Netherlands Books

I did not like this guide. It gives little sense of the "spirit" of each island, seeming rather to be a list of "drive here, drive there" with occasional useful information, but little commentary on the sights. Personally, I prefer a guidebook that will tell me what is tourist-hokey and what is worth seeing. No websites listed in the accommodations section (which is pretty sketchy). Look up "sailing" and it just lists names and phone numbers of boats -- no indication of available tours, prices, comparative quality. Ditto with snorkeling, a list of places to snorkel, no info on where to rent gear or tour options. Frommer's Caribbean was a better resource.

This book was a great disappointment. The book only covers the most generic tourist spots, and on the subject of the Red Light district unacceptably refuses to even review or mention anything dealing with coffeeshops or prostitution. If you want a bland and intentionally incomplete guide, this would be the book for you. If you want an unbiased and complete guide, try the Time Out Guide to Amsterdam instead.

This book claims to analyze the newspaper industry in the Netherlands and in the United States, and then compare and contrast them. I know very little about the newspaper industry in Europe, but I do know enough to know that the newspaper industry in the Netherlands and the newspaper industry in the United States have almost nothing in common with each other besides the same general product.
I know a lot about the newspaper industry in the United States, and despite the book's title and its pretensions, the book's focus on economic and technological issues tells only half the story. The author seems rather clueless about the relatively poor quality of most newspaper staffs--especially when compared to the often brilliant people running computer hardware and software companies, major consumer magazines, and so on. Does the author even know that the average daily newspaper in the United States has a circulation of only about 12,000? Does the author know about the booming industries of weekly community newspapers, alternative newsweeklies, etc.? Finally, the author seems to have taken everything that executives of major newspaper chains and individual newspapers at face value (he both assumes that they know what they are talking about and that they are being open and honest with him), despite the fact that if more of them knew what they were doing, the author wouldn't be asking if newspapers are a "lost cause."

My Antonia By Willa Cather was a novel I chose to read for a project.This book was split into five differentbooks,was told by a character in the play, and plotted on closeness vs. distance. I didn't like this book that much. I thought it was too long and pretty boring.
This Book was split into five different books. These books were written by a man named Jim Burden. The first book starts when he is ten years old, and he on a train ride to Nabraska to live with his grandparents. He writes about his whole life through all five books. He also inquires about an imigrant who lives in Nabraska named Antonia.
Jim was the main character in the book. It is based on his life as a richer person watching the imigrants grow in Nabraska. He was writing about the settlement in the midwest. He had a secret love his whole life for this girl, named Antonia. She wants nothing to do with him in the first part of the book. He thought that she treated him with little respect, and not giving him the attention that he wanted.
In this novel he compares closeness with distance. He loves Antonia, and he is phically close to her. At the same time he was so far away from her, she didn't want to have anything to do with him. He has a vision of her in his mind, and that was what he thought of her. She was completely different. Thats why he was so close to her but so far away.
This book was not the best for someone who is looking for a book that will be an attention grabber. I didn't enjoy this book very much. It was just too boring, there wasn't really anything that was too exciting going on in this book. It was about this mans love for a woman, that he never really persued. He just kept it to himself the whole time. Thats not exciting to me.I wouldn't recommend this book for anyone who has to read it in a time period.

Really more a history , with some B/W pictures, plus a few tiny floor plans/elevations on the last page. Does not explain its construction.

worst book that i've ever tried to read.

Hey, guess what? There is an international criminal court! And we Americans aren't supporting it! Now, is that because we Americans want to commit crimes and get away with them? The author of this article implies that it is. But I think it is more of a case of legitimate concerns that Americans and others would be accused of crimes by genuine criminals. And that the international criminal court would in fact support the thugs.

Green claims that there is a valid concern that the ICC will be ineffective: its jurisdiction is limited to crimes committed either by a citizen or in the territory of a signatory state. The ICC could not prosecute leaders of non-signatory states. But Green points out that the United States could undo this flaw: this rule was put in to protect the United States in the first place.

In addition, there is a risk of American servicemen being at risk of ICC prosecution. Green dismisses this on the grounds that we Americans could and would investigate such soldiers ourselves were they suspected of war crimes.

I don't buy it.

Let's look at an example of the international justice in action. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on the Israeli separation barrier, even though its jurisdiction was seriously questioned, to say the least. So I figure the ICC could well rule against America even when it had no business even being involved. Not only that, the ICJ ruled against the barrier (in favor of the thugs who want that barrier removed so they can commit more murders!). That ruling opposes Israel's right to self-defense. It also shows an ICJ bias against Israel, and that leads me to suspect that there could easily be a similar, arbitrary, and unjust ICC bias against America. We could find our own land being called "occupied territory," we could be accused of violating the rights of terrorists who attack us, and we could be found guilty of all sorts of war crimes if we ever tried to defend ourselves. So I disagree with Green. And since Green failed to even discuss such concerns, I think his article is pretty much meritless.

Thank goodness Van Gogh didn't paint with the colors used in this book! He would have faded away in history as unskilled, insane and obscure. For the most part the colors the printer used showed nothing of the richness of Van Gogh. Someone at the photo or printing department really screwed up on this one. For the most part, every pictures white upper limit has been brought down too low, and this creates a most displeasing washed out version of Van Gogh's original picture. Meyer Schapiro's commentary is good, and I don't know if the copy of the book I got was defective (there were 5 pages missing directly from the publisher) but the final out product I received was very bad.

I've tried to study languages by myself before and had varying degrees of success. The last time I tried this method with Dutch I gave up because I only succeeded in making actual Dutch speakers laugh with the ridiculous phrases I learned--"Does your neighbor have a lion in his garden?" may have been the most useful of them all. Perhaps naively I decided to try again, and to try with Vocabulearn. What did I learn? Well, nothing.

The audio program consists of two people. One says a word in English, there is a pause and then the other person says the word in Dutch. This process is repeated over and over and over again--with a different word each time for THREE hours. The effect is rather like trying to learn a language by reading a bilingual dictionary--but far less interesting and more frustrating.

I couldn't believe that this is what the program consisted of; it seemed an impossibility. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the words that were chosen, and no repetition or chance to practice them in phrases or even to learn the plural or masculine or feminine forms (I assume that these exist in Dutch, Vocabulearn certainly won't tell you!).

Surely, I must be wrong. After the title is announced and you are treated to a few electronic dings the program begins in earnest: "The grass," a male voice says in English. Pause. The word is translated into Dutch by the female voice. The male voice is back, "The moon." The pause, the translation. The next words are, "the sound, the airport," and "December."

The first time I listened to the program I waited eagerly to see what sort of dialogue or story all these disparate words would be used in later on in the lesson. In fact each time I listened I expected something of this nature to happen. Some integration, some practice, some of the "useful phrases" the description offers. Nope. Nada (I obviously didn't learn Spanish from Vocabulearn!). I couldn't bear to listen to the program in its entirety, but I fast forwarded through enough of it to be sure that it didn't improve. I thought that maybe I could listen to it while I tried to fall asleep, so that I would absorb the vocabulary that way. Not a chance. I still haven't learned the first five words, and listening to this program irritated me so much that I couldn't sleep.

The description for this program announces that Vocabulearn teaches languages how "you learn best" and is "recommended by educators world-wide." Now, I can't imagine what these educators actually teach, but it must not be language. I not only study languages but also teach and I would never, ever, recommend this program to even my most irritating student.