Austin Reviews

This book is by far not the best book that I have read on pirates. It is written more for a woman who is feeling bad about her sexuality. The book is an effort to list every woman, fictional and otherwise, that has ever had a role in maritime history. The book starts out by talking about ancient gods (yes, female gods) that related to the sea. This discussion is better saved for a book on mythology because it was a good summary of female gods but it did not pertain to pirates. The book moves on and talks about female pirates through the ages all over the world. While this is somewhat informative I believe that the significance of these woman pirates in history is way overstated. Female pirates were very few and far between, and many really shouldn't be considered pirates. The best part of the book was the discussion of the most netorious women pirates, Mary Read and Anne Bonny. These two chapters were interesting and informative but they were also burried in the book. I would suggest a book that includes but is not limited to woman pirates because the fact is that there were very few woman pirates in history. The last quarter of the book focused on the politics of the Jolly Roger. This section helped to save the book but it often repeated and contradicted the first part of the book. I noticed a few inaccurate statements in this section, but on the whole this section was well done. This book is not a total waste of time, but it gets off topic and overstates things in my opinion. Women have played a huge part in world history, just not as pirates.

According to Vail the time span recorded in the Grand Canyon is only 6,000 years and its rocks are a record of the Biblical 6 days of creation and Noah's flood. Vail has given us a book that is based on absolute dependence on a group of sacred writings as infallible - rather than to geological science.

Extraordinary interpretations require extraordinary evidence, and in this regard this book is an extraordinary failure. For example,Vail asserts,"... in the creationist's view, the carving of the Canyon would have taken place when the sedimentary layers were still soft, allowing the catastrophic erosion process to quickly and easily cut through the layers."Today, the Canyon walls stand up to 1600 m high in a series of cliffs and benches. The benches form where softer rocks, such as the Bright Angel Shale, occur.The cliffs are formed of harder,more resistant rocks such as the Redwall Limestone.Given that these rocks formed from muds-clay-rich in the case of the shales, and calcium carbonate-rich in the case of the limestones-the onus is on Vail to demonstrate that weak, plastic muds could stand in such enormous cliffs while being catastrophically eroded.

It would require a another whole book to discuss all the absurdities propounded by the authors of this book. However, the chapter on fossils offers several particularly egregious examples. Vail illustrates excellent examples of trace fossils (he calls them "fossilized worm tubes") in the Bright Angel Shale.These are the products of marine animals that were filter feeders and deposit feeders living in the mud of a Cambrian sea, just as their modern counterparts do today. Many other horizons within the rocks of the Grand Canyon are replete with such examples of trace fossils and bioturbation, indicating that these fauna lived and died in place, in the sediments in which we now find their traces, rather than being transported there by catastrophic flooding.

This book is an example of a new, slick strategy by Biblical literalists to proselytize using a beautifully illustrated, multiauthored book about a world-famous, spectacular locality.

The beautiful photographs of the Grand Canyon in this book are attractive. However the text pretends to discuss the geology of the area but does so only from the point of view its biblical literalist authors. It asserts that the Canyon and most of its rocks formed in Noah's Flood, 4,000 years ago. This book espouses both bad science and bad theology under one cover.

I ordered this book after seeing similar ones in the bookstore that were far more expensive. However, I was really disappointed when I recieved it -- there are only a few pages in each category (caterers, flowers, cakes, etc.) and then lots of blank pages. Frankly, I will be returning this -- it's not worth $12.95.

This book has a lot of points, but I feel that it is not put together well.

This book is rife with factual errors which render it useless as a reference volume, (its intended purpose). Birth dates, death dates, birth and death places, career histories and the current state of an artist's career are so frequently wrong as to require anything stated as fact in this book to be double checked.

Even worse, the book's original edition contained substantial passages reprinted, largely intact and without attribution, from Bruce Cook's "Listen to the Blues," most notably those sections discussing Charley Patton and Robert Johnson. While I am not accusing Mr. Sonnier of willful plagiarism, it can be noted that at the time of his book's publication (1996), Mr. Cook's book had been out of print for many years. I caught this matter because Cook's book was republished at about the same time and I was reading the two of them simultaneously. When notified of this problem, Sonnier's publisher withdrew the book from distribution.

I do not know if there was a second edition which solved all these problems, but the first edition must be avoided at all costs. It is impossible to conceive of an audience for whom it would be both appropriate and adequate.

This book proved to be a great disappointment. While the topic, the geography of North America, is clearly too large for a book of this size, I can understand the need for brevity when writing for a young audience. The real weakness of the book lies in the text. There are factual errors, such as a map that says the primary language of Belize is French (the correct answer is English). There are grammatical errors that any word processor should have flagged. Frequently opinions are stated as facts, which can be misleading for children. All in all, this book is a poor choice as an introduction to geography.

This is a very poorly written and disappointing work. It does not offer any new insights and is just a rehashing of old ideas.

One very unsettling aspect of Kliman's work is the way he ascribes sexual motives to the behavior of his young clients. He does not appear to sympathize with his clients and his work is an exercise in repetition. Another disturbing element of his work is the slap happy, overly permissive nursery he launched in 1965. Permissiveness often undermines authority and does not encourage responsibility. The sad part is that permissiveness does not speak to respect in general; the underlying message is one of having low expectations, therefore allow undesirable behavior to continue with impunity.

This is a complete waste and contributes nothing.

This book is so dumb that I couldn't even stand to read more than a couple of pages without putting it down, totally disgusted with myself for wasting the time to pick it up in the first place. If it hadn't of been the only book in the bathroom it wouldn't have gotten any of my time at all.

Not that the other books in this series are any good either. They are all pretty burnt if you ask me. I guess it says something about me though that I have read a few of them. I guess I just don't know when to give up, or when to never start at all, sometimes.

In conclusion- stay away, far away.

This book was a complete waste of time and money. It appears to be a vanity book - this guy wrote about some stuff that interested him and then paid to have the book published. There are typos galore - a completely unprofessional job by the publisher.

As someone with over 5000 Magic books, many of which written for children, I would say that this book / kit is far below the average. The "levitating card" relies on a gimmick that even professionals have some difficulty with, and when I tried it, it broke! There are several effects which the person will have to obtain on her or his own, and several which require adding something to the "props" included to make the total effect.

In addition to the uneveness of the eleven effects in the booklet -- most of which are not Magical and will be easily seen through unless the performer can be coached by a savvy teacher -- there are effects which are beyond the age range suggested, and the outcome will be frustration and disillusionment. If this is purchased for a complete beginner in Magic, it will end up in a junk pile; if purchased for someone with some experience in Magic, it will end up in a junk pile.

There are no real presentation points given in terms of patter or story lines, and, as anyone who has ever done any Magic knows (unless they have had a complete personality-ectomy) it is NOT the "trick" or the "fooling" that endears Magic to others, but the invitation to the audience (Mom and Dad to anyone else) to enjoy some mystery and fun. Sadly, all-too-many books for youngsters omit this concept, and the result is the perpetuation of the general view of "magicians" as losers. How much better even this poor excuse for a "Magic book" would have been had it provided some stories to seed some creativity.

I suspect that some parents will fall prey to impulse buying as this booklet and "kit" is attractively packaged (although mine was somewhat crushed in shipping) and feel that, at the low price, even if it becomes a "throw away" nothing is lost. They will be wrong. The right introduction to Magic is the most important aspect of the Art. No, I don't think that everyone who picks up a Magic book-- even a great Magic book -- will stay with Magic or even, sadly, show it the respect it (and wonderful Magicians) deserves, but why not try to maximize that possibility with books that provide what is needed and not just the impulse to buy? There are many great introductions to Magic, but this is not one of them.