Book Description
Winner of Lamaze International's Marjorie Karmel Award, for providing a strong voice for parents seeking a positive birth experience.
"I'm pregnant. I found out yesterday. I took an eight-dollar pregnancy test, which involved sticking a plastic strip between my legs and peeing on it. The strip had two pink lines: pregnant. Just one pink line would have been a false alarm. But within the three minutes the test guaranteed, the second pink line appeared, darkening even as I prayed for it not to. I blinked and blinked, hoping for it to fade, but it didn't."
In Jennifer Matesa's atypical account of a typical pregnancy, the mother-to-be didn't start picking out names or knitting booties the moment she learned she was with child. Instead, Jennifer gives voice to the experience of many women, who often feel anxiety and doubt along with anticipation and excitement but, because of cultural pressure, they are reluctant to say so. Jennifer's honesty is made even more intimate by the pictures--taken weekly by a photographer friend--that offer a powerful glimpse of her developing body throughout this life-changing experience. _Navel-Gazing_ is a true and natural portrait of a pregnancy, its trials, its joys, and its beauty. The book's unique double view--from the inside and out--reveals how bearing a child can change you forever, emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually. An empowering alternative and supportive companion for the expecting mother, _Navel-Gazing_ is a sensuous and perceptive expression of the essence of the pregnancy experience.
Customer Reviews:
Honest, compelling account of pregnancy and birth.......2005-06-08
Jennifer's honest and accurate account of the range of emotions and body changes associated with pregnancy is something many women will relate to. Whether you're pregnant with your first child or are done with childbearing, you'll enjoy reading her story, a story you won't read in any of the popular birth books today. She examines the doubts, shares her triumphs and describes the day-to-day ennui of pregnancy. This is truly a book I didn't want to finish reading.
Different kind of pregnancy book.......2002-05-11
This is worth reading if you are pregnant simply because it is very unique among typical pregnancy books - however, the author is a very negative person and a lot of the book is her complaining about anything and everything (granted, it is her journal, but enough already)! It got a little old. But, it's a quick read and offered interesting similarities to my own pregnancy (example - her baby always quieted down when her husband has his hand on her stomach - we thought it was just our kiddo). I was disappointed that there weren't more pictures, since the ones included were very great.
Navel-Gazing.......2002-03-10
"Having a work life takes confidence." I think this quote that Jen wrote about her mom, sums up her adventure into motherhood. Having a life with a baby takes lots of confidence, and Navel Gazing truly depicts how one woman grows into honoring herself throughout the pregnancy process. It shares the raw ups and downs of being pregnant. I am very excited that she had the courage and perservance to tell us her story.
Navel-gazing hard to put down.......2002-03-10
I didn't want to put down "Navel gazing". Although Jennifer shared her own personal experience I kept finding myself in the thoughts, fears, joys and the suspended question mark that characterizes pregnancy. I especially enjoyed Jennifer's genuineness and forthrightness in discussing the myths, social expectations, use of language and strange behavior surrounding pregnant women. The photographs were thought provoking and beautiful. Their very existence in a world where, as Jennifer points out, we don't see many visuals of pregnant women, was refreshing and engaging. As a mom of a two year old considering having another child, it was an important book in making me feel not so alone with some feelings about pregnancy that don't often get verbalized. It is about time women started having conversations about the tough stuff (and the joyful stuff) that constitutes the journey to motherhood. We, and our life circumstances, are not all "Polly Perfect" as is implied by some other books on pregnancy. I thank Jennifer for engaging us in this much-needed dialogue. While this is an insightful work for those of us in the child-bearing process, I did end up losing the book for a period of time to my mother who is going through menopause. It probably is not a book that she would have thought had anything to offer her, but she read it almost cover to cover and said afterward that she found the issues that Jennifer brought up to be very relevant for her as well. My husband is on deck to read it next! I highly recommend this book to other readers and commend Jennifer for her willingness to share the extremely personal vulnerabilities and strengths that can be discovered along the journey of motherhood.
Honest and moving.......2002-02-22
Jennifer Matesa bravely bares herself -- body and soul -- in this honest account of her pregnancy. This is a book for every woman (or man) who hesitates, even slightly, on the threshold of parenthood. It is also a book for those of us who are already parents because it reminds us to look, really look, at our children and our own evolution. I've read the book twice, the first time in a big gulp, the second time in bits and pieces. I keep it in my car so I can pick it up every time I have a spare moment. A lovely book that feels like a wonderful companion.
Book Description
The Grand Army of the Republic, the largest of all Union Army veterans' organizations, was the most powerful single-issue political lobby of the late nineteenth century, securing massive pensions for veterans and helping to elect five postwar presidents from its own membership. To its members, it was also a secret fraternal order, a source of local charity, a provider of entertainment in small municipalities, and a patriotic organization. Using GAR convention proceedings, newspapers, songs, rule books, and local post records, Stuart McConnell examines this influential veterans' association during the years of its greatest strength.
Beginning with a close look at the men who joined the GAR in three localities—Philadelphia; Brockton, Massachusetts; and Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin—McConnell goes on to examine the Union veterans' attitudes towards their former Confederate enemies and toward a whole range of noncombatants whom the verterans called "civilians": stay-at-home townsfolk, Mugwump penion reformers, freedmen, women, and their own sons and daughters. In the GAR, McConnell sees a group of veterans trying to cope with questions concerning the extent of society's obligation to the poor and injured, the place of war memories in peacetime, and the meaning of the "nation" and the individual's relation to it.
McConnell aruges that, by the 1890s, the GAR was clinging to a preservationist version of American nationalism that many white, middle-class Northerners found congenial in the face of the social upheavals of that decade. In effect, he concludes, the nineteenth-century career of the GAR is a study in the microcosm of a nation trying to hold fast to an older image of itself in the face of massive social change.
Customer Reviews:
Fascinating look at the Union veterans in postwar USA!.......2003-12-02
I highly recommend this book on a Civil War-related topic that
is very little known. The organization and activities of the Union veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic offer a host of
lessons for us today. It is an intriguing look at the effects of the Civil War on those who fought it, as well as their goals
and efforts to shape postwar society. My favorite portion was the section on the efforts of the veterans to inculcate patriotic
values among the youth of the Gilded Age. Well worth the time to
expand your knowledge of this aspect of the Civil War!
Average customer rating:
- Flawed book on important subject
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Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 20th Century
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Relations
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Cultural
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ASIN: 0198279469 |
Book Description
Ten years before the Soviet Union collapsed, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan stood almost alone in predicting its demise. As the intelligence community and cold war analysts churned out statistics demonstrating the enduring strength of the Moscow regime, Moynihan, focusing on ethnic conflict,
argued that the end was at hand. Now, with such conflict breaking out across the world, from Central Asia to South Central Los Angeles, he sets forth a general proposition: Far from vanishing, ethnicity has been and will be an elemental force in international politics.
Drawing on a lifetime of scholarship, the Senator provides in Pandaemonium a subtle, richly textured account of the process by which theory has grudgingly begun to adapt to reality. Moynihan--whose previous studies range over thirty years from Beyond the Melting Pot (with Nathan Glazer) to
the much acclaimed On the Law of Nations--provides a deep historical look at ethnic conflict around the globe. He shows how the struggles that now absorb our attention have been going on for generations and explain much of modern history. Neither side in the cold war grasped this reality, he
writes. Neither the liberal myth of the melting pot nor the Marxist fantasy of proletarian internationalism could account for ethnic conflict, and so the international system stumbled from one set of miscalculations to another.
Toward the close of World War I, Woodrow Wilson declared the "self-determination of peoples" to be an Allied goal for the peace. Toward the end of World War II, Josef Stalin inserted "self-determination of peoples" into Article I of the United Nations Charter, defining "The Purposes" of the
new world organization. This process has been going on ever since. The first phase, the breaking up of empire, was relatively peaceful. The second phase, presaged by the 1947 partition of India, is certain to be far more troubled, as fifty to a hundred new countries emerge.
Moynihan argues, however, that a dark age of "ethnic cleansing" is not inevitable; that the dynamics of ethnic conflict can be understood, anticipated, and moderated. Ethnic pride can be a source of dignity and of stability, if only its legitimacy is accepted. Moynihan writes in a learned,
reflective voice: at times theoretical, but always in the end directed to issues of fierce immediacy. A splendid achievement, Pandaemonium begins the re-education of Western diplomacy.
Customer Reviews:
Flawed book on important subject.......2000-04-26
The idea behind this book is a good one: Moynihan attempts to bring light to the ethnic troubles that plagued the world at the time of publication in the early 1990s (which seem to have become even more acute now) by delving into some of the origins of this problem. He essentially focuses on two themes: ethnicity, ethnic identity and the persistence and predominance of ethnic loyalties (as opposed to class loyalties); and national self-determination, particularly how to define this term and the international legal conundrums this concept has caused since it first became a part of mainstream political parlance about a century ago. In its initial sections, the book does succeed in shedding some light on the role of ethnicity and self-determination in the political history of the last hundred or so years, and how essential they have been to international relations, even if often ingored by mainstream scholarship-especially during the cold war-which tended to focus almost exclusively on ideology and political "realism" a la Henry Kissenger (which, as Moynihan points out, was far from realistic). Perhaps the best thing about this book is that is offers a good introduction to the problems of ethnicity in international politics, and provides an excellent reference list of sources for further reading on the subject. As an introduction, however, it suffers from being superficial at times. At times it seems as though Moynihan implicitly accepts the "primordial" thesis on ethnicity and nationalism, for he cites without critical commentary the all-too-common lament of many journalists and other armchair experts who bewail the "ancient ethnic hatreds" burning in some remote corners of the world. He doesn't really look into the fact that ethnicity politics and the ensuing nationalism tend to be the product of contemporary political agitation which often have little to do with historical fact. Although he mentions the general multiethnic harmony of certain pre-nationalist communities, e.g. in Central Europe, he doesn't really go anywhere with this. This the general fault of this book: its disjointed approach. At times Moynihan goes into excessive detail on certain examples while skimming over other cases. In addition, the text is riddled with extensive quotations (some as long as two to three pages) of other works or his own previous works on this subject. Since the book was based on a lecture delivered at Oxford in 1991, I can only assume that he rather hurriedly adapted the text for publication. This is unfortunate, for this could have been a really top-notch work on a very important subject.
Average customer rating:
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Padé Approximants (Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications)
George A. Baker , and
Peter Graves-Morris
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
General
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Calculus
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Infinity
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ASIN: 0521450071 |
Book Description
This second edition is a comprehensive treatment of all straightforward aspects of Padé approximation, and the authors develop some themes to the level of current research. They extensively cover applications to statistical mechanics and critical phenomena, and there are newly extended sections devoted to circuit design, matrix Padé approximation, computational methods, and integral and algebraic approximants. The new edition also contains a chapter on multiseries approximants. The book contains an extensive bibliography of recent monographs on other specialized material. This succinct and straightforward treatment will appeal to scientists, engineers, and mathematicians alike.
Average customer rating:
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Applications of Pade Approximation Theory in Fluid Dynamics (Series on Advances in Mathematics for Applied Sciences)
Amilcare Pozzi
Manufacturer: World Scientific Pub Co Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Fluid Mechanics
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Dynamics
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| Differential Equations
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ASIN: 9810214146 |
Average customer rating:
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Essentials of Pade Approximants
George A. Baker
Manufacturer: Academic Press Inc.,U.S.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Mathematical Analysis
| Mathematics
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General
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ASIN: 012074855X |
Average customer rating:
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Pade Approximants and Their Applications
Manufacturer: Academic Press Inc.,U.S.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
General
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ASIN: 0122959507 |
Book Description
For the first time, Etty Hillesum's diary and letters appear together to give us the fullest possible portrait of this extraordinary woman. In the darkest years of Nazi occupation and genocide, Etty Hillesum remained a celebrant of life whose lucid intelligence, sympathy, and almost impossible gallantry were themselves a form of inner resistance. The adult counterpart to Anne Frank, Hillesum testifies to the possibility of awareness and compassion in the face of the most devastating challenge to one's humanity. She died at Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of twenty-nine.
Customer Reviews:
flowers and fruits grow where they are planted.......2007-07-25
Etty Hillessum's diaries and her letters from Westerbork serve as an outstanding testament to the human spirit and the ability to find the sacred in the most horrific of situations. Although she was not a saint in the sense that Teresa of Avila or Juan de la Cruz were saints, she could properly be considered a mystic and a good example of a modern who had 'enlightened' insights. I find her diaries at once humane and modern in the sense of a liberated 'bohemian' who explored her sexuality and her psyche. As her diaries progress, her inner life (and oneness with God) deepens as the horrors of the realities of being Jewish in Europe during the Second World War becomes more apparent. I highly recommend this book! It will change your life!
A Hauntingly Beautiful Gift.......2007-02-22
This is one of the most profound documents ever written. Etty Hillesum was truly a person who had reached transforming union and had the ability to be able to share her experience through journaling and letters. She was unwaivering in her desire to see the beauty and meaning of life in one of the most difficult situations ever experienced on this planet. There are no words to express how deeply this work has influenced my life, except to say that I go back to her writing over and over again. She is a bright light for anyone seeking spiritual growth.
If Ann Frank wrote as a vibrant young woman.......2007-01-18
In nearly all of our nation's middle and high schools the Diary of Anne Frank is required reading. This present volume ought to be a required follow-up reading for the older student.
This Owl Books publication includes excellent photographs and commentary to bring alive holistically the full presentation of this intelligent and searching young woman's life and vision, whose eight well-preserved copy books reveal to us her soul, supplemented by personal, surprisingly joyful and hopeful and positive do-not-lose-heart letters from a way station on the road to Auschwitz. Together this corpus of writing presents bright light in the deepest darkness and locus of despair. One cannot read these living words on the way to certain death without weeping, and reflecting, at the unreasonable cruelty and inexorable deadly fruit of any total war. One cannot read this without a cry for the end of all war.
Please read this book in a prayerful way. Consider the promising and peaceful lives which were lost, whose voice rings out truly here in this thick volume of her writings, and resolve to work for peace, that we may never study war, no more. Let us work for peace, and pray with the prophet that our swords may soon be beat into plowshares, that all may live in peace to their fullest promise.
This book brings to us the reality of the horror of hateful war, through Etty's human and hopeful and joyous and beautiful voice, ever encouraging those in the deepest despair until she herself is also placed on the road to Auschwitz, a road from which so very few ever returned.
Breathtaking diary.......2006-11-10
I've read this book several times, actually. The first time was a "paradigm-shifting" experience. This young woman wrote her heart's truth, during a tragic time in history when Jews like herself were endangered, even hunted. Her growing faith in herself and in humanity's goodness, despite what was going on around her and to her, is astonishing and luminous. She wished to write a meaningful book one day. She did: this diary. I commend it to anyone, of any faith.
Perhaps she told us more than we need to know.......2006-02-22
By all means, if you "buy" Etty's diary, be sure to get the book that includes the letters (an early publication was the diary only, no letters). Even with the letters, the book ends abruptly and there is no closure, of course, but the letters provide a bit more about actual events she and her fellow victims were experiencing. The diary, on the other hand, explores more her philosophy on life, and less on the actual living conditions. Etty seemed particularly naive, considering she was 27 years old when she wrote the diary, when it came to personal relationships. It is "5 stars" if you appreciate this genre; if you are asked to read this for a school assignment, or a reading club, and you have no interest in this genre, you probably won't appreciate the book. This is not a book I would go back and re-read. Having said that, it was an important book to read.
Book Description
One of the little-known tales of the Civil War involves the fighting outfit formed by Irish rebel Thomas Francis Meagher. The Union's Irish Brigade built an unusual reputation for bravery and gallantry, having fought throughout the war, from First Bull Run in 1861 to the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Court House in 1865. The regiments were small, but highly effective, and Meagher, who had fought for the independence of Ireland from Britain, threw himself into the contest for union and liberty. This enthralling, well-illustrated story of a colorful, little-known hero and his brigade includes detailed accounts of their battles and skirmishes throughout America's Civil War.
Customer Reviews:
The Irish Brigade: A Pictorial History of the Famed Civil .......2004-12-10
This book is the best ever published showing extensive artifacts related to the Irish Brigade. In addition, the history is well written and accurate. I cannot recommend it any more highly.
Book Description
Edited by Eric Foner and coordinated with each chapter of the text, this companion to Give Me Liberty! includes primary-source documents touching on the theme of American freedom. The freedom theme is explored in the words of well-known historical figures and ordinary Americans. Each document is accompanied by an introductory headnote and study questions.
Customer Reviews:
Interesting!!.......2007-01-12
It was shipped out fast because I needed it for my history class. It is not my subject at all, but I liked it. I have it for sale to sent out PRIORITY MAIL!! At no extra charge look it up and buy!!
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- Nelly Custis Lewis's Housekeeping Book
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- Parenting Rule #1: Mom Has Fun! A Guide to Responsive Parenting
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- Past, Present, and Personal: The Family and the Life Course in American History
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Books Index
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