Dictionary Reviews

This is a super book for people who want to learn about uses of oils. I've read several of Ms. Solomon's books and they are all MUST READS! I just wish I could find the rest of her catalog at Amazon (hint, hint!!!) I hear she's coming out with a new book soon...hope Amazon carries it.

HELPING YOURSELF WITH MAGICAL OILS,A-Z....If you are seeking ways to create a sense of"magickal bliss" in your life this
is the book for you.

Maria Solomon walks you through an array of concise recipes to help you in all areas of your life. I found this particular book to be quite informative for laypersons, students and practitioners within the new age and spiritual communities.

This is an easy to read guide for anyone who desires to positively enhance their opportunities for success in business, romance, personal and spiritual development. This is a "must have book" for your library from this well-known American spiritual writer.

This is a grand primer for those who have just begun to be interested in heraldry. It has clear black & white line drawings and concise non-stuffy text descriptions of heraldic elements, with some basic rules for assembling them and describing the results. "An Heraldic Alphabet" is aimed primarily at English modern heraldry. It does not cover every possible charge; it does not cover continental variations in style or rules. It is a great place to start, before jumping into more comprehensive (and more expensive) sources, such as Stephen Friar's "History of Heraldry", Arthur Charles Fox-Davies' "A Complete Guide to Heraldry", or "Heraldry Sources, Symbols and Meaning" by Neubecker, Brook-Little, and Tobler. Those interested in medieval heraldry, and medieval recreationists, will need guidance from other sources, such as the other books here mentioned and from their re-creation group's particular rules.

This has to be one of the rarest of things; a book on heraldry that is useful for beginners and serious students. And rarer still, the author shows occasional flashes of humor!

With hundreds of entries, this dictionary of heraldic terms is a godsend to students. J.P. Brooke-Little covers MANY terms, both familiar and obscure, and includes alternate spellings and obsolete terms that would be encountered in older blazons.

While no book of this sort could be comprehensive, "An Heralic Alphabet" is quite thourough, and a must have for any student of heraldry.

This book is tiny but full of little pictures that make it an even better reference guide. If you are looking for color pictures, detailed information and/or illustrated examples in culture then this is NOT the book for you.

This book should be on the reference shelf of anyone designing or evaluating logos. It is compact and packed with information on shapes, images and symbols from the perpectives of cultures around the world - from prehistory forward. It is illustrated and cross-referenced. Grab it several time throughout the design process to make sure you are on target with the symbolism inherent in the shapes and images you are using in your designs. Great value.

only book you ever need,let your creative juices GO.

Hering's has been a favorite with cooks and chef as long as I can remember,which is about 42 years.

For anyone who is interest in the history of Latvia, this book is a MUST. The book does not go in great depth. But presents the reader with highlights of Latvian history, culture, and chronology. Most of the book consists of a historical dictionary. The historical dictionary, portion of the book, is interesting. After the dictionary, I would rate the bibliography as interesting and useful. It is 25-1/2 pages long.

This book is a MUST, for the Latvian historian.

Plakans' dictionary is well thought out and reads extremely well with supporting background material. A must for scholars and historians as well as the casual Baltic observer or student!

This book is an essential reference for those that are involved in researching terrorism. As the below reviewer cites, there is a timeline of key events and an A-Z of terms and organizations, as well as a very extensive bibliography/recommended reading section. I use this book so often, that it no longer has a place on the shelf, it sits on my desk. A very impressive effort on the authors' part. Outstanding.

The Historical Dictionary of Terrorism by Sean Anderson and Stephen Sloan provides a ready reference into the multifaceted topic of terrorism. The authors literally go through the breadth of terrorism from A to Z--including informative entries on groups, concepts, individuals. The work includes an extensive bibliography that is helpful in continuing research on the listed topics. The Dictionary also contains a chronology of significant incidents, ideas and personalities pertaining to terrorism from A.D. 66 to 1994. This 450 page work has been an essential reference tool for me as an analyst and an academic. I have used the Dictionary to refresh my memory of groups and individuals as I write, as well as, before I teach a college class on issues of terrorism. While I would like more depth on some of the entries, the entries provide enough material to answer most of my questions, or at least point me in the right direction. It is one of my most used books in my terrorism library.

Autenrieth's Homeric Dictionary is an indispensible tool for reading Homer in the original. Because it focuses only on Homeric vocabulary, it is easier to use than standard lexica that include thousands of other words and later, non-Homeric meanings for Homeric words. Illustrations and detailed explanations are supplied for words describing armor and weapons and the like, which is helpful and not offered by most other lexica. Autenrieth is also more convenient than the glossaries found in beginner's texts because it allows the reader to look up words in a separate volume rather than turning to the back of the same book.

The introduction to the text claims that students should be able to read Homer with this dictionary almost twice as fast as they would with a standard lexicon. This may sound somewhat overblown, but in my experience it is true. Anyone reading a considerable amount of Homer would do well to pick up this volume and save themselves some time.

The only unfortunate thing is that this isn't available in hardcover. Why publishers increasingly fail to recognize the value of offering hardbound editions of reference works that are likely to be used often, I just don't understand. Even still, the Homeric Dictionary is worth owning if you plan to spend any serious time with Homer in Greek.

This dictionary was invaluable while I was translating The Iliad. It is amazingly comprehensive, full of wonderful illustrations that accompany the definitions and includes clear instructions on how to read Homeric verse.

My hovercraft is full of eels.

This handy little phrasebook allows you to communicate immediately upon your arrival in Hungary. I found Hungarian to be an extremely difficult language. But armed with this handy guide, I was navigating my way through the pastry shops and thermal spas in no time! The great thing about this phrasebook is that it tells you entire phrases through keywords. And it provides easy-to-follow pronunciation after each phrase. For anyone traveling to the land of the Magyars, this book is well worth the price!

I'm not sure whether I'm allowed to use this space for a pure response, but I'm wondering what the Reader from NY suggests as an alternative of case endings. Does he or she suggest that the language be changed so that the locatives and other case-endings become separate words? Postpositions? I would caution one against thinking to change the language to make it easier for an english speaker to learn. It's not as if some loony grammarian decided that some things are attached to words and some things are not: that's all part of the language. As a student of Finnish, I am quite familiar with this sort of case-ending particle: it's just something you have to get used to. I admit to enjoying the technical terms as a part of grammar study (as well as to being a Latin student) but they do not seem in any way necessary to the study of the language if they seem confusing. Finnish has an "inessive particle" which means you add -ssa/ssä to the end of a word when you're saying that something is in it, but there's no need to memorize the fact that it is called inessive: you just have to know that when you want to say "I am in bed" or "I live in Helsinki" you have to say "Olen sängyssä" and "Asun Helsingissa." If I have your complaint misinterpreted I apologise for the mistake, but I absolutely love the Finnish Grammar from this series which gets very technical about grammar and think that that is what a grammar reference should do, whether or not the student feels it helpful to use the technical terms provided.

(NB: Finnish also has "post-positions," so that you say "sängyn alla" for "under the bed" (literally "[the] bed's under"), but I find it easier just to consider it a word meaning "under" and to remember that the other word has to be in the posessive/genitive than to start worrying about whether to call it a post-position or a case ending (although of course, the former is correct).)

This book lives up to the standards of the Routledge grammars both in terms of attractive presentation and substantial content. On the other hand it continues what I consider to be a severe defect in Hungarian grammar books, involving what can only be described as a grammarian's approach to case.

"Case" in most European (i.e., IE) languages involves small changes made to the end of nouns to indicate grammatical function (direct object, indirect object, etc.) With the exception of the direct object, or accusative, which is always "declined" (i.e., given the case ending), the other nouns in an ordinary European sentence are declined in four to six cases and are "governed" or preceded by prepositions (for, with, to, in, into, etc.) English is an exception since, while we continue to use prepositions, we don't decline our nouns after prepositions, indeed, we don't decline them at all, except to denote possession.

Now Hungarian is a lot like English in this respect. Nouns themselves are not changed except to indicate possession or plural, and there is a direct object marker (letter "t"). Prepositions are widely used, but they come after the noun, rather than before, hence they are in effect "postpositions." (E.g., we say "in the box", Hungarians would say "(the) box-in".) But the noun itself is not declined.

Now there are about two dozen Hungarian postpositions, about half of them having to do with location (in, out, around, through, across, about). About two thirds of these change their vowels to correspond with the vowels of the preceding noun, for the sake of euphony. Somewhere in here, someone got the idea of dividing these postpositions into two groups, half a dozen "postpositions" that are invariable and are written separate from the noun, and the rest which have been christened "cases" and which are written attached to the noun.

This is a monstrosity, with all due respect, because it creates a vast list of bizarre Latin case names (adessive, essive, etc.), which intimidate the student, and has almost nothing to do with declining nouns, except for the vowel harmony (which is largely intuitive anyway) previously mentioned.

It is also bad for three other reasons. First, most of the postpositions (now called "cases"!) have a wide conceptual reach, just like English, thus "-tol" is primarily a general preposition in post position ("from", "I came the house-from") but can also be used with certain verbs "ask s.o.-of", analogous to English. However, by learning the "case" one has to learn all the conceptual exceptions, even though the "case" in most instances is the same as an English preposition in final location.

The second problem is that, again, just like English, all the "case" markers can take personal endings, to correspond to English prepositional phrases like "for us, to me, out of it", but this again makes it difficult to grasp when it is being taught as a "case."

The third problem is that all of this "case" business -- which involves page after page of paradigms! -- distracts the learner from understanding that the main difficulty with Hungarian, aside from the separable verb prefixes with are a lot like German (and English! "drink up" "He drank it up"), is that you have to put your prepositions after the nouns and not before.

For some reason, the author here repeats the "case" approach of the grammarians, the same tools with which Arthur Whitney slew the Hungarian and Finnish languages.

However, I am giving this book five stars for the following reasons. First, it is the only real grammar out there, the Torkenczy is a bare boned reference grammar for people who just want to consult paradigms (Rounds is three times longer). Second, It is meticulous in describing the use of seperable verb prefixes (coverbs) and in rendering all the usages of the "cases" and postpositions, all with illustrative sentences. Third, I want to encourage more work in Hungarian.

This is a good book for the curious who want to know how Hungarian works, faute de mieux. If you want to learn Hungarian, skip Pontifex and the Colloquial series and spring the (dollar amount) for the FSI Hungarian set with 40-50 cassettes and drill your brains out. But this book would make an excellent side book for that set, better than any other. It will not give you any real subtleties of syntax, as with, say, Lewis' Turkish grammar, but it is a good book up through intermediate level.

Although the case business still irks me, I do think that besides that this book deserves high praise.

This book in question, i.e.,The Hutchinson Dictionary of Ideas by Anne-Lucie Norton (Editor) is an excellent book for anyone remotely interested in ideas and their origins. The font is very easy on the eye. The table of contents well developed and the introduction is very well written without being overbearing or stuffy. Highly Recommended.

Never before have I had the pleasure of using such a fantastic resource... as a social studies teacher I use it in the classroom to help my students understand difficult concepts and ideas. Better than a dictionary or encyclopedia, this book explains each topic in an easy to understand format that can be further discussed or researched with greater understanding. Much to my delight, my soon-to-be college freshman has claimed it as part of his necessary cargo citing the need for its continued use in each of his classes. A must-have for anyone's bookshelf.