Blue sky, green trees.
This book is great because it reads like a conversation with your most interesting friend.
As a huge fan of Sarah Vowell's work on NPR, it was pretty much a given that I would enjoy her book. This is a witty account of her pilgramage to sites of importance to the assassination of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. The only thing that was surprising, and a little unsettling, was her injection of current politics into the narrative. Don't get me wrong, I definitely share her views, but they distracted from the flow of the story. Overall, it's a fun and interesting book.
This book focuses mainly on the calendar of that the Western world uses, and how it came into being. It does touch on various other calendars (Hebrew, Mayan, etc.) but does not explore these in depth. There is a good amount of math, which I found myself either going over several times to try and understand or skimming over in order to maintain focused on the story. Don't let this stop you though, because the book is really very interesting and quite well written.
Mary Ann is a lot harder to connect with in this book. Her actions in this book are a far cry from the Mary Ann of the first three Tales of the City stories. Still a great read if you're in the mood for a well-written San Francisco soap opera.
This is the book I wish I had written. There is a specific plot - moving from San Francisco to Hay-on-Wye - but there are a lot of tangents that are all about books books books, which to me is great great great. This is now in my top favorite books.
The best part was how many photos had people because I could stare at them and wonder about their lives. Loved that it was written by librarians!
I enjoyed the “About Lester” section that detailed the author's life - very interesting. However the actual body of the book is better for people who know something - anything - about plants; it is not a good starter book.
This book was really easy to follow and digest because it read like a conversation, or rather like a lecture from the cool and smart professor whose class everyone wants to join. I love that the ideas are completely practical and logical, yet they are still quite bold. It seems like the type of book that I would want to read for fun once I'm fully in the library field.
Not sure how they made a Disney movie of this book, seeing as how the entire thing is about sex. Good book, though.
My favorite thing about this book was how artifacts, famous paintings, and landscape photos were integrated into the myths. This really made the stories and the people who told them feel real.
The author and his wife see over 400 different birds on their journey around the continent of Australia, and each one is detailed in this book. Sound boring? It's not. This book is a great guide to travel across Australia. Not in the “eat here, sleep there, and don't forget to see this sight!”, Lonely Planet-type of guide, but in the sense that it tells you what exactly it was like to travel through it. That does include a fair amount of info about Australian wildlife, but written in a totally accessible style. Thanks to the index I've actually been able to use this book to identify plants and animals on my trip.
Not as complete as Victoria Finlay's “Colors”, but very very good. They actually work really well together, if one is interested enough in the topic to read more than one book about it.
I am giving this book three stars for how it compares as a textbook, which is the context in which I read it. It's fairly pleasant to read, and some of the chapters cover topics that were truly new and interesting to me. If I was reading this book for pleasure, however, it would be too dry to finish. It would feel too much like reading, well, a textbook.
This was one of the books listed by my professor in lieu of a regular textbook. So as a “textbook” it was much more engaging than the usual. As a regular reading book it was pretty good. I didn't finish this book because the section of class covering the history of books ended, and it wasn't worth it to keep reading after its usefulness was over.
These authors are extremely biased against traditional research, and they are fine with that. As someone who doesn't really care that much about research, and is only reading this book because it's the text for a mandatory class, I found this book to be rather boring. In fact, the only good parts were when the authors talked trash about traditional researchers and their methods. Which actually happened a lot in this book. Anyway, for people interested in conducting their own action research this book would likely be a useful general guide. For people needing to read this book for a class I strongly suggest saving your money by getting it from your library or through interlibrary loan.
The YouTube videos are hilarious, but seeing them in book-form somehow makes them incredibly depressing.
Loved everything except the last chapter. He absolutely could have left the last part off and left us a masterpiece.
Pretty good for a textbook. About every third page contains a snippet of a news article related to archives, which made the reading a lot more fun.
Models strength in conviction and never giving up. Shows that sometimes adults aren't right, and that traditions can be created as well as followed.