomnia."
Cathal O Searcaigh

Janice Fitzpatrick-Simmons was born in 1954 and educated in the USA. She has her M.A. from The University of New Hampshire and was The Assistant Director of The Robert Frost Place. She was a long time resident of Northern Ireland and is now living in Donegal. She is the co-founder of The Poets' House and programme director for the M.A. in Creative Writing at The Poets' House. She is widely published with poems appearing in Stand, Force 10, Janus, Writing Women, Cuirt Journal, The Irish University Graduate Review, The New Orleans Review, Fortnight, US1, The University of California Review. She appears regularly in The Honest Ulsterman and Poetry Ireland. She has read at The Irish Festival in Brighton, The University of Antwerp, The University of Mons Hainault, Notre Dame University Brussels, The University of Delaware, Vermont College, Brown University Bookshop, Bracknell Arts Centre, Reading Festival, Lancaster University, Bewleys Dublin, Eigse na Cuige, Cork, Letterkenny Arts Centre, Wexford Arts Centre, Dundalk Arts Festival, The Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast, Queens University, Belfast etc.. She has one chap book and her first book Settler was published in 1995 by Salmon Poetry.

Optics ramified historically into three major paradigms: rays, waves, and photons. While exposing these three, the generic undergraduate textbook on optics can spare little space for the delicate issue of the transition between them. The thoughtful student who stops to think about it may sometimes notice that one must cross over a dark crevasse in passing from waves to photons. For example, I can mention a paradox concerning spin angular momentum. Quantum mechanics teaches us that the photon carries a spin of one unit parallel (or antiparallel) to its direction of propagation. But symmetry considerations in the wave picture imply that a circularly polarized infinite plane wave--a common classical analog of a photon--cannot carry any such component of spin angular momentum.

The text of Joseph Simmons and Mark Guttmann is a thoroughly fresh and original approach to the theoretical foundations of optics at the undergraduate level. The special, distinctive focus here is on the quantum mechanical nature of light. While it does not get into the quantum field theory of photons, it moves in that direction by developing the Schrodinger equation of a single photon in free space.

Although this book was published 37 years ago, nothing in it is obsolete because the authors stick to ageless fundamentals. This book was obviously crafted with great care and is a true gem--it is lucid, concise, with pleasant, not-too-hard chapter ending problems, and well-designed, informative appendices.

4th year undergrads (in physics and math) and 1st year grad students should be able to understand it: the level is similar to that of the optics text by G. R. Fowles. But the scope is narrower than that of Fowles, or other generic optics texts, in that it is focused on: a) the analytical theory, and b) the free-EM field. Because of a) and b), two items are largely missing: a) the hardware of optics, such as lenses, microscopes, spectroscopes, and lasers, and b) interactions with charged particles, or, equivalently, the optics of material media (birefringence, etc.) It contains many standard topics that would be found in an advanced undergrad text, such as the matrix theory of ray optics, Fresnel-Kirchoff Diffraction theory, and conservation laws of energy and of linear momentum. As is typical of all topics in this book, I found that these familiar topics are handled in a fresh, elegant, and succinct way so it was not tiresome for me to encounter them again.

There are many treasures waiting to be discovered in this book. I'll merely mention three of them: 1) a whole chapter devoted to the Stokes parameters; 2) another where the authors use the polarization states of a light wave as a springboard to develop much of the foundations of quantum mechanics--an amazing performance! ; and 3) the spin paradox I mentioned at the start of this review is beautifully resolved in the final chapter.

Having read the book cover-to-cover, and having attempted most of the problems, I found, among its many other virtues, a very low frequency of typos or errors. I am sorry to see that it has gone out of print. Good people at Dover Pubs., please listen up: this is an outstanding candidate just crying out to become a reprint and join the illustrious ranks of Dover optics books by Fowles, Ditchburn, Wood, Michelson, and others. I believe optics enthusiasts with a strong theoretical bent would find, as I did, that it is richly rewarding.

Yes, God speaks to those that listens but in this book you will find His presence can be felt by those He chooses. This book will bring the realization of a grandmothers persistent prayer for her granddaughter's life. You will also feel the emotional struggle of a young mother as she learns the still small voice of God in her life. This is a wonderful enjoyable book about a real person and her life as a Christian.

I deal with depression and anxiety. My doctor prescribed anti-depressants for my depression; however, my doctor wants me to learn to deal with my anxiety. Stress keeps my anxiety in full throttle and wears me out.

This book is now out of print. I bought it used. This book is simple to understand and useful. I swear I would call this book, the greatest little secret. We all need to improve our mental health, regardless.

This books offers ideas to prevent problems and to recover from anxiety produced problems. In this fast paced world, we all get stressed out. Read this, use the ideas and you will be amazed. I suffered from agoraphobia for five years and hardly left home for four years. This book is my rabbit's foot.