Secret Gardens of Santa Fe

Book Description

Gloriously illustrated, this book goes behind garden walls to reveal 18 of the most beautiful private gardens in North America's second-oldest city, including one of the city's most venerable horticultural treasures, the public Bandelier Garden. The city's ancient cultural heritagethe intermingling of Native American, Latin, and Anglo presencesmakes its influence known here, and gardeners find their creativity in this region where days are hot, nights are cold, and water is precious.

Customer Reviews:

Inspiring Gardens & Art.......2007-04-21

This is a beautiful book for artists and gardeners. Wonderful color combinations in landscapes & hardscapes, all accented with inspiring art pieces. Good text but...the photos say it all! (No offense to the author, I know writing is hard work.)

Flower-power in the High Desert.......2006-10-02

Santa Fe is a pretty tough place to garden. At 7,000 feet, the growing season is short, winds are high, and a five-year drought has made watering your garden politically incorrect.

Nevertheless, serious gardeners persevere, and some of the better results are documented here. It helps to be rich, to have a private well, to have a gardener -- best if you have all three. The color photo reproductions here are simply splendid. The text ranges from OK to pretty good (but who buys flower-porn for the text?) Recommended for gardening and Santa Fe fans, who will surely drool over the lovely gardens, homes and art so beautifully portrayed here.

Happy gardening,
Peter D. Tillman
Santa Fe

The Secret Gardens of Santa Fe is a stunning portrayal.........1999-11-17

The photographs, in The Secret Gardens of Santa Fe, offer a glympse of a very special place in the western states. Sydney Leblanc does a fine--brief--job descibing the history of Santa Fe, and the reasons the gardens of this unique area do so well. Charles Mann has the touch when it comes to photography. He captures the mystery, the spectacular colors and design, and the fabulous art that adorns many of the gardens. A terrific book that makes one want to visit New Mexico, and see for one's self the magic of the high desert.

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Secret Gardens of Santa Fe
Sydney Leblanc
Manufacturer: RIZZOLI
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000OJIPGS

Amazon.com

In her early 50s, Australian historian Inga Clendinnen fell ill with acute liver disease. "'Fall' is the appropriate word," she writes. "It is ... like falling down Alice's rabbit hole into a world which might resemble this solid one, but which operates on quite different principles." Her imaginative, unconventional memoir mirrors the hallucinatory nature of this world as she mingles reminiscences, fiction, hospital sketches, and family profiles to chart the course of her physical and mental life from diagnosis through a successful liver transplant and recovery.

Anyone who has ever been in a hospital will recognize the frail, vulnerable, disoriented state of mind she evokes in describing her time there. Yet Clendinnen also displays biting humor (especially in portraits of fellow patients) and an almost mystical sense of purpose as she seizes on writing as the tool to make sense of her situation. Childhood memories loom large, many invoking the beauty of the natural world, ever-present and overwhelming in rural Australia. Presiding over that childhood, her proud, stoical, impenetrable mother "provided me with an inspiriting mystery: the obdurate opacity of other beings"--and sparked, Clendinnen believes, her lifelong pursuit of historical mysteries.

But the experience of being seriously ill dominates this text. The title comes from her determination to emulate a zoo tiger she admires because he refuses to acknowledge his imprisonment: "I too was in a cage, with feeding times and washing times and bars at the side of my cot, and people coming to stare and prod ... whenever I felt the threat of the violation of self, I would invoke the vision of the tiger." For all the grim candor with which she evokes physical deterioration, Clendinnen also persuasively conveys her discovery that "illness casts you off, but it also cuts you free ... the clear prospect of death only makes living more engaging." --Wendy Smith

Book Description

"A decade ago...I fell ill.'Fall' is the appropriate word; it is almost as alarming and quite as precipitous as falling in love."

So begins Inga Clendinnen's beautifully written, revelatory memoir exploring the working of human memory and the construction of the self. In her early fifties, Clendinnen, Australia's award-winning historian of Mayan and Aztec history, was struck with an incurable liver disease, immobilized and forced to give up formal research and teaching. From her sickness comes a striking realization of literacy's protean possibilities: that writing can be a vital refuge from the debilitation of the body, and that the imagination can blossom as the body is enfeebled.

Exiled from both society and the solace of history, and awaiting the mysterious interventions of medical science, Clendinnen begins to write: about her childhood in Australia, her parents, her neighbors, her own history. In addition to recovering half-forgotten stories -- about the town baker and his charming horse, Herbie, about the three elderly, reclusive sisters who let her into their clandestine world -- Clendinnen invents new ones to escape the confines of the hospital, with subjects ranging from the jealousies between sisters to a romantic, Kafkaesque encounter on a train. She also traces the physical, mental and moral impacts of her disease, and voices the terrifying drama of bizarre, vivid drug- and illness-induced hallucinations -- even one she had during her liver transplant.

Along the way, Clendinnen begins to doubt her own memories, remembering things that she knows cannot have happened and realizing that true stories often produce a false picture of the whole. With her gifts for language and observation, Clendinnen deftly explores and maps the obscure terrain that divides history from fiction and truth from memory, as she tries to uncover the relationship between her former selves and the woman she is now. An exquisite hybrid of humorous childhood recollections, masterful fictions and probing history, Tiger's Eye is a uniquely powerful book about how illness can challenge the self -- and how writing can help one define and realize it.

Customer Reviews:

Slow going.......2001-12-17

I have to disagree with the other reviewer with 5 stars. The book just didn't grab me as I hoped it would, and it was a bit of a struggle to complete. I thought about ditching it at around page 50, but continued on to see if it improved--which it did to a small extent. After reading other books about people with illnesses, I found that Tiger's Eye paled in comparison. Go for "It's Not About the Bike" by Lance Armstrong if you want a more gripping personal account of someone dealing and overcoming serious illness. Now that's a real page-turner!

Hour of Lead, Remembered.......2001-08-07

Tiger's Eye is Inga Clendinnen's account of her diagnosis of a rare liver disease, her rapidly debilitating illness, finally a liver transplant and ultimate if precarious recovery. But that is like saying Moby Dick is about whaling. This historian from Australia has written a superb treatise full of hard truths on both illness and memory. After all, the truth is not always carried on angels' wings. Along the way she also has written fiction-- short stories-- and some of the history of Australia. After her diagnosis of Active Auto-Immune Hepatitis, she began writing this memoir on her laptop computer, not knowing if she would live or not. She writes searing accounts of her hospitalization: the good, the bad, the indifferent hospital personnel. The visitors who came late and leave early, to get back to their lives outside an institution.

Ms. Clendinnen writes: "What distinguishes the healthy from the ill--which is a more significant division in any society than class or gender or possibly even homelessness--is that the healthy consider feeling well to be the normal state of things." Then there is memory and all the attendant problems. For example, two children of the same parents have different recollections of their parents, but they are both right. "Being ill had taught me how much of ourselves there is in all the stories we tell about the past." Ms. Clendinnen wanted to preserve the memories of her parents, to try to discover what they were like before she was born. The portraits, "as accurate as memory allows," the author would say, of her parents are the best thing I think in this book. Her descriptions of her mother Catherine, born in Melbourne in 1897-- and her futile attempts ever really to know her mother made my eyes water. Her mother's hard life was in some part her own making. Not all her sisters, for example, were as miserable as she. About her mother's death, Ms. Clendinnen writes "how could her life be ending when it had not yet begun? Bound from childhood in a net of unsought obligations, she fought hard, but with weapons which always turned and lacerated her own flesh. In the desolation of old age, with death imminent, I think she finally knew herself to have been trapped, and defeated, from the beginning."

Ms. Clendinnen named this memoir Tiger's Eye after her favorite animal, the tiger, "because he was the only animal who did not acknowledge he was in a cage. . . I too was in a cage, with feeding times and washing times and bars at the side of my cot, and people coming to stare and prod, but the kaleidoscope of the horror of helplessness ceased to turn because I withdrew my consent from it." Like Melville's Ishmael, the now wiser writer lived to tell her tale: "Illness granted me a set of experiences otherwise unobtainable. It liberated me from the routines which would have delivered me, unchallenged and unchanged, to discreet death. Illness casts you out, but it also cuts you free. I will never take conventional expectations seriously again, and the clear prospect of death only makes living more engaging." There is so much to learn from Ms. Clendinnen's ordeal-- about illness, about courage, about getting on with our lives. A very fine book indeed.

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In the Eye of the Needle: Diary of a Medically Supervised Injecting Centre
Dr. Ingrid van Beek
Manufacturer: Allen & Unwin Academic
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 1741143810

Book Description

The rise of Australia’s first legally sanctioned and medically supervised injecting center is chronicled in this personal account of addiction, public policy, and the health sector. As the center’s health professionals struggle to save the lives of addicts, its leaders struggle against legal action, political snares, and fierce opposition from all sides: the Prime Minister, the Vatican, and the United Nations International Narcotics Control Board.

Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Objects/Histories)

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Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Objects/Histories)
Jane Lydon , and Jane Lydon
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Collections, Catalogues & Exhibitions | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Portraits | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Australia | Australia & Oceania | History | Subjects | Books

New Zealand | Australia & Oceania | History | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0822335727

Book Description

An indigenous reservation in the colony of Victoria, Australia, the Coranderrk Aboriginal Station was a major site of cross-cultural contact the mid-nineteenth century and early twentieth. Coranderrk was located just outside Melbourne, and from its opening in the 1860s the colonial government commissioned many photographs of its Aboriginal residents. The photographs taken at Coranderrk Station circulated across the western world; they were mounted in exhibition displays and classified among other ethnographic “data” within museum collections. The immense Coranderrk photographic archive is the subject of this detailed, richly illustrated examination of the role of visual imagery in the colonial project. Offering close readings of the photographs in the context of Australian history and nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century photographic practice, Jane Lydon reveals how western society came to understand Aboriginal people through these images. At the same time, she demonstrates that the photos were not solely a tool of colonial exploitation. The residents of Coranderrk had a sophisticated understanding of how they were portrayed, and they became adept at manipulating their representations.

Lydon shows how the photographic portrayals of the Aboriginal residents of Coranderrk changed over time, reflecting various ideas of the colonial mission—from humanitarianism to control to assimilation. In the early twentieth century, the images were used on stereotypical postcards circulated among the white population, showing what appeared to be compliant, transformed Aboriginal subjects. The station closed in 1924 and disappeared from public view until it was rediscovered by scholars years later. Aboriginal Australians purchased the station in 1998, and, as Lydon describes, today they are using the Coranderrk photographic archive in new ways, to identify family members and tell stories of their own.

White Eye: A Novel by the Author of Turtle Beach

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White Eye: A Novel by the Author of Turtle Beach
Blanche D'alpuget
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 0671620053

Through Enemy Eyes: After Months of Planning, the Viet Cong Were Near Long Tan and Ready to Attack . . .

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Through Enemy Eyes: After Months of Planning, the Viet Cong Were Near Long Tan and Ready to Attack . . .
David Sabben
Manufacturer: Allen & Unwin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Military | History | Subjects | Books

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

War | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1741145619

Book Description

This fictionalized account brings to life the events that lead up to the Vietnam War battle of Long Tan—the most famous action fought by the Australian Army during the war. Told from the rarely revealed Vietnamese perspective, this gripping tale claims that the battle of Long Tan disrupted the Viet Cong’s plans to force Australia to withdraw from the war—which would have been a morale disaster for the American troops—and possibly changed the outcome of the war.

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The Angry Eye
Max Harris
Manufacturer: Elsevier
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Australia street: A boy's-eye view of the 1920s and 1930s

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Australia street: A boy's-eye view of the 1920s and 1930s
John Kingsmill
Manufacturer: Hale & Iremonger
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Australia | Australia & Oceania | History | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0868064416

Australia Through American Eyes: 1935-1945

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Australia Through American Eyes: 1935-1945
P. G. Edwards
Manufacturer: Univ of Queensland Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Australia | Australia & Oceania | History | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0702213659

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Australia Through Italian Eyes
Stephanie Lindsay Thompson
Manufacturer: OUP Australia and New Zealand
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Australia | Australia & Oceania | History | Subjects | Books

General | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Australia, land of color: Through the eyes of Australian painters

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Australia, land of color: Through the eyes of Australian painters
Rosemary Dobson
Manufacturer: U. Smith
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

General | Painting | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Book Description

Everyone needs a place to scrawl their brilliant ideas before they flit like sugared-up three year olds out of their heads. These remarkable journals will safely house your deepest thoughts, nurture your creativity, and keep the dreary world at bay. Choose the fun of a Bettie Page girlie magazine, the fanciful romp of Sock Monkey or the yee-haw of kuties on horsies from Lisa Petrucci, and let your thoughts run free.

Average customer rating:

Only for MBA's

This book needs to be about 500 pages thick!

Excellent but expensive

A major disappointment

Reinventing the CFO: Moving from Financial Management to Strategic Management
Henry Johanson , Thomas Walther , John Dunleavy , and Elizabeth Hjelm
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Strategy & Competition | Management & Leadership | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
Management | Management & Leadership | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
Corporate Finance | Finance | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
General | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
Entrepreneurship | Small Business & Entrepreneurship | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

Reinventing the CFO: How Financial Managers Can Transform Their Roles and Add Greater Value

CFO: Architect of the Corporation's Future

Best Practices in Planning and Performance Management: From Data to Decisions (Wiley Best Practices)

Process Improvement for Effective Budgeting and Financial Reporting

CFO as Business Integrator

ASIN: 0070129452

Book Description

Chart your company's course. Reinventing the CFO is the groundbreaking guide by financial veterans Henry Johanson, Thomas Walther, John Dunleavy and Elizabeth Hjelm that offers a proven blueprint for professionals making the enormous shift from ``number cruncher'' to strategist and business partner. Based on Coopers & Lybrand's pioneering Office of the CFO frameworks, it leads you through the live critical steps that will define how you can face today's challenges: partnering and integration; redefining the role of finance and retraining staff to understand business operations and market drivers; strategy; applying traditional analytical skills and business judgment to the question; where shoudl our company apply its capital resources? management control; producing a new set of strategic measures that business managers can use to anticipate problems and monitor progress; cost management; creating an aggressive, long-term least-cost program that replaces ``cost accounting'' and continuously drives costs down from within; processes and systems-classifying each financial process as ``core,'' ``support,'' or ``no added value,'' and determining the real drivers that affect the company's profitability.

Customer Reviews:

Only for MBA's.......2000-08-27

Some people find it hard to understand this book. But if you're an MBA graduate, terminologies like "value chain" isn't so hard to undertsand. Better to take Startegic Management first before reading this book.

This book needs to be about 500 pages thick!.......1998-10-31

As a student I was excited to find so many new ideas in one place. However, when faced with writing a review of the ideas in this book, I needed to review my finance and accounting texts. If you want to be up on the popular terminology read this book. If you want to reinvent your financial office look somewhere else.

Excellent but expensive.......1998-09-28

Reinventing the CFO is an extraordinary book. In Austria, Business Administration and Financial Management is over all based on hard "financial" facts. It is good to get to know a perspective, where strategic tasks are truly part of a CFOs work. The book is an excellent guideline, full of ideas. Remarkable is the invention of a socalled "Quickgrid" which allows the reader to check the situation of the financial function in his/her company. The only disadvantage: For a book of about 170 pages, it is very expensive (well, not if you pay amazon`s reduced price).

A major disappointment.......1997-06-27

For $34.95, I expected more than just 156 pages of text. The authors are four present or former Coopers & Lybrand consultants (Coopers & Lybrand puts its name on the cover too). The book is a slim volume of summary conclusions from their workpapers without the back up. They desperately need to include this detailed backup.

Sentences and paragraphs are lengthy and generally provide no guidance or ideas for reinventing the CFO. The conclusions are convoluted and difficult to follow. The authors use a graph many times to visually display different thoughts. Yet it is the same graph, over and over: the curves are similar and the definitions are identical. Also, key phrases such as "value chain" go undefined.

The table of contents contains wrong page numbers and there are some typos and grammar errors such as bullet 3 on page 15 (plural subject with singular verb).

It appears to me that authors and publisher all quickly slapped this together for fast money. Well, I want mine back

Average customer rating:
Reinventing the CFO: Moving from Financial Management to Strategic Management
Henry; Dunleavy, John; Hjelm, Elizabeth Johansson
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OFJ6PG

Customer Reviews:

Got the job done!.......2006-01-08

I had this book on the shelf for quite a while before I suddenly had to use it. I had a convoluted series of unfortunate mechanical events on my motorcycle and could have been hurt
badly, if not killed, and my complaint letter needed to get
good results, financially and otherwise. I read the whole book and followed the advice to a "T", using pieces of various sample
letters. I had a response from this company within 24 hours and
the results I wanted within 10 days. I am grateful to this book.

Very Helpful Guide.......2000-02-10

This book gets right to the point! It clearly identifies the things every successful complaint letter should contain. I found the sample complaint letters very helpful and was thrilled with the list of addresses for agencies, federal & state, that take complaints against companies. Also, the list of addresses for most major companies was a wonderful resource. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for results!

Book Description

A major problem in health economics is how to give a value to changes in health. This is the first book to examine all the money measures that are used in such evaluations. Changes in health might be caused by medical treatments, by public safety programmes and by anti-pollution programmes, and the cost-benefit analysis of such programmes involves the use of money measures. The author defines the properties of these money measures, examining them in both a certain and a risky world. He evaluates available empirical approaches for the assessment of the value of health changes, and considers measures such as quality-adjusted life years (qalys) and healthy-years equivalents (hyes). This book raises the important question of whether we are willing to pay the costs for our health care system. It will be of interest to advanced students of health economics and related disciplines, and will also be useful for professionals working on projects that affect human health.

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