Wilson Books

I actually bought two copies of this book; one for myself and one for my teenage cousin who is a budding sculptor.

Needless to say we were both immensely pleased.

Its not a "text-heavy" book but it does contain enough information to make you feel informed. The quality of the images is spectacular and the details of the iconic and slightly lesser known sculptures have really helped him develop his technique.

Whether for educational application or casual perusal this book excels.

Don't let the price deceive, this is one of the best books of photographic reproductions available documenting M's sculpture. I originally purchased this in 2000 when I was in Rome, and I couldn't find it anywhere else. I wanted to give some copies to friends, and I had to order then from Italy, but now anyone can have this book; and you should buy it. Enclosed are beautiful, full page prints, and many macros from interesting angles; so close you can see the chisel marks! The works photographed:

Battle of Centaurs
Madonna of the Steps
Bacchus
La Pieta
David
Bruges Madonna
St. Matthew
Moses
The figures of the Medici Chapel
Slaves and captives
Brutus
Palestrina Pieta
Rondanini Pieta

This well written text book is helpful in grasping the various basic concepts of microbiology.

I utilized this text for my microbiology class in undergrad. It lists the major parasites, molds and bacteria. Parasites were the most interesting because it shows you what foods are associated with what parasite. Pretty gross stuff but was not boring at all. I also used:
Microbiology Study Guide: Key Review Question and Answers, isbn 0971999635, to help me with test preparation. The questions were quite similar to what I found on my college microbiology tests. Both books helped me to achieve very good scores on my tests.

Finally! Finally, there is a book on Micromosaics, and what a wonderful book! Prior to the publication of Jeanette Hanisee Gabriel's masterful research job, there have been no books available to the collector of Micromosaics or for anyone who wants to read about a little-mentioned, and fading art. And who better to write the book then Ms. Gabriel who has been Sir Arthur Gilbert's Private Curator since 1994. Sir Arthur Gilbert's collection which now resides at Somerset House in London can only be equaled by the collections of The Vatican Museum in Rome and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.

There are a number of books that cover the vast and impressive Gilbert Collection: "Gold Boxes", "Monumental Silver", "Portrait Miniatures in Enamel," "Gold and Silver," "Hardstones" and now "Micromosaics." As I happily have the other books in my library - I can honestly say that the micromosaic book must have been the most difficult and yet it is extremely comprehensive. Ms. Hanisee's scholarly work on "The Gilbert Collection: Hardstones", must have been a bit easier to write as there is so much information on the art of Pietra Dura and Hardstone. Micromosaics is another ball of wax as so little was written - and I'm sure if it was to be had - Ms. Gabriel uncovered the information.

The Appendix has a fascinating section written by Professor Massimo Alfieri "New Notes on Giacomo Raffaelli and Michelangelo Barberi" two of the leading Master Mosaicists of the 18th and early 19th century ---- fascinating. It takes you to the time of the workshops, with letters, sales receipts, drawings and the like. Not only revealing, but just plain fun for devotees of the period. One can also find a section on techniques and materials used in the making of these compelling masterful and minutely executed works of art.

Seeing the fabulous color plates on almost every page, the items in the collection, one finds themselves rubbing their eyes in bewilderment over the artistry of these rare and intricate pieces. The footnotes are so interesting and well-written that they are a book within themselves, and my only wish was for a third hand to mark the place as I turned from text to illustration to footnote and back to text. In many books one tends to skip a lot of the footnotes, unless they pertain to a particular interest -- but Ms. Gabriel has added fascinating information and I told myself it was worth the digital exercise to read each and every one.

Lastly - Jeanette Gabriel has masterfully included very detailed Biographies of the known artists of the time and the literature connected with these artists; a Glossary - with full descriptions; a seven page Bibliography; Exhibition Histories, and an extremely well-written Index.

"The Gilbert Collection: Micromosaics" may look like a sumptuous coffee table book of 310 pages (which it is:), but it is definitely not fluff and mirrors -- it is a serious and fascinating work which should included in any library of Decorative Arts.

Obviously - I think it's just great, I thank Ms. Gabriel, and I give it 5 stars.

Margot Conte

This is a beautiful and informative book with insights into historic and technical aspects of micromosaic provided by the leading authority on this art form. Beautiful close up photographs reveal the intricate details of these little treasures. This book is a must have for micromosaic and decorative arts enthusiasts and a beautiful addition to any library.

MIRRORS is the kind of big juicy read that's hard to find. It's got it all... passion, betrayal, the triumphs and glamour of Hollywood in all its glory. Plus amazing research that brings every moment to life.

This three generation Hollywood saga, from the Silent Era to the Golden Age of the 1940's to the Oscar Age of the 1970's, covers the lives of silent screen siren, Crystal Rivers, her two daughters Leanna and Shelly, and her granddaughter, Dana. Crystal is caught between scandal and passion for a stunt star, Hart Ferrell, whom she truly loves, and her Svengali director and future husband, Garret Sinclair.

As seen through the eyes of Crystal, Kay Klem paints a vivid picture of what the movie world of Hollywood must have been like in the early 20's. Her characters spring to life from her canvas of words. It was a dusty grimy place of outdoor studios where stars and extras alike were at the mercy of the elements and rickety barns converted to the first primitive sound stages. Here young star struck country girls and runaways came looking for fame and fortune only to barely eke out livings as extras or worse. Crystal was one of the lucky ones who was befriended by the tragic Virginia Rappe, whose death put comic Fatty Arbuckle on the stand accused of murder in the most sensational trial of the twenties. When Hart refuses to marry Crystal, Garret marries her to save her career from scandal, but in the process and ensuing rivaly of the her stuntman lover and director husband leads to catastrophe.

There is a nearly seamless transition as the reader moves from the life of Crystal Rivers to her daughters, Leanna and Shelly, who follow separate paths. Leanna claws desperately to win her mother's success on the screen. She latches onto a bigger-than-life (in more ways than one) singer, but leaves him for a West Coast mobster and tragedy.

A nurse in the war-torn Pacific, Shelly casts everything aside for flying ace, Brady McKay, including the man who hoped to marry her. Kaye Klem's descriptions of the Pacific Island of Vella Lavella are a stark and realistic look at conditions of an Island in the front lines of World War II. There are only a couple of minor technicalities regarding aircraft, which are inaccurate, but nothing that distracts from the story line.

The third generation sees Leanna's daughter, Dana, facing her own demons--in love with her astronaut cousin, she careens into a violent marriage where she is accused of murder. And yet, she finds redemption in a talent greater than Crystal's, and the unexpected healing power of love.

This is a wonderful read. Kaye Klem keeps the reader turning the pages with her magnetic characters and engrossing story line. I recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys the glitz, glamour and scandals of Hollywood.

i am an engineering student and i enjoy reading this book. Although many topics are about psychology, you can find all kind of different subjects that you will never find anywhere else. That is way it is so valuable. the book is very heavy.

The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences - "MITECS" - is a truly excellent book. MITECS is the book I spent four years wishing for back when I started studying cognitive science. MITECS is also a very *large* book; I've set out to read all 471 articles, and I'm currently on "Computational Neuroscience" (p. 166 of 900), although I've also read a lot of other articles as circumstances required. From that sample size, my comments:

The good news: There are some truly excellent articles in this book. Microcolumns and macrocolumns, cerebellar chips, the pathways of the visual system - you can read this book and find out a hundred amazingly cool things that you never even realized you desperately needed to know. Oddly enough, MITECS is also a pretty good as an encyclopedia - if you suddenly need to know more about vision, you'll find what you need to know in "Visual Anatomy and Physiology". (Or "Visual Processing Streams". Or "High-Level Vision". Or "Computational Vision". Or "Mental Rotation". You do need to do a certain amount of hunting, if it's a sufficiently broad subject. More than half the cerebral cortex is devoted to vision - see "Mid-Level Vision" - and MITECS reflects this fact.)

MITECS *excels* as an authoritative reference; you'll almost never need to quote anything else. If you're familiar with cognitive science, you'll often laugh when you get to the end of an article and see the author's byline: "Columns and Modules" by William Calvin, "Chinese Room Argument" by John Searle, "Evolutionary Computation" by Melanie Mitchell, "Evolutionary Psychology" by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.

The bad news: If you try to read MITECS linearly, you will find that many of the articles, perhaps even a majority, are eminently skippable. (For the record, I read them anyway.) As all of the articles were written by independent individuals - none of whom could read the book first, since it didn't exist yet - there is understandably a great deal of duplication of information. Every third author feels the need to inform you that the mind is a computational information-processing system. (If I had one request to make of the hundreds of authors who write the next edition, it would be: "Skip all the introductory material and the philosophy and try to pack in as much useful detail as you can.") There are also some understandable problems with depth of coverage, made worse by the aforesaid tendency to write introductions; whenever I read an article about a topic that I had earlier studied in more detail, it really brought home the realization that each of these 471 articles tries to cover a topic about which *multiple* entire books have been written.

There are several things I'd like to see in future editions of this book. First and foremost is *less philosophy* and more focus on concrete details, particularly *surprising* details, or details that have something substantial to say about how the mind works. I don't want to know what David Hume thought about causality; I want to know if anything interesting happens when research subjects are asked to reason about causality. (I must also confess myself uninterested in most of the biographical articles that form much of MITECS - but then, that's probably because I'm not using it to study history.) Finally, I would like to see a neuroanatomical index as well as a table of contents. It's already a big book, but they can afford another six pages to show a detailed neuroanatomical map, with names for the areas, and references to the appropriate sections of the book. Such a map would be an enormous help to those of us trying to build up a concrete visualization of the brain.

Conclusion: This is a *really good* book. It's not so much "a good book with a few drawbacks" as "an excellent book with tremendous potential for *even more* improvement", and I mean this in all seriousness. If you're a cognitive scientist, you have basically no choice but to buy this book. If you're a student of the mind or a cognitive hobbyist, then this may not be the *first* book you buy, but you will buy it sooner or later.

It's just such a great book.

if you are a Game Master and wants to learn about new monsters with an excellent black and white graphic this is the right book to purchase.
Stefano

I couldn't say enough good things about the first Monsternomicon, and after delving into "volume 2," I am still of the same opinion.

The trend with many monster books in the Role Playing genre is quantity. Stuff as many monsters and their stat blocks into a book as possible, slap a price on it, and feed it to the masses.

Monsternomicon Volume II continues to exhale the breath of fresh air that the first installment brought to the genre.

Rather than focusing on hundreds of monsters for the sake of hundreds of monsters, Monsternomicon focuses on more content PER MONSTER and less filler monsters in general. Each monster is fleshed out beyond the stat block with insightful (and fun to read) backstory, history, and hooks.

A "journal entry," a story, a tale in addition to combat styles and history enhance the read for the prepping GM. No longer do I scramble to find a monster and move on with prepping... often I find myself immersed in the book, thinking and developing how the details provided can fit my campaign.

GMs working on the fly when their group diverges from the expected path will embrace the book as each entry includes the lore (or "what the PCs know about it") section that can be quickly referenced should time not permit a full review of the monster's flavor.

The artwork is dynamic and consistent with the other IK source material.

Thankfully, Privateer Press continues to "buck" the mainstream and provide quality over quantity... the result is a source book that grows beyond the "source book." This style provides for a deeper experience for GMs and PCs alike.

I can only hope that the volumes continue to roll in after 4e launches or 3.5e lives on.

Even better than the original. I'm a man and believe that every woman should own this book - except it should be filed under "Women's Self-Help", not humor.

Angry women will get a kick out of this humorous belittlement of men. I know I did. I recommend this for any woman who is fed up with men.

One of the most overlooked sons of the South,whose early death is overshadowed his brilliant career, and what could have been, some said he could have been president ,nothing was impossible, this little book gives a good impression of a man worthy of much more attention than been given, i can only recommend it, and hope that you will bring it home and treasure it for many years to come.Christian (Denmark)

You can best judge a person by the company he keeps; and in Clyde Wilson's case he has been keeping very good company indeed.

In this book, the editor of the papers of John Calhoun tells the story of one of the defenders of Calhoun's principles, James Johnston Pettigrew. The portrait is of a man who is engaging and noble.

When you visit Gettysburg, stand at the North Carolina monument and gaze across the field at the copse of trees; you will be standing at the spot where Pettigrew and his men began their march to glory. As Wilson's portrait of Pettigrew makes clear, and as any serious and honest student of the struggle for Southern independence should know, these were men who fought for a variety of reasons. In Pettigrew's case, it was to preserve a substantial measure of the world that America had inherited from Europe against a foe bent on destroying that world in the name of an abstract principle.

These were not, in short and contrary to the simplistic explanations of the conflict that dominate public discourse today, men who marched into the cannon's mouth with dreams of masters whipping slaves in their hearts. On the contrary, they were men who believed fervently that they were resisting the tyranny of a government that was fighting to keep them where they would rather not be; and in this, they, not Lincoln and his generals, were the real heirs of the American Revolution.

It is through reading the work of scholars like Professor Wilson that we can honestly approximate the reasons for this last (on the Confederate side) just as well as necessary war in America's story. For unlike this rather partisan review, the book is soberly written and the story unfolds in the measured tones of a man who has absorbed the lessons of his heroes.

Nancy Hope Wilson's Mountain Pose tells of Ellie, who receives an unexpected inheritance of family records when her estranged grandmother dies. Ellie finds the family farm and diaries a powerful connection to a veiled past: despite her father's warning she reads them and begins to understand the tensions which have divided their lives. Realistic and riveting.

Mountain Pose,is about a girl who loses a grandma that she hardly knew exsisted.In her grandma's will,Ellie is given the land and some old diaries with secret symbol sentenes.Ellie and her best friend Leese try to figure out what the secret symbols really mean.Ellie's father isn't sure if he should let Ellie have the land.He thinks the diaries will cause somthing to hppen to her.Father and Ellie move to the land, and Ellie starts to like it.
I think the author was trying to put the message that it doesn't matter where you are,you should try to keep close to your friends.The other message is to not be frieghtened when something big happens because you don't how it's going to turn out.
This book is fantastic because the author makes everything in the book realalistic. Moutain Pose is both sad, happy,and very exciting.It was hard for me to put the book down.

It is a shame it is out of print. This is one of the books I don't mind reading to my child over and over again. Funny and detailed artwork to go along with a great story.

We just received this book last week , and we've already read it a few times. The story is reminiscent of the ant and the grasshopper.The story is about two mice ,first there's Mr. Murry who always worries and is busy preparing for the winter ahead,and than there's Thumbkin who makes his home in a pumpkin and never thinks about tomorrow. He lies around all day taking it easy, while Mr. Murry is always busy.When the two mice meet , Mr. Murry tries to warn Thumbkin about the foolishness of living in a pumpkin house , but of course Thumbkin doesn't listen.As time passes , the pumpkin rots away and the top collapses. Now Thumbkin's house has no roof .AT first Thumbkin says it doesn't matter he still has half a pumpkin, but he soon discovers that Mr. Murry was right , it's snowing, he's freezing, and he has no where else to go. He should have prepared for the winter.He should have listened to Mr. Murry and moved into a better house. Well , Mr. Murry of course comes to the rescue , he goes to Thumbkin and tells him that he can live with him in his teapot house. I feel that the story teaches some good lessons. It teaches not to just live for today, you do have to think about tomorrow. It teaches about compassion,and helping those less fortunate than yourself. Also, I love the illustrations,and the text flows smoothly, making it a very enjoyable story for both child and adult.