The Edwardian Lady: The Story of Edith Holden, Author of the Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady

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The Edwardian Lady: The Story of Edith Holden, Author of the Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady
Ina Taylor
Manufacturer: Henry Holt & Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
General | Biology | Biological Sciences | Science | Subjects | Books
Natural History | Nature & Ecology | Science | Subjects | Books
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The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady: A Facsimile Reproduction of a Naturalist's Diary for the Year 1906

Cookery Notes (Country Diary)

The Nature Notes of an Edwardian Lady

ASIN: 0030574544

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The Edwardian Lady, The Story of Edith Holden, Author of The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady
Ina Taylor
Manufacturer: Book Club Associates, London
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000LSSET0

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The Edwardian Lady. The Story of Edith Holden author of 'The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady'.
Ina (compiled by) Taylor
Manufacturer: Book Club Associates
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000OEFG5Q

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THE EDWARDIAN LADY: THE STORY OF EDITH HOLDEN, AUTHOR OF THE COUNTRY DIARY OF AN EDWARDIAN LADY.

Manufacturer: BCA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000HJE5VY

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The Edwardian Lady the Story of Edith Holden Author of The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady
Taylor Ina
Manufacturer: Holt, Rinehart and Winston
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000UD358G

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The Edwardian Lady: The Story of Edith Holden, Author of the Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady
Ina Taylor
Manufacturer: Holt Rinehart & Winston
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OA2FEA

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The Edwardian Lady: The Story of Edith Holden, Author of the Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady
Ina Taylor
Manufacturer: Holt Rinehart & Winston
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000JEILS0

Book Description

Barbara Nicholson combined her artistic skills and her broad botanical knowledge to produce these botanical illustrations that are both scientifically accurate and visually compelling. Originally created as ecology wall charts for the British Museum of Natural History, each lush and beautifully detailed picture represents a particular habitat and the relationships of its plants both with each other and to their environment. Plants are shown in intricate detail, with fruits, flowers, leaves, and the whole plant all displayed to facilitate recognition and identification.

Book Description

The best of Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming

Mountain-and-valley driving tours and city walking tours
Vistas, canyons, ghost towns, Native American ruins, national parks and forests, arts festivals, rodeos
Top spots for canoeing, kayaking, cycling, fishing, backpacking, horse packing, rafting, and mountaineering
In-depth reviews of major ski resorts

Where to stay and eat, no matter what your budget

Grand resorts, mountain lodges, charming B&Bs and inns, dude ranches, hotels, motels, and other reliable lodgings
Steak houses, grills, elegant dining rooms, rustic cafés, rowdy brewpubs, saloons, cantinas, and other ethnic eateries

Fresh, thorough, practical--from writers you can trust

Costs, hours, descriptions, and tips by the thousands
All reviews based on visits by savvy writer-residents

30 pages of maps--and dozens of unique features

Important Contacts A to Z; Smart Travel Tips; Fodor's Choice; What's Where; Pleasures & Pastimes; special-interest chapters for outdoors enthusiasts

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DOS Ph Custom Test
Phillips
Manufacturer: Pearson US Imports & PHIPEs
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 0132395266

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DOS Ph Custom Test
Philip Kotler
Manufacturer: Prentice-Hall
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | History & Historical Fiction | Children's Books | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0132435519

Book Description

The Complement FactsBook contains entries on all components of the Complement System, including C1q and Lectins, C3 Family, Serine Proteases, Serum Regulators of Complement Activation, Cell Surface Proteins, and Terminal Pathway Proteins. Domain Structure diagrams are incorporated to clearly illustrate the relationships between all the complement proteins, both within families and between families. The FactsBook also includes the cDNA sequences, marked with intron/exon boundaries, which will facilitate genetic studies.

Key Features
* Includes the cDNA sequences, marked with intron/exon boundaries, facilitating genetic studies
* Presents detailed structural information including cDNA and gene structure for all proteins
* Introduces complement function, simply described for each function
* Data is as up-to-date as possible, including unpublished work from many contributors
* Incorporates domain structures diagrams, which beautifully illustrate the relationship between all the complement proteins, both within, and between, families
* Each chapter has been written by an expert in the field
* Data is as up-to-date as possible, including unpublished work from many contributors
Entries provide information on:
* Alternative nomenclature
* Physiochemical properties
* Structure and function
* Tissue distribution and regulation expression
* Protein sequence/modules
* Chromosomal location
* Genomic structure
* Database accession numbers
* Deficiency and polymorphic variants
* Key references

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Nice read, but

BRADBURY SPEAKS: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars
Ray Bradbury
Manufacturer: William Morrow
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OF0IVC

Customer Reviews:

Nice read, but.......2007-08-09

RAY BRADBURY: over the years has been writing about computers and why they are not creative and why they restrict creativity...

He wrote, in his little collection of essays, BRADBURY SPEAKS: "To test my notion, plant me in a room with two hundred chaps, at two hundred computers, give me a number two Red Ticonderoga Pencil and ten cent Red Mowhawk pad and I will outthink and outcreate the whole Goddamn bunch."

Of course, this is a lot of Hoo! Hah! So Ray Bradbury with his pencil and paper is going to sit back and knock off a work of art that will rival SHREK? I'll venture that a man who cannot drive a car, refuses to drive one, is not competent to discuss technology. If he doesn't know how to turn on a computer, he should not criticize what he fails to share and experience.

Of course, a Bradbury fan will applaud this weird statement without thinking. It would sound good on a stage, delivered to a crowd (which it was), get a thunderous round of applause, move the crowd and make everyone nod in approval, but this kind of rabble rousing doesn't carry far, and doesn't reach out on cold print. It just sounds absurd. A computer helped create the book that was published that has this message in it. And when you see it in print, it sounds real dumb. And how are you reading this review?

There are times when being a Luddite isn't worth it. Perhaps in days gone by, the poets complained that when epics were written down, they lost the life they contained. But they were not forgotten. The Maori of New Zealand were disappointed that the young wrote down the names of the elders, instead of committing them to memory. They were not lost or forgotten.

Time will go on, the passions for art will change and how it is created.

And the luddites who cling to old ways of creating may be really losing the thrust that thier writings could give because they cannot change.

Bradbury has been making more absurd staements as he grows older, but this is to be expected. He refuses to change. And the world does change. From being quaint, he now sounds pretty cranky.

There are a lot of good speeches in here, and when he deals with literature, he comes off pretty sound. It is when he approaches something he "instinctively" fears that he is at his worst.

Some of these works don't read very well, because they require the audience feedback and the tone of voice and the interaction between the two. Brabury doesn't write speeches like William James or Mark Twain did, and then again, very few ever did, or will do so again.

Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars

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Bradbury Speaks...
A rare glimpse into the mind of a brilliant writer...
An Intimate Portrait in His Own Words.
What A Crazy Book
For Bradbury Fans

Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars
Ray Bradbury
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Essays | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0060585692
Release Date: 2006-08-15

Book Description

He is an American treasure, a clear-eyed fantasist without peer, and a literary icon who has created wonder for the better part of seven decades. On subjects as diverse as fiction, the future, film, famous personalities, and more, Ray Bradbury has much to say, as only he can say it.

Collected between these covers are memories, ruminations, opinions, prophecies, and philosophies from one of the most influential and admired writers of our time. As unique, unabashed, and irrepressible as the artist himself, here is an intimate portrait, painted with the master's own words, of the one and only Ray Bradbury—far more revealing than any mere memoir, for it opens windows not only into his life and work but also into his mind and heart.

Customer Reviews:

Bradbury Speaks..........2007-01-09

I got this for my daughter. It was just what she wanted. I got it quickly and it looked in brand new condition.

A rare glimpse into the mind of a brilliant writer..........2006-07-14

Ray Bradbury has perhaps been the most author who has most influenced my own writing. When I saw this book, I had to have it. What a wonderful glimpse into the mind of a man who can turn language into music, who can make prose sing like poetry. From the first time I checked out one of his books at the library--when I was around nine or ten years old--he taught me that it's possible to transcend the the borders between genres. What a wonder to get a glimpse into the years that make up his life. The only reason I put four instead of five stars is that I'd like to see a true autobiography, in his own words, that looks over the eighty-plus years he's walked the earth.

An Intimate Portrait in His Own Words........2006-01-19

This book is filled with fascinating stories of his life, his writings, the towns he loved, Paris & Los Angeles, in a series of short familiar essays "in which the writer draws on personal life experience, ideas and the world around him." The one he wrote in 2004, "Remembrance of Books Past," is especially interesting. It's about a fan letter from the great French Renaissance art historian, B. Berenson, and his novel FAHRENHEIT 451, which connected them fifty years ago into a remarkable friendship.

He wrote THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES in 1944 as a collection of stories. He became intersted in the Red Planet as a ten-year-old in Waukegan, Illinois, out looking at the night stars and the "special red fire burning in the dark" sky. He collected Buck Rogers comics, and his favorite was "Buck & Wilma on the Red Planet." He read Edgar Rice Burrough's THE GODS OF MARS. Then, after finishing school, he got a job working on an astronomical program for the Smithsonian Planetarium. He studied some photos of the mysterious universe taken by Lowell Observatory. The started pondering on the Big Bang Theory and the impossibility of so simple (and complex) a creation for our world.

In 2000, at the age of eighty, he remembers how all this early sky watching adn deep thinking had evolved into his science fiction writing. When he was twelve, he became fascinated with the pterodactyl and Tyrannosaurus rex dinosaur ride at the Chicago Century of Progress Fair. The 'Sinclair Oil's frozen-in-place paper-mache prehistoric monsters were on the world's first animatronic display. The moving platform provided a four-minute jaunt back to the Past.

First, he's soared into the future in his imagination toward the cosmos. Using the Grand Canyon as foundation for Space Station #1: Earth, his 'Chronicles' took him first to Space Station #1: the Moon. On to #3, Mars; then take off for the whole Universe. Our Space program since the 1960s has taken us there and back, now we're on a mission to Pluto, the last unexplored planet in the solar system.

When he fell "backward to the future," the dinosaurs "delivered me to tomorrow in ways I could not imagine." The memory of walking backward through Chicago's multimillion-year remembrance enabled him to write the screenplay for 'Moby Dick." From there, he was commissioned to develop a building at the New York World's Fair in 1964, with a ride through America's history. He was asked, "Can you create a four-hundred-year history of America in seventeen minutes flat, with a full symphony orchestra?" He was delivered "to the topmost interior of the United States Pavilion, where, gliding on a circular track as big as a football field, he wept in disbelief that by long ago stepping in reverse, he had fallen into Now."

That led into the grand Disney offer to develop the Epcot Center. Walt's Imagineers had a 50 million-dollar building to transform into the world of tomorrow. "Can you write a two-thousand-year communication history in twelve minutes flat with a full symphony orchestra?" He'd made a journey from cave to Ben Franklin's lightning shocks, to Apollo's Moon and beyond. He dedicates this volume "with love to my friends, Loren Eiseley and Aldous Huxley, whose essays showed me the way."

What A Crazy Book.......2005-11-08

My report was done on Bradbury Speaks Too soon from the cave, too far from the stars. At first this book looked very interesting. It said it would talk about space and how we would get to it and how far have we really come from earlier man. But I was proven wrong by the book. The book discusses Bradbury's life and how he met important people and interviews that went into the stuff described but it was really not at all about the future and space. That was the first sign of trouble.
I then began to actually read the book. Oh boy was that hard. The context of the literature is so hard to understand. This was one of the most challenging books I have ever read. It wasn't hard language it was just the way he used it. I struggled all the way through this book just trying to understand what the heck he meant. When I finally did start too understand the book was still a huge bore.
All he would write about was himself and for all I could read about this book it didn't say anywhere that this was an autobiographical book. It says that the stories are written by students and journalists that have Bradbury. But they all sound like they are his words. Like that they are all in first person and they don't come from an interviewer's point of view. This really ticked me off. This book was down right hard.
Now the stories themselves were really difficult. He wrote as if he had no personality. Giving only facts and making the stories dull and uninteresting. Half of them I couldn't even understand what they were about. They are so factual and have absolutely now pizzazz to them. This book gave me a sense of that no one knows what's going to happen to the human race. The book made me both sad and crazy. Crazy because he can't go directly to the point with out having a confusing remark that sent you off another road of thinking. So you would forget all about what you just read and have to start all over again. This is a book that requires too much attention from one person. All the stories talk about is how he met important people and how he likes the rain. Witch is really stupid. The book followed nothing from what you expect it to be. I would now read it if I were you.
If you want a really good book about the future past and present don't look here. But if you are looking for a dull boring something you would read if you had to this would be the book for you. I lost interest in the book since the first page but I had to keep going because it was for school. Other wise I wouldn't bother with the book. I mean even the really weird Hitchcock films were better that this book. I would sit through one thousand Star Wars Episode I movies if I could not read this book again. I would not suggest this book for my life!

For Bradbury Fans.......2005-11-04

Reading these essays, anecdotes, love letters and diatribes is like sitting in the room with Mr. Electrico himself. For Bradbury fans this is a sweet bottle of dandelion wine from the vintner himself. Much less formal than his usual writing, but much more personal because he just shoots from the hip here, and from the heart.

Average customer rating:

so so

Convoluted writing style

Beautifully written - but didn't engage me

Marlon Brando NOT Courtney's Grandpa

Wrenching

Borrowed Finery: A Memoir
Paula Fox
Manufacturer: Picador
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Authors | Arts & Literature | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
Fox, Paula | ( F ) | Authors & Illustrators, A-Z | Children's Books | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0312425198
Release Date: 2005-10-20

Amazon.com's Best of 2001

In this elegant, wrenching memoir, Paula Fox looks at her childhood with the same detached acceptance of life's arbitrary cruelties that informs such acclaimed novels as Desperate Characters. Born in 1923, she was abandoned at a Manhattan foundling home by her alcoholic father at the insistence of her panic-stricken, 19-year-old mother. Paul and Elsie Fox were in no way prepared to take on the responsibility of a child, although they couldn't leave her alone either. Fox's austere narrative unflinchingly describes the couple swooping down on their daughter, who was being raised in upstate New York by a kindly minister, for visits that were as alarming as they were intermittent. For reasons best known to themselves (Fox does not attempt to analyze their motives), they removed her from the minister's home when she was 6, then bounced her among relatives, schools, and their own disordered care for the next 12 years, from Hollywood and Long Island to Cuba and Montreal. The restraint with which Fox describes these traumas is a reproach to all those maudlin memoirs of family dysfunction that have been so prevalent in recent years. She demonstrates that you can write about painful experiences honestly without wallowing in self-pity, and her prose here is as perfectly calibrated as it is in her novels. Thank goodness that this sad story is leavened by a running counterpoint of short passages showing young Paula discovering the pleasure of words and the power of literature. Though she too had an unwanted baby at an early age, the book closes with a moving scene of the author's reunion with the daughter she gave up for adoption. --Wendy Smith

Book Description

Born in the 1920s to nomadic, bohemian parents, Paula Fox is left at birth in a Manhattan orphanage, then cared for by a poor yet cultivated minister in upstate New York. Her parents, however, soon resurface. Her handsome father is a hard-drinking screenwriter who is, for young Paula, "part ally, part betrayer." Her mother is given to icy bursts of temper that punctuate a deep indifference. Never sharing more than a few moments with his daughter, Fox's father allows her to be shuttled from New York City, where she lives with her passive Spanish grandmother, to Cuba, where she roams freely on a relative's sugarcane plantation, to California, where she finds herself cast upon Hollywood's seedy margins. The thread binding these wanderings is the "borrowed finery" of the title of this astonishing memoir of one writer's unusual beginnings, which was instantly recognized as a modern classic.

Customer Reviews:

so so.......2006-09-19

Never got hooked on this book. Continued to read and finished the book because she is Courtney Love's grandmother and wanted some insight in that regard. I thought it was boring and all over the place. Best memoir I ever read is "The Glass Castle."

Convoluted writing style.......2006-03-14

Returned the book. Started to read the book but within the first cou0ple of pages couldn't get past the word-jams and author's long convoluted sentence structure.

Beautifully written - but didn't engage me.......2004-10-03

"Born in the twenties to nomadic, bohemian parents, Paula Fox was left at birth in a Manhattan orphanage..." What a range of people she had caring for her over her growing up years, what neglect at times, what an interesting range of geographic locations she lived in during her childhood. This "memoir" seemed to hold such promise, but really I found it a chore to read. A collection of memories, not always connected up, it never hooked me in, leaving me eager to find out what happened next. It also completely lacks any analysis - of the characters, events, Paula's reaction to them, the impact on her life, etc. Its main redeeming feature for me was its brevity - had it been longer, I may well have given up. Maybe if I was a fan of her novels (certainly her memoir is well written), or interested in other members of her family (apparently she is Courtney Love's grandmother), I would have been more motivated to enjoy rather than just tolerate this book.

Marlon Brando NOT Courtney's Grandpa.......2004-08-14

Great book, but the customer review alleging that Marlon Brando sired Courtney Love's mom is untrue. In an exclusive interview with The Oregonian, Paula's daughter and Courtney's mother Linda Carroll angrily confirms that her father is NOT Marlon Brando.

Wrenching.......2003-06-27

Hard to take all this in, how Paula Fox not only survived, but in some ways thrived and lived to write a memoir of her wrenching childhood. Her nutso parents (loving but out-od-his-depth father, cold and rejecting mother; both more interested in their own lives than in her) dropped her at an orphanage shortly after her birth in 1923. A series of mostly kindly people passed her on down the line, but of course there were scars.
From the distance of old age, Fox writes with careful prose and elegant understatement about her unimaginably tragic youth.
Beautiful, and very, very sad.

Average customer rating:

BORROWED FINERY - A MEMOIR
PAULA FOX
Manufacturer: HARPER COLLINS/THE BOOK PEOPLE
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000SFK6X8

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BORROWED FINERY: A MEMOIR.

Manufacturer: Ted Smart
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 0007673434

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BORROWED FINERY: A MEMOIR.
Paula. Fox
Manufacturer: Ted Smart
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0007736479

Elegancia Prestada / Borrowed Finery (Literatura Y Memoria / Literature and Memory)

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Elegancia Prestada / Borrowed Finery (Literatura Y Memoria / Literature and Memory)
Paula Fox
Manufacturer: Turner
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Women | Specific Groups | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Memoirs | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Spanish | Foreign Language Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Spanish | Foreign Language Nonfiction | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

General | Biografías y memorias | Libros en español | Formats | Books

Memorias | Biografías y memorias | Libros en español | Formats | Books

Borrowed Finery: A Memoir. (Books: growing up alone).: An article from: American Scholar

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Borrowed Finery: A Memoir. (Books: growing up alone).: An article from: American Scholar
Rachel Hadas
Manufacturer: Phi Beta Kappa Society
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
ASIN: B0008EQ60G
Release Date: 2005-07-29

Book Description

This digital document is an article from American Scholar, published by Phi Beta Kappa Society on January 1, 2002. The length of the article is 1734 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Borrowed Finery: A Memoir. (Books: growing up alone).
Author: Rachel Hadas
Publication: American Scholar (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2002
Publisher: Phi Beta Kappa Society
Volume: 71 Issue: 1 Page: 148(3)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

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Borrowed Finery : A Memoir
Paula Fox
Manufacturer: Henry Holt & Company, LLC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000KTA7J0

Book Description

Following Elite 115 – which described the composition of Napoleon's military and civil 'households', and Marshal Berthier's army general headquarters – this title offers an intimate glimpse of the Emperor's entourage in the field. Centred on the Waterloo campaign in 1815, it draws comparisons with his earlier triumphs. From the testimony of his trusted servants, the text draws a vivid picture of his daily routines on the march. Of particular interest are new details of Napoleon's tented camp HQ from 1812; and a further selection of the striking uniforms worn by his closest attendants.

Elite 115 - Napoleon's Imperial Headquarters (1) Organization and Personnel

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Elite 115 - Napoleon's Imperial Headquarters (1) Organization and Personnel
Ronald Pawley
Manufacturer: Osprey Publishing, Limited
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000TZ36QQ

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Napoleon's Imperial Headquarters: v. 1
Ronald Pawly
Manufacturer: Osprey
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000K2SETM

Book Description

The era of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal was a time of depression and despair, economic rebirth and renewal, and mobilization for a war spanning two oceans. Richard Polenberg's introduction to this new volume provides an engaging historical and biographical overview of the period. This is followed by over 45 topically arranged primary sources that provide readers with a rich context in which to understand FDR's multi-faceted role as President, reformer, policymaker, and Commander-in-Chief.

Customer Reviews:

imbalanced but strong.......2003-04-26

According to its title, the book compiles documents from 1933-1945, the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but the contents are strongly tilted toward the 1933-1941 period. Maybe that's justified, given Polenberg's clear focus on domestic social and political issues and given, of course, that the New Deal period consituted more years than World War II. But I felt more than a little disappointed by the brief treatment the war effort received. And the documents pertaining to the war focused largely on Japanese internment and the issue of bombing the concentration camps. These are both important topics and worthy of attention, particularly the latter which I fear is sometimes overlooked (and which is in many ways a telling issue). FDR's Four Freedoms speech is not included, nor the Atlantic Charter, nor the Pearl Harbor speech. The book would definitely have profited from inclusion of these documents and perhaps also of documents pertaining to strategy or military policy.

Nevertheless, the book has three strong points that make it worthwhile. One, Polenberg includes a wide variety of primary sources: speeches, photographs, Supreme Court decisions, letters, posters, poems, songs, press conferences, etc. The sources also come from a range of people, left and right, "large and small." This makes the book particularly useful as a teaching tool for showing students how to tackle primary documents of all types.

Two, in the book's imbalance lies its strongest element--it covers the Depression and the New Deal thoroughly, offering new perspectives and carving new dimensions. We hear from the Roosevelts, both Franklin and Eleanor. We read the views of writers John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair, and of Roosevelt opponents Charles Coughlin and Huey Long. Administration officials provide their opinions on New Deal legislation (including the frequently ignored Federal Theatre Project). Dorothea Lange's photographs depict the misery and poverty of the Depression. Mexican-American, African-American, and Native American viewpoints also receive attention. Polenberg successfully draws documents to paint a multi-dimensional, in-depth portrait of the 1930s.

And three, Polenberg concludes with a fine bibliography for further reading on the various topics of spanned by the documents.

All in all, despite the weak coverage of World War II, the book is eminently useful for readers interested in the period and especially for teachers and students. Had Polenberg covered the war years in the same detail as the Depression/New Deal, this would be a thoroughly excellent sourcebook. Nevertheless, it is a worthwhile book and could function quite well in an AP history course, or as a complement to reading, say, David Kennedy's Freedom from Fear.

Average customer rating:
The Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-1945: A Brief History with Documents (The Bedford Series in History and Culture)
Richard D. Polenberg
Manufacturer: Bedford/St. Martin's
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OT30SQ

Book Description

A dramatic story of the interplay between environment and economy in New England.

Customer Reviews:

Came for the topic, stayed for the author.......2005-02-17

Ms Muir is a great storyteller. I was interested in the topic and prepared to slog through boring text to learn something, but this was AMAZING. Read like a novel. She sees inter-relationships and draws conclusions which taught me a lot. Now I want to read everything she's written. I was sorry when I finished this book.

Not just for New Englanders.......2003-01-25

Other reviewers have discussed the virtues of the book, so I will only add that the lessons to be learned from this well written and fascinating study are relevant to the entire planet, not just New England. As such, the book is highly recommended to anyone anywhere who is interested in mankind's relationship to the environment and its effects on culture and economics.

An Intriguing Glimpse at New Englandýs History.......2002-10-31

Using a pond near her home in Newton, MA as a backdrop, Diana Muir weaves a compelling view of New England history, which she argues is a series of ecological crises.

From pre-Columbian times, Muir says, New England was populated by individuals struggling on a land that was not conducive to making a living. Radical solutions to unsolvable problems were their only escape. In the 1790s, when farming was the only occupation, a growing population and a soil spent by generations of misuse, resulted in a dearth of farmable land. With no prospects and no future, individuals like Eli Whitney and Thomas Blanchard, were forced to look for creative solutions to society's problems and set in motion an industrial revolution.

I was particularly intrigued by the story of Frederick Tudor, the man who in 1806 introduced ice to Martinique. It is one thing to sell ice to people who because of their location, understand the concept. It is quite another, to sell ice to people who have never experienced it, to say nothing about the practical necessities of ice houses to warehouse the product.

His father's real estate speculation losses left Tudor with nothing but ambition and a house with a pond in Saugus, MA. He succeeded after two difficult decades. There was always a wrinkle to be solved before a fortune could be built. Iceboxes had to be designed and then marketed in southern ports to people who had to be taught how to preserve it.

This phenomenon explains why there so many Crystal and Silver Lakes dot the New England landscape, relics of an enterprising age. Savvy ice dealers understood that attractive names sell products. For a brief period even Muir's Bullough's Pond was briefly renamed Silver Lake.

Diana Muir e-mailed me twice during the past two years introducing her book to me. Having read her book, I am grateful for her persistence. If you enjoy reading unique looks at our history, I implore not to wait for her to contact you. Read her book; you will not regret it.

on reflection, dazzling.......2002-08-02

This is one of the best books I have ever read- period! At the core of the book is Ms. Muir's message that we are part of nature, not separate from or above nature, and we have a great responsibility to maintain the integrity of the environment. Granted, this message is not new. Where this book is very different is how Ms. Muir leads up to this message. She shows how the New England landscape changed from one where farming dominated to one that was a mixture of many different types of mills and factories. You learn the consequences of everything that was done along the way: the consequences to fish and birds of damming rivers; the consequences to forests and to the air we breath of heavy logging; the consequences of catching too many of one type of fish, etc. What is great about this book is that Ms. Muir does not deal in hazy generalities. She takes you step by step and shows you specifically how certain actions cause certain changes in the environment, often unforseen. There is nothing simplistic in her observations and she knows there are no easy answers. She lays out the data for you and you can come to your own conclusions. But what really takes this book to another level is the fascinating biographical information that Ms. Muir provides concerning the many, many New Englanders that invented the machines of the Industrial Revolution and kept the economy vibrant as the importance of agriculture diminished. The way this book is put together is very unusual, due to the combination of all of the above factors and in the space of 248 pages you will learn a great deal of information. The research Ms. Muir must have done in writing this book is staggering and her knowledge across many different areas is amazing. Don't miss reading this book.

breaks new ground.......2002-07-25

It is hard to imagine how Reflections in Bullough's Pond could have been better written. Diana Muir gives an account of the interplay between New England's economic history and its environment in a lapidary prose which never leaves the reader behind. By the end of the book we are enlightened about the ebb and flow of these matters over the five hundred-odd years from early European settlement to modern times without ever being overwhelmed, for Ms Muir always wears her erudition lightly.

She breaks new ground in her treatment of the environment as both an economic resource and as a complex-often vulnerable-amalgam of ecosystems. Her thesis is that we are living on capital, be it fossil fuel, topsoil or forest-she is particularly compelling on the vulnerable biochemistry of these last. Unusually, however, Ms Muir is scrupulous in her use of statistics and fastidious in her argument. She never seeks to undermine the legitimacy of the economic impulse, though she does not flinch from her conclusion: an argument for restraint in economic activity and population.

Nor does she lose sight of the propensity of ecosystems to renew themselves, albeit often in new forms: she is pleased-almost amused-by the return of the beaver and the moose, while regretting the extinction of the elm and the emergence of local spruce monocultures. Indeed Ms Muir expresses herself more forcefully on the loss of flora than fauna. Perhaps this is because the long life cycles of the former make it harder to take an optimistic view of their capacity to renew themselves. Alternatively it may be because the collapse of agriculture in New England following the opening up of the West, has stimulated the return to southern New England of so many species formerly evicted to Canada.

Reflections in Bullough's Pond is no naïve elegy for a Paradise Lost; it never loses sight of a human interplay with the landscape which long antedates industrialisation, not to say European settlement. In a particularly ingenious section of the book, Ms Muir reminds us that in the middle of the nineteenth century, the courts and legislatures altered common law doctrines of liability to free up industrial activity. This reflected the climate of the times. Ms Muir argues that the climate of our own times may well give rise to more extensive liability concepts to restrain the corporations, notions very much with the tail wind of popular and professional thinking.

Given the book's generosity and elegance, it seems curmudgeonly to cavil at any part of it. But a couple of issues do arise. First forests. Since the invention of agriculture, we have cleared them for the simple reason that we have better uses for the land. This has been going on in the Old World for millennia. Of course there have been local environmental disasters, eg in North Africa and Mesopotamia, but nothing sufficiently general to justify veneration of forests as a precautionary measure. This is an artefact of late-twentieth century sentiment in the New World. There such virgin forests as have not lost within living memory are being destroyed even now, thus the local salience of the issue. Over the past fifteen years their defenders have sought to enlist support by arguing that they served one or another vital purpose: producing oxygen, acting as feedstock for drugs, now Ms Muir points to their role in topsoil. The first two arguments are infrequently heard these days. As to the last, let me point out that where I grew up in the eastern part of England, the ground was cleared eight or nine hundred years ago, but the topsoil remains sufficiently fertile for the local farmers to get out record yields.

I was also left uncertain as to the course Ms Muir might prescribe for the several billion who have never seen Bullough's Pond, and whose habitats have been profoundly altered by economic activity for millenia rather than centuries. The residents of Asia's great river valleys cleared the forests long before Columbus saw the New World. They have to eat-with luck raise themselves above thoughts of the next meal. Ms Muir has practical suggestions as to how the courts might restrain US corporations, but nothing on how to restrain the aspirations of those who dream of a fraction of American prosperity. I suspect she is wise enough to know that there is nothing to be done on this score. In a rare nod towards the nether reaches of environmental alarmism, she hints that she expects nature to impose population restraint, if we do not. I am more sanguine. In whatever might come to pass as in what has come before, we will wade through. As we must.

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Reflections in Bullough's Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England.(Review) (book review): An article from: Conservation Matters
Debra Simes
Manufacturer: Conservation Law Foundation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
ASIN: B0008JAYE0
Release Date: 2005-07-28

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Conservation Matters, published by Conservation Law Foundation on June 22, 2000. The length of the article is 936 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Reflections in Bullough's Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England.(Review) (book review)
Author: Debra Simes
Publication: Conservation Matters (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 22, 2000
Publisher: Conservation Law Foundation
Volume: 7 Issue: 2 Page: 34

Article Type: Book Review

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