Nature Notes of an Edwardian Lady (companion to Country Diary)

Customer Reviews:

The Nature Notes of an Edwardian Lady.......2005-02-28

Edith Holden was an excellent observer of nature and an outstanding artist of what she saw. The inclusion of some of my favorite poems by well known authors makes this book an absolute delight!

Breathtaking nature walk.......2004-12-02

Elizabeth Holden's The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady seems to have more popularity than The Nature Notes, but I have found it to be just as awesome and inspiring as The Country Diary. In fact, if it is possible, I like this one more so than The Country Diary, although its setup is very much the same. The book is broken down by months from January through December. Each month begins with a brief history of the month, related folk lore, and poetry. The art work is wonderful and the entries draw you into the adventures of Ms. Holden. Even though the journal was kept almost 100 years ago, you feel that you are right there beside Ms. Holden, and for me, she has become a friend. She has been a great motivation for me to illustrate my own journals. I would highly recommend this book as well as The Country Diary if you love nature walks and journaling.

1905 THE NATURE NOTES OF AN EDWARDIAN LADY

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1905 THE NATURE NOTES OF AN EDWARDIAN LADY
E. HOLDEN
Manufacturer: GUILD
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000SDKSJM

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THE NATURE NOTES OF AN EDWARDIAN LADY
Edith Holden
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OJ1T2A

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THE NATURE NOTES OF AN EDWARDIAN LADY.
Edith. Holden
Manufacturer: Guild
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000O7EUHS

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Nature Notes for 1906 (Unabridged)
Vanessa Benjamin
Manufacturer: audible.com
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio Download
ASIN: B000E10YSI

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THE NATURE NOTES OF AN EDWARDIAN LADY.
Edith: Holden
Manufacturer: Pan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000W35FZK

Nature Notes of The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady

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Nature Notes of The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady
Edith and Jenkins, Alan C. Holden
Manufacturer: Harper & Row
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000O7WDUE

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Nature Notes of the Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady
Alan C. & Holden, Edith Jenkins
Manufacturer: HARPER &Row
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000K96AX2

Customer Reviews:

The guide to Christian travel in and around Jerusalem........2001-08-26

Many travel guides can tell you locations and the history of the monuments around Jerusalem. But this one tells you the histories of the various Christian communities who worship there. Its focus is not architecture but worship. It provides insights into their traditions as well. Most importantly perhaps, it provides contact information and tells the schedules of worship services. The authors do not assume any prior theological or historical knowledge; everything is simple and straightforward. In the back of the book is a map of central Jerusalem on which most of the monuments can be located. There is a brief, helpful section on Bethlehem and Nazareth as well. In short, most travel guides are not written for Christian worshippers, but this one is. This books purpose is to enable Christian travellers to find communities, learn about them, and join with them in worship. If you want that experience to be part of your trip to Jerusalem and Israel, this is exactly the book you need.

The guide to Christian travel in and around Jerusalem........2001-08-26

The authors do not assume any prior theological or historical knowledge; everything is simple and straightforward. In the back of the book is a map of central Jerusalem on which most of the monuments can be located. There is a brief, helpful section on Bethlehem and Nazareth as well.

In short, most travel guides are not written for Christian worshippers, but this one is. This books purpose is to enable Christian travellers to find communities, learn about them, and join with them in worship. If you want that experience to be part of your trip to Jerusalem and Israel, this is exactly the book you need.

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Living Stones Pilgrimage with the Christians of the Holy Land
Alison Hilliard
Manufacturer: University of Notre Dame Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OQYILM

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LIVING STONES PILGRIMAGE, with the Christians of the Holy Land
Hilliard & Bailey
Manufacturer: Cassell
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OS4DNS

Product Description

Two great books in one! It presents Facts in Brief, Have you ever wondered, Meet the relatives, and many more informative sections plus color photographs & illustrations for kids to learn by.

Book Description

A lecture supplement for use in introductory biology courses at two- and four-year schools. In Professor Farnsworth's Explanations in Biology, basic biological concepts are revealed through fictitious scenarios between the professor and students.

Customer Reviews:

Wonderful Choice.......2003-01-20

I think it is especially helpful to those who prepare for
SAT 2 biology M test. The professor explains the concepts
of biology with many examples.

Wonderful Choice for Biology.......2003-01-20

I think it is very helpful to those who prepare for SAT 2
Biology M test. This book explains biology with many examples.
They are easy to understand and I'm sure that it is a wonderful
choice for students.

I wish I'd had this book when I was a student........1998-09-17

"Professor Farnsworth" knows his stuff, even if he is a figment of Frank Heppner's imagination. In 22 marvelous lectures, full of outrageous examples, he explains just about everything the introductory biology student needs to know. Non-majors will find this useful as they probe the mysteries of respiration, photosynthesis, and genetics. Majors who are just starting out will find this a great help in understanding the most basic principles in biology, which will help them construct a solid foundation for future studies.

Besides, it's just plain fun to read.

Book Description

Consisting of 16 refereed original contributions, this volume presents a diversified collection of recent results in control of distributed parameter systems. Topics addressed include - optimal control in fluid mechanics - numerical methods for optimal control of partial differential equations - modeling and control of shells - level set methods - mesh adaptation for parameter estimation problems - shape optimization Advanced graduate students and researchers will find the book an excellent guide to the forefront of control and estimation of distributed parameter systems.

Control of Nonlinear Distributed Parameter Systems (Lecture Notes in Pure and Applied Mathematics)

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Control of Nonlinear Distributed Parameter Systems (Lecture Notes in Pure and Applied Mathematics)

Manufacturer: CRC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Engineering | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books

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General | Mathematics | Science | Subjects | Books

General | Medicine | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0824705645

Book Description

An examination of progress in mathematical control theory applications. It provides analyses of the influence and relationship of nonlinear partial differential equations to control systems and contains state-of-the-art reviews, including presentations from a conference co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, the University of Minnesota, and Texas A&M University.

Book Description

In this extensively researched collection, editor Anna Holmes has amassed an inspirational, historical, and highly entertaining collection of letters from women across the centuries (both known and unknown, fictional and real). From Heloise (of Abelard and Heloise) in the twelfth century, to writer and co-executive producer of Sex in the City Cindy Chupack in the twenty-first; from mad missives and caustic communiques to downhearted dispatches and sweet send-offs, Hell Hath No Fury is the most comprehensive collection on the shelf of letters from the end of the affair. Featuring: the tell off, the other man, the just friends, the unrequited, the marriage refusal, the slow fade, the string-along, the you’ve changed, and reams of other romantic rants, ruminations, and reckonings, included here are correspondences from Agnes Von Kurowsky to Ernest Hemingway, Rebecca West to H. G. Wells, Stella Bowen to Ford Maddox Ford, Nina Eliza Pinchback Toomer, mother of Harlem Renaissance writer and philosopher Jean Toomer, to her estranged husband, Dorothy Thompson to Sinclair Lewis, Candida Royalle, adult film star, to an ex, Jennifer Belle, author of Going Down and High Maintenance to an ex, Kate Christensen, author of In the Drink and Jeremy Thrane to an ex, Lucinda Rosenfeld, author of What She Saw to an ex, Monica Lewinsky to Bill Clinton, and many more.

Customer Reviews:

An Even Mix.......2007-02-28

Hell Hath No Fury is a collection of letters written by women and the end of a relationship. The letters are grouped by themes starting with the fantastically gritty "tell-off" letter, some of these got very nasty. Two categories I thought stood out were the autopsy letter (the letter where we dissect everything that went wrong with the relationship) as well as the unsent letter.

There are MANY letters in this book and at least half of them are snoozers or too desperate-sounding to be enjoyable reading.

There are some absolute gems, though, especially some of the historical figures including a letter from Anne Boleyn (in the tower awaiting trial) to King Henry VIII. I also enjoyed the letters from Zelda, Sylvia Plath, and Sandra Bernhardt. The book is practical for subway commuting since most letters are at most a few pages long.

Ah, those three little words. . ........2007-02-10

Get over it.
-----------

This inability to do so may go far in explaining the recent studies and the curiously overlooked criminal justice statistics that report men are killed twice as often as women due to family violence and the number one motive reported for female on female and female on male violence? Jealousy.

In a world in which we turn our backs on Black males[who are at 8 times greater risk of being the *victim* of a violent crime than they're White female counterparts], we seem compelled to "rescue" and creatively excuse nearly every act of female aggression and violence, even towards each other, perhaps it's neither "Hell" we should worry about facing nor even the wrath of the jilted and hopelessly insecure, petty, delusional, and dependent women overwhelmingly featured in this sophomoric collection of impulsivity, resentment, and misandry; it is ourselves. But then again, culpability is something these women never seem to grasp. If only they could, maybe, just maybe, they could just move on and somehow manage to do so without harming others in the process.

AX~

Uneven.......2005-03-08

Being, like the reviewer called Kim, interested in the epistolary genre, I eagerly purchased "Hell Hath No Fury". Like her, I found it extremely rewarding in some aspects, disappointing in others. The editor is an amateur (she admits that she knew nothing about the history of women's letters before undertaking this project), which may account for some of the flaws in this otherwise engaging book. Some of the letters could certainly have been dispensed with. Tanya's letter, with its tiresome stream of abuse (come on! do we really need to read about her boyfriend performing oral sex on her right after she had finished having sex with another man?) was gratuitous obscenity, but Leigh L.'s was something even worse, revealing racism and a nastiness which I personally found disgusting ("I guess that's what comes with being a good Jewish girl in bed with a Mexican", "thanks for letting me take your Panamanian virginity away" - you get the style; however, for a "good girl", she does seem to have been sleeping around a bit, and anyway, what exactly is a "Panamanian virginity" like?).

If you can overlook this sort of trash, and those letters that simply are not interesting enough, you may find some worthwhile - and occasionally moving - pieces. I deeply identified with Kate Christensen's frustration at her relationship with John, having felt exactly the same impotence and wretchedness when faced with my then-boyfriend's utter lack of understanding or respect for my beliefs and feelings. I also enjoyed the 63-year-old woman's letter to the man she had met on the internet - although I'm much younger, I could identify with what she felt. And the historical as well as some of the literary letters are a delight.

Another drawback that I found was the unusual, extremely high number of typographical errors, which made me wonder if I might not have been reading an uncorrected copy. But the good quality of the paper and altogether nice edition sort of made up for that :)

All in all, it's an enjoyable book (even if it's so uneven as to make you wonder why some of the letters are featured at all) and I read it through in only a few days because of its historical and emotional interest. I suggest you get a used copy - even though it'll probably make a fun read, I don't think it's worth buying new.

Great gift.......2003-02-19

This book is simply a lot of fun to flip through. It's a neat way to see a different side of famous figures, ranging from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to George Sand to Dorothy Sayers to Anne Boleyn, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Bronte... I was impressed with the sheer range of figures represented. It's an addictive read.

More real writers, less contemporary whiners, please.......2002-12-17

Being interested in the epistolatory writing genre for several years now (e.g. Ovid's Heroides, the Heloise and Abelard letters), I thought this book might be an interesting read - shedding light on not only the emotions at the 'end of the affair', but on the lives of the many women - Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth I to name a few - whose missives are included here. The chapters are divided according to the type of letter written - Refusal of Marriage letter, the Autopsy letter, the Divorce letter, etc. While many of the letters could fall into several catagories, it's an effective organizational device. Many of the letters by famous women were unfamiliar to me, so that was a nice bonus. I didn't realize when I purchased the book, however, that many of the letters included are from modern day, ordinary women. Now, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this concept at all - mixing 'historical' letters with contemporary letters (and emails). Provided the emotional and literary quality is on par - which might be wishful thinking, but wish it I did. Unfortunately, I found that many of the contemporary letters are amateurish and immature, often ineffectively vulgar, and poorly written. I'm sure the emotions are sincere, but that is not a justification for publication. While reading some of these modern letters might cause the reader to think "I'm not alone, other women have gone through this too" - which I am sure is the aim of the book - I just ended up thinking that I could outwrite and better express myself and my emotions more than most of the contemporary women included in this book. Not to say that all the contemporary letters are horribly bad - the 63 year old administrative assistant in North Carolina wrote an interesting letter about the end of her affair with a man who appeared not to know what he wanted - she's no Sylvia Plath, but her letter was not filled with variations of the F word, and did not involved the immature, unclever put downs and vengeful-ness of some of the 20 year olds featured in this book. Perhaps that's the key -age brings with it maturity - or perhaps real talent does, as the letter from a 16 year old Anne Sexton or the letter from a 19-20 year old Sylvia Plath reads as more mature than some recent letters from women in their late 20's, 30's and older. Or perhaps the difference is that society has changed - it seems more acceptable today to express yourself like a foul mouthed harridan than in yesteryear. Please don't mistake my criticism of these letters for the notion that women should not express their anger and their feelings. They most certainly should. I would just prefer they express it in a mature, creative, clever way, if I am going to pay money to read about it. Since there seem to be more 'historical' letters than 'contemporary' letters, I still recommend this book to women who want to read how others coped with the end of their affairs. And I would caution readers that if they are reading this book for ideas to use in their own letters, they might want to follow better examples than Tanya of the Methadone Clinic.

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The best biography of Poe

A very well done bio of one of the greatest

Poor Poe!...

you've either read this or you haven't!!

Borderline Disorder Personality?

Edgar A Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance
Kenneth Silverman
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Authors | Arts & Literature | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
General | History & Criticism | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography

The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe (Historical Guides to American Authors)

Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

ASIN: 0060923318

Book Description

From a Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer, the most revealing, fascinating, and important biography of one of our greatest literary figures.

Customer Reviews:

The best biography of Poe.......2007-07-24

If you have a sincere interest in Edgar Allan Poe, you must read Silverman's biography of Poe! It is well-researched, comprehensive, and written in an accessible, understandable way (just what you'd expect from a Pulitzer Prize winner). Silverman lays down all the facts, but also makes the reader aware of the complexities of Poe's story, admitting there are certain fuzzy areas. The book interweaves Poe's life with his work, the background of the 19th century American publishing industry, and critical interpretations both contemporary and modern. Silverman has admitted he was not a Poe fan before setting out to write this book so it is unbiased. Incredibly thorough and an enjoyable read, this is the last Poe biography you'll ever need!

A very well done bio of one of the greatest.......2006-10-28

This is an excellent, highly detailed and informative biography of one of the greatest American authors and poets.

Poe's life was rough from the start. His parents (David and Eliza) left him early, his father through abandonment, his mother through an early death. Young Poe was sent to live with surrogate parents, the "father" being John Allan, a wealthy merchant who wanted Poe to be something more (or at least something different) than Poe himself wanted to be.

Silverman pulls no punches, painting a most realistic and unbiased account of Poe's life. For example, he tells of Poe's troubles in his early college years, with Poe blaming his troubles on the parsimonious John Allan. In reality, however, much of Poe's troubles were caused by Poe himself, via his gambling, his habit of breaking promises, of borrowing and not repaying, and so on.

Silverman covers Poe's Army serivce, telling of young Edgar as Sergeant Major of Artillery, of Poe's few months at West Point (he did not graduate), of his work as a magazine writer, editor, and critic, and of Poe's most memorable triumphs--including the publication of the poem THE RAVEN, a masterpiece for which Poe is perhaps best known. Silverman also tells of Poe's almost constant grinding poverty, his relationships with women and family members, his struggles to start his own magazine, his depression, his alcoholism, and much more.

My overall sense from reading this bio is that Poe was certainly a tragic figure, recognized by many during his time for being a literary genius, but not often rewarded as such. Then again, Poe's boorish, drunken behavior, his near constant begging for money, his failure to repay his debts (not to mention his almost complete lack of a business sense) certainly did not help him gain positive recognition. It seems, in fact, that Poe was often his own worst enemy.

Poor Poe!..........2006-08-02

Poor Poe suffered a great deal of personal tragedy. Silverman's account is probably the best current critical bio around.

you've either read this or you haven't!!.......2006-05-26

i loved the honest attempt in this work to deal with Poe's alleged alcoholism,something hinted at or dealt scantily with in other biographies. As if a writer would somehow be afraid that by dealing with the alcoholism issue,Poe's works could be downgraded.(NOT POSSIBLE!!)The way this biography is presented,Poe comes off as being a seedy,yet noble character in a real life Poe tale,so as life imitates art.Lots of goodies here in this biography,if you only read 1 biography a year make this one your project.the Foster Brooks moments keep the book rolling.still this a serious work on a serious,interesting personality. Who was the real Poe,the writer,the philosopher,the seeker of beauty in all its forms,or the at times petty,vice driven man of ambition.From reading this book i would say Poe was both and maybe more as well.Ithank Poe everytime I have to absorb criticism of my amateurish attempts at poetry,i in turn read my critics material and say "well your poems aren't exactly "The Raven" either!! Poe may have been a "binge" type alcoholic,sober most of the time and then losing control at times,this would explain the discrepancies from descriptions of him as noted by numerous sources.Being sober 99% of the time,that other 1% can get you every time.Also covered in this book is a good description of Poe's service in the United States Army as an artillery seargent.Most people don't realize that he served 2 years with honors and i wouldn't have wanted to be on the receiving end of a cannon sighted and calculated by Poe!If in the .5 of the 1% chance he was inebriated even less.

Borderline Disorder Personality?.......2005-01-22

I bought this book primarily to find out Silverman's take on Poe's being found (just before his death) in clothes that did not belong to him (as indicated in a video in the Great Authors series). That odd fact, combined with the alter egos he created in stories like "Fall of the House of Usher" made me wonder if Poe had some sort of alter ego himself. Though the clothing issue is not completely explained (after all, who could know with certainty?), Silverman's book does offer insights into Poe's use of false identity, pseudonym, anonymous writing, plagiarism, and other identity issues (especially relating to his odd perversions of the Allan name and his brother's name). In addition, Poe's behavior, as explained by Silverman, put me in mind of a book entitled *I Hate You, Don't Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality Disorder* by Jerold J. Kreisman and Hal Straus, published in 1989. I'm an English teacher, not a psychologist, and I do not know the current thinking on borderline personality disorder, but it is apparent that virtually every characteristic Kreisman and Straus identified in the borderline personality were exhibited by Poe. The next time I teach Poe, I plan to present information from both books for my students to consider (after reading "Fall of the House of Usher," Poe's story with a cross-gender alter ego). Thanks, Professor Silverman, for a marvelously researched and documented book!

Edgar A Poe : Mournful & Never-ending Remembrance

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Edgar A Poe : Mournful & Never-ending Remembrance
Kenneth on Edgar Allan Poe Silverman
Manufacturer: HarperCollins Canada, Limited
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000P0VXVU

Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance

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Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance
Kenneth Silverman
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OEORYW

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EDGAR A. POE: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance.
Kenneth. Silverman
Manufacturer: HarperCollins
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OA6CXA

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The first full-length history of this campaign

The Forgotten Front

The Forgotten Front: The East African Campaign 1914-1918 (Revealing History)
Ross Anderson
Manufacturer: Tempus
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Military | History | Subjects | Books
World War I | Military | History | Subjects | Books
All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
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The First World War in Africa (The First World War)

Armies in East Africa 1914-18 (Men-at-Arms)

The Great War in Africa, 1914-1918

Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika

My Reminiscences of East Africa

ASIN: 0752423444

Book Description

The First World War began in East Africa in July 1914 and did not end until November 13, 1918. In its scale and impact, it was the largest conflict yet to take place on African soil. Four empires and their subject peoples were engaged in a conflict that ranged from modern Kenya in the north to Mozambique in the south, leaving hunger and devastation in its trail. Yet the East African campaign has languished in undeserved obscurity over the years, with many people only vaguely aware of its course of events. Africans bore the brunt of the fighting and few escaped the impact of the war.

Customer Reviews:

The first full-length history of this campaign.......2004-10-12

The first world war began in East Africa in 1914 and didn't end until 1918: its impact would change a world, and was the largest of its times on African soil - yet the East African campaign would remain largely under-stated and nearly forgotten were it not for Ross Anderson's in-depth study THE FORGOTTEN FRONT. Surprisingly, THE FORGOTTEN FRONT is the first full-length history of this campaign, providing in-depth coverage of events and politics as well as military strategy analysis. It is these elements which make for an exceptional history for World War I scholars.

The Forgotten Front.......2004-07-29

I had high hopes for this book. However, after reading it I found that there was very little new information added to the subject matter and most was from the British point of view. There are already numerous other books which covers World War One in German East Africa and they are more entertaining. I came away from the book with the question if the Gen. Lettow Vorbeck and the schutztruppe were never victorious, then why did it take the Allies four years to defeat them? Anderson's first book on the Battle of Tanga was more informative and added new information which was missing from the other sources. However, in closing the book is well researched and documented and a new reader of the subject would well be advised to have it in their library.

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The Forgotten Front
Ross Anderson
Manufacturer: Tempus Publishing Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Military | History | Subjects | Books

World War I | Military | History | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0752441264

Book Description

"In order to recruit new members on a scale that would be required to significantly rebuild union power, unions must fundamentally alter their internal organizational practices. This means creating more organizer positions on the staff; developing programs to teach current members how to handle the tasks involved in resolving shop-floor grievances; and building programs that train members to participate fully in the work of external organizing. Such a reorientation entails redefining the very meaning of union membership from a relatively passive stance toward one of continuous active engagement."—from the Introduction

In Rebuilding Labor Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss bring together established researchers and a new generation of labor scholars to assess the current state of labor organizing and its relationship to union revitalization. Throughout this collection, the focus is on the formidable challenges unions face today and on how they may be overcome. Rebuilding Labor begins with a comprehensive overview of recent union organizing in the United States; goes on to present a series of richly detailed case studies of such topics as union leadership, organizer recruitment and retention, union democracy, and the dynamics of anti-unionism among rank-and-file workers; and concludes with a quantitative chapter on the relationship between union victories and establishment survival. This interdisciplinary collection of original scholarship on New Labor offers a window into an otherwise invisible emergent social movement.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent book for Union Organizers!.......2007-05-07

This book is a good reference tool for the novice Union Organizer. I recommend it highly. It goes over alot of stuff you already know, but it is good to be reminded of such!

Book Description

The environmental imagination does not stop short at the edge of the woods. Nor should our understanding of it, as Lawrence Buell makes powerfully clear in his new book that aims to reshape the field of literature and environmental studies. Emphasizing the influence of the physical environment on individual and collective perception, his book thus provides the theoretical underpinnings for an ecocriticism now reaching full power, and does so in remarkably clear and concrete ways.

Writing for an Endangered World offers a conception of the physical environment--whether built or natural--as simultaneously found and constructed, and treats imaginative representations of it as acts of both discovery and invention. A number of the chapters develop this idea through parallel studies of figures identified with either "natural" or urban settings: John Muir and Jane Addams; Aldo Leopold and William Faulkner; Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Dreiser; Wendell Berry and Gwendolyn Brooks. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, but ranging freely across national borders, his book reimagines city and country as a single complex landscape.

Customer Reviews:

Reading Between the Lines into the New, New World.......2001-07-07

Employing a crypto-academic style that is by turns baffling, enervating but often frequently stimulating, Buell puts modernists classics of literature through their paces through the optics of "environmental criticism," a movement of which he and a few others appear to be the primary practictioners (from what I can glean from the book, the bibliography and the liner notes).

For example, his environmental criticism of Moby Dick is really quite a marvelous way to re-imagine the Melville classic as a text in which the boundaries between the consciousnesses of whales and men are elided through Melville's sympathetic and candid reportage of the whaling expedition and his inclusion of chapters on whaling lore. He does another marvelous job on Faulkner's "The Bear" and the collection in which it originally appeared, noting that the narrator's description of the abandoned sawmills, the clear-cut forests and the resulting floods and related catastrophes create an emblematic context for the telling of the vexed, multi-layered story of the end of the Southern elitist hunting tradition through the agency of extractive industrialization. His reading of DeLillo's White Noise restores its enviromental concerns (the Airborne Toxic Event) to its rightful place at the forefront of the DeLillo's topos -- unlike many other recent readings which do not mention this theme. (Buell notes that such ommissions in what is rapidly becoming a touchstone work in the realm of cultural criticism is a disservice to the book and to DeLillo's environmental concerns demonstrated in his other works such as Underworld, a view that I entirely agree with: I was working at DeLillo's publisher at the time of White Noise's release, and it's publication happened to coincide with a real airborne toxic event in New Jersey, a happy coincidence which not only highlighted this imporant aspect of the work, but, happily for the publishers spurred sales of the book in its prescience.)

There are other interesting readings of notable works of fiction and non-fiction through the lens of environmental criticism as well. Too, the introductory chapters which examine the various types of "toxic" discourses and describe how they restrict how we think of our relationship to the natural and man-made worlds are quite good as well. So are the final chapters which deal with changing our conceptions of nature (once primary nature, now a second-hand, or second-nature, which he argues should include manmade enviroments as well). Here he also encourages using the idea of the watershed as an organizing principle of locality and the most appropriate frame of our environmental imagination -- not arbitrary boundaries placed on the landscape either in theory or in practice.

But as you might suspect from the above, Buell covers a lot of territory with this book. Perhaps this is because in advancing the notion of environmental criticism he feels compelled to treat a lot of areas than would normally be necessary in a more deeply populated field of criticism. Don't get me wrong. Just because there's a lot to chew over in this book, doesn't mean it's bad. Much of it quite good, in fact. For instance, Buell is very attentive and inventive in his readings of Whitman, Thoreau, Williams Carlos Williams, Joyce, et. al. He also includes a number of well-selected non-canonical works which illustrate his theses imaginatively. To summarize, good readings, an interesting, if too somtimess too diffuse programme, a defect which can be easily forgiven. Now if only the style was more "grounded."

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