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An introduction to the economist Adam Smith. This volume discusses: institutional structure as a key to growth; virtue, citizenship and civilized monarchies; Smith's reservations about the age of commerce - the question of alienation; and Adam Smith and liberalism. ... Read more

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The daily life of a cowboy in the Old West was not as glamorous as legend would have it. Cowboys endured an endless cycle of hard, dirty, dangerous work, from the spring roundup through the cattle drive, the end of the trail, and the return south. Still, the romantic and appealing aspects of life in the Old West have created in the cowboy an indelible American icon. (20020901) ... Read more

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This collection of essays is in honor of noted theologian Donald G. Bloesch written by former students and colleagues representing seven countries. Writing from an Asian perspective, the contributors examine the relationship between theology and culture as found in Scripture, theological thought, the life and work of the church, and in the work of Donald G. Bloesch. Topics range from biblical studies to a consideration of the current emphasis upon spirituality. Evangelism and mission are discussed in considerable detail with specific reference to the rapidly growing church in Korea. The phenomenon of post-modernism and its influence upon modern theology is evaluated. ... Read more

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12 all-new magical stories by Charles de Lint, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Tanya Huff, and more

Faerie folk have cast their magical spell over people the world around. Now some of today's most imaginative fantasists explore into the heart of this enchantment with twelve all-original stories that will bespell their spells on readers of all ages. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Solid stories all the way through
Faerie Tales is a volume of twelve short stories "about the folk of Faerie as they mix in mortal affairs". I love short stories, and am continually drawn to collections like this. It's hard to find a collection where all the stories are of good quality - this is one of them. An excellent read, with authors putting thier own spin on the old tales.

An eclectic mix of tales staring the Wee Folk
Faeries, the Fair Folk, the Old Ones: no matter what name they take, Fairies have long fascinated us, holding our collective imagination in their small, yet inescapable grasp. In this anthology DAW presents 12 original tales, some funny, some sad, all about fairies. They include:

***Sweet Forget-Me-Not by Charles de Lint
*** The September People by Tim Waggoner
*** Judgment by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
*** Changeling by John Helfers
*** Yellow Tide Foam by Sarah A. Hoyt
*** He Said, Sidhe Said by Tanya Huff
*** A Very Special Relativity by Jim Fiscus
*** Witches'-Broom, Apple Soon by Jane Lindskold
*** Wyvern by Wen Spencer
*** A Piece of Flesh by Adam Stemple
*** The Filial Fiddler by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
*** The Stolen Child by Michelle West

Really, this book gets 3.5 stars in my eyes. It is not the best DAW anthology out there. Many of the stories use repetitive themes. One third of the stories deal with changelings and stolen children. There's so many other things the fairies are known for, why dwell on this one point? Also, Stolen Child and Witches'-Broom, Apple Soon were both clinkers by usually good writers. However, to balance this, a Piece of Flesh and Sweet Forget-Me-Not are both bloody brilliant, the type of haunting story that sticks in your brain long after you're done reading the book.

This is more of a mixed bag than the usual DAW excellence, but it's still well worth buying in my opinion.

Good retelling of old tales
FAERIE TALES does the near-impossible; it retells old, shopworn tales, giving them life and up-to-the-minute relevancy in the process.

Sometimes, the oldest plotlines are the best.That surely is the case here; the absolute, #1, best story here, bar none, is John Helfers' "Changeling."This uses one of the oldest plotlines anywhere (that of an Elf baby being exchanged for a human baby) to explore the problems of adoption in a brand new light.The Elfling never quite "fits," and when he finds out the truth of his birth and adoption, goes to look for his birth parents.And what he finds . . . well, let's just say that I was reasonably sure how it'd end, but Mr. Helfers did an excellent job in keeping me riveted to the page until the story was complete.

Five stars plus with the highest recommendation possible for "Changeling."

Two other stories were very good, and nearly up to Mr. Helfers' in quality.These were the stories by Charles de Lint and Tim Waggoner.Both of these stories were interesting, well thought out, and I enjoyed them very much.Five stars for each of them.

I didn't really care for Ms. Huff's story or Ms. West's story, but other folks might like them.I'd give those stories a three rating (so-so), with the remaining stories all three and a half to four ratings.Which is why the anthology gets an overall four-star rating.

And while I'd recommend the anthology itself anyway, I highly recommend Mr. Helfers' exceptional story, "Changeling."Read it.It's very good, probably one of the best short stories I've read all year. (And I've read a whole lot of good ones.)

Barb Caffrey

twelve delightful fantasies
FAERIE TALES contains twelve delightful stories from a virtual fantasist who's who.Each contribution entertains the audience with its enjoyable link between humanity and faerie lands that make the latter seem genuine.Many of the stories actually provide deep messages, which normally are surprising for shorts yet with authors like De Lint, Rusch, Hoyt, Huff, and Spencer, etc. it is to be expected.The other contributors are also top rate (Waggoner, Helfers, Fiscus, Lindskold, Stemple, Scarborough, and West) furbishing winners as Greenberg and Davis obviously got the top guns to provide a tale.Some inputs are amusing while others contain serious tones, but all are fun.Fans of fantasies will appreciate this strong compilation in which each contribution holds the bar of excellence at the highest levels.An aside to Mr. Greenberg the guru of anthologies: looking forward to seeing how you can top this treasure.

Harriet Klausner ... Read more

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United States West Coast: An Environmental History explores the interplay of ecology, economy, and culture throughout the history of the region of North America where the waters drain to the Pacific Ocean.

Synthesizing the most recent and insightful studies on the region, United States West Coast portrays environmental change in the far western United States from the emergence of humans in the Pacific Northwest (about 12,000 years ago), to the rise of European colonial trade networks, to the era of industrialization and urbanization, to present day activism and public policy responses to environmental damage. By investigating how humans interact with their nonhuman surroundings across a specific expanse that encompasses all kinds of landscapes, cultures, and commercial enterprises, this insightful volume shows just how interdependent the relationship between people and their environment is.

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From The Inside Flap:
During the years 1941-1942, Ansel Adams was employed by the U.S. Department of the Interior to take a series of photographs in the Western national parks. These photo-graphs were part of the Mural Project, a series of decorative murals created for the Department's new museum in Washington, D.c. at the request of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Ickes learned of Ansel Adams' work and decided that photographic murals would be an appropriate addition to the conventional, painted murals already commissioned for the Project. The Mural Project offered Ansel Adams a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel at government expense and photograph the national parks. By November 1942 he had completed a series of 225 signed exhibition prints; however, World War II intervened and the Mural Project was put on hold. It was never resumed after the war, and Adams' photographs were filed away, all but forgotten. This volume marks the first time the Mural Project photographs have been presented to the general public. These are monumental photographs, an impressive addition to Adams' extensive body of work on the national parks. 85 black and white images are reproduced here, using the advanced printing techniques Adams developed in the maturity of his career. The photographs are accompanied by excerpts from the wilderness writings and speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, an early champion of the national park system. A preface by the present director of the National Park Service, William Penn Mott, and an introduction by Peter Wright and john Armor, the compilers of this volume, outline the history of the Mural Project and the rediscovery of these timeless photographs. The publication of The Mural Project fulfills the promise these photographs have held for almost 50 years, and is a major addition to the legacy of one of America's greatest photographers, Ansel Adams. ... Read more

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Western plants have been used for thousands of years in healing. This book carefully explains the use of 115 plants in healing. Each plant has a color photograph, plant description, traditional uses, active compounds and recommended uses. The second edition has many new color photographs and a new section, sacred not psychedelic. This book is unlike any other because spirituality is presented as a necessary part of healing. Recommended uses of each plant are given, making the use of the plants easy. ... Read more

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A True Healer
I am personally acquainted with the author, Cecilia Garcia. She is a valued figure in the Chumash tribe. She is a true healer and is a great source of tribal history. She lives and breathes her culture and has helped so many. This publication says so much about the true resource that she is! Well done! ... Read more

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A former double agent for East and West Germany recounts his recruitment into the Stasi--the Ministry of State Security--his disillusionment with the Stasi, the privileged underground of fear and intimidation in East Germany, and more. ... Read more

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Werner Stiller was a double agent and betrayed the infamous Stasi !!
Stiller became a double agent and betrayed the infamous Stasi The Ministry of State Security of the GDR . (and he lived to tell about it in this book) His escape from East Germany is regarded as one of the most spectacular spy scandals in the Cold War.

Stiller ..named a lot of names and became of some value to the West.
The dialogue is done quite well and it is most interesting when Stiller is still a committed Socialist.

He escapesthrough East Berlin to West Germany.

Allegedly he was also quite a ladies man. So much so that it is very funny. See Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi's Spy-Tech World ... Read more

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Originally published in 1918. This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies.All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.Amazon.com Review
Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about their ownabilities. But The Education of Henry Adams is surely one of the fewmasterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. Theauthor, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. Both hisgrandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. presidents. His father, arelative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court of St. James. But young Henry, born in Boston in 1838, wasdestined for a walk-on role in his nation's history--and seemed alarminglyaware of the fact from the time he was an adolescent.

It gets worse. For the author could neither match his exalted ancestors nordismiss them as dusty relics--he was an Adams, after all, formed from thesame 18th-century clay. "The atmosphere of education in which he lived wascolonial," we are told,

revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though hewere steeped, from his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor ofpolitical crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature;the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; fornumberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as athing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they sawno reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; theduty was unchanged.

He was not, by any measure but his own, a failure. And the proof of thepudding is The Education of Henry Adams itself, which remains amongthe oddest and most enlightening books in American literature. It containsthousands of memorable one-liners about politics, morality, culture, andtransatlantic relations: "The American mind exasperated the European as abuzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest." There are astonishing glimpses ofthe high and mighty: "He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughedface; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kidgloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any otherfamiliar Americanism..." (That would be Abraham Lincoln; the"melancholy function" his Inaugural Ball.) But most of all, Adams'sbook is a brilliant account of how his own sensibility came to be. Aliterary landmark from the moment it first appeared, theAutobiography confers upon its author precisely that prize he felthad always eluded him: success. --James Marcus ... Read more

Customer Reviews (45)

"His humor was glow, like iron at dull heat; his blow was elementary, like the thrash of a whale."
I'm half inclined to blame this book for choking up my reviewing agenda. It took me a very long time to read, and also a very long time to review. I found I needed quite a bit of time to capture my reading notes, and to try to come to terms with what I had read.

And, to be truthful, I'm not really sure I have succeeded. Despite all the time this book took me, and despite my notes, I'm not really sure I have the feeling I really read the thing. I feel as though I wish I had. But have been tested and found wanting-- or something like that.

This is an autobiography, and as a reader Adams' habit of describing himself in the third person is quite jarring. I suppose this is because it is still written like a journal, or an autobiography, which really are quite first person forms. Third person voice implies a measure of description, a kind of central point. Marrying the two kept causing me to draw myself out of the text, sputtering. I never really got used to it & had to relax again into it every time I picked it up at night.

The subject matter is fascinating. Unlike some of other reviewers, I was fascinated by the minutae of the time. I would have rather Adams had stayed with that material. The book jumps around quite a bit in his life, and I found myself making liberal use of both introduction and footnotes in order to sort out where I was.

He was a sad man, who mocked himself. The use of the third person voice seems to hold off any possibility of comfort or justification. I'm not sure if I really got a look of Adams as a man-- don't know enough about his life to judge. But it was a very vivid image of someone.

I'd recommend it, I suppose. With caveats. I'm still trying to get my head around it, to be honest.

I just don't enjoy it - is that wrong?
Who am I to say that this is not a great book? Numerous scholars have called it one of the best non-fiction books ever. But man, what a grind it is. Now that I've plowed through about half of the book, I'm throwing in the towel.

To my tiny, contemporary brain, this book is hopelessly ponderous and self-indulgent. The constant use of the third person and the education theme wore thin in the initial chapters. Perhaps I've misread him, perhaps he's poking fun at himself, but the author sounds truly insufferable. Even when he's being self depricating, it rings false.

There are some interesting nuggets in this book, like the descriptions of the 1860's London social scene, a few witticisms, and some of his travel experiences as a young man. But, I felt that the effort I had to expend to dig to them was not worth it. The book is a tough trek, and your companion for the trip, Mr. James, makes it all the longer by prattling on, sneering at the unwashed masses, and bragging about his family.

Worth revisiting
I tried reading this book in my twenties.Couldn't do it.Too much of it was inaccessible to me.The book, which was written privately for his friends, assumes a certain knowledge of events that most readers, understandably, will not have.It also is deeply metaphysical and reflective and written from the perspective of someone who has lived a full and varied life, which, well, bored me.If I had written a review of it then, it probably wouldn't have been a very positive one.

But, when you're forty, half of you belongs to the past, as the saying goes, so I picked up this book again.I loved it.

Adams offers probably the best insight into the century that transformed America of any author from his time.He must have been astounded-especially given his revolutionary heritage-to witness the Sons of Liberty turn into empire builders, all within the span of a few generations.His political observations especially often are prescient.He saw, it seems, the coming of war in Europe and German nationalism.In fact, many of his observations in general are prescient, when they're not too inscrutable.

Not a book for everyone, but definitely a book worth visiting or revisiting, if you think you might be interested.

Would also recommend The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865 and New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915 by Van Wyck Brooks as companion pieces.

The Intellect and History of Henry Adams
The Kindle edition of THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS conveniently provides the reader the opportunity to read one of the most fascinating autobiographies that deciphers the history in which Henry Adams lived.Originally printed privately in 1907 but published in 1918 and later earning a Pulitzer Prize and accolades as the world's great autobiographies, the book is a long conversation, which stretches limitless boundaries and eclipses various topics from the history of science that included geology and anthropology as well as the humanities, history, literature, and philosophy.But one will also see Adams's inner qualities as a self-reflective, intelligent and narcissistic man.

Undoubtedly, Adams's narrative is a stark reflection of his life that was immensely enriched with history and buttressed between intellect and inquiry or so-called "galloping mind."With the mere fact that his great-grandfather was John Adams and his grandfather was John Quincy Adams, two of the most illustrious presidents in US history, and his father, Charles Francis Adams, served as President Lincoln's appointed American minister to the Court of St. James, there would be no escaping the political history that was engraved within his pedigree.Having lived throughout the nineteenth century and observing all aspects of history-in-the-making during the period of the Republic and the Gilded Age, Adams attempts to examine the most pivotal parts of history.However, as one reads, there is a somewhat limited and ambiguous quality of Adams's understanding of the East, which falls precisely under the category of the straight and narrow and highly romanticized and misconstrued.

After reading THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS, one may see that learning is a never-ending cycle.Although parts of the book appear dated, there is plenty of food for thought within his narrative that shows how Adams's education clearly resonates the most pinnacle part of intellectual history that was the Enlightenment.

And your point is ...?
I may be the very first person to make this comparison, but this book reminds me of the play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead."In that play, the two title characters wander about the stage while great events are taking place, looking unsuccessfully for a role to play.By the end, of course, they are dead, and have learned nothing, influenced nothing, and contributed nothing.

I could easily describe "The Education of Henry Adams" with the exact same words (substituting the singular Henry Adams for the plural Rosencrantz and Guildenstern).

Adams did not intend the book to be a biography, and it certainly isn't, if only because it completely omits about twenty years of his life.And if it HAD been a biography, it would have been an unusually boring one, since he didn't lead a particularly interesting life.He didn't intend it to be a history book either, since he was not a close or first-hand observer of most of the significant historical events that occurred during his lifetime.The most important event during his lifetime was the Civil War, and he didn't even spend that time in the United States!

Adams apparently intended this book to be a book about education, but if he had anything noteworthy to say on the subject, I certainly missed it - and I'm an educator!In fact, after relating almost every event he chose to describe in the book, he ends up saying something like, "This did nothing to contribute to my education."

The last major event he talks about in the book is the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904.After visiting the fair and seeing the prototypes of the new inventions that would dominate the social and technological changes in the developed world during the 20th century, he concludes that time has passed him by and that there will be no room for people like him in the future.The reader may well wonder why he didn't reach the same conclusion about the era in which he lived his life, since he seems to have stood outside the scene of action, puzzling over the meanings of the events.

If your interest is 19th-century American history, there are scores of better books.If your interest is in biography, there are hundreds, and probably thousands, of better biographies.If your interest is education, almost any competently written book ever written on the subject will be more thought-provoking than this one is.

And this is the greatest non-fiction book of the twentieth century?What on earth were people thinking? ... Read more

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Hand signed publicity photo of actor Adam West.It comes with a Certificate of Authenticity from North American Rarities. ... Read more

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In 1976, Robert Adams shot "Fort Collins, Colorado," a nighttime picture of a lone tree in a Colorado parking lot, the crescent moon hanging in the sky above. More than 30 years earlier, Ansel Adams had captured "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico," showing a magnificent vista of desert scrub and clustered buildings, snow-capped mountains in the distance, the full moon majestically presiding in the expansive sky overhead. These two pictures could be neither more different nor more similar; nor could the younger Adams have made his photograph without knowledge of his greatly admired predecessor's. If Ansel Adams created singular images in search of a platonic ideal of nature, Robert Adams explored repetition and conformity; both were responding, in their own personal and aesthetic way, to the landscape of the American West. The first book to juxtapose bodies of work by these two 20th-century master photographers, Reinventing the West reveals how their photographs reflect changing attitudes toward the western landscape and the natural world.

Edited by Joseph N. Newland.
Essays by Allison Kemmerer and John Stilgoe.
Introduction by Adam D. Weinberg.

Paperback, 83 pages, 39 b&w ... Read more