Columbia Books

Ever wish you had a book that had certain qualities, and then find one that just meets your needs?

If you are interested in gardens around Washington DC, this is the guide book!
I have quite a bit of free time this spring and wanted to plan several garden visits, but couldn't find anything other than detailed histories of some of the major gardens in the area. In a stroke of luck, I checked out from the library and liked it so much I had to buy a copy.

It's a wonderfully detailed, yet readable description of each of the gardens with lots of nice historical detail without getting bogged down. I am very familiar with oneof the gardens and found the description to be very good.
It is aimed at the gardener, with descriptions of plants.

A real joy for the gardener looking to explore the gardens of Washington, DC.

Judy Karpinski's photos and Karen Thompson's illustrations enhance Barbara Seeber's A City Of Gardens, an impressively informative surveying of public gardens in and around Washington D.C. Any who live on the East Coast will find City Of Gardens to be an excellent destination-oriented guide which invites gardeners and tourists to enjoy the city's garden wonders. Notes on rare plants, old trees, and more pinpoint what makes each destination special.

I left D.C. over five years ago for Southwest Louisiana. Ms. Seeber's wonderful book "A City Of Garden's" allows me the priveldge to re-visit some of the most wonderful public gardens in D.C., such as Dumbarton Oaks and The Bishop's Garden at The National Cathedral, via a book. And, introduced me to a garden I have missed: "The Old Stone House," which Ms. Seeber astutley points out, "you could walk by and miss." For anyone interested in discovering the real splendors of the D.C. (and vicinity), the public gardens, there is only one source: "A City Of Gardens." Kudos, Ms, Seeber. This is a walk through my past, and a treasure of the utmost to anyone seeking the original and finest destinations in the Washington, D.C. metro area.: the glorious public gardens in and around our Nation's Capital, as the cover rightfully conveys.

The day Cityscapes arrived brought me back to the city of my childhood and of my family and closest friends. Page after page of wonderful photographs, of history remembered and learned yet again. So many places visited with my elementary school field trips and then revisited years later on my brief stays in New York. Cityscapes offers a visual feast as well as an intellectual journey to places and people seen years ago, but only now understood in historical context.

A month or so after I fell into Cityscapes, I was delighted to host a young couple from New York. They saw the book on my coffee table and picked it up. Hours later, the two of them were still pouring over the book, learning new and fascinating slices of urban life in their recently adopted city.

Just as New York offers something for everyone, Cityscapes brings light to the eyes of anyone who opens its cover and enters its world.

There is no place like New York, and there is no book about New York like this one. As revealing as the superb choice of photos, sketches and maps are, so is the narrative story linked with the visual: colonial seaport blossoming into a republican town, fragmented city becoming the immigrant metropolis, and finally the cosmopolitan community and global village we celebrate today. The authors have opened for us vista after vista and close-up after close-up of the poignancy and power of this magnificently restless, creative and changing Empire City.

The destruction of the World Trade Center has altered the New York City skyline forever and has forced people to confront a new image of New York. The next generation of New York observers will only know the Towers from their images - several magnificant ones appear in this book's final chapter.

Cityscapes is more than just a history of New York City and it is more than simply a book of beaufitul pictures. It is a unique social history that explores the timely question of how New York, the City, has been both constructed and reflected in images captured over four hundred years.

So far, this is my favorite book of New York City history.

I purchased this book as part of my research to a follow-up book, Don't Weep for Me, America: How Democracy in America Became the Prince (While We Slept). I wanted to see if the Cold War was the same big fraud as today's War on Terror. Thanks to author, Thomas Doherty, I learned that not only was McCarthy THE chief propagandist for the "red scare", but that television was almost invented for the purspose of providing its platform. The blacklist that author Doherty details in his excellent chapter, "The Gestalt of the Blacklist" is an incredible story that a reasonable person would have trouble understanding could happen in a true constitutional republic. But it did happen. And today, the level of crime committed by the state, through planned and systematic propaganda has reached its...zenith...

The author should take a bow. He has written a wonderfully balanced, anecdotal-rich account of the simultaneous evolution of the Cold War, TV and political culture in the Age of McCarthy (which is, in all too many ways, an age we are still in.) That the junior senator from the cheeshead state was a craven opportunist is as well known now as it was even then, but what he exploited via the new electronic medium was the pervasive fear that subversion lurked behind every vacuum tube as well as behind every State Department desk.

Cold War, Cool Medium is a terrific and compulsively readable study of McCarthyism in the context of the early history of television. Doherty astutely establishes the way televison worked in its formative days. Then he shows how its weaknesses aided in the rise of McCarthy and how both its strengths and weaknesses aided in his fall. Superb and easiy to read history.

These authors write so it's hard to put the book down! I love the intermingling of mystery, local history and romance. I wish there were more books in this Hidden West Series. They are SO very good! Well written.

Love Tony and Price Shadowbrook, a husband and wife writing team who are entertainingly portrayed in a hidden west locale full of adventures and struggles. Price fights for her place in the co-writing and comforts a new friend and widow who suspects her husband's death wasn't accidental. Tony fights for a private place to write while tourists traipse through their unusual summer home. Meanwhile, their adult kids provide complications. It's fun and inspirational reading.

I highly recommend all of Stephen and Janet's books. I was able to meet them Labor Day weekend 1999(after having written to them for several years). They are such a wonderful couple as well as great authors. I can't wait until the next book comes out, no matter what the series is!

I've recently had to obtain a broad background in material science, and this book was a wonderful introduction. Holden gives great physical explanations with a wide array of simple models that are tailored to give the insight necessary to understand diverse topics such as crystal structure and symmetry, electrical conductance and specific heat with nary an equation.

I highly recommend this to anyone who wants good understanding of the different physics in solids without getting bogged down in the math. It was a wonderful introduction for me.

This short, easy to read book serves its purpose: a non-mathematical but informative intro to solid state physics. The illustrations and descriptions are good. I read it as self study before solid state physics and it was useful in the non-mathematical setup (albeit mostly review) for the mathematics of the class.

I thought I read this book when I was an undergraduate, but the date of publication on my hardback copy says it must have been later. In cleaning out our library my wife asked, "You don't really still want this old book, do you?" I said that I thought I once thought it was pretty good, so let's keep it. And I started to re-read it.

Maybe 35 years as a working physicist (nuclear, not solid state) has colored my view of things, but this book is rather better than just "pretty good". It is amazing how much meat of the subject that Holden can get across in a qualitative, non-mathematical way! He doesn't use the words "Fermi gas" -- in fact, Fermi isn't even noted in the index -- but the concept comes across very well. It is remarkable how much I learned about the nature of solid state, but maybe that only says how much I had forgotten from the first time I read it.

Very nice! Thank you, Alan Holden.

I recommend this volume of poetry to any Emily Bronte fan. I own a copy of this collection of poetry. I can certainly see traces of Wuthering Heights in these poems. My favorite poem (besides the Gondal poems) is a chilling account of a dark young man coming to a family's home for dinner. I'm not sure if the young man is human, ghost, or demon, but if you read this poem in this amazing collection you can judge for yourself. Also at the begining is an informative essay on the Gondal poems. I suggest that one should read that before beginning the poems because it is most helpful. Again this is a must-read book.

Emily Bronte's poetry is wild and beautiful. Ranging between gentle melancholy to fierce pride, her poems successfully capture human emotion. Many of her poems are about, or written from the viewpoint of the inhabitants of, the fictional kingdom of Gondal. Although these are set in an imaginary land, the Gondal poems stand well alongside the more personal verse. This particular volume is valuable because it includes a description and history of the Gondal saga Emily and her sister Anne created. It is often hard, in other collections, to tell which is personal and which is fictional, but here the Gondal poems are listed. This is very useful to those who wish to study this creation of the Bronte imagination. Also useful is the the chronological order of the poems (as far as can be determined), which makes it easy to follow her development as a poet. I recommend it highly.

Few who read Emily Bronte's poems and magnificent novel, Wuthering Heights, can fail to be moved by the sheer power of her language and insight. Though her tragic early death robbed the world of countless literary treasures, EJB's poetry here provides plenty of beautiful poetry (some of it foreshadowing WH) for those who love her to enjoy and study. Read it and savor it.

Although Elanor Roosevelt's life and work have ispired dozens of books, her own prolific writings are largely confined to the Roosevelt archives in Hyde Park. Courage In A Dangerous World allows her own voice again to be heard. Noted Elanor Roosevelt scholar Allida M. Black has gathered more than two hundred columns, articles, essays, speeches, and letters, tracing her development from timorous columnist to one of liberalism's most eloquent and outspoken leaders. From ''My Day'' newspaper columns about Marian Anderson and experts from Moral Basis of Democracy and This Troubled World to speeches and articles on the Holocaust and McCarthyism, this anthology provides readers with the tools to reconstruct the politics of a woman who redefined American liberalism and democratic reform.

Much has been written about Eleanor Roosevelt but this collection gives us the chance to read her own words. What an amazing and astute woman. There is almost no current issue that Eleanor Roosevelt did not foresee, analyze, and have a definate position on--race, civil liberties, international interdependence, government support of the arts, working women/mothers. Allida Black has assembled documents and out-of-print materials that would be terribly difficult for most people to access. Black's introductions to each section are clear and helpful and work to dispel the myth of Roosevelt as basically the "eyes and legs" of her husband or the woman of sorrow who only turned to political life after her husband's affair. Anyone reading this collection will come to appreciate Roosevelt for the powerful and courageous person she was--and see how compassionate to an extraordinary degree she was. Even a sampling of these writings will make you want to get involved and not sit by the wayside. For activists, it will be a validation for caring.

What an amazing collection! Eleanor Roosevelt was truly a woman ahead of her times, and this book uses her own words to illustrate just how forward-thinking she was. The depth and bredth of her opinions, her reasoning, and her skill at conveying her ideas to the general public never failed to astound me through reading and rereading the selections. Allida Black has done an incredible amount of work to bring this volume to fruition, and all the trouble she has taken is absolutely worthwhile. Every essay is full of the ideas and actions for which Roosevelt continues to be known and respected.

Who should read this book? Anyone looking for strong ideas about the world and what it should be like. Anyone looking for ways to affect lives for good. Anyone who needs a role model, something to aspire to, or something to work toward.

JoBeth Allen has created an exceptional resource and guide book in this text. She uses the voices of teachers and others in the schools, as well as her own mother/grandmother experiences to expose the reader to what a welcoming school looks like, feels like, and does. I would encourage anyone who is interested in their school or school district being sincerely open and welcoming to families to read this book. If you really want partnerships with parents, this is a wonderful place to start or extend on what you've already begun.

This book is a pleasure to read on so many different levels. For starters, Allen doesn't fall into the trap of pitting teachers against parents. She writes frankly from the perspective of a parent and an educator, building on her own experiences and those of others to illustrate the challenges in creating productive partnerships between families and schools in diverse communities. She does an exceptional job of suggesting ways to create meaningful family-school relationships that move beyond bake sales; in doing so, she gets readers to think about the kind of partnerships that are shown to really improve student learning. She does this in a way that is open, engaging, even friendly, while not being afraid to ask us as parents and educators to take a hard look at our practices and assumptions. In sections that are worth the price of admission, she discusses real-life examples of ways to create genuine dialogue between families and schools that deepen understanding and communication while also providing opportunities for increased student learning. But the book doesn't stop there. Instead, it moves into the arena of educational transformation, pushing readers to imagine ways of building community-school-home alliances that speak to living in a democratic society. In that sense, it is an optimistic, hopeful and inspiring book, chocked full of practical ideas, hands-on activities, thought-provoking stories, and opportunities for action. And did I mention that, on top of all that, it's a good read?

JoBeth Allen (Professor of Language and Literacy Education, University of Georgie) presents Creating Welcoming Schools: A Practical Guide to Home-School Partnerships with Diverse Families, a useful resource that explains how schools and diverse families across America have entered into constructive partnerships to improve student learning. Intended for teachers, parents, and school administrators, Creating Welcoming Schools covers such options as writing cultural memoirs, inviting dialogue at the conference table, engaging families in classroom projects, collaborating for more democratic schools and a more democratic society, and much more. "Evidence of learning may come from other teachers or adults who know the learner. If the child has a gift in art or music or physical education, or is working as an assistant in the library, invite that teacher for the conference. These teachers cannot go to every conference of every child, but they are rarely invited to any. What does that say about what we value?" Highly recommended.

First, I must state that I am not overly fond of autobiographies in general and celebrity autobiographies in particular. I found this one in a used book store and added it to my stack of finds on pure whim. I am very glad I did. The book was actually quite readable and very enjoyable. I have always enjoyed Ms. Reynolds' work and after reading her story, appreciate it, the work, even more. The books is salted with many fine photographs of the subjects life and work and are well placed. The narrative is easy to follow and as I said, "readable." Quite a fascinating life. All in all, if you are interested in such things, I highly recommend this one

Debbie tells her story with great energy....just like she has in all aspects of her life.......you want to laugh and cry with her....she is honest about her life and those around her....you walk away feeling good........just like you do after you've seen her on stage......Bravo Debbie

I was not able to put this book down! It is so wonderfully entertaining, just like Debbie Reynolds herself! "My Life" is full of great Hollywood stories and focuses on one of the most interesting stories I've ever heard--Debbie's life story. It's funny and it brings you right in, as though Debbie is telling you the story, not just writing it. I HIGHLY recommend this stellar book, "Debbie:My Life."

"Dinosaur Tracks and Other Fossil Footprints of Europe " written by Martin G. Lockley and Christian Meyer is a wonderfully exciting book about vertebrate ichnology... the study of track of footprints of ancient vertebrates, that have walked the face of Europe some 200 to 300 million years ago.

"Dinosaur Tracks and Other Fossil Footprints of Europe" was wriiten after "Dinosaur Tracks and Other Fossil Footprints of the Western United States" by Martin Lockley and gives the reader a more indepth knowledge of Dinosaur, reptilian, amphibian, and mammalian tracks and informs the reader of the difference in each of these track formations.

"Dinosaur Tracks and Other Fossil Footprints of Europe" is beautifully illustrated with numerous trackway art in line drawings and in photographic evidence. This book limits its scope to Europe mainly England, Sweden, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, and Croatia giving the reader a broad sense of the scope to which the dinosaur roamed in major trackways or super highways of travel. It is noted in the book that most of the known trackways are of a migration paths from the south to the north, but there are trackways that go in different directions and both sauropods and therapods tracks have been found.

I liked the book much better than the first book on ichnology by the same author as this book has copious illustrations to back up the author's claims and theories and you can see for yourself what the author is trying to tell you in the text, Thus illustrating, and it makes a lot of sense. The current dinosaur track renaissance in Europe is part of a worldwide dinosaur-tracking revolution that, during the past decade, has thrust the study of fossil footprints into a prominent position in the world of paleontology and sedimentary geology.

Paleontology and geology are just two of the scientific disciplines that you'll need to have to read this book along the anatomy and general mechanics of movement would help in understanding this books full potential. Such observations are perhaps not surprising when we consider that Europe and North America were united with other continents at this time as part of the Pangaen supercontinent. Archosaurs and other vertebrates, therefore, were able to range widly across the Triassic world, establish themselves in their perfered habitats, and leave their distinctive tracks and traces alongside other distinctive plant and animal remains.

Tracks in "Dinosaur Tracks and Other Fossil Footprints of Europe" cover a wide range of times. There are tracks from the Paleozoic, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous and Tertiary periods of time making for a wide discussion of events in this book. Moreover, these observations help to demonstrate that the composition and distribution of vertebrate trackmakers are less complicated that previously supposed.

"Dinosaur Tracks and Other Fossil Footprints of Europe" is a solid 5 star book and you'll learn much about the habits and habitats of the dinosaurs that made these tracks so long ago. The book has attempted to summerize the important sites and the insights they offer into vertebrate activity and evolution in Europe. Mesozoic tracks, however, are a differect story. The authors have been involved with active research at the Europian sites and have added significant knowledge and data that have been reported in recent years as the scope to which the science of ichnology is growing as more research is being devoted to these reminants of a lost age. There are very adequate bibliographies throughout the book and an extensive reference sections making this book a well annotated book and can be used for a stepping stone for future research into the amazing world of ichnology and there is and extensive appendix that is well documented as to where in Europe you can go to exterience fossil tracks first hand with illustrations to show the different formations.

Can a book make a loud SWOOSH? This one does -- the sound of a gigantic information void suddenly filling. It is a wonderfully encompassing coverage of dinosaurian and other ancient tracks of Europe, coupled, when appropriate, with well-informed comparisons to track types world-wide. Superbly illustrated with some of the most beautiful trackway photos I have seen published, and by abundant, carefully thought-out drawings, the person interested in either dinosaur or other ancient European tracks who misses this book will be as Sherlock Holmes without his magnifying glass. It is well-written in a style that should please the broad spectrum of readers from those just casually interested in ancient animals and their tracks, through the most serious of professional paleontologists and paleo-ichnologists (researchers of ancient traces). In fact, it is difficult to imagine any reader who would not appreciate and learn from this book and want to keep it accessible for years of useful reference, as well. Also, some significant re-interpretations of specific tracks or trackways that had been differently interpreted in earlier publications by various authors will appeal to the mystery lover in most of us. Trackways, after all, provide us the most dramatic insight into the dynamics of dinosaurs and other ancient animals that we will ever study or just enjoy, unless science fantsy becomes reality and Jules Verne's "Time Machine" volume becomes clearly prescientient. Meantime, "All aboard!" via the next best transport: Lockley and Meyer's DINOSAUR TRACKS...

Can a book make a loud SWOOSH? This one does -- the sound of a gigantic information void suddenly filling. It is a wonderfully encompassing coverage of dinosaurian and other ancient tracks of Europe, coupled, when appropriate, with well-informed comparisons to track types world-wide. Superbly illustrated with some of the most beautiful trackway photos I have seen published, and by abundant, carefully thought-out drawings, the person interested in either dinosaur or other ancient European tracks who misses this book will be as Sherlock Holmes without his magnifying glass. It is well-written in a style that should please the broad spectrum of readers from those just casually interested in ancient animals and their tracks, through the most serious of professional paleontologists and paleo-ichnologists (researchers of ancient traces). In fact, it is difficult to imagine any reader who would not appreciate and learn from this book and want to keep it accessible for years of useful reference, as well. Also, some significant re-interpretations of specific tracks or trackways that had been differently interpreted in earlier publications by various authors will appeal to the mystery lover in most of us. Trackways, after all, provide us the most dramatic insight into the dynamics of dinosaurs and other ancient animals that we will ever study or just enjoy, unless science fantasy becomes reality and Jules Verne's "Time Machine" volume becomes clearly prescientient. Meantime, "All aboard!" via the next best transport: Lockley and Meyer's DINOSAUR TRACKS...