Columbia Books

This books is a must have for any architect or urbanist interested in theory.

An excellent compendium of writing from that period. Unlike KM Hayes' book covering a later period, the selections were made with the wisdom that comes with almost 30 years of hindsight and is less about the time in which it was published (90s).

I stumbled upon this book by chance in a library, opened it, skimmed through the first paragraph, and immediately set myself to the task of reading it in entirety. The writing is clear and concise - Panossian's intelligent prose illuminates the past, without pages and pages of elaboration that one might expect to find in a book that covers roughly 2500 years of history.

It is heavily researched, containing quotes from at least one hundred total sources. Moreover, towards the end of the book, which covers the period from the 1965 commemoration of the Armenian Genocide in Soviet Armenia to the 1988 Nagorno-Kharabagh movement, there are good number of quotes from personal interviews that the author conducted, including several Catholicoses, politicians, and various Armenian ideologues.

The notes to the main text make up roughly one-third of the book and contain some interesting facts. For example, the title "King of Armenia," from the Cilician Kingdom that fell in 1375, eventually passed to the House of Savoy in Italy. That title was proclaimed by the Savoys until 1946, when Italians voted to abolish the monarchy and replace it with a rupublic.

This is an excellent book on Armenian history, with an emphasis on nationalism and what exactly makes a nation a nation.

The book is very well written, but clearly the value of this book lies beyond its readability this is an original piece of work that is complete in the sense that it covers more of the evolution of the "Armenian identity" than meets the eye. For instance the historic fact driven discussions on the Armenian identity goes to the core of the current political issues of modern day Armenia. The book builds a useful bridge between Armenian history, politics and sociology.
If you have ever asked yourself what is an Armenian then you should read this book. I read it twice and it hit me at some point that I was in the process of discovering what it is to be an Armenian.
IMHO the author is fairly balanced and unbiased about Armenian issues.

I found some new information in this book... In situation when the topic like this (arms trade) is not so popular and very hard to find an information about arms transfers at the beginning of this century, this book looks very useful and informative... While there are some mistakes anyway book looks very fine and mistakes not so important... I'd like to recommend for those peoples who interested in military and politic history...

Very interesting and useful for researchers and historians... I found some new information in this book... In situation when the topic like this (arms trade) is not so popular and very hard to find an information about arms transfers at the beginning of this century, this book looks very useful and informative... While there are some mistakes anyway book looks very fine and mistakes not so important... I'd like to recommend for those peoples who interested in military and politic history...

Dr. Victor H. Mair's 2007 scholarly book, "The Art of War: Sun Zi's Military Methods" (published by Columbia University Press), provides not only an accurate translation of The Art of War but also the most recent research into its origin.

With a knack for Sinitic etymology, Sinitic lexicography, and the origins and evolution of Chinese script, Victor Mair pushed for Chinese language reforms in exceptional efforts such as how Chinese dictionaries should be best arranged. Dr. Mair's expertise allows him to break new ground in his Art of War translation and book which contains bold and original data, analyses, and theories. Like a scientist, he methodically asserts evidences to challenge our current knowledge and leaves us with renewed scholarship and appreciation for The Art of War. You won't regret owning this refreshing, authoritative, and well-researched edition.

Victor Mair is a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated from Dartmouth College (where he was captain of the Dartmouth basketball team and tasked to guard Bill Bradley from Princeton), served in the Peace Corps in Nepal, and holds a master's degree from University of London and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He has taught at Kyoto University in Japan and at Sichuan University in China.

After much debate and discussion, we at Sonshi are ranking Victor Mair's "The Art of War: Sun Zi's Military Methods" the #1 Art of War edition; how rare a book that courageously stands up to centuries of established thought, proceeds to knock it down with sound logic and proof, and succeeds in convincing even the Old Guard to change their views.

Victor Mair is amazing! I own an older version of Sun Zi, and I have to say hands down that this is much more readable and insightful a piece of work. Mair is an excellent writer in his own right, and his expert scholarship is clear from the authoritative introduction, some 55 pages long but easy to read. I have devoured this book. It is hard to put down and it doesn't bog down. His translation is superior to the older Shambala edition. I enjoyed the discussion on putting the treatise into a historical and military context. Even the forward by another author, comparing Sun Zi with Clausewitz, is excellent, thought-provoking work. I think this moves Sun Zi scholarship forward but in a way that is also perfectly readable to the layman. Mair gives the more serious scholar ways to get more into the weeds in the notes section and in references to more academic papers he has done on the subject, which is fine by me.

I highly recommend this to anyone interested the Sun Zi, tactics, and Chinese philosophy.

This book should be a required read for anyone studying to teach early childhood education, but anyone interested Reggio Emilia or young children will find this an excellent resource. Through the lens of the Reggio Emilia philosophy, the book looks at "the image of the child", "the role of the teacher", environment, documentation, relationships, curriculum, aesthetics, and finally "the Hundred Languages of Children". It is a highly enjoyable read, rich with real life examples of Reggio in practice, as well as the reality of the challenges faced by teachers. Wonderful!!

I just recently graduated with my masters degree in education and just got a job as a kindergarten teacher for this school year. During my graduate studies I became intrigued with the ideas from the Reggio Emilia schools: Documentation, Projects, the studio, collaboration, spaces, etc. I really wanted to be able to bring these ideas to my own classroom. I have read a lot of literature out there about Reggio Emilia and the various ideas associated with them- But a lot of those books are very academic and wordy and force you to ponder deep issues, which is great, but I'm not a grad student anymore. I need something a little bit more easy to read, with less theory and such and more how-to's. So I found Authentic Childhood and love it! It lays out the basic ideas of Reggio Emilia in a really accessible way. It has been a nice addition to my professional library. I mean, there is still theory in this book- but its Micheal Crichton-level reading, not James Joyce.
I also recommend: In the Spirit of the Studio (Learning from the Atelier of Reggio Emilia) and Making Learning Visible. These are valuable tools for any educator!

For anyone wanting to learn about Flower Essences for their children, this book is wonderful. I read it in about an hour and gleaned a wealth of information from it. I now know exactly which essences will suit my children best. I highly recommend this book!

I have always had my homeopathic remedies made by a pharmacy and was skeptical of remedies that could be purchased at a store. Well, when all else failed to work for me, I decided to try the Bach remedies and they worked! From there, I branched out into treating our cat and also my children.

This book is easy to understand and use. As most Flower Remedy books do, it starts with a short introduction. From there, it goes on to list the remedies alphabetically and to explain which sort of child would benefit. In a style that reminded me of Waldorf School educators, the author also included a short story to be told to the child related to their personality type. Very interesting.

At the end, there is a chart listing the remedies and the conditions each one can treat. This is a very useful reference. This chart differs from the chapters because it also lists physical problems, as well as emotional personality. For example, I looked under pimples for my daughter. Of course, Bach thought that physical problems all had emotional or psychological roots to begin with.

This is a book that I will consult over and over again. It is very well done.

This is an absolute MUST for everyone mountain biking in the Canadian Rockies. The maps and descriptions of the trail are extremly acurate and are extremly useful.

This guide book gives a good review of all the major mountain biking trails in Southern Alberta. The maps are good and there are entertaining photos throughout of some vintage mountain bikers.

The difficulty ratings are quite realistic, in my opinion.

I also had the wonderful oppurtunity of taking Dr. Jason D. Hill's multiculturalism class (ISP 200). He teaches the class with two texts, one of them being his own Becoming a Cosmopolitan. Dr Hill is a wonderful person, and his book is almost poetic in nature. He has a profound love for all of humanity and is a very admirable person.

His book inspires you to look beyond the boundaries of race, color, creed, nationality and gender, and accept everyone as constituents of the human race. Beauty is an intrinsic quality of all human beings, according to Hill.

His class at DePaul University and his book has given me a new way of seeing and interacting with other people: through moral cosmopolitanism.

This is a must read to get a full fledged idea of how inherently beautiful humanity is.

This beautifully and poetically written book is perhaps the first of its kind. Hill, I believe has two purposes here. The first is the idea that all fights against racism, ethnocentrism and nationalism are doomed until one begins to question the legitimacy of and then fight against their root foundation: tribalism. It is tribalism that Hill feels is the real danger of the modern world and the root cause of, as he puts it, all the carnage and butchery of human existence.He refers to tribalism as a form of infantilism in which the need for parental protection is sublimated and mapped on to the nation/race or ethnos. He thinks that tribalism is evil because it demarcates a set of what he terms, arbitrary and morally irrelevant attributes of people and then use them as moral criteria in judging their worth and value as human beings. He believes that there is virtue in forgetting where we came from (we, meaning humans in general) not as a way of denying our history, but as a form of benevolence in showing that we are willing to open up ourselves to the process of "becoming" (Hill's coinage); to show that we don't take our starting points in life as absolutely defining us in who we have to be for the rest of our lives. The second purpose his book seems to fulfill is that of providing a psychological way of actually becoming a lover of humanity. He thinks the self has to be re-socilaized all over again and he sort of provides a blue-print for how it can actually be done. His ideas range from the notion of moral masking, to adopting the view of the self as a construct of narratives or stories. The end result he believes is one that will bring about a kind of radical self-invention and real comsmic freedom. This book will require careful reading. The author is a philosopher. But he has tried to write for a broad audience. I can't say for sure whether the world Jason Hill wishes to come into existence is really possible. He gives us litle advice on how on a political level a comsopolitan universe is possible. But on the personal level he has tried to communicate how, as he terms it, a radical soul transformation is possible.

Dr. Kurten's status as the pre-eminent expert on Ice Age megafauna is unchallenged. One of the most fortunate facets of this professor's expertise is his ability to transmit the fruits of that vast knowledge to his readers in a lively, interesting, easily readable, and well-organized fashion. This book is an apt example. Without overwhelming the reader by overuse of taxonomic names, statistics, or anatomical terms, Dr. Kurten offers a novel view of the Ice Age animals that dominated North America before the coming of man.

Rather than preceding along anatomical or taxonomic lines, Dr. Kurten moves forward through time, beginning in the Pliocene epoch that immediately preceded the Quaternary period. Dr. Kurten divides the time period by use of the Blancan, Irvingtonian and Rancho LaBrean periods, rather than through more traditional European time periods. By use of these American-based dividing lines, he is enabled to discuss not only individual North American species, but how the American animal community evolved and prospered into one like the world has never seen.

The reader is not only treated to discussions about familiar animals such as the sabertoothed cat, and the mammoth, but can be exposed to and learn about such creatures as the scimitar cat, the Florida cave bear, the American camel, zebra and lion,
and giant extinct condors, among many others. You will learn about the evolution of bison, and about the many animals that migrated to the Americas from Eurasia over the exposed Bering Straits during the height of the Ice Age.

The book is unendingly fascinating, and one wishes he or she could be transported in time back to the day when these now-departed creatures made the American plains and forests teem with life. I recommend this book very highly to all, especially high schoolers with a little scientific background.

Kurten at al have described the wonderful variety of large mammals that lived in North America for millions of years, until as recently as 13,000 years ago. Saber- and scimitar-toothed cats, camels, sloths, mastodons, lions, cheetahs and other animals combined to make North America a teeming home to large game more diverse than Africa now has. Many fine illustrations accompany the text.

The book is well-written, easily accessible to the interested lay person and does not require college level understanding of morphological bone analysis. Having been to southern Africa in 1997, I now cannot drive or hike through rural North America without imaging mammoths, tapirs, bear-sized beavers, one-ton running bears, and glyptodonts coming to the watering holes and browsing and grazing their way across the landscape.

For a comprehensive college-level treatment, see "Quaternary Extinctions," Paul Martin and Richard Klein, editors.

At last! An historical novel that's interesting, amusing, and *entertaining* and so *real* you feel you need to clean your boots every time you read a piece of it. Yeah, the pictures are faded. They're *old*, dammit, *real*. These are *everybody's* folks, the way they grew up and loved and lost their limbs just so we could be here. John Sayles, *do* read these books. You'll have another "Matewan" in your hands.

'Labor of love' seems inadequate in describing BEHIND THESE MOUNTAINS, authored by resident-historian, Mona Leeson Vanek. This engaging book narrates virtually every known event of significance in the region, through the use of oral tape recordings, letters, and written documentation. Beginning before the arrival of David Thompson, it contains determined homesteaders, exciting log drives down river, pioneering merchants, establishment of schools and churches, and the horrors of the 1910 forest fire. Countless stories of individuals, ranging from mildly amusing to hilarious enliven this history. Where else in a book of this sort can one find characters who vow to escape from a local jail "disguised as a bunch of radishes?" or a shingle-mill owner who closed down his mill after having to ante up compensation for too many workers' sawed-off fingers - at $1,000 per finger. BEHIND THESE MOUNTAINS stands as the definitive history of its region, the lower Clark's Fork of the Columbia River and the Bull River valley in Sanders County, Montana. The chapter on the Forest Service's arrival in the valley clearly describes the bitter struggles between pioneer ranger Augustus Ferdinand Silcox and local businessmen, led by Clifford R. Weare, who wanted to continue their unfettered exploitation of the public domain. The more than 200 photographs are positioned in the book to match and enhance the text, but reporoduction of many of them obviously is more faded and washed out than the author would have liked. The thorough index is a boon for genealogists. A complete set of end notes contain material that enhance the stories, and if readers ignore the footnotes, they'll miss some stirring accounts of vigilante activity during the 1880s. Excellent accounts of the building of the Northern Pacific Railroad, which opened the northwest area of Montana to settlement, provide vivid accounts of problems along this 'most difficult and expensive division' of the entire NPRR line. Vanek has done her community and Montana a great service