Stevens Books

This was an outstanding story. It was good to see a related story about the children of "The African" in Blood Brothers. Not to mention it appears that a government is also keeping tabs of some sort on the occult.

Steven Barnes has a been personal favorite of mine ever since I read "Streetlethal". Barnes is an avid Martial Artist and student of eastern philosophy whose considerable knowledge in both of these subjects shows in his stories. If you are interested at all in either of these subjects you will definitely enjoy this book. On a story level, Barnes' plots are usually not too complex; however he is a master at characterization and he really makes you care what happens to his characters. I loved this book and have already pre-ordered a copy of "Lion's Blood".

Steven Barnes has written alot of good, solid science fiction over the years -- and he uses that experience here to build a contemporary mystical fantasy adventure that entertains, intrigues and engages you completely. Iron Shadows makes forays into the darkly mystical world of cults & sexual magic, while maintaining a James Bondian plotline and reaching deep into the frailties of human interactions. The erotic tension and gripping issues make this a hard book to put down. My only amazement is that in all the explorations of human sexuality -- the only character that crosses over the standard straight stereotypes is the "evil" villain. Trite, but it doesn't destroy the quality of the remainder of the novel. Highly Recommended.

This book is perfectly calculated to be read in the street on a hot day, holding the place lightly with a finger as one walks from one superb building to the next. Effortless learning and prose shine on them like a torch. The book has the humility to accept historical Islam on its own terms, uniquely explaining the Arabic texts written on walls already saturated with religious and political meaning. Is there any other guide quite like it and quite as good?

Caroline Williams and her predecessors have put together a marvelous guide to most of the Islamic monuments, large and small, in Cairo. The book is divided by sections of the city and Williams suggests several "tours" visitors can give themeselves. I found it a valuable "tour guide" when I was exploring the city and an important reference when cataloging my slides after returning home. With detailed information about the history and finer architectural points of some two hundred monuments, as well as tips for getting around Cairo, this book (or its paperback version, ISBN 977-424-316-2) is a must-have for every Cairo-bound traveller!

Cairo is one of the great cities in the world, and a walk through its Islamic areas transports you back hundreds, even thousands of years. This guide has been my bible as I've walked and walked and walked on many visits over the years. It illuminates what you see. Almost every block has something of interest, and it is invariably described lucidly in this guidebook.

Enough said -- if you want to walk through Islamic Cairo, you need this book. And if you don't want to walk, the book will make you want to!

Very good book for those wanting to improve their people skills. Yes, technical skills are important, but people/communication skills are equally, if not more important. I read an interesting newsclip a while back, claiming almost 2/3 of hiring managers would rather have someone with good soft skills and somewhat weaker technical skills than the other way around. Why? Technical skills are usually easier to teach.

The book features good scenarios on dealing with different types of co-workers, managers, customers as well as harassment and politics. Strongly recommended regardless of career choice.

I have perused and read more than my fair share of A+ and other certification guides and none of them have given any thing more than lip-service to what is arguably the most important aspect of any service related profession: human relations. The "IT Professional's Business and Communications Guide" tackles this topic and its specific IT complexities head on.

After a quick review, I found the information presented in an interesting and extremely readable fashion. The situational problems presented within aren''t just common-sense scenarios but interesting tactics to use in negotiating with the customer, the manager, or your fellow IT professional.

Few things matter more when it comes to getting ahead in life in general--and the workplace in particular--than politics and perception. Navigating the sometimes murky morass of office politics has been a struggle for me, and I believe, many other IT professionals. This book has helped me immensely in this area.

Even if your problem area isn't in office politics, "The IT Professional's Business and Communications Guide" is a priceless "how-to" for everything ranging from dealing with rude customers to tactfully handling the angry person on the other end of the helpdesk line. My favorite chapter was the one which gives simple but priceless tips on grasping and effectively using IT team leadership.

Let's face it, most of us are geeks. It's a term that many of us bear with pride. Unfortunately, as geeks, we often haven't placed as much emphasis on social networking as we have on Cisco networking.

This book helps, a lot.

This book has been a tremendous help to me! The book is well organized and is designed for logical thinkers. One section was especially helpful for me; a section that explains how no amount of checking or reassurance makes your health any better. When I read that section, I STOPPED checking and reassuring myself for good! Why did I stop? Because the book makes logical sense and is written by two psychologists who really know what they are talking about. I use to be horrible at checking my blood pressure and blood sugar, but now I only have my pressure checked at the doctor's office. I have also gone to the doctor less often after reading this book. Anyone who has health anxiety problems or know someone who does should get this book! The book should be used by Clinical Psychology students in ALL grad schools in my opinion.

For ALL Therapists: The book allows your patient to became pro-active in treating their health anxiety. You can work with them during your sessions to help them overcome their Health Anxiety.

For ALL Patients: Don't just read the book. Put what you are reading into action and it should work for you. First and foremost, don't read the book in a negative (Oh this book will never work for me) mindset.

I don't know why this book has not received more attention than it has actually. Bad marketing possibly?

None of the other books listed by Amazon sounded like they dealt with health anxiety, so I tried this one. It is EXCELLENT!!! It is very thorough and simple to understand. It has wonderful tips to use as well as suggestions on how to work with doctors and when to get additional help. Not much is written for the regular person on health anxiety, so this is a very valuable resource. Health anxiety is a form of anxiety in which the person worries excessively about his health and bodily sensations. Going to the doctor repeatedly for assurance does not help because you can get addicted to the reassurance! By the time you get home from the doctor after he tells you that you are fine, you have convinced yourself that he must have made some type of error or omission of tests, and you are super worried all over again! This book uses cognitive behavior therapy to help break the cycle of worry and fear over symptoms.

This book does an excellent job of not blaming patients. It simply asks them to focus on improving their accuracy rate of whether something is physical or anxiety related. Dr. Asmundsom and Taylor get the right feel to the balance of encouraging patients to consider what is physical and what is cognitive. Patients, and families, have responded well to this book in my experience. And this book is greatly needed for patients who are highly anxious, terrorized at times, of the danger of their physical concerns.

This is one of my favorite Italian books out there. The photography and writing are beautiful. I lived in Naples for 4 years and while there got the opportunity to do a bit of traveling throughout Italy. This book truly captures the feel of being there. Whenever I miss the time I had over there, I bust out this book and give it a good slow flip through, sometimes reading it, sometimes just daydreaming about the sites and places I have been before and hope to visit again.

What words can be used to describe Rothfield's "Italian Dreams"? All that can be said of his images is that they like Italy is a dream- as boundless, captivating and distinguished. With the use of thoughtful quotes by such famous personels as William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and George Elliot, this collection of poetry has the magic to "speak" of Italy in a way that keeps me enchanted until the last photograph....Simple things like bloody oranges and Verona's corners are captured- indescribable.

A crazy beautiful book. Every time I wish I were in Italy, I pick it up for a quick, virtual vacation.

This is a wonderful book, where the imagination of a child runs wild over a visit to Sea World. It involves sharks, penguins, goldfish, whales, an octopus and a heroic boa constrictor. The group goes to Sea World and the supervising mother is accidentally bumped into the whale tank. She yells, "I can't swim", but the children hear, "Jump in!" They do, unleashing a chain of events where the animals and children play together. After being kicked out of Sea World, all of the children buy Jimmy a goldfish and they have a party at Jimmy's house. At the end, Jimmy's mom is totally stressed, but Jimmy is thanking her for a wonderful birthday. I loved it and I passed through my real childhood decades ago.

I knew from the first sentence in this book that we (my 3 boys and I) were going to love it. It is a riot to read this a loud. A wonderful combination a reptile and truely creative writing. We are going to buy every Jimmy's Boa book we can find!

This is a wonderful book for children and adults as well. The humor in the book was easily understood by the children. The book was easy enough to read but yet challenging. It was such a great hit in my class that we had to get another copy!

I will not go on about this book. The two previous revews by Feldmar and Yocum are written with eloquence and erudition. It is extraordinary and is a must for all those interested in existential therapy, history of psychotherapy in Britain,RD Laing, the interface of phlosophy, religion and psychotherapy and a number of other worthy topics. Its candor and fluidity are refreshing.

I've heard rumours of criticism of the openness, transparency of this book as regards the evolution of the Philadelphia Association, post Laing. I am unsympathetic. Analysts/therapists encourage others to explicate the knots and dilemmas of their family histories and relationships, why not those who do the inviting?

But far more than family secrets, it reveals the hidden agenda of being human. Laid out there. In the dialogue. As a therapist and trainer of therapists, I appreciate this immensely. If only all who are paid for their presence had the honesty the openness the candor of Leon Redler and Steve Gans, and the audacity of Bob Mullan--master of the Big Ask.

I look for more books from this quarter and to the forthcoming dialogue on justlistening.com. The recorded dialogue has only begun.

Just Listening: Ethics and Therapy is a sparingly edited record of conversations between two psychotherapists. From its title, the book might be mistaken for a standard treatise on professional behavior. The focus is therapeutic conduct, but the content is far from standard. Gans and Redler propose no legal or theoretical framework, no techniques, no body of knowledge - in short, no pre-defined structure for therapeutic encounters.

People troubled enough to seek a therapist usually want their pain and confusion ended as quickly as possible. They typically assume that there is some knowledge or method that will enable this to happen. They also assume that the therapist possesses the knowledge or knows the techniques, and is skilled in imparting this information. Most psychotherapists share this assumption. The particular knowledge, the specific methods, vary greatly from place to place, time to time, and therapist to therapist. A good-sized library could be filled with the volumes written to describe and promote the wide range of beliefs held by hundreds of schools of therapy.

Although Gans and Redler are familiar with many of these perspectives, they insist that therapy can occur only when the therapist forgoes placing clients in the therapist's conceptual framework. This they call "just listening," which is "more about inviting and welcoming and attending to and finding skilful means than it is about `doing' something or following theoretical guidelines."

Informal, often very personal, their conversations reflect concerns not burned away in the crucible of several decades of therapeutic experience. What remains is how therapists relate to people experiencing a kind of pain that can't be as easily located and treated as an aching tooth or broken finger. This pain is difficult to describe because it resides in relationships rather than entities that are related. It is not inside their clients, their clients' families, or their clients' friends. The problem is not located in the "who" that is relating, but in the relating itself. Yet relating is not an "it" - not an object that can be seen, weighed, picked up, or put in a box.

Psychotherapy is "the talking cure," but language in general is best suited for discussing objects. Words denoting relationship - respect, dependency, fear, love, hate, evil, harmony - can be nouns. Worse still, European cultural constructs and languages - including our own English - impose a bipolar structure upon phenomena that are not dual in nature: mind-matter, good-evil, love-hate, introvert-extrovert, dominant-submissive, sanity-insanity, and so on. We tend first to attribute false concreteness to non-physical realities, then assign placement inside an imaginary binary structure to non-existent entities. Within these conceptual and linguistic distortions it quickly becomes difficult to think or talk clearly about relationships - troubled or otherwise.

Gans and Redler don't use this terminology, but are aware of the problems. They find congenial idioms in phenomenological and post-phenomenological European thought, notably Levinas. An uncommon use of words, along with the complexly woven phrasings of Levinas, his predecessors, and some of his contemporaries, offer the potential advantage of impeding both misplaced concreteness and the illusion of duality. Redler introduces the Buddhist tradition as another alternative to our familiar Western belief in independently existing entities that can be manipulated to achieve defined ends.

In addition to phenomenology, Levinas, and Buddhism, Gans and Redler acknowledge indebtedness to Freud, as they understand him, and to Hugh Crawford and R.D Laing, psychiatrists with whom they trained and worked extensively. Finally, Redler brings a tenacious, detailed skepticism to the discussions.

Just Listening is uniquely thought provoking, but the conversations are clouded by differences between what the authors say, and what they seem to want to say. The book is full of references to hypothetical entities (mind, soul, self, other, ego, sexuality), and Gans and Redler occasionally display preferences for choices that don't exist.

Gans: "Being human is to be in accord, rather than in discord." Yet neither of these aspects of relationship can be chosen to the exclusion of the other because they are mutually dependent. Being human is to experience both. In the context of the rest of the book, where the authors emphasize their obligation to accept the wholeness and complexity of their own and others' experience, such statements are confusing. Nor is this the only instance in which they appear to want to exclude, or "disengage from," hatred, greed, envy, jealousy, pride, suffering- the "bad" stuff. Yet the premise that life consists of good and bad things that can be included or excluded plays no small part in generating and maintaining the kind of pain and confusion they seek to address.

However, their conversations are not a doctrine, and they don't pretend to clarity or consistency. Their therapy is a relationship about relationships, a meta-relationship in which they endeavor not to provide answers, but to listen to and question, themselves and others, openly and attentively.

This is so at variance with prevailing beliefs about psychotherapy that is seems unlikely many will even understand them.

An anthropologist recounts that sometime before the arrival of Europeans, a storm off the coast of Java washed a strange, half-dead creature onto the shore. Upon examining it, local priests determined that it was a large white monkey belonging to the entourage of the Sea God, and that as punishment for some misdeed, it had been banished from the sea kingdom by the god whose anger also produced the storm. Orders were given for the creature to be chained to a boulder and kept alive. Many years later a Dutch archeologist was shown the boulder. Scratched on it in Dutch, English and Latin were the man's name and a brief description of his shipwreck.

Basic assumptions about what sort of world this is and what sort of creatures we are, unexamined yet largely creating our reality, can result not only in distorted communication or complete misunderstanding, but a lifetime of unnecessary pain.

Just Listening is a reminder, a challenge and an invitation to question such assumptions. The invitation extends to a Just Listening website where their conversation continues.

Tillich raised the ethical question of the nature of courage. I remember in my late teens worrying about the possibility that on my death-bed I will judge myself to have been a coward. It was Laing who asked me what did courage mean to me. "Fearlessness," I replied and he laughed. In his estimation, he told me, he had never met a fearless person, nor could he claim to be fearless. The next best thing, he said, he had achieved, which was not to be afraid to be afraid. He re-framed courage for me to mean doing what I wanted even though I was terrified; not allowing fear to be my advisor. "Practice courage," he exhorted, "and you'll get better and better at it!"

Alphonso Lingis wrote that "Aristotle, who wrote the first treatise in the West on rational ethics, listed courage first of all the virtues. It is not simply first on the list of equivalent virtues; it is the transcendental virtue, the condition for the possibility of all the virtues. For no one can be truthful, or magnanimous, or a friend, or even congenial in conversation, without courage. And every courage is an act done in risk: of one's reputation, of one's job, of one's possessions, of one's life".

Elsewhere, Lingis states that to "enter into conversation with another is to lay down one's arms and one's defenses; to throw open the gates of one's own positions; to expose oneself to the other, the outsider; and to lay oneself open to surprises, contestation, and inculpation. It is to risk what one found or produced in common... One enters into conversation in order to become an other for the other".

Gans and Redler are two courageous psychotherapists who recorded, edited and published their conversations, mostly with each other and at times with Bob Mullan, the editor of Just Listening. Topics range from money to sex and transcendence; from love and intimacy to welcome and hospitality; from know-how versus knowledge to music and re-lease. The tone is convivial, friendly, and often intimate. Mullan represents the naïve, yet at times condescending and obtuse hoi polloi questioning the aristos.

The spirits of R. D. Laing, Hugh Crawford and the original Philadelphia Association are often paid homage to. Crawford's "Only you can do it, but you can't do it alone" weaves through the book like a musical refrain. Laing's "Are you sure?" and "What to do when you don't know what to do?" aren't explicitly quoted, but Redler's steady scepticism consistently questions dogma even when it is his friend Gans who sounds just a bit too certain. "All that philosophy can do is to destroy idols. And that means not creating a new one - for instance as in `absence of an idol,'" wrote Wittgenstein, and in this sense Gans and Redler are philosophers.

Gans thinks of therapy as an attempt to "shift people out of need" and to "open them up to their desire". "Demands kill desire," he states, illuminating a host of difficulties in relationships. Babies need, toddlers demand, adults desire. No wonder then that when an adult comes across as needy and demanding the therapist's job is to frustrate. To satisfy or comply would turn the therapist into a prostitute and the patient would never wake up to his/her own responsibility.

Redler speaks of "the fundamental perversion being beyond not responding in responsibility to the face of the Other, not only not welcoming the Other, not only not saying `yes, yes' to the Other, but really kicking in the face of the Other. Psychotherapy has to attend to ways in which this perversion has been rampant in people's lives; it's been done to them, and probably they are doing it to others".

The diamond of psychotherapy has many facets and Gans and Redler illuminate a large number of them. They are informed and inspired by psychoanalysis, Buddhism, R. D. Laing, Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida, music, meditation and martial arts, and many other people, practices and traditions. The authors are more concerned with making sense than knowing, with the acknowledgment of lived experience rather than justification and proof. Wittgenstein's worry that we are the prisoners of the power of language is taken seriously by both authors and words are used by them carefully, often poetically.

More than anything, this is a generous book, filled with treasures for the practitioners of the art of psychotherapy, for patients past, present and future, and for anyone who has interest in what is between us, in the vicissitudes of relationships.

Albert Camus's definition of heroism, "Ordinary people doing extraordinary things out of simple decency," applies to the work Gans and Redler are engaged in. Like Camus, they attack dogma, compliance, and cowardice in all their manifestations, private, public, institutional. Their insight that therapy is fundamentally ethical and political leads them to insist that all truly important questions come down to individual acts of kindness and goodness. Like Camus, they are moralists who have a sure eye for distinguishing good from evil, yet they abstain from condemning human frailty.

My only disappointment, after reading this book, was that I wasn't a part of the conversation. Often I wished I could have joined in. Well, now I can, it so happens, easily, by visiting the "justlistening" website.

So can you. Check it out!

Andrew Feldmár

This book was awesome. I can't wait until Kadakas IV is made into a movie. Hopefully the movie will star David Hasselhoff and Natalie Portman. I'm not really into science fiction, but I got really into this book. I don't want to disclose too much information and spoil the story ... I will end with the note that I highly recommend this wonderful book !!!!!!!!!!!

Kadakas IV is a space adventure with the heroes facing the dangers and uncertanties of reaching and exploring a distant earth like planet. The orginality of the story comes from some applications of teleportation technologies that are unique. The author couples that with plain old outer space adventure to produce an exciting tale of man versus monsters and hostile alien environments. It reminded me of classic science fiction stories written by the great SiFi writters of the 50's and 60's.

When I received the book as a gift I was a little surprised because I'm not really a science fiction fan, or so I thought. It's summer so I decided to give it a shot because it wasn't too long. In short, it captivated me and I couldn't put it down. To my amusement I noticed that as the action picked up that I was reading faster and breathing harder. The bio on the author, Lt. Colonel Steve Warr, indicated a 34 year military career which really had me questioning how much of this could or will happen, and what does he know that we don't and he just can't tell. I've never written a book review before but felt the effort was worth it in this case because I so enjoyed the book. All the best. Doug Sparks

This is a wonderful book with a range of easy to more complicated crafts for children from 4-8. We have done a number of the projects in here and not only do my children enjoy them, but they get some exposure to cultures outside of their own. There are suggestions for changing the art projects to incorporate more creative impulses as well. It's the one craft book I keep returning to because the ideas are so interesting.

This is another excellent art book in the "A Williamson Kids Can! Book" series. I have several in the series, all of which have provided me many ideas for my students' art projects. I have used this particular book least however, because the projects are more complicated than the other books, and require more adult intervention, especially with younger children. It's advertised as for ages 4-8, but for children to work more independently, I recommend most projects as suitable for ages 7-13.

Materials include paper, aluminum foil, yarn, salt dough, yarn, popsicle sticks, mud, paper plates, papier mache. There are recipes included for the papier mache and salt dough. The projects represent the following cultures: Native American, Latin American, African, Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese. None are very authentic, but are good simulations of arts from these cultures, and can enhance cultural studies, or be done just for fun. One project I have returned to several times because of it's ease to do, and because of its attractive artistic results is the Guatemalan Wild Cat.

This is another excellent art book in the "A Williamson Kids Can! Book" series. I have several in the series, all of which have provided me many ideas for my students' art projects. I have used this particular book least however, because the projects are more complicated than the other books, and require more adult intervention, especially with younger children. It's advertised as for ages 4-8, but for children to work more independently, I recommend most projects as suitable for ages 7-13.

Materials include paper, aluminum foil, yarn, salt dough, yarn, popsicle sticks, mud, paper plates, papier mache. There are recipes included for the papier mache and salt dough. The projects represent the following cultures: Native American, Latin American, African, Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese. None are very authentic, but are good simulations of arts from these cultures, and can enhance cultural studies, or be done just for fun. One project I have returned to several times because of it's ease to do, and because of its attractive artistic results is the Guatemalan Wild Cat.

The Kidnapped King is a very good book. This book is mostly about a boy named Dink looking for the King , Queen and the Prince of Socotra because they are friends. The royal family were being held prisoner in the hotel by Joan Klinker because the king's enemies wanted to take over the country. This book is a mystery book. My favorite part is when Dink looks for Sammi ( the Prince ) when I got to this part I didn't want to put the book down. Dink is brave, smart and an ordinary boy.

A new kid on the block (staying in Dink's house!), a little action (a kidnap!), a little language lesson (French!), and a lot of teamwork (involving both children, parents, and authority figures) leads to another intriguing tale and a happy ending. Ron Roy's A-To-Z-Mysteries have proven quite successful in our household. I've now read all eleven installments to my four-year-old son, and he has found them immensely entertaining. Similarly, our best friend's daughter, an advanced elementary school reader, promptly consumed these books and deemed them enjoyable. Sure, like most of the chapter book series for little people, the plots tend to be marginally predictable -- conversely, these books weren't written for the parents (and the children seem to find the mysteries sufficiently compelling). I also find that, at a certain level, the fact that the characters in these mysteries are (reasonably) normal children confronting seemingly pedestrian criminals is a welcome break from my son's fascination with the preternatural and his preference for the less realistic (but highly entertaining) series such as the Secrets of Droon, Bailey School Kids, and the Magic Tree House. Also, unlike many of the series books, it does not seem critical to read the books in order (although we do). It's also nice that the protagonists -- Dink, Ruth Rose, and Josh -- play well together, think through difficult problems, exhibit good manners and, for the most part, display the type of vocabulary you won't mind if your children repeat.

This is a book about three friends who solve mysteries. In this book the three friends will rescue three rich people who are the King, Queen, and Prince.

Now I will tell you about the story. These friends names are Dink, Josh, and Ruth Rose. These friends have solved many mysteries and saved many people from going to prison.

This author entertained my feelings. People write comments on his books because they like them. The mysteries he writes are very good.

The illustrator is also very good at drawing. He draws exactly what the author writes. The drawing looks really real.

I recommend this book because it is a very good mystery to read at night. I like the way he makes the kids find clues.