Open Books

This is the text book for the PADI diving course. Do not read or purchase this book unless you are taking or intend to take the PADI scuba diving course.

This is a very exciting, colorful and amusing manual, very interesting to read, yet enough to pass SSI Open Water Exams, and become a comfortable and proficient diver.

The first chapter explains what equipment do you need for diving, and the miscellaneous details about the equipment. The second chapter gives you proper procedures for entering the water, descending and equalizing pressure, establishing and maintaining neutral buoyancy, ascending, safety stops and exiting the water.

Chapter three, "Your Body and the Underwater World", make you able to understand the effects of increasing pressure on your body, understand how breathing compressed gas affects you body, understand the basic function of respiration, understand partial pressure and how they apply you as a diver, know basic procedures to adapt to the underwater environment, know proper ascent procedures under normal and emerging conditions and know the causes, treatment and prevention of Nitrogen Narcosis, Decompression Sickness and overexpansion injuries.

After completing the chapter four, "Planning and executing your dive", you will know why divers need to use Dive Tables or a dive computer on every dive, how other factors can affect nitrogen absorption and decompression, the value of diving with a buddy and buddy team functioning, and how to execute your dive.

Chapter five is about the underwater world: fundamentals of wave, tide and current action and how this affect divers, what surge and surf are, proper diver techniques as they relate to surge and surf, how coral reefs form and their global importance, species of marine life including potentially hazardous marine life.

The final sixth chapter is about the SSI organization: Universal Referral Network, Continuing Education Ratings, SSI Levels of Recognition, the types of training included in the SSI Dive Control Specialist course.

There are numerous useful tips, tricks and advices throughout the book, and lots of nice color photographs. This is a very exciting book!

This is another delightful book in the Katie Kazoo series. Once again, Katie is changed into someone else through the magical wind. This time, she becomes a dentist to help a younger child overcome his fear of the dentist. Along the way, she learns that words, once spoken, can't be taken back.

Written in a easy to read style and coupled with the illustrations, this book will capture a child's attention. Join Katie and her friends on another enjoyable adventure!

Open Window is a book of poems. I have read this book and could not put it down. It is full of passion, heartbreak, love, humor, and what could be only if.......
j.k. gravett has the soul and eyes of a true poet.

I would give this a five ***** rating.

So get comfortable and cozy and enjoy the book.

Jacqueline Rankine-Van Wassenhoven.

These essays are quite down to earth and enjoyable to read. Included in the book are interviews with Annie Dillard and Francis Schaeffer. Even though this book is now hard to find, it is worth pursuing and purchasing. Thought provoking and well written.

Open World (note: this is listed as "Open Worlds" on [...]; the correct title is "Open World") "Le Nouvel Obsrvateur", Paris, says that Kenneth White "is bound to appear as the foremost English-languge poet of these times" (from the cover), and I agree. I first ran across his name and some of his poetry in books by J. Philip Newell, then found "Open World" on amazon.com and bought it. It comprises his collected works from 1960 to 2000. Each time I pick it up and open it, I find new things that I had missed in a previous reading, like finding gold where you had looked before and there, on a second or third or fourth digging, there it is, right before your eye.

Born in Glasgow in 1936 and raised in western Scotland, Kenneth White is also an essayist, travel writer and held the chair of 20th Century Poetics at the Sorbonne from 1983-1996.

If you haven't heard of him, buy this book and read it; it's become one of the most important books in my library.

Book review by J. Otto Pohl, Sacramento, California, author of the book, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937-1949

Samuel Sinner's new book is a welcome addition to a growing body of literature on the subject of genocide. Sinner describes the various phases of the genocide perpetrated against the Russlanddeutschen and calculates the resulting excess mortality from each of these phases. The whole process of this genocide encompassed 34 years (1915-1949) and three different rulers; Tsar Nicholas II, Lenin, and Stalin. During World War I, Tsar Nicholas II deported close to 200,000 ethnic Germans from Volhynia, Bessarabia, and other western regions of the Russian Empire to Siberia. Sinner estimates that between one third and one half of those deported perished. During the Russian Civil War (1917-1921) Bolshevik forces massacred over 60,000 ethnic Germans in the Volga, Ukraine, Crimea, and Caucasus. These atrocities occurred in the context of forced grain requisitions that left the German communities of the Volga and other areas without any food. Sinner calculates that the famine resulting from these requisitions claimed the lives of 300,000 Russlanddeutschen, 150,000 of them in the Volga region. Under Stalin, the mass deportation of peasants branded as kulaks, executions, and the 1932-1933 Holodomor (Murder Famine) killed another 300,000 Russlanddeutschen by 1937. Finally, Stalin's forced dispersal of virtually the entire German population of the USSR to special settlements and labor army work sites during the 1940s brought the total death toll of the Russlanddeutschen due to the policies of the Russian and Soviet governments from 1915-1949 up to around one million. This final phase also permanently destroyed the centuries old German communities of the Volga, Ukraine, Crimea, and Caucasus.

Sinner's book has two roughly equal parts, one in English and one in German. The two parts are similar, but not identical. The German section has considerably more statistical information regarding demographics than does the English part. In the German portion there are 14 tables regarding population statistics, whereas the English section has no tables. In contrast, the English portion of the text deals more extensively with placing the Tsarist and Soviet policies towards the Russlanddeutschen within the context of comparative genocide studies. Sinner manages to comment on almost the entire English language historiography dealing with the subject. He even devotes several pages to the writings of the present author.

Sinner firmly establishes that the Russlanddeutschen were victims of genocide as defined by the system of international law established after World War II. He also makes the first tentative, but necessary steps of comparing the genocide against the Russlanddeutschen to other more well known crimes against humanity. In particular he highlights some important similarities and parallels between the genocide against the Russlanddeutschen and the Aghed (Armenian Genocide). In many ways this is Sinner's most valuable contribution. He brilliantly demolishes the too often heard argument from some academics that the Soviet government never targeted specific groups for mass murder on the basis of their ethnicity. By showing the historical errors inherent in such arguments, he has greatly advanced the discipline of comparative genocide studies.

A great deal of research still remains to be done regarding this dark chapter of history. But, Sinner's book has established the broad outlines of the genocide against the Russlanddeutschen. He presents the historical narrative of these events and puts them in the proper theoretical and comparative context. His work is a very important contribution to both the scholarship on the Russlanddeutschen and comparative genocide studies.

This is one that once you pick it up you cant put it down , It grabs you in to see what happens next.

In the Summer of 1978, our delegation of ten from the Sino-American Buddhist Association and Dharma Realm Buddhist University went to Asia on an invitation from the Special Welcoming Committee of the Malaysian Buddhist Association. The journey expanded into a two-month visit to Singapore, Thailand, and Hong Kong as well as to Malaysia. The Venerable Abbot Hsiian Hua was welcomed by tens of thousands everywhere. Thousands took refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, - the Sangha -- the Triple Jewel. Thus, the delegation instigated the first step in a revolution, that of reviving the Proper Dharma in Asia.

Buddhism originally came from Asia. But, almost all of what we members of the delegation saw of Buddhism in Asia was a dilapidated jumble of protocol, empty ceremony, and superstitious customs, It ws a sad discovery for us.

In the heart of the Buddhist Temple Jewel is the Sangha, the holy order of monks (Bhikshus) and nuns (Bhikshunis) who live by an unsurpassed moral code prescribed by the Buddha in the Vinaya. Those who have left the home-life to become Bhikshus and Bhikshunis must receive the complete ordination of full precepts - two hundred fifty for a Bhikshu and three hundred forty eight for the Bhikshuni. Then and only then are they considered fully ordained Sanghins. Buddhism in Asia hs degenerated into a great neglect of the Vinaya. We found that even some of the most basic precepts, those prohibiting killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and the taking of intoxicants, are overlooked, not to speak of the subtler rules of moral conduct laid down by our original teacher, Shakyamuni....

The major theme repeated again and agian throughout our journey was the Abbot's unconditional gift of the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas to the entire world, in fact to all religions and all living beings. The Abbot has vowed that wherever he goes he will allow only the Orthodox Dharma to thrive, and not permit the Dharma-Ending Age to set in. In the face of Asian Buddhism, which is collapsing like a burning house, consumed by factionalism and jealousy, the selfless gift of the City of
Ten Thousand Buddhas may be the only way to save the Dharma from imminent and total disintegration. The Abbot has promised the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas and Dharma Realm Buddhist University as a place of refuge, intellectual disciplines, where people from the world over can live together in peace and investigate true principles.
--- excerpt from book's Introduction

This a great book from a great seller. I love it. The transaction was excellent. Delivery was one time.