Stewart Books

Covers basics for young players - spiced with advanced concepts you wouldn't find even in a book written at the College coach level. Brilliant.

The best part of this literary tour de' force is its amazing illustrations! Bravo Mr. Lafleur!!!

This book is unbelievable. It give stats from every single baseball player in 1997. Whenever your bored and need something to read, just sit down and read a few biographies, Itll increase your baseball knowledge, and most of them are very interesting.

This book is a good learning tool to use in informing others.

It's a shame to find that this book is out of print because it avoids the two pitfalls that many books fall into regarding this vast battle: it doesn't get confusing and it's well researched enough that it doesn't neglect any details of what actually happened. It is also told equally from the Japanese as well as the American perspective. Easily the best book about the subject I have read.

More than anything, Frank Stewart challenges you to think. The examples he gives are designed to topple the very paradigms, or "natural plays", that burden our development as bridge players. Many times, after working through a problem, I've thought, "Wow! I never thought of that!". It really opens your eyes. If you're an intermediate player, who wants to improve your game, this book is for you!

Buster Bear is a book of many lessons that we could use today. Little Joe Otter played a part in showing the need of not having things happen your way always. Grandfather Frog was a rock of common sense throughout the story.

-Eric Smith, Dyersburg,Tennessee

Caught up in our own times, we can easily be deceived into thinking that the battle between those who view the Bible as literally true and the scientists who come up with demonstrations that it is not is something that started sometime around the Scopes trial. We might push back and concede that the controversy began with Darwin and his famous theory, but this is wrong, too. The battle between Galileo and the church had been fought centuries before (the church nominally won, to its shame), and then Christianity versus science was stilled, but it wasn't Darwin who reactivated it. For 200 years before Darwin, scientists and philosophers had faced the difficulties that Enlightenment thinking had brought for those who thought the Bible literally true. In _Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature_ (Yale University Press), Keith Thomson has given the history of the conflict before Darwin's Theory of Evolution was proposed and became the cornerstone of biology. He examines thinking on both sides of the issue, and is fair to both; after all, science came up with flawed evaluations for, say, the age of the Earth or for heredity, and the clerics came up with explanations that only seem absurd with the hindsight we have the luxury of displaying from the twenty-first century. It is a great story of a march toward eventual understanding, full of odd personalities and dramatic events.

The main figure in this book is William Paley (1743-1805), a "somewhat shy, shambling figure, built short and square," who wrote many books on faith, but it is his final book, _Natural Theology_, that made him famous, and its ideas are still used by creationists and those who favor Intelligent Design today. Even Darwin was impressed by it, before he toured the world and started coming up with his own ideas. He said it gave him as much delight as Euclid did. Paley's famous contribution to the argument was that of finding a rock on a heath versus finding a watch; it is all too clear that the watch has a designer. (In England, indeed, Thomson's book is titled _The Watch on the Heath_.) Similarly, anything as complex as a living organism must obviously have a designer, and of course the world had a designer, too. This argument was not original to Paley (it goes back at least as far as Cicero) but he expressed it so forcefully as to make it his forever. There was more to Paley's book, and he accepted as an intellectual ally Thomas Malthus. He helped promulgate Malthusian ideas, such as how people showed overproduction of their numbers and that the environmental economy changed in the struggle for existence. Paradoxically, therefore, Paley was advocating two of the fundamentals that would power Darwin's ideas. The theme of such connections between those promoting faith and thereby eventually assisting the triumph of science runs throughout Thomson's book.

Christians had to reconcile their faith with what scientific evidence demonstrated to them, not only about the age of the earth but about the imperfections within creatures and the amorality of animals in competition for resources. Thomson shows that the way forward for Christians devoted to their Bibles as well as to natural history was to accept that the sacred texts were not scientific texts, and were metaphorical. Science and religion would deal with two different realms. They could always satisfyingly trump science with a "That's the way God made it" or "That proves God's benevolence," but this in itself indicated a basic acceptance of the scientific truths first. The alternative of rejecting science's findings entirely remains attractive to many, but also rejects the simple fact that over the centuries, science has proved to be a better way of explaining the way the universe works (setting aside such fields of enquiry as ethics or salvation). Those who make such a rejection loudly insist that there is controversy over Darwin's ideas when actually there is no such scientific controversy, but Thomson's fine book shows that they are merely participating in a long losing battle. The battle didn't start with Darwin.

Whether you read this book and come away moved by the heartfelt simplicity of its narrative, or whether you put it down after the final page and realize you've just experienced a complex metaphor of war and innocence, BEL RIA will never leave you. Like BLACK BEAUTY, this book is not just a children's book, although children will understand it completely - maybe better than adults. Like many earlier children's classics, it's a book of the real world, genuine and not at all diluted for young audiences. BEL RIA is a classic story of a dog's journey though a baffling human world as well as a simple and profound comment on the violence of war and what it means to the most innocent; the animals. Personally, at the instant I finished the book I understood that, when it comes to war, we are all Bel Ria. Professionally, as a writer, I deeply admire the author of this book and wish she had written many more books than she did. This is a book that will come into it's own, time after time, and I can think of no better answer to a child's question, "What is war all about?"

Reviewed by Susan Pettrone for Reader Views (10/06)

"Beluga Sky," by Winky Deveze, is a charming story, seen through the eyes of a small child and told as only a child can, with simple, frank language and innocence. Through the pages of this book, we follow the path of a whale as it "swims" across the sky, blocking the sun and generally having fun. The uncomplicated sentences, with their predictable rhymes and easy rhythm, both engage and entertain even the youngest of listeners. And the uncomplicated, childlike illustrations complete the circle by adding both to the charm and appeal of this book as well.

"Beluga Sky" is a book that is both loveable with its innocent questions and naïve observations, and is engaging as well. Winky Devese delivers, within this book, a wonderful glimpse of the world through the innocent eyes of a child and Keith Stewart's illustrations are warm and inviting to children of all ages, helping bring to life, the words within its pages.

As the mother of two sons 8 and 13, I am pleased to report that both found this to be an amusing, delightful book. Even with his teen preference for books obviously more mature than this, my oldest commented that he thought the imagery was "cool, and the story well told." And as the book came to its end, my youngest commented, "the boy saw the whale with his imagination, and his mom saw the cloud with her eyes...." Somehow, I know the reader will want to read this book with the imagination of a child as well, in order to fully appreciate it as we did. For it is imagination added to the story within "Beluga Sky," that truly makes it come to life.