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Packed with information on over 100 public and private gardens, the slim Garden Lover's Guide to France offers the perfect tour for anyone who's passionate about plants and wants to explore the tailored greenery of France. Author Patrick Taylor is an experienced garden historian who includes a balanced mixture of information, photographs, and diagrams to describe what he calls the two distinctive types of cultivated areas in France: the 17th-century Baroque gardens and public gardens. Covering mostly grand and formal gardens, the book is divided into five major regions and includes helpful tour maps and directions. In each garden's profile, readers will find detailed descriptions of the garden, its history, color photographs, plant species and varieties, special landscape or architectural features, facilities information, and nearby sites of interest. Some of the larger and more renowned gardens such as Versailles and Chateau de Courances have three-dimensional garden plans, which are helpful when exploring the grounds. From the Jardin des Plantes in Paris to Monet's garden at Giverny to the desert specimens of Jardin Exotique in Monaco, visitors are sure to find la plus belle of this picturesque country. --Karen Karleski
Book Description
This authoritative new series of guidebooks to the gardens of Europe is the perfect companion for any garden enthusiast, whether tourist or armchair traveler. Each title is a richly illustrated in-depth guide to over 100 gardens, from the famous to little-known hidden treasures, and features colorful photography and easy-to-read illustrations commissioned especially for this series. Also included are maps, directions, complete visitor information, special features, and neighboring sites of interest.
Each guide, written by a gardening expert, begins with a comprehensive background on the country's garden history and local climate. The most significant gardens in each volume are featured in even greater detail, accompanied by illustrated plans of the gardens and close-up views of particular features. The numerous color photographs and maps show travelers what awaits at each garden. The Garden Lover's Guides are indispensible aids for those planning European travel itineraries. The Garden Lover's Guide to France covers the Baroque parterres of Versailles as well as the explosive patterns of color in Monet's garden at Giverny.
Customer Reviews:
useful information, especially about the North of France.......2001-11-21
I have been looking at a number of books about gardens in France, and this is the only one that I could use to plan a trip. The coverage is very good, though the vast majority are in the Paris region (Ile de France).
Unlike, say, "the Secret Gardens of France", the gardens listed here are open to the public.
The notes on each garden are concise. You will need another book if you want to learn about the history of landscape architecture. But the author does provide an assessment of the gardens described: state of repair, relation to original design, beauty, etc. The photo illustrations are very good.
My only criticism is that I wish the book was twice as big.
Book Description
The story of Noah's flood is one of the best-loved and most often retold biblical tales, the inspiration for numerous children's books and toys, novels, and even films. Whether as allusion, archetype, or literal presence--the American landscape is peppered with "recreations" of the ark--the story of Noah's animals and the ark resonates throughout American culture and the world. While most think of Noah's ark as a dramatic myth, others are consumed by the quest for geological and archeological proof that the flood really occurred. Persistent rumors of a large vessel on the mountain of Ararat in Turkey, for instance, have led many pilgrims and explorers over the centuries to visit that fabled peak. Recent finds suggest that there may have been a catastrophic flood on the shores of the Black Sea some 7,600 years ago. Is this then the reality behind the ancient tale of Noah? More to the point, why does it matter? What does the story of the Flood mean to us and why does it so stir the collective imagination? When the Great Abyss Opened examines the history of our attempts to understand the Flood, from medieval Jewish and Christian speculation about the physical details of the ark to contemporary efforts to link it to scientific findings. Unraveling the mythical dimensions of the parallel Mesopotamian flood stories and their deeper social and psychological significance, J. David Pleins also considers the story's positive uses in theology and moral instruction. Noah's tale, however, has also been invoked as a means of justifying exclusion, racism, and anti-homosexual views. Pro-slavery advocates, for example, used the story of Noah's Curse on Ham's son Canaan to rationalize the enslavement of Africans. Throughout this expansive and lively book, Pleins sheds new light on our continuing attempts to understand this ancient primal myth. Noah's Flood, he contends, offers a unique case study that illuminates the timeless and timely question of how fact and faith relate.
Customer Reviews:
Masterful Biblical Commentary.......2007-08-25
First, let's talk about what this book is NOT:
* It is NOT a book intended for a reader that rejects (or doubts) the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible.
* It is NOT a book that attempts to use scientific techniques to examine the physical evidence (fossil record, geology, astrophysics, biological chemistry, etc.) with which all theories of origins (whether creationism or naturalism) must reconcile.
* It is NOT a book primarily intended for a non-Christian reader
Instead, the book is primarily a biblical *commentary* for someone that is already a student of Scripture. It examines each and every book of the Bible, aimed at those who operate from a Christian framework and worldview, and addresses three fundamental questions:
1. Is a literal 6-day "fiat" creation and a relatively young (i.e. 6,000 year old) earth the only reasonable interpretation of Scripture, or can Scripture comfortable accommodate a universe that is billions of years old, life on earth that is approaching a billion or more years old, and development of life that occurred through gradualistic, macroevolutionary processes (i.e. "theistic evolution")?
2. Does the Bible treat the Genesis flood account as a literal, historically accurate event that was truly global in scope or is it merely allegorical, intended to impart some deeper spiritual lesson(s)?
3. Do either 1 or 2 *matter* in terms of the way a Christian lives? In other words, are they foundational or peripheral in matters of faith and conscience?
Thus, if you pick up this book looking for a deep (or even shallow) scientific treatise you will be sorely disappointed, for this is neither the author's intent nor purpose. He is trying to address, in substantial and exhaustive depth, the question "what does the BIBLE teach about creationism?" ... not "what does SCIENCE say about creationism?" (he addresses that question in his other books).
Hence the title: *BIBLICAL* Creationism
It is noteworthy that critics of this book ALWAYS start with the premise that an old earth and macroevolution are indisputable scientific "facts" and as such, the Bible can only properly be interpreted in light of these "truths." They don't just posit that the earth is old and that macroevolution is fact, they INSIST upon it. Their resulting exegesis of Scripture becomes a tortured attempt to take plain meaning and contort it until the "biblical" evolutionist can have his cake and eat it too. Notice that the critics don't attempt to argue the Scripture. They try to discredit Morris's commentary based on science, rather than using what should be the absolute bedrock of the Christian faith: the Scriptures as the inspired, inerrant word of God. Then, they lament that a literal interpretation makes the fundamental Gospel message so unreasonable and hard to believe that it becomes entirely discredited, suggesting that literalists bundle the equivalent of a "flat earth" with the salvation message, destroying its intellectual and scientific pallatability.
As Morris shows, there really can be only one possible interpretation without creating hopeless contradictions within the Bible and undermining many of its other messages. So, in many ways, this book is as much about one's willingness to accept the inerrancy of Scripture as it is about creationism.
My only criticism is that Morris at places overreached where it was wholly unnecessary by taking a few marginal passages of scripture and suggesting they were discussing creation when it was far from clear. However, this does not undermine the overriding strength of the book's conclusion. There are literally HUNDREDS of scriptures that directly and indirectly deal with a creation that occurred in six normal "solar" days, treating it as absolutely foundational to our understanding of the nature of God, the person of Jesus Christ, and His redemptive work. When the student of Scripture attempts to "reconcile" the Bible with evolution rather than reconciling the Bible with ITSELF and with authentic physical facts, he will go sadly and seriously astray from "the faith of our fathers."
That is Morris's message, and he communicates it most convincingly here.
Good Zeal, BAD Science.......2005-04-21
This book is revealing a Typical Young Earth Creationism (YEC). These people have a good and great zeal to defend the Christian Faith. I commend them for that. But I must say in a loving way that their method is UNSCIENTIFIC. It is misleading and untruthful. We cannot defend truth by using part-truth. Either way, this is still lying! How can anyone defend a good cause with bad tools? This will destroy the Christian witness of the gospel.
As a theologian and Scientist I must refute the young earth creationist movement. Many Christian Leaders and Theologians are opposing young earth creationism because of their lies. The scientist community (including Christian scientists) rejects the kind of pseudoscience promoted and distributed by YEC.
Today, the evidence against Young Earth Creationism (YEC) continues to accumulate. This leads inevitably to a general conclusion against all Christianity. I am so grieved when I see atheists laughing at the kind of science that is propagated by YEC. Christ's name is being hurt. Why do young earth creationists have to twist facts and lie so much? Well the answer is simple. They do NOT have ANY evidence in science whatsoever! Then, they have to invent it somehow.
This is how they do it. They Say God created the universe (this is right). By using Usher's Genealogy they believe the Bible says the earth is young. (The Bible does NOT say that) Then they say: "We have to prove what we believe by means of science (after all God created science)". But the Science is not helping them. Then they are forced to dig around to find any flaws in science that they can use and abuse. They continue by accumulating anything they can find to make a case (bits and pieces of unresolved issues, like little discrepancies in scientific data and so on). By using scientific language (and their degrees in science) they go out of their fields of expertise and continue their propaganda by misinterpreting and manipulating scientific data, twisting and ignoring facts, misquoting various writers, using the wrong tools for different kinds of measurements, etc. This is lying. If they find one discrepancy out of, lets say one hundred, they choose to ignore the 99 in order to stress the one that fits their theory. This is NOT integrity. Do you call this science?
By doing sound apologetics we need to bring the unbelieving scientists to faith in Christ. Unfortunately this kind of YEC propaganda is doing exactly the opposite. One day they will be held responsible before God. Zeal is not enough; you need wisdom too.
A good book with one flaw.......2004-07-11
This is a good book that clearly shows that creationism is an important part of Christianity instead of just a few contradictory sentences that can be easily abandonded. I just think that Morris goes too far when he claims that every single reference to creation in general supports the idea of creation having happened the way told in Genesis 1. If you use common sense and think critically, this book certainly is worth reading.
Creation from Genesis to Revelation.......2003-06-26
To those who believe that they can perform an exegetical lobotomy on the Bible and discard the first eleven chapters of Genesis this book comes as a disapointment.
Morris takes us through the many passages in the Bible that speak about creation, the curse and the flood, from Genesis to Revelation, including the teachings of Jesus, the disciples and the apostle Paul. One cannot really make sense of any other of the central doctrines of the Bible, such as sin, death as a result of sin, the need for salvation, the physical encarnation of Jesus, His physical ressurection, the promise of a new heaven and earth without curse and death, apart from the doctrine of creation and the fall.
As I read this book I took the opportunity to read and mark all the quoted texts in my Bible and even found more interesting texts. I had never studied the biblical doctrine of creation before, and I must say that the simple reading of the relevant biblical texts is quite conclusive: theistic evolutionism and progressive creationism just cannot be made compatible with the Bible.
If Jesus, the creator Word, can get himself a new ressurected and special body in a matter of seconds, he can create the whole universe in six days. The opposite also makes total sense.
What's more, when Jesus multiplied the fishes and the loaves of bread and ressurected Lazarus, he didn't need trial and error nor randomness. He just did it right there. After all, the Bible makes it clear that he his the creator and sustainer of the universe, just by his Word. I just don't see why I should have more confidence in human scientists then in their creator.
It takes a lot of argumentative acrobatics to even try to harmonize the hipothesis of evolution with the Bible, but in the end it just won't work. The Bible presents a creator that knows exactly what to do and how to do it. Random mutations is just not his way of creating things. Nor mutations nor natural selection are able to generate all the complex specified information present in living organisms.
The reading of this book made it clear to me that there are good and irrefutable theological reasons to support the biblical model. It also made it clear to me that we are dealing with an whole powerful God that is not very impressed with the science of the guys at Harvard, MIT or Oxford. The Bible says, in the book of Eclesiastes, that there are things that God has done that will never be understood by human beings, no matter how hard they study them.
But what about scientific reasons? In my opinion, you have to start by accepting the biblical account by faith, puting aside all materialistic and antimetaphysical assumptions. No doubt about it. But it is not a blind faith. There are good a priori reasons to this faith. I don't advocate just any kind of blind faith.
But once you accept the biblical notions of special creation, fall, curse, flood, Babel, dispersion and speciation, you will find that it makes sense of the origins of matter and life, the fine tuning of the universe, the fossil record, living fossils, good and bad design, DNA, homology, mutations and natural selection, speciation, irreducible complexity, complex specified information, apes and men, cave men, the emergence of languages and races, the ice age, continental drift, plate tectonics, radiometric dating, etc.
Most of all, it makes sense of the rational, moral and spiritual nature of man and of his longing for God and for eternity.
Thorough and revealing exegesis.......1998-11-16
This is not a science book, it is a Biblical commentary. As such it is thorough and comprehensive, and the author clearly has extensive Biblical knowledge and not inconsiderable Christian wisdom.
Certain individuals seem to make a hobby of rubbishing books they have not read by authors they dislike. This is an unfortunate irritant we must live with, alongside the benefit of internet book reviews.
Many Christians think that since science has 'proved' evolution, the Biblical creation account must be myth or allegory. However, by examining the many references to Genesis and Creation throughout the Bible, this book shows that such a view is not easy to reconcile with the scriptures. In fact, to anyone who holds that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, belief in evolution or an old earth is untenable.
Many people avoid the issue, by trying to come to some sort of compromise, or more likely, not thinking too much about it.
Be warned, this book could be dangerous. Armed with the Bible's references to a recent creation, you will soon reduce a progressive creationist to bluster and reference to scientific 'facts'. The more committed someone is to a compromise position, the more aggressive they are likely to be. Be careful talking to your vicar/pastor!
Understanding the reality of a recent 6-day creation, brings new understanding to the whole of God's Word, to the Gospel, and to evangelism.
Customer Reviews:
Looking at God's Word within the context of his Works.......2004-09-01
As Stanley Jaki diagnosed in his "Genesis 1 Through the Ages", it was necessary for the Protestants, once they had rejected the infallible magisterium of the Catholic Church, to fall back on some other form of infallibility: that of the Bible. The problem, as Davis Young remarks (px) is that the Bible is not self-interpreting: it must be, as it has always been, interpreted within a certain context of "extra-biblical knowledge", i.e. our knowledge of the world around us which, being God's work, has a lot to say about Him.
That context of extra-biblical knowledge, fortunately, has not stagnated since men first attempted to make sense of the Bible. It has kept expanding and expanding, as observations and improved theories have accumulated in such sciences as geology, biology or geography, requiring ever finer and more informed interpretations of the texts.
In the process, a Biblical book or passage that may rationally have appeared to be historical to some of the greatest minds of the Church may now be revealed to be nothing more than a story, and just as fictional as one of Jesus's parables, whose value does not depend on our finding the bones of the Good Samaritan or the well-preserved oil-lamps of the foolish virgins buried somewhere on mount Ararat.
Taking the story of Noah as an example of the way increasing extra-biblical knowledge has transformed our understanding of Scripture, Young does for it what Jaki did (less charitably perhaps, but with a sounder ecclesiology) for Genesis 1, retracing more than two millenia of intellectual perplexity and progress in order to shed light on modern controversies.
Young clearly shows how problematic certain interpretations have become in the light of what we now know of the way things work: for countless evidential reasons, none of which have to do with "the rationalistic preconceptions of recent centuries", or any bias inherent in modern science other than a fondness for keeping one's eyes open, a literal reading of the Noah story has become untenable, all the efforts of the Woodmorappes of the world to make the impossible look plausible notwithstanding.
The book is not without its flaws. Being a Protestant, the author seems to believe in a Frankenstein monster of a "church" consisting of the Catholic Church until 1517, and then of the collective body of Protestants after that date, seen as having some sort of organic unity and as being continuous with the pre-Reform Catholic Church, while virtually none of the members of the post-1517 Church are deemed worthy of intellectual discussion, let alone of inclusion in the list of the "premier minds" of "the church."
Interestingly, when it comes to determining which aspects of the interpretation of the Bible are "non-negotiable", i.e. impervious to reinterpretation in the light of new evidence, Young has to fall back on pre-1517 decisions of the Catholic Church, since it seems hard to imagine how his patchwork "church" could ever produce any "settled interpretations" of its own (p308.)
That said, I highly recommend "The Biblical Flood" to anybody who wants to know what to think of the very vocal and self-assured defense made by certain modern Christians of a geographically or anthropologically universal Flood.
Insightful and exhaustively documented.......2000-05-01
Professor Young has done a superb job in collating how different scholars have responded to the Old Testament flood account through the centuries in the light of extra-Biblical data. This detailed study was largely in response to the rise of support in the last 40 years among some (not all) Christians for the global as an explanation for much of the geological record. Young shows repeatedly how this recent phenomenon is out of step with the way Christian scholars have dealt with extra-Biblical data over the last two millennia. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the interaction between science and Christianity, in the history of geology, and in modern young earth creationism.
Of Limited Overall Value.......1999-12-10
The author does a fairly good job describing the history of the church's understanding of the Noachian Deluge. With few exceptions, the Flood had been accepted as universal. Then, in response to the rationalistic preconceptions of recent centuries, the church has largely backed away from Biblical truth, and settled for a local-flood compromise. Sadly, Davis Young, the author, himself is part of this compromising-evangelical community. In particular, his claims that the Ark could never have carried all of the world's animals is patently incorrect. See Woodmorappe, John. 1996. Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study.
Honestly a well written and researched book.......1999-08-07
I would go on about all the details of the book, but Young does a superb job. He traces the way scientists and theologians alike have viewed the flood in the light of increasing amounts of extrabiblical evidence. The greatest understanding I had taken away from his book is that science was once used to help better understand the true meaning of scripture. Today many Christians believe science is irrelevant, but when the evidence is as tremendous as shown in this book it only further forces one to realize maybe they are just being stubborn in the way they want to read things, and not rejecting God.
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A Study of the Interpretation of Noah and the Flood in Jewish and Christian Literature
Jack P. Lewis
Manufacturer: Brill Academic Publishers
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ASIN: 9004054987 |
Customer Reviews:
The most balanced book on controversies in Genesis.......2007-09-22
This book is the best book to get all the major perspectives on the most controversial questions in Genesis. Do not expect to come away with one view touted over the rest. Each of the 12 questions comes with two authors arguing both views effectively. Though it is not affiliated with it, the book comes off similar to the 4 views books if you are familiar with those. You will want to have a basic knowledge of the debated questions, particularly the scientific ones. Probably not an introduction, but more like a book given to stretch ones existing beliefs on creationism and other various questions in Genesis.
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Autumn Floods: A Photographic Interpretation
Peter Yung Wai-Chuen
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Calligraphy
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ASIN: 0195851706 |
Book Description
Over two thousand years old, Chuang Tze's fable "Autumn Floods" is one of the great works of Tao philosophy. Now, in this stunningly crafted volume, film director Peter Yung provides a pictorial interpretation of this classic work. Printed in a limited edition of one thousand copies, this
unique handmade volume of photographs features an embossed calligraphic cover, heavy double-folded papers, vellum overlays with smokey pen-and-ink calligraphy, a seventeen-by-thirteen oversized format, and a durable slipcase. A book collector's dream, it will appeal to anyone attracted to Taoist
philosophy, the quiet contemplation of nature, or exquisite bookmaking.
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Before the flood: Hugh Hood's work in progress
Manufacturer: ECW Press
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0920802001 |
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The Bible May Agree With Evolution and Science May Agree With the Flood
Marjorie Mary Gilfillan
Manufacturer: Wenzel Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0930887204 |
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