Lincoln Books

A very thoughtful and thorough book on Lincoln from the perspective of his physiology, well-written and surprisingly easy to absorb given the extensive detail, evidence and data. If you're a fan of presidents or specifically of one of our best, I suspect you'll probably enjoy how the author uncovers (through exhaustive research) Lincoln's physical frailties. It's not a light literary romp(I definitely looked up a few words and had to read sections over to make sure I grasped them), but it was totally worth the investment!

I find the book to be revealing to see how President Lincoln's health was in the large picture. The book is packed with fasinating facts and profound information to make the reader see how one great man as Lincoln was, lived and functioned. This is a wonderful research to any Lincoln scholar, or researcher like myself.

Let me say in the first sentence: "Picasso and the Girl with a Ponytail" is a wonderful introduction to Picasso and his art. If more informational books for children were as creative and colorful as this one, children would stand in line at libraries and bookstores clutching their cards or money to take this kind of book home. It's that good!

Laurence Anholt, both author and illustrator, captures one summer in the life of Picasso in Vallauris in southern France in 1954. Picasso met young Sylvette, a shy teenager who had very secret aspirations to be an artist herself. He drew a delicate pencil sketch of her head and shoulders, featuring particularly her lovely ponytail. This was the first of about 40 works of art with Sylvette as subject.

Anholt's artwork is both light, colorful, and cheerful and casts Picasso in a most delightful manner. Although his house was cluttered with items he would later use as "found art," it shows so many different works of art Picasso had already created.

Finally, Sylvette tells Picasso her dreams. So he advises her. One night at the end of summer he completes a sculpture of Sylvette made of huge pottery pieces and adds a huge key in one hand as the key to all her secrets and a key to open a new door. He gives her a choice of any painting. She chooses the first one he did of her, later sells it, and buys an apartment on the top floor in a building overlooking all of Paris. That painting was her key.

I know I have told the ending, but in a biographical sketch, there are no secrets. Besides, the fun of this book is the joy in every illustration. Unlike some books which denigrate Picasso, this book celebrates him.

Although designed for children 9-12, this book will appeal to all ages as a delightful, one-stop foray into Picasso's famous and flamboyant life.

very big coverage, goes beyound a well-known names. Also great out-of-print the picture history of the great inventors

This is a fantastic book. I have the softcover edition. We got this because we were talking about Thomas Edison and reading the Edison Childhoods of Famous Americans book. This is an excellent tie-in, and so much more.

The pages are high-quality paper, and each inventor gets a page (some get a two-page spread). You get historical context for the time period the inventor was living -- there is an illustrated timeline at the bottom of the pages. Then you get a large section of text and many, many illustrations of the inventions and ideas of the inventors. The detail is excellent, and the information on each inventor is very rich. There are all the inventors I would expect, and plenty of people whose inventions are great but whom I had never studied. So new information, TONS of information, and fun facts and trivia. This is truly a dynamite book.

The book is chronological and it includes a table of contents, an 8-page illustrated glossary at the back, an index, and three synopsis pages -- one each for the seventies, the eighties, and the nineties. The seventies page shows the floppy disk, microchip, the Sony Walkman, the compact disk, the maglev train, MIT and Apple and personal computing, LCDs, space innovations, fiber optic cables, pocket calculators, VCRs, bar codes, the Sears Tower, and historical context. It's amazing.

Its style reminds me of some of Lynne Cheney's books -- the excellence of the illustrations and all the information packed on the pages. Each page is like an illustrated biography, with so much information packed in and made clear. I really can't praise it highly enough. It took us over an hour to absorb the page on Thomas Edison. We just kept learning more and more.

This is a very good book of photos of our greatest president. After all these years looking at his face shows the soul of the man. Every line indicates the extreme pressure he faced in a perilous time in our nations' history.

This book was very helpful in tracing our family tree.
I was able to confirm some information I was given before
I got the book. It was great to double check my information.

Polar Extremes: The World Of Lincoln Ellsworth is the historic and engagingly written saga of Lincoln Ellsworth's impressive and hazardous struggle to make aviation history by flying over the earth's Poles. From his 1926 attempt to fly across the North Pole in a dirigible, to flying his custom-made plane over Antarctica in 1935 and discovering a mountain range now called the Ellsworths, Polar Extremes is a compelling biography of a daring and adventures life driven by death-defying passions. Polar Extremes is highly recommended as a rousing and true biographical account and a welcome contribution to the growing library of Aviation History.

Everyone knows how highly praised are the charms of an English country garden. But how about an English indoor garden? For centuries, Britons have been bringing plants indoors for various reasons - for fashion, for prestige, to clear the air, or just because it's nice to have something natural indoors. It's part of their illustrious gardening history, and now in _Potted History: The Story of Plants in the Home_ (Frances Lincoln Limited), historian (and gardener) Catherine Horwood has examined this important part of the British fascination for gardening, and has often placed the particular history of indoor plants within larger British social history. This is a satisfying volume about what might be an obscure subject, made accessible due to its larger themes and also through the lovely pictures, mostly color reproductions of historical paintings and prints showing plants and the interiors that held them.

Horwood explains that the British relationship with plants in the home has fluctuated; "... sometimes we fill our rooms to bursting with greenery or scented plants, then banish them on the grounds that they are unfashionable or too demanding." One of the reasons Horwood can so well document indoor gardening trends is that Britons not only love gardening, they love reading about it, so that she can provide plenty of delightful quotations from advice books. She traces the history of bough pots, which sat in the unused fireplaces during summer months, large ceramic pots to contain plants. Forcing bulbs like tulips and hyacinths to bloom out of season was first noted by the botanist and physician with the fitting name Nathaniel Grew in 1682. There are pictures here of glass containers especially made to hold the bulbs just above a the water in which the roots are suspended. They look just the same as the ones you can buy at the garden store still. If you tour stately homes in England, you often visit what used to be the orangery but nowadays there are never any orange trees in them; it was eventually cheaper to import oranges. Victorian homes were crammed with everything, but they were dark from the coal dust outside and the gas lamps inside. The classic "cast iron plant" of the time was the aspidistra, which had been brought from Hong Kong in 1863. Poorer Victorians who might have a window bought cheap geraniums for their ledges, and artists of the time would include a forlorn red geranium on a sill as a symbol of the inhabitants' aspirations to respectability. The upper class mania for improving the lower classes was manifest by flower shows; the poor would be issued plants to look after, and several weeks later would bring them in for judging by professional horticulturalists. A minister who organized such a competition said that caring for the plants would give the poor a "simple recreation" and might improve their "spiritual condition".

With modernism, cluttered plants gave way to simple cacti or rubber plants, but in the 1950s, with bright rooms and controlled temperatures, houseplants as décor were big again. Horwood notes, though, that as the century ended, houseplant enthusiasm was declining. "Time had become the precious commodity and houseplants just were not `instant' enough for the next generation." Horwood shows the Zamioculcas, which are becoming popular "because of its strong lines and easy-care regime". Peace lilies and orchids are also in style now. Whether they will boom like aspidistras, and whether future indoor gardeners will regard them with the quaintness the aspidistra now claims, no one can predict. But there is no reason to doubt: there will always be an England, and it will always have plants indoors. Horwood's entertaining book documents centuries of this truth.