Libraries and Museums Books

When I got this book I didn't think it would be much. When I started reading it I couldn't put it down. I always wanted to find out what was next to happen. This book has a cool plot to it. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes mystery stories.

Mike loves hanging out in his father's little museum. It is full of cool stuff like a mummy, a bunch of spooky figures. Mike loves the suit of armor until he notices some strange eyes inside the armor.

This story is about Mike who loves hanging out in his father's weird little museum on Fear Street. It is full of cool stuff-a guillotine, a mummy, a bunch of spooky wax figuress

If you do not believe that a suit of armor is haunted, read the evidence in this book. You will get the goosbumps by reading this book. The main character in this novel is Mike a twelve year old boy. Mike also has a younger sister her name is Carly. Mike's father owns a wax museum with only one employee, Mr.Spellman. The museum gets a suit of armor which belonged to an evil knight.

there are over 250 pictures ans documents, it's very complete. the texts are interessing, not boring.
there is a cd also.
we can hear a few dialogues,. there is one with rfk and on the 14 tracks we can hear young caroline.
there is part to rfk and jbk too.
so I enjoyed it.

This book is the most complete and accurate book on President John F. Kennedy. With the contribution from the John F. Kennedy Library & Museum, the true and exact data regarding the man who changed the life of many Americans is shown here in a direct manner. Great pictures. In conclusion, this book deserves to be at each home in the USA and abroad. JFK is worth to be known and admired through this masterpiece. This book is a must.

John F. Kennedy: The Presidential Portfolio features more than 250 photos and documents from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum that capture the essence, style, and excitement of the Kennedy presidency. Included in these pages are the artifacts from a lifetime young Jack's letter requsting to be made Godfather to his brother Teddy, a handwritten fragment of the inaugural adress, correspondence from Nikita Khrushchev, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and many others. Providing the backdrop for these images is a carefully rendered narrative highlighting the many remarkable events of Kennedy's life and his presidency: the tremendous physical ailments JFK had to overcome on a daily basis, his privileged chilhhood, transformation from reluctant student to Pulitzer Prize - winning author, dramatic political campaigns, struggle over the Cuban missile crisis, and his efforts to end segregation as well as counter nuclear proliferation, are all recounted here.

To Enhance The Experience of reliving the Kennedy years, a riveting 60 - minute audio CD of JFK'S phone conversations and personal dictations is packaged with the book. The following is a list of the recordings.

- An undated memoir entry concerning JFK'S entrance into politics.

- A dicated letter (circa 1959) to Joseph P. Kennedy on election and poll results.

- A dictated letter (circa 1959) to Jacqueline Kennedy on weekend in Rhode Island.

- Phone Conversation with Sargent Shriver recorded on April 2, 1963 regarding keeping CIA out of the Peace Corps.

- Three phone conversations with Ross Barnett recorded on September 30, 1962, regarding the University of Mississippi crisis.

- Phone conversation with Richard J. Daley recorded on October 28, 1963 regarding the civil rights bill.

- Phone conversation with Charles Halleck recorded on October 29, 1963 regarding the civil rights bill.

- An undated phone conversation between JFK and RFK concerning articles in Newsweek and Time magazines.

-Phone conversation with Dwight D. Eisenhower on October 22, 1962 regarding Cuban missile crisis.

- Phone conversation with Dwight D. Eisenhower on October 28,1962 regarding Cuban missile crisis.

-Phone conversation with Lincoln White on October 26,1962 regarding comments to the press concerning Cuban missile crisis.

- A dictated memoir entry dated November 1963.

As a twenty-something, I really don't know much about John or Robert Kennedy other than the vague "Camelot" fantasies tossed around. I acquired this book as part of my recent appetite for understanding JFK/RFK.

I found it to be a light-weight overview of the major periods of JFK's life, along with some information on RFK and Jackie. While it revealed a few new things I hadn't heard before, this book is really of interest primarily as a coffee table book for ocassional perusal, and not for study. It's a great combination of stories you will have heard and pictures you have already seen.

The accompanying CD, however, is particularly interesting in what it reveals about JFK the man and his way of being. Overall, I enjoyed it.

Highly recomended. I loved reading this. It gave insights into so many things I never thought of before such as the embalming process. A great work with expert diction and a great layout.

This is an excellent and provocative book. Asma ranges widely, but also deeply, over the relatively uncharted territory of museum practices and theories --some mainstream and others quirky and idiosyncratic. One of the great virtues of the book is that it consciously avoids the typical postmodern cultural studies lingo that most of the other recent museum books invoke. This is clear and thoughtful analysis of the tradition of natural history collecting --analysis that brings us face to face with oddball curators like Peale and Hunter. But it also connects the older forms of edutainment (early taxidermy, etc.) with the more contemporary and controversial forms (Hollywood-type displays of dinosaurs, etc.). Two other important aspects of the book are scarcely mentioned in the promo blurbs, but they make for fascinating reading. One, is a fresh, if ocassionally dense, tour of European scientific classification theory --a philosophically important and often ignored area. And two, a powerful argument for evolution theory as against creationism and the increasingly popular "intelligent design" theory. Great writing and very intelligent!

If you do not want to know the nuts and bolts (or rather, the knives and molds) of the craft of taxidermy, but you want to know about why people might be interested in such an activity, what happens to their exhibits in museums, how museums express cultural and scientific philosophy, and how we come to categorize the biology that fills our world, then Stephen T. Asma's _Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums_ (Oxford University Press) will do nicely. It is an amusing ramble through museums, but since Asma is a professor of philosophy, it veers through much larger ideas.

Asma obviously likes museums, and he has gained entrance to the back rooms denied to other mortals. He is delighted to report his findings, such as the dermestid beetle room at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. These beetles, held in a stinky sealed room that has a door like a submarine hatch, swarm over the skinned bodies of specimens, literally gnawing them to the bone in a couple of days. He has interviewed curators and exhibition designers, and has them explain what they are trying to accomplish in their exhibits. But they may not know; how a display is arranged depends on scientific and social philosophy which varies from time to time and from nation to nation, and may be covert. Louis Agassiz displayed human racial artifacts at Harvard to emphasize that races were different, having been separately and specially created, rather than showing the continuity of human descent. The natural history museum in England have exhibits that emphasize Darwin, but the French hardly mention him. The Americans will have the most modern philosophy of taxonomy.

Comfortable with including Plato, James, Wittgenstein and others from his own field, Asma gives a wide-ranging discussion of epistemological issues that is academic but is never stuffy and never loses its sense of fun.

Stephen Asthma's Stuffed Animals And Pickled Heads surveys the presence and evolution of natural history museums around the world, interviewing curators, scientists and exhibit designers and providing many observations of the history of these museums and how their contents and approaches have evolved. The result is an excellent and intriguing story of the evolution of natural history collections.

Stephanie and Michelle had to watch the triplets that live around the corner. The three children seem like little angels. The two sisters thought this is going to be an easy job. Boy, were they wrong! On the day of the job,the triplets' mother took everyone to the Imaginarium -- a museum in town. And the triplets run wild! Can Stephanie and Michelle keep the triplets in line? Or will their babysitting job be a total disaster?

Stephanie needs a helper to babysit triplets. Michelle's helped with one, she's helped with the twins, it's easy, right? The problem - it's not in a home, but a crowded museum they must watch them. The bigger problem - Michelle brings a furry visitor which just adds to the hijinks.

this i very cool, i give it 5 stars and if you like "Full House" you will DEFINATELY like this book :)

This is a cute story for children entering or in 2nd grade. Most children can read the story themself and the pictures are bright and cute.
My son really enjoyed it.

I bought this book for my grandson who has just completed the first gade. I think the book is funny. The vocabulary is easy enough and the illustrations are excellent. Even without them, a beginning reader can picture everything. It contains a strong appeal to the senses, and the situations are easy for a second gader to relate to. I highly recommend this book.

I highly recommend this book to anyone! It is a lovely, enchanting, and funny tale, and the pictures complement the story beautifully. I read it to my son recently, and we both loved it. He listened the entire time and wanted to hear it again! It has quickly become one of his favorites! We also have Katharine Kenah's book The Dream Shop (illustrated by Peter Catalannotto), which is a gorgeous picture book. I recommend her books to everyone!

I highly recommend this book. Not that I could fully mine its wisdom in the short time I've owned it, but I think it is excellent.

It is simple and direct, and does not take years and years of customer service training to understand. It is grounded in sound theory about how museums, zoos, and other attractions actually work and how guests interact with those places (and each other in those places). Most importantly, the author approaches the entire work from the viewpoint of guests. I know that sounds simple, but her approach disarms some of the traditional barriers to building great guest service by framing the entire book the way she does.

The book is oriented toward action, versus often unfruitful and empty intellectual exercises.

It is by far one of the best works on the subject I've seen.

CREATING GREAT VISITOR EXPERIENCES is an easy-to-use handbook, providing structured steps for making museums (and like institutions) more welcoming and rewarding for all. Packed with inspiring examples and useful ideas, Stephanie Weaver's book is a must-read for staff and volunteers.

This book will be a real eye-opener to any business owner, not just museums, parks, zoos, etc. The customer is in your control, as the author aptly points out, from the time he gets out of his car in the parking lot and sees the first signs for your business until he leaves. Does he notice trash outside the door? Is the restroom clean...and, more importantly, is the restroom pleasing? Are your employees helpful, pleasant and not over-bearing? Can he easily use your signs to find his way around? Everything affects your customers' "experience" and the greater the experience, the more repeat business you will have. An entertaining read for anyone in business!

This is a very welcome counterbalance to the many voices that stress differences among cultures at the cost of losing sight of what we humans share. With extensive use of anthropological studies, Brown alerts the reader to those almost innumerable and too easily taken-for-granted elements of humanity. We all smile when happy, mourn the loss of a child, negotiate a place in a social setting with specific traditional roles. We all eat, experience hunger, learn which foods are acceptable, connect eating with social occasions, use food-related activities as basic metaphors for aspects of life. (The annotated bibliography is especially good for its lists of shared human factors.) Those who stress differences among people now usually do so to promote tolerance of "the other." But a good basis for tolerance is to recognize the common humanness within all the differences. This book does that well. It is good but highly readable anthropology.

This is a comprehensive survey of the anthropological study of human universals, human nature, culture vs. biology, etc. It's also a critique of the field of anthropology, and one given from a refreshing outside-looking-in perspective. Brown deals with several influential cases (such as Margaret Mead's study of Samoan adolescence) and shows where they erred. He discusses the processes of defining and demonstrating universals, takes us on a grand tour of the history of universals in anthropology, presents the basic gamut of how universals have been and can be explained. In the final chapters he lays out his position and leaves cultural relativism thoroughly refuted. Cultural relativists, he demonstrates, have relied on universals even in their attempts to show cultural relativity. Among even the most dissimilar human languages, for example, the similarities (grammar, syntax, rhythm, content, etc.) still far outweigh the differences. Anthropologists have historically focused on the differences while remaining blind to the (often more fundamental and important) similarities. I'm a little leery of some of the traits Brown ends up calling universal; he does acknowledge the "working" nature of such a list. But what precisely shall be found to be universal is less important than simply the shift to an orientation that would seek to understand human nature in such terms. This is what Brown proposes. He understands the place of anthropology in the social sciences, the field's potential, where and how that potential has gone unrealized, and how anthropologists will need to alter their approach if they're to be fruitful in the future. I haven't even scraped the surface here; the book is a gold mine of interdisciplinary connections and it brims with insights. More than anything, it's a sensible, biologically-informed, (dare I say) reality-based account of human nature. The tone is that of a genuine pursuit of truth, as opposed to the trend among some social scientists to search high and low for anything that supports established theory. This book is packed, and in many ways it only aims to lay the framework of a better approach to the subject.

This is a very welcome counterbalance to the many voices that stress differences among cultures at the cost of losing sight of what we humans share. With extensive use of anthropological studies, Brown alerts the reader to those almost innumerable and too easily taken-for-granted elements of humanity. We all smile when happy, mourn the loss of a child, negotiate a place in a social setting with specific traditional roles. We all eat, experience hunger, learn which foods are acceptable, connect eating with social occasions, use food-related activities as basic metaphors for aspects of life. (The annotated bibliography is especially good for its lists of shared human factors.) Those who stress differences among people now usually do so to promote tolerance of "the other." But a good basis for tolerance is to recognize the common humanness within all the differences. This book does that well. It is also highly readable anthropology.

"Take a liberal base of Dickens, throw in a healthy helping of Dahl and spice with a bit of Margo Lanagan, and you might approximate the recipe that yielded this fey little fantasy." -Kirkus Reviews

Okay, that is cheating! You can't say that a book is a mix of things. There is not recipe for a sublime story. Besides, this quote is missing a few key ingredients. For example--

Orphans, an abandoned baby found in a box of cabbages, a brave girl that is mother to them all, betrayal, separation, an entrancing cigarette-smoking abomination of a woman, a claustrophobic treasure hunt, tyranny, revolt, totalitarian pomposity, clowns, women coming out of canons, human dictionaries and above all --COMPLETE MADCAP UNBRIDLED OPTIMISM.

It is 200+ pages of quadruped delights!

What makes a family? This is only one of the questions that David Elliott seems to be asking in Jeremy Cabbage and the Living Museum of Human Oddballs. There are others, too: What is the definition of tolerance? What are the qualities that make a hero? (In Jeremy's case, rather than the knuckle-bearing, weapon-toting figures we hold up as models for boys today, it is keeping a steadfast heart.) But these important questions are asked subtly, embedded in a rollicking adventure that is both heart-warming and, at times, hilarious. Filled with a cast of eccentric, lovable characters, and with enough villians to make us curl our lips (in one case, one can't help but ask: Was Elliott thinking of a certain foolish but dangerous ego-driven President when he was writing the Baron?) Jeremy Cabbage would make a wonderful read aloud for any classroom or family. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll be sorry when you've finished.

A bit droll. A bit daffy. A lot of enjoyment. In other words, another story by the imaginative, irrepressible David Elliott.

We meet Jeremy Cabbage, an orphan and resident of Harpwitch's Home for Mean Dogs, Ugly Cats and Strey Children (Ms. Harpwitch did not spell well). The day comes when he is adopted but rather than being clasped to the ample bosom of his new mother (and few bosoms are ampler), he hears, "Yeah, he's kinda scrawny but he'll do." That doesn't bode too well for Jeremy nor does his return to the Home and the adoptions that follow, including the pair that simply wanted an au pair for their sick goldfish.

Jeremy really misses Polly who cared for him after finding him, an abandoned infant in a crate of cabbages. However, they were separated when a city ordered raid gathered up all orphan children. The city is Metropolis and it is ruled by a heartless man, Baron Ignatius von Strompie. Jeremy wonders where Polly is, if she was taken to a place as horrible as Harpwitch's Home.

At last, there's a ray of light when Jeremy is adopted again - this time by human clowns or cloons as the Baron has dubbed them because he detests everything different. And these clowns or cloons are unique in Metropolis because they're happy and they make people laugh. - anathema to the Baron and he vows to get rid of them. What chance do Jeremy and the cloons have against such power? Will he ever see Polly again?

With fond memories of Elliott's Roscoe Wizzle (2004) this reader adds the irresistible Jeremy Cabbage to my list of favorite characters.

Enjoy!

- Gail Cooke

This is a very handsome book - of great interest for architectural buffs or historians. It pairs two great architects - Robert Venturi and Irving Gill - in a unique, engaging, and informative way. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (in La Jolla, California)is one of the finest small museums in the country, well worth a visit to see outstanding architecture as well as cutting-edge contemporary art.

This is an outstanding book for anyone interested in the work of two great architects - Robert Venturi and Irving Gill. The combination of their work at the museum in La Jolla is masterful, and this book gives a fascinating look into the museum's history and Venturi's thought processes as he sought to restore the historic "Scripps House" while expanding and modernizing the Museum of Contemporary Art. A great find - makes me want to visit La Jolla and see it for myself!

Buy this book even if you've never been to the La Jolla museum it describes. If you've been to the museum, it's worth buying to give you pause to reflect on what you've seen. This book offers both the history and theory behind Venturi's reshaping of a wonderful museum in an attractive location. Those of us who remember the museum in the old days have got to be impressed with what Venturi has done. Although this text is all too brief, it provides the illumination needed to appreciate more fully this California classic.

My three years old daughter is a big fan of Leo Lionni's books. This is one of her favorite stories. I just got this book two weeks ago. She asks me to read this book everyday. She is excited every time I read to her, especially the part when Matthew met Nicoletta (his future wife) and when his dusty old corner magically turns into a wonderful piece of art (or maybe it's Matthew's imagination). There're a lot of nice arts in this book too, making it a great book for children who appreciate arts.

I have read this book to my son since he was born (he is now 3 months old). He loves it - coos and kicks his legs throughout the entire book. Very vivid colorful pictures and a great story. Can't wait to get more books from Lionni.

Although the subject matter of this book initially appeared to be for an older child, it is clear that the text and illustrations appeal as strongly to the younger set. Ever since learning of Matthew the Mouse's determination to become a painter (in contravention of his parents desires that he become a M.D.) my two-year-old son (also named Matthew) has been wielding his paintbrush often and furiously. The illustrations are aesthetically pleasing and clarify the text perfectly. The text, while simple in form, provides excellent vocabulary builders (e.g., use of "embrace" rather than "hug") and also gives the reader the chance to discuss with the child many ideas and activities that take place inside and outside the home. All in all a wonderful find; a story that truly respects a child's right to follow his or her own dreams.