You could choose to wait until preschool to teach the ABC's to your child, but it's not necessary with such great home teaching tools as this book. This is a great book for 2 to 6 year olds, to go beyond the usual A is for Apple and Z is for Zebra.

The layout of this book is one letter of the alphabet on the top of each page, both upper and lower case in the corners. An illustration of an animal dominates the middle, while sidebar illustrations of it's prey bracket like a frame. A few short lines of text on the bottom explain a little bit about the hunting habits of the animal. Example: Merganser. "A hungry merganser pops to the surface. Only fish, frogs or crayfish that hide carefully escape this diving duck."

A Bold Carnivore was given to my son at the age of 2. He was really more attracted to the illustrations of animals at that time, which are detailed and realistic. A child's mind retains information amazingly well at that age, and he was able to memorize the lines in short order.

We would point to the letters at the top of each page - one in upper case and one in lower - and name them as we went, then naming the animal pictured below. This was a great way of learning letters and associating each one with a specific animal. My 4 year old son now also knows twenty six obscure varieties of carnivores, what they eat and their habitats.

Andrea, aka Merribelle

Loss, redemption, ruptures and healings. From the roots of a native perspective, Hogan chants vivid stories in poems that illuminate and heal. With true magic, she opens us to greater depth and vision through the power of words that haunt and whisper and eventually compel us to change. Raise yourself up and read this collection.

This was my "beginner" book, but has also remained my favorite guide to identify my local feathered friends.Large and full colour pictures of the species allowed me to match my sightings simply by flipping through. Later as I became more fluent in typing my birds the I found the index easy to use. Descriptions of the individual birds were informative, but also entertaining with tidbits about each that were not strickly scientific. There are aspects of this guide that I have even yet to put to use, but hope to: the traveler's guide to birding sites of North America.

The pictures are amazing and they have a page for many of the different owls. Each picture is filled with detail and the author gives lots of information. If you have a research project due on owls this is the book to get.

I love to hunt elk, deer and antelope and wrote the book Colorado's Biggest Bucks and Bulls, so I found this book very helpful when including B&C big game from Colorado in my book listings and index. The field photographs are excellent and the design is clever. I am especially fond of the records listings because it helps me plan my future hunts.

I have fallen in love with the carry the wind triliogy scratch and padock are a perfect pair and their adventures are outstanding I have learned so much from them.The way Terry C Johnston writes he makes you beleive that you are part of the story. Through thick and thin the pair will always be part of me and each other.I hope that this book and others will touch others as it has mine Black Cloud

This book gives the reader a poignant view of American history. It deals with areas that other historians refuse to talk about. This book should be on the "required reading list" for all high school and college students.

Bruchac's smooth yet distinctive reading voice, his excellent "animal" character voices, a sprinkling of songs, drumming, and rattles, and vivid stories make this a favorite of an almost 4 year old AND his 40-year-old mom -- especially the title story, which is moving without being sentimental. A very minor quibble is that Bruchac's voice occasionally "catches" as if he's stopping for breath at a line break. P.S. We liked this tape much better than the Navaho one in the series

I like thin books with thick subject matter. I also like book titles that herald the contents. This book does both. In an essay of 200 pages, Frank Pommersheim, a Lakota tribal judge, artfully braids together the variegated feathers of tribal sovereignty. Experience, Culture, History, Language, Politics, and Law, not just Acts of Congress (treaties, statutes), decisions of the United States Supreme Court, and executive action (orders and regulations) shape, limit, and ultimately enhance or diminish tribal sovereignty. The author, sometimes poetically, sometimes polemically, but always pointedly argues that tribal courts are the fundamental institution of legitimate, authentic tribal self-determination.

We bridge difficulties. We like a bridge over troubled waters. We needed a bridge into the new millennium. Bridges have a hold on us in a way that other examples of civil engineering do not. And we often don't notice them as we use them. Although I had traveled on the Natchez Trace Parkway many times, upheld by a bridge in Franklin, Tennessee, I had never looked down and appreciated the span until alerted to it a couple of years ago. It is a beautiful, big, parabolic concrete arch which I now get off and admire fairly often. According to _Bridges: The Spans of North America_ (Norton) by David Plowden, I am not alone. This bridge "is unlike any heretofore built in America and has been the recipient of innumerable awards." Calling attention to the bridges we take for granted, and telling a history of American bridge building, Plowden's book is fittingly big, and displays his beautiful black and white pictures in large format, splendidly reproduced. It is properly sized for the coffee table, but the text is appropriately comprehensive, and as worth reading as the pictures are worth admiring.

_Bridges_ is divided into chronological sections based on the materials used: stone and brick; wood; iron; steel (divided into three time periods, since there are so many steel bridges); and concrete. Erecting a stone bridge was expensive and time consuming, especially compared to using wood. There are more miles of wooden bridges than any other type in America, although Plowden has little good to say about the "cult of the covered bridge" which has obscured the trusswork he thinks is the important part of these wooden bridges. Iron was used for bridges for only a short time, and iron bridges are the rarest of bridge artifacts. Concrete bridges are the way to go for the main bridge-building impetus in America, the highway system. Reinforced concrete does extremely well for piers to hold bridges up, as well as for the flats that carry traffic. Plowden spends many pages on the most famous type of bridge, the steel spans, and his pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge present them in new ways, and he hurtles through the engrossing stories of their construction because they are relatively familiar. The stories of lesser known bridges, such as the wonderful Eads bridge in St. Louis (built by Captain James Eads, of few engineering credentials and no bridge experience) bring to light many surprising difficulties and solutions the bridge builders came up with.

Plowden's history serves as a demonstration of engineering problem-solving. Each bridge is unique in purpose, location, and difficulties of completion. This is true even in replacement bridges. Many of these beautiful photographs show bridges that are no longer existent. There have been bridge failures, of course, but usually bridges built in the nineteenth century show signs of distress, and are called out of commission. Sometimes railroads simply no longer need a particular link. There are, however, new vistas for bridge building, especially in the straits and bays that have needed bridges and now have proposals for bridges meeting new engineering and economic abilities previously unavailable. Plowden is confident that utility will continue to be combined with beauty, and his handsome book supports such confidence.