Customer Reviews:
A great summer read.......2007-06-27
I enjoyed this book so much, I'm getting another copy for my daughter to take on vacation. It was interesting to learn not only about life in France but about Kristin as she adjusts to her life there. She observes herself as acutely and entertainingly as she does her new home. I found the book while browsing the travel section, I'd never heard of her blog before this - the reviewer below me is right, she's got a terrific blog with beautiful photos, but I think he's way off about the book. I found it worked both as a story read straight through, which gives a fascinating and satisfying total picture, or as vignettes read as separate chunks.
Pure charm from the first page.......2007-06-09
I first found out about Kristin's writing from her "word a day" emails. It was a natural progression to get her book and it is thoroughly charming cover to cover. This is the book that I pick up in between my trips to France to remind myself of all the things I love about the country and its people.
If you've never been to France, read it and you'll be on the next plane. If you've been to France, read it and you'll be returning again soon.
I hope Kristin soon publishes another volume!
Hey! They're just like us ...........2007-06-02
The value of this charming and instructive book by a natural writer and observer of the (French) social scene is that it makes picking up new vocabulary easy because you remember the lovely stories in which they were packaged.
This is part soap opera, part cultural exchange, part charming honesty, part ingenuousness, and, overall, a very natural and entertaining way to enhance one's French vocabulary at the same time one gains an understanding of the culture that comes along with that language.
It is delightful to be a fly on the wall during the culture shock of a French major from the American Southwest finding love and community in La France.
I have been a reader of her blog for a while and benefited from that, but it is a different, and better, experience to read some of her best columns in book form, which, by the way, suggests in its design the south of France, a Mediterranean touch stylewise. It's a handsome dustcover.
This unique book will have you learning French while chuckling at her account of getting 'hung up' on entering the church for her wedding. Such refreshing candor! You'll love this book.
Addenda:
Kristin's web columns are so good I wondered how I could access as many as possible of her previous work. Voila! As a Google mail holder, I found could go to one of their services called Google Reader which allows one to add RSS (really simple syndication) feeds to that page and access them in a convenient fashion (summary or listing). When I added the URL for her webpage, Google went out, got the RSS and placed it on a list to the left of the page. I found the LIST format most useful for scrolling backwards in time more than a year to see all her French Words on which I could click to get the original page with all her vocabulary suggestions and her delightful stories.
Her genius is that she places new French vocablulary gently amongst a story, otherwise in English, that is so interesting that one wants to read it to the end, and then look over the associated words and phrases.
In effect, one learns new French words from the context in which they are placed in the English language story. Enormously clever and effective. It resembles the way we learn vocabulary in our own language: from context.
FRESH.......2007-05-17
A WONDERFUL FRESH BOOK THAT ADDS DIMENSION TO WORDS IN FRENCH TO MAKE THEM MORE MEMORABLE FOR A STUDENT. LIGHT AND PERSONAL AND A GREAT AID TO MAKE A LANGUAGE YOUR FRIEND. WELL DONE!
Essence of experience..........2007-04-17
The great thing about the stories are the truth behind them...
In the vernacular phrase of our day, "It is what it is...", great stories, by a great author, written in a great part of the world as back drop.
Bravo Kristin for living your dream and telling others about it!
Amazon.com
An original and engaging memoir about a young girl seduced by the French language, its forms, and its culture.
French Lessons is not just a growing-up story, but a story about language, the compulsion to embrace foreigness to discover oneself, and the growth of intellectual awareness.
Book Description
Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life.
The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of "leaving home" and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French "r," attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover.
When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject "that made history impossible to ignore:" French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the "de Man affair" — the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject.
French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre's Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.
Customer Reviews:
The story of a love affair with the French language........2005-07-20
This is a beautiful book.
My first reaction to reading it was envy: Envy that her family had the means to send her to a Swiss boarding school to absorb French language and culture. Envy that she has been able to devote her professional life to the study of such a beautiful and absorbing subject. And envy at the precision of her language, and the equal precision of her insight into herself. She is a very intelligent and strong-willed person, but she isn't arrogant. She seems to appreciate that her relationship with the French language is a gift, and she has done her best to use it well. I'm sure she is an excellent teacher, compassionate and understanding of her students. By the end of the book, I came to realize that she has had her share of pain, loneliness, and unhappiness, just like all the rest of us. But I still envy her.
The author's relationship with the French language is, as one might expect, complicated. As she tells us how she came to be a teacher of French, we learn much else: Of her childhood, her father and his premature death, and its effect on her; of her first immersion in the French language at a Swiss boarding school; of her boyfriends, her cigarette smoking, her willfulness and her anger. We also learn about the relationship between post-WWII French politics and the literature of the French fascists, of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and also Drieu La Rochelle, Bardeche, and Brasillach. We learn about her experiences with Paul de Man at Yale, her disillusion when he was exposed as having been a Nazi sympathizer during the war. We learn of her experiences teaching the Capretz method, and of her search for the perfect French "r".
This complicated story is told with great economy and precision, as one would expect of someone who has spent her adult life immersed in French language and literature. Her style is completely lucid and transparent. Her descriptions flow off the page seamlessly into the mind's eye. And although we learn quite a lot about the author, we learn only as much as we need to know in order to understand how she came to teach French, and no more. In this she is very French.
So far as I can tell, there is no French translation of "French Lessons", although Kaplan's book on the Brasillach trial has been translated. I would guess that "French Lessons" would be very difficult to translate adequately into French.
reflection on self and otherness through language...........2005-04-23
I was loaned this book when living in France and the book relieved me of much of my difficulties being there. Many readers will be attracted to this book because of their homesickness for France or because of other symptoms of Francophilia. While I lived and worked there, I did not especially like Paris or the French people I met in public, although some individuals were quite nice. I didn't feel that people there were especially anti-American or anything, just that they were cold and closed (it was Paris, after all). I felt alienated and understood too much of what was going on in some areas (like politics, the news, the psychotic/alcoholic relationship my roommate had with his girlfriend) but without access to more positive private spheres(just as some Europeans I have met assume they understand people from the US without really understanding). Kaplan's careful and warmly ironic discussion of her experiences in the Francophone world and that particular moment in history helped me suddenly frame my experience in terms of common themes and differences with her own work. I was personally relieved and engrossed, a rare experience for me with biography of any sort.
Reading _French Lessons_ opened a whole new world to me and on the experiences I was having. Kaplan's autobiography is reflective and self-aware, even self-critical at times and reveals the author's struggle with the seduction and domination she experienced at the hands of the French language and her path to a kind of liberation without distancing. This led to her choosing a difficult topic, the literature of French fascism (still a difficult and unpleasant topic in France today) and the difficult task of positioning herself as an outsider interested in what many French people would consider to be the nation's dirty laundry.
The intellectual history she covers in the second part of the book has been important to many and I hope that readers do not simply flip through. She is a professor without being professorly and has something to teach--her approach to the topic she chose, which she describes in the book is just as much a reflection on the nature of inquiry and one's position in relation to it as the earlier experiences of childhood and adolescence she details. While some readers may choose to view this section as "ego ravings" or "digression," they are choosing to disregard her musings over her professional training--which I would bet they would not do if she were not an academic. I strongly and wholeheartedly recommend this book as a good read, as a brilliant and warm reflection on this woman's work and life.
Insight into 2nd Language Acquisition.......2002-03-04
Alice Kaplan's autobiography provides some insightful data into the factors involved in second-language acquisition. Internal factors such as motivation and external factors such as the environment seem to have an important role within the process of acquiring the target language. Further, Kaplan's story reveals a methodology of instruction that she was exposed to as a child. We then are able to see the success of this approach to language teaching and able to compare it to a methodology that she incorporates later in life when she begins to teach French herself.
The role of motivation appears to play a significant role in Kaplan's acquisition of French. Yet an important question is raised by Lightbown and Spada, "...are learners more highly motivated because they are successful, or are they successful because they are highly motivated?" Kaplan's first years with French begin in the fifth grade where she seems more interested in playing pranks than schoolwork. Four years later the opportunity to study in Switzerland arises and it seems likely that the excitement that accompanied the move was what initially sparked her interest and consequential motivation in studying French.
Once in Switzerland, Kaplan seems almost obsessive in her studies, substituting physical nourishment for a philological diet, "I grew thinner and thinner. I ate French." This intense desire to learn French seems to stem from her search for a new identity. The loss of her father seems to have left a void, which she fills through her study of French. She compares herself to her past, "At home I was the worst in sports; here, miraculously, I was good. It felt like my life had been given to me to start over."3 It is this new life and new identity that fuels her desire to absorb her target language.
The environment in which language acquisition takes place is, in my estimation, probably the most influential factor in successful learning and retaining of the target language. The obvious benefit is the amount of time the native environment provides the learner to use the language. Numerous other factors involved in the process of acquiring a second language seem to be contingent upon the environment in which those factors are operating. For instance, motivation has been considered a factor that plays a role in learning a second language. From my experience, I was much more motivated learning Polish in its natural environment rather than being limited to the classroom setting three hours a week. In addition to the excitement of being abroad in a foreign country, I was always eager to be able to apply the knowledge gained in the classroom through real world experience. The natural environment seems to make the acquisition of a second language practical, rather than a theoretical knowledge used only in an academic setting.
Further, being immersed in the natural environment also seems to decrease one's inhibition with the target language. When Kaplan arrives in Switzerland, she soon realizes that French is required in everyday functions. In the classroom one might be more self-conscious, whereas in the environment, one's concern is likely more on using the language to achieve a practical goal. This appears to be an important point given the effect inhibition has on acquisition, "In a series of studies, Alexander Guiora and his colleagues found support for the claim that inhibition is a negative force, at least for second language pronunciation performance."
Kaplan's early years of study in Switzerland had heavy emphasis on dictation and memorization. This was the typical approach to language instruction; to teach it as you would any other subject. It is this approach that Kaplan excelled in, "Don't be original, learn from a ready-made reality ready-to-hand." One interesting approach that she spent a year with while a student in Switzerland was the lecon de choses; a method in which the student draws objects and then labels them. This method appeals to me because it incorporates other motor and cognitive skills that may lead one to acquire lexical items unconsciously. Further, this approach seems a lot more enjoyable than rote memorization and thus may increase the student's motivation with the language while decreasing boredom and consequential discouragement, "Dictation can ruin a child's relationship to language."
Once Kaplan becomes a language instructor she relies upon the Carpretz method, a tradition that fully immerses the student and then forces them to "sink or swim". The Carpretz method incorporates the visual stimulation of an on-going television sitcom in the target language. English is not spoken and there are no exercises in translation. Grammar and vocabulary are integrated into the plot of the story. "The Carpretz method reproduces the conditions by which a student on her junior year abroad might learn French language and culture..." Kaplan asserts that this method is very successful in the classroom and that her extroverted students did so well that it frightened her.
Kaplan's text was especially beneficial in its practicality. She did not leave us to indirectly derive various factors in her language study and then speculate about their effectiveness. But rather, she went into detail about the instructional methodology of her own study of French, as well as the methods she incorporated in her own classrooms. As she says, "...language teachers are always in search of the full proof method that will work for any living language and will make people perfectly at home in their acquired tongue." This book is definitely appropriate for those that wish to increase their effectiveness in language instruction, as well as those that simply wish to have a better understanding of the process behind second-language acquisition.
Living the Language.......2001-09-01
I wish I had started this book sooner. I quickly put it ahead of everthing else I was doing, including lesson plans for my Spanish classes. Kaplan writes very convincingly and vividly about living in France and Switzerland while learning French. She has a family story to tell and she weaves in so many important elements that create an emotional ending. I relived so many of my own experiences living and learning Spanish while I read her stories. She helped me put lots of memories into some more simpler order that had escaped me for years. Merci.
Good book in many ways.......2001-08-25
This book was a textbook in preparation for a study abroad trip to France. In many ways I could relate to the author. In particular, I too lost a parent suddenly and unexpectedly when I was young. I too (for different reasons) ended up living in France, learning French, and falling hopelessly in love with it (as well as the people and many aspects of the culture; however, I'm a linguist at heart). Because of this, much of what she wrote about her life experiences, her love of and need for French, rang true to me. I was profoundly grateful to her for giving me the words and concepts necessary to understand myself and the world around me better. On the other hand, I found her intellectual approach to life difficult to handle. I appreciate the intellectual side of life, but there's a point when it becomes too excessive and all-controlling. At times I felt she slipped over into this too much. For example, her experiences in French graduate work convinced me almost single-handedly NOT to study French after my bachelor's degree. All in all, I would recommend this book to someone who is already in love with France, French, and the French. Otherwise it may come across as overly intellectual and of little interest.
Book Description
Having travelled across West Africa for over 10 years, Peter Biddlecombe's often hilarious account is a highly readable, hugely entertaining introduction to French Africa. In countries such as Togo, Mali, and Burkina Faso, Biddlecome encounters old-fashioned camel butchers, modern witch doctors who run mail-order companies, gold smugglers, and counterfeiters who send their sons to Oxford. He also experiences eerie voodoo ceremonies in the old slave port of Ouidah and Italian ice-cream parlors in the middle of the Sahara desert. And Biddlecombe reveals not only Francophone Africa's politics, business traditions, and culture, but also provides a mass of practical advice on everything from how to eat a water-rat to talking your way through a road block in the middle of an attempted coup.
Customer Reviews:
Roller coaster ride through Africa.......2002-05-29
"French Lessons in Africa: Travels with My Briefcase Through French Africa" is a collection of business-travel experiences and observations in ten countries in Francophone Africa (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Congo, Cote d'Ivoire, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Togo, Zaire). Biddlecombe careens from business-class hotel and international conference center to rural village and farm, and describes his encounters with everything from white magic in Benin, locusts in Mali, to lost luggage in Congo. He shares his encounters with Africans of all sorts: government minister, customs officer, doctor-entrepreneur, gold smuggler, chicken farmer, soap manufacturer, and cassette pirater. He shares his thoughts, knowledge, and conversations covering African leaders, economic development, the CFA franc, colonization and independence, health and nutrition, literature, music, and architecture. All with a great deal of wit and humor. This is no introductory text, but anyone with some basic knowledge of Africa will find this book informative and enjoyable.
Average customer rating:
- Battlin' Bastards and Pigboats
- Well Written True Story of the Bataan Death March
- A GRIPPING ACCOUNT OF FORGOTTEN ATROCITY
|
Battlin' Bastards and Pigboats: The Pow and Submarine Interface During Wwii
Robert K. Harmuth
Manufacturer: Xlibris Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 Japan
| Asia
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Military
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| World War II
| Military
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Naval
| World War II
| Military
| History
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0738852732 |
Customer Reviews:
Battlin' Bastards and Pigboats.......2003-11-01
This is one of the best and true accounts of World War II and the fighting that took place in the Phillipines. The story is told through the eyes of some of the men that were there and how their lives were affected and changed. What they felt like as the Phillipines fell into the hands of the enemy forces in 1942. Men like, Mansfield Young and Manny Eneriz and their experiences on what was called the Bataan Death March and their will to live while others lost their lives on the long march. Any one that could survive what the Japanese put these men through, must have had bodies of steel or they sat on the right hand side of God. The death march was only the beginning of their long ordeal and the book tells the complete story. This book is a must read. Larry Hobson author of the book "The Day Of The Rose"
Well Written True Story of the Bataan Death March.......2003-04-29
This book is an expertly written historical story of not only the Bataan Death March, but the earlier encounters of the war leading up to that point of WWII. Robert writes about the movements of the Japanese starting from 1939 up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, which was the starting point of World War 2. It goes into the part of WWII that covers The Bataan Death March, and the submarine encounters in that area of the War. It is also the true story of Mansfield R. Young and his experience of surviving the Death March, as well as being a Prisoner of the Japanese, and the Starvation and Torture, he and fellow POW's endured in the Prison Camps and the Hell Ships and as a Slave Laborer in the Lead Mines in Japan, and also being in Japan when the Atomic Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, which thank God was the beginning of the end of WWII. I recommend reading this book as well as others like it, that are true stories of the AMXPOW's who actually were there and experienced it first hand. This book is excellently written by Robert K. Harmuth, Ex Submariner, to much experience to mention here, but is mentioned on the inside cover of the book, of Port Hueneme Ca.. As told to him by Mansfield R. Young of the 194th Tank Battalion out of Salinas Ca., from Ventura Ca. " my father", now resides in Oxnard Ca. and Manny Eneriz from the 31st Infantry, now deceased from Camarillo Ca. Please do not miss reading this book. You will be glad that you did, and you won't be able to put it down until you finish it.
A GRIPPING ACCOUNT OF FORGOTTEN ATROCITY.......2002-12-07
Bob Harmuth's "Battlin' Bastards and Pigboats" is a very interesting, readable, and enjoyable account of some of the forgotten heroes of World War II. Mansfield Young and Manny Eneriz, friends of author Harmuth, were soldiers in the American Army in the Phillipines on December 7, 1941. This is their story, and the story of the defeat of American forces (surrendered on April 9, 1942), and the terrible fates that awaited those taken captive by the Japanes. This included the Bataan Death March and other, nameless but just as ferocious atrocities. Harmuth is no apologist for the Japanese, and in this account, few punches are pulled in terms of describing the depth, and breadth, of Japanese inhumanity during the War. These atrocities are in fact described in vivid detail, and in such a way as to make any American sick at heart. Yet "Battlin' Bastards" is in some ways a hopeful book. Both Eneriz and Young survived their long ordeal, and Eneriz actually witnessed the atomic bombing of Japan (where he had been shipped as a POW laborer). Their endurance in the face of overwhelming tragedy and loss, and their struggle to survive against the odds, is well worth reading.
Amazon.com
You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the opening story of Representative John Kasich's Courage Is Contagious, in which he discusses his friendship with Bobby and Eric Krenzke, two preadolescent boys whose lives were cut short by the rare neurological order dystonia, but who always faced their fates with dignity and calm. "Seeing Bobby was never a matter of sympathy or doing him a favor," writes the Republican representative from Ohio. "It was one of friendship. If any favors were done, in fact, he did them for me. In Washington, I inhabit a world of compromise; back home, Bobby reminded me what real courage is." Kasich also writes about the Krenzke brothers in order to spotlight the efforts of the Special Wish Foundation, and in the other 16 profiles in this book he focuses on other people who are making a difference in the lives of fellow human beings because they sincerely believe it's the right thing to do. From Amber Coffman, a teenage girl who organized a program to provide the homeless with sandwiches, to Albert Lexie, a shoeshine man who has worked his trade at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh two days a week for nearly 20 years and donated almost $40,000 in the tips he's made there), the accounts in Courage Is Contagious are a uniformly inspiring work of human-interest journalism.
Book Description
A modern-day
Profiles in Courage about twenty people who are doing heroic things to improve the lives of their fellow Americans.
Now available in trade paperback,
Courage Is Contagious is a remarkable document about everyday people helping to reshape America. Written by Congressman John Kasich, the book profiles twenty men and women from across the country who have, through their own courage, determination, and generous hearts, attempted to improve the lot of their fellow citizens. The values they exhibit, Congressman Kasich argues, are the very values we as a society need to encourage and support if we are to end our nation's divisiveness and fulfill its glorious promise. Among the people Kasich writes about are Cheryl Krueger, who started a successful cookie business that puts people ahead of profits by employing women who often wouldn't be given a chance by other companies; and Dr. Jack McConnell, who, shocked by the poverty outside his neighborhood, organized over one hundred retired doctors, nurses, and dentists to create a free medical clinic that now serves over ten thousand people in the Hilton Head area of South Carolina and has inspired similar volunteer programs nationwide.
A heartfelt and optomistic message in a world grown increasingly distrustful,
Courage Is Contagious offers hope and inspiration to all who read it.
Customer Reviews:
Um, I have dystonia.........2002-11-30
I'm delighted he has written about TWO dystonia patients...but I want everyone to know that there are over 300,000 of us out here, and dystonia takes many different forms. Most of us do not die..but it would be wonderful to be able to have a bit of dignity when we go out in public! We're not monsters....in fact, the nastiest part of dystonia is that the people it afflicts are invariably of above average intelligence.
It takes Courage and a good editor.......2001-07-21
You get a big morale booster after reading this book (and also a guilty conscience!). The stories are very inspirational, and you realize how much better this world would be if everybody felt like these ordinary heroes. However, the writing style is quite simple, and takes away from the substance. This book needed a good editor to polish the style and give it more of a shine.
Celebrating Everyday American Heroes.......2000-12-04
In "Courage is Contagious," Republican Ohio Congressman - and author - John Kasich presents short stories of U.S. citizens who have performed extraordinarily to improve their communities and the lives of others. As Kasich says, "The most wonderful thing about the heroes in this book is that they are really just ordinary people who one day decided to act."
Congressman Kasich devotes sixteen chapters in his book to stories celebrating everyday American heroes. The book contains narratives aided with in-depth interviews that make the material lively and compelling.
Here are a few excerpts from the book's short story chapters: A selfless Maryland mother and daughter feed scores of homeless people each week in "The Happy Helpers."
"Something Had To Be Done" chronicles the story of a compassionate woman in New York who works to save the lives of children born with AIDS.
In "A Lump in the Throat," a restless retired physician recruits other medical professionals to treat people who do not have health insurance coverage.
Set in World War II Poland, "A Whisper From Above," recounts the courage of a teenage Polish Catholic girl (now an American citizen) who faced the horrors of the Nazis, and saved some lives of Jewish people.
"Courage is Contagious - Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things to Change the Face of America" is motivational, inspirational, and thought provoking. The book is relevant for everyone to learn what we can achieve as individuals in helping others and reshaping our communities.
An Outstanding Book About Extraordinary People.......2000-08-19
"This book is about heroes..." That is how Congressman John Kasich begins his book "Courage is Contagious" Indeed Kasich's book is filled with profiles of extraordinary Americans who take it upon themselves to help others. The Americans profiled in Kasich's easy reading book could be your neighbor, co-worker, or even you. Their profiles tell the stories of everyday people who take the time to help others, display unquestionable amounts of courage, and provide an inspiration to those who meet them.
Kasich's profiles include stories of Geoffrey Canada (author of Fist Stick Knife Gun) who crusades against violence, brothers Eric and Bobby Krenzke who suffer from a hereditary illness yet triumph in their life, a young girl who provides lunches for the homeless, a retired doctor who provides medical services to people who otherwise could not afford medical care, a holocaust survivor shares with younger generations the tragedy of World War II, and many other stories of courage that will hopefully inspire and make you want to share this book with others.
If you enjoyed this book "Heroes After Hours" written by David C. Forward is another excellent book profiling volunteers and programs that seem to succeed.
John Kasich answers the question "What can one person do?".......1999-05-01
In Courage is Contagious, John Kasich answers the age old question - "What can one person do to make a difference?" In each chapter, John talks about a person who "dreamed things that never were and said 'Why not?'" Each chapter tells about someone who felt they could no longer let things stay as they are. That person went out and did something to make a difference. It doesn't matter if it was Albert Lexie donating over $40,000 worth of tips from shining shoes to Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh's Free Care Fund or Irene Gut Opdyke's saving Jews during the Holocaust. In each case, one person decided they could not accept things as they were and they did all they could to change our society for the better.
John Kasich shows just how much we all could do if we just tried.
This is a must read for anyone who wants to make our world just a little better.
Average customer rating:
|
The Courage to Live: My Personal Journey With God, a Kidney Patient's Story
Carmen Buelvas Critchlow
Manufacturer: Acorn Publishing (MI)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Medical
| Professionals & Academics
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Immunology
| Basic Science
| Medicine
| Subjects
| Books
Diabetes
| Diseases
| Medicine
| Subjects
| Books
Infectious Disease
| Internal Medicine
| Medicine
| Subjects
| Books
| Communicable Diseases
| Epidemiology
| Parasitology
| Tropical Medicine
Nephrology
| Internal Medicine
| Medicine
| Subjects
| Books
Hepatology
| Internal Medicine
| Medicine
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Diabetes
| Disorders & Diseases
| Health, Mind & Body
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0971098832 |
Average customer rating:
|
Genes, Blood, & Courage
NATHAN
Manufacturer: Belknap Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Historical
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Self-Help
| Health, Mind & Body
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Health, Mind & Body
| Subjects
| Books
Social Services & Welfare
| Poverty
| Current Events
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
Genetics
| Evolution
| Science
| Subjects
| Books
Molecular Biology
| Biology
| Biological Sciences
| Science
| Subjects
| Books
Public Health
| Administration & Policy
| Medicine
| Subjects
| Books
Genetics
| Basic Science
| Medicine
| Subjects
| Books
Microbiology
| Basic Science
| Medicine
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Research
| Medicine
| Subjects
| Books
Hematology
| Internal Medicine
| Medicine
| Subjects
| Books
Infectious Disease
| Internal Medicine
| Medicine
| Subjects
| Books
| Communicable Diseases
| Epidemiology
| Parasitology
| Tropical Medicine
Molecular Biology
| Biology
| Biological Sciences
| Professional Science
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
Genetics
| Evolution
| Professional Science
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
Genetics
| Basic Sciences
| Medical
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
Hematology
| Internal Medicine
| Medicine
| Medical
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0674344731 |
Book Description
David Nathan was stunned when he first saw Dayem Saif at Children's Hospital in Boston in September 1968. Dayem was then a six-year-old with the stature of an average-sized boy of two. He wore baby shoes on his tiny feet and was unable to walk without holding his mother's hand. His color was dark yet pasty and his face horribly misshapen. The child was being ravaged by thalassemia, a life-threatening inherited disease of the blood, and one of the leading causes of disfigurement, disability, and death in children worldwide. Without effective treatment, Dayem would almost certainly die before his twentieth birthday.
Genes, Blood, and Courage is David Nathan's absorbing story of the thirty-year struggle to keep Dayem alive. "Immortal Sword" is the English translation of Dayem's Arabic name, and under Nathan's care Dayem, indeed, seems immortal. Despite his continual reluctance to follow his doctor's orders and the repeated hospitalizations that result, Dayem--the misshapen, stunted boy--survives to become a handsome, successful businessman.
In Genes, Blood, and Courage Nathan goes beyond his struggles with this seemingly immortal patient to describe in detail the emergence, over the past twenty-five years, of an entirely new force in medical care called molecular medicine. As Dayem's case illustrates, this new area of human genetic research--in which Nathan is a leading clinical investigator--promises tremendous advances in the rational diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of inherited disorders, such as thalassemia and sickle cell anemia, and even of acquired illnesses such as cancer and infectious disease.
Genes, Blood, and Courage is a celebration not just of Dayem's triumphs but also of the tremendous accomplishments and potential of the American biomedical research enterprise in the late twentieth century.
Customer Reviews:
outstanding.......2000-03-25
Although when I bought the book, I expected more of a focus on the boy of the title "Immortal Sword", I found it was much more than a description of a child's struggle with thalassemia. While Immortal Sword served as the focal point for the book, this was really an account by the author (the physician who treated the boy) of his developing interest in understanding thalasemmia and the search for more effective treatments. The author is a gifted writer able to explain complicated medical concepts in a concise and simple way to a lay audience. One can also sense his dedication to his patients (he even plans a surprise birthday party for Immortal Sword-- how many doctor's become close enough to their patient's to do that?). Although thalasemmia is not a commonly discussed disease like sickle cell, it can be devastating and does affect certain ethnic groups--particularly mediterranean in origin-- more than others. Overall, a very interesting book from the humanistic standpoint of understanding this disorder's impact on the lives of the sufferer as well as tracing the medical development in the understanding of the disorder and its treatment.
Average customer rating:
- Good management history but neglects the larger philosophical question
- New Challenges in Park Management
|
The New Urban Park: Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Civic Environmentalism (Development of Western Resources)
Hal K. Rothman
Manufacturer: University Press of Kansas
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
General
| Biology
| Biological Sciences
| Science
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Natural Resources
| Nature & Ecology
| Science
| Subjects
| Books
Conservation
| Environment
| Outdoors & Nature
| Subjects
| Books
Living on the Land
| Ecology
| Outdoors & Nature
| Subjects
| Books
| Architecture
| Hunting & Fishing
General
| Conservation
| Outdoors & Nature
| Subjects
| Books
Environmentalism
| Conservation
| Outdoors & Nature
| Subjects
| Books
Reference
| Outdoors & Nature
| Subjects
| Books
California
| State & Local
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Urban Planning & Development
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
Look Inside Outdoors & Nature Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
All Titles
| Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007
| Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
-
New Guardians for the Golden Gate: How America Got a Great National Park
ASIN: 0700612866 |
Book Description
From Yellowstone to the Great Smoky Mountains, America's national parks are sprawling tracts of serenity, most of them carved out of public land for recreation and preservation around the turn of the last century. America has changed dramatically since then, and so has its conceptions of what parkland ought to be.
In this book, one of our premier environmental historians looks at the new phenomenon of urban parks, focusing on San Francisco's Golden Gate National Recreation Area as a prototype for the twenty-first century. Cobbled together from public and private lands in a politically charged arena, the GGNRA represents a new direction for parks as it highlights the long-standing tension within the National Park Service between preservation and recreation.
Long a center of conservation, the Bay Area was well positioned for such an innovative concept. Writing with insight and wit, Rothman reveals the many complex challenges that local leaders, politicians, and the NPS faced as they attempted to administer sites in this area. He tells how Representative Phillip Burton guided a comprehensive bill through Congress to establish the park and how he and others expanded the acreage of the GGNRA, redefined its mission to the public, forged an identity for interconnected parks, and struggled against formidable odds to obtain the San Francisco Presidio and convert it into a national park.
Engagingly written, The New Urban Park offers a balanced examination of grassroots politics and its effect on municipal, state, and federal policy. While most national parks dominate the economies of their regions, GGNRA was from the start tied to the multifaceted needs of its public and political constituents-including neighborhood, ethnic, and labor interests as well as the usual supporters from the conservation movement.
As a national recreation area, GGNRA helped redefine that category in the public mind. By the dawn of the new century, it had already become one of the premier national park areas in terms of visitation. Now as public lands become increasingly scarce, GGNRA may well represent the future of national parks in America. Rothman shows that this model works, and his book will be an invaluable resource for planning tomorrow's parks.
Customer Reviews:
Good management history but neglects the larger philosophical question.......2007-10-08
In this book, Hal Rothman provides a history of Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA). Rothman sees this as an example of a new type of urban park, though he doesn't really spend any time comparing it to Gateway NRA in New York, Cape Cod NRA outside Boston, Cuyahoga NP outside Cleveland, Santa Monica Mountains NRA outside Los Angeles, and the many other examples of urban national parks - - which should probably include the open spaces in Washington DC such as Rock Creek Park and the National Mall, for that matter. Instead, he views GGNRA more or less as one of a kind, despite the title of the book.
Two related themes take up most of his book: "civic environmentalism," that is, the local interest groups that pushed for the park and that shape its every action; and the management challenges that the National Park Service (NPS) faces in this environment. These challenges include issues such as dealing with natural and man-made fires, off-leash dogs, a nude beach, protecting cultural and historic resources, and figuring out what to do with Alcatraz. Most of the book deals with such matters and the politics around them. Rothman's narrative always risks going off into minutiae, but he keeps his eye on the larger management issues.
Rotman also includes lots of "obiter dicta" in his narrative - - opinionated and unsupported comments about American politics and society that are irrelevant for the story here. It's indicative of this predilection that Rothman mentions Ronald Reagan and his Interior Secretary, James Watt, far more than he mentions Nixon, Carter, Clinton or either Bush, or their Interior Secretaries. Rothman would rather get in some digs at Reagan and Watts as he tells the story, though these two figures were no more involved in decisions at Golden Gate than, say, Clinton and Babbitt.
Aside from that distraction, this is an informative and well-crafted book. I'd like to know more about why people think Golden Gate is a *national* resources as opposed to a state or regional resources, and in fact many of its properties used to be state parks. Given the remarkable diversity in resources, why should all these non-contiguous units be gathered together in a single national recreation area? Rothman never addresses this larger issue, which seems to me a fundamental policy question about these kinds of parks.
New Challenges in Park Management.......2004-11-18
Completing a full-length history of Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) might seem odd considering its relative youth compared to other national park areas. Hal Rothman, chair of the history department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas demonstrates the park deserves such a study because it is different than anything the National Park Service has managed before. At GGNRA, the traditional NPS management style had to be adapted for a dynamic urban population that visited the urban park for a variety of reasons, most of which were not the typical uses long-established in the bureau's "crown jewels" like Yellowstone, Yosemite and Glacier.
Accustomed to exerting great influence in and around its larger, more conventional parks, at GGNRA the park held "one of many seats at a regional political and economic table" (x). Residents did not defer to park management like they had in and around the crown jewels. Previously, national parks functioned more as symbols than participatory reality (2). At GGNRA, the park service had to accept fully participating public and break its affinity to hiking by admitting visitors that enjoyed activities such as biking, hang gliding, skateboarding instead of simple sightseeing.
GGNRA has presented many management challenges. The park is largely without boundary signs or markers and it has been easy for visitors to overlook its national status (61). Many areas of the park contain private property, which is a source of management difficulty because the owners' decisions could impact visitors experience in the park and the park's ecology (94). Unlike any previous national park, GGNRA established a Citizen's Advisory Board. The NPS has greatly heeded to public comment in shaping management practices. The park presented one of the most comprehensive management plans ever enacted (62).
Interpreting became the linchpin of the park, a way of communicating to its endless constituencies. Instead of merely explaining features, interpretation in GGNRA explained the very presence of the Park Service (150). Interpretation and management of the park will always be a challenge, according to Rothman, because GGNRA is "asked to be all things to all people, all the time" (xi). GGNRA is a prime example demonstrating that no single presentation will impress all national park visitors. Multiple presentations must exist to appeal to a public that visits national parks for a myriad of reasons. Nowadays national parks are anything and everything to visitors, depending on their interests, whether they are recreational enthusiasts or car-bound sightseers.
The book contains one large map of the park, but no photographs or more detailed diagrams. The narrative would be thoroughly enriched by providing its readers with a means of visualizing the locations described. In the introduction, Rothman states that the Park Service embraced recreation in the 1960s. The park service, in reality, has embraced recreation since its inception. The author declares later in the narrative that the NPS was more accustomed to viewing its visitors as hikers and equestrians than bikers and skateboarders. Hiking and horseback riding are definitely forms of recreation. These small weaknesses aside, The New Urban Park proves a thorough study of how NPS management has had to reinvent itself to take on the administration of sanctuaries that appeal to a wider public than it has traditionally served.
Books:
- A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
- A Leg to Stand On
- A Memoir of Jane Austen: and Other Family Recollections (Oxford World's Classics)
- A Year in the Maine Woods
- American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880 - 1964
- Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey
- As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl
- Bernadette Speaks: A Life of St. Bernadette Soubirous in Her Own Words
- Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture
- Bismarck and the German Empire
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- The War Within: One More Step at a Time
- Spanish Now! Level 1 with CDs
- Something Dangerous
- Robert Indiana
- Ramones
- Principles of Combustion
- The Chelsea Whistle: A Memoir
- Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings, Portraits of American Genius
- Return to Spirit Lake: Journey Through a Lost Landscape
- A Guide To Rocky Mountain Plants, Revised
Tune Up Your French: Top 10 Ways to Improve Your Spoken French
A Year in the Merde
All You Need to Be Impossibly French: A Witty Investigation into the Lives, Lusts, and Little Secrets of French Women
Easy French Reader
Entre Nous: A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl
