Ramp up Your Soccer Tactics with Disguise and Surprise

Book Description

Serious youth soccer coaches will be glad to finally have in their hands a thorough handbook of playing tactics specifically geared to the capabilities of youth players. Practical Soccer Tactics covers the fundamentals, such as when to pass the ball and when to retain it; these basics are taken for granted in books for older players. At the same time, the book includes the teaching of tactics that will stretch the young players; defensive and offensive build ups, transitioning, set pieces and so forth. These youngsters deserve exposure to the fine art, as well as the common art of soccer.

The author guides youth coaches through the variety of individual, group, and team tactical movements that can provide the winning edge in close matches. Time phased diagrams show clearly how each tact will take shape in the field of play. This book provides a match analysis tool to help coaches isolate and identify tactical problem areas, and practice drills to clear up tactical deficiencies in the shortest possible time. Coaches will find this approach particularly valuable for making their players themselves understand how each tactic works and when to use it. If you're serious about coaching, you'll want to buy this unique and helpful resource.

Customer Reviews:

NICE BOOK AND WELL DONE BUT WITH A FEW FLAWS.......2007-10-06

First, as is not my usual practice, I will address why I gave this one only four stars. Number one: The author has sort of overly simplified or dumbed-down some of her explanations and observations. I think she did this in order to make it mord kid friendly. When dealing with science, nature, literature, I feel this is a mistake. It is one of the major problems we have with our current educationsal system. Kids need facts, true facts, and do not need to be spoon fed tipid information just to make it more "current and readable." Second: There are simply better books out there on the same subject. That being said, I enjoyed this one as do the children I read it with. The book is about various animals and the methods of camouflage they use and secrets of defense. Artic Fox, Polar Bears, Stick Insects, Crocodiles, Frogs, Crab Spiders, Mantises, Screech Owls, Geckos, Elk, Plover and Lions are some of the animals addressed here. The pictures are great. As to the question the Library people asked here in their review "who really actually tastes grasshopper spit?" Well, I for one have. And yes, it does taste yukky. All in all, a fun read, interesting, but there are better.

Mulan/Prepack: Surprises and Disguises Paper Doll

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Mulan/Prepack: Surprises and Disguises Paper Doll

Manufacturer: Golden books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Ages 4-8 | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

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Surprise Disguise! (Stickerific)
Golden Books
Manufacturer: Golden Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Humorous | Literature | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

General | Literature | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

General | Ages 4-8 | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

All 4-for-3 Deals | 4-for-3 Books Store | Stores | Books
ASIN: 0375827927
Release Date: 2004-07-27

Book Description

Bob and his friends are getting ready for a costume party, and guess who has a few surprises up his sleeve? Spud! Kids can make their own surprise disguise with Spud on the back cover. A full page of stickers adds to the fun!

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Surprise Disguise (Cartwheels)
Thelma Lambert
Manufacturer: Penguin UK
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0241002966

Disguises and Surprises: Camouflaged Animals

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Disguises and Surprises: Camouflaged Animals
Claire Lllewellyn
Manufacturer: Candlewick
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000HZ02O2

A league of three, or, A boy's detective stratagems: A tale of disguises and surprises (Old Sleuth's own)

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A league of three, or, A boy's detective stratagems: A tale of disguises and surprises (Old Sleuth's own)
Old Sleuth
Manufacturer: J.S. Ogilvie
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B00089317C

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Luther's Surprise Disguise
Cari Meister
Manufacturer: SIMON & SCHUSTER CHI
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

The mysteries and miseries of the great metropolis,: With some adventures in the country: being the disguises and surprises of a New-York journalist

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The mysteries and miseries of the great metropolis,: With some adventures in the country: being the disguises and surprises of a New-York journalist
Arthur Pember
Manufacturer: D. Appleton
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Amazon.com

Edmund Blair Bolles is investigating a mystery: human creativity. Garbage in, garbage out is the rule for even the most intelligent machines; but with human minds, the rules change. Sometimes the rule is as true for us as for any computer, but every once in a while it's Ignorance in, insight out.

The example Bolles looks at is the Ice Age. Nowadays it's familiar to every schoolchild, but this familiarity has dulled our appreciation of just how wild an idea it once was. Earth-girdling floods seemed both reasonable and biblical, volcanoes unusual but not unknown. But a mile-thick sheet of ice covering much of the North Temperate Zone only 20,000 years ago was beyond anyone's experience or imagination.

The professor and the politician of Bolles's title are Louis Agassiz and Charles Lyell, two of the most famous geologists of the 19th century. The unusual character in Bolles's story is the poet: Elisha Kent Kane. To call Kane a poet is both over- and understatement: he was a celebrity, a romantic, a self-promoter, a mediocre explorer, and a particularly poor leader of men. He was also a dreamer who tried to find the lost Franklin expedition, and found the far north very different from his (or anyone else's) expectations: "dreams in, nightmares out." Yet it was Kane's bestselling book about his travels that brought the reality of great ice into the minds of laypeople and scientists alike: writes Bolles, "He is the one who made the Ice Age imaginable." --Mary Ellen Curtin

Book Description

The surprising story of three ambitious men and how their clash of egos, ignorance, and imaginations led to the discovery of the Ice Age

Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), extraordinary Swiss scientist and professor, conceived of the Ice Age and then spent decades trying to persuade other scientists he had not gone mad. Charles Lyell (1797-1875) was his century's most influential geologist and a master politician among his fellow scientists. His scientific principles said an Ice Age was impossible, even after his eyes showed him it was real. Elisha Kent Kane (1820-1857), an adventurer trapped for two winters at the top of Greenland, wrote a poetic description of a harsh and frozen landscape. His reports portrayed previously unimaginable great ice and set the stage for the story's unexpected outcome.

The discovery of the Ice Age is one of science's greatest and least-known stories. Like James Watson's The Double Helix and Dava Sobel's Longitude, The Ice Finders shows that, for all their boasting about reason, scientists are driven by their passions and obsessions-human traits that actually advance the evolution of scientific discovery.

Customer Reviews:

yeah, a very nice book.......2007-05-08

Although the title is a stretch (the poet, philosopher, politician stuff), this is a great read. The author not only is a very good writer, but also a very good storyteller, an expert at weaving his way back and forth between the Swiss Alps (and the Juras) and the glaciers of the west coast of Greenland. Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz is the biggest star, although I often found myself wanting get back to the trials faced by Elisha Kent Kane and company on the coast of Greenland.

I learned a lot, all in the context of a great story.

Saga of Mind and Place.......2006-10-21

Fun to read, well-organized, and sprightly in style. We are lucky to live in a Golden Age of writing about the history of science. The Ice Finders is about explorers both of extreme environments and extreme realizations. One such realization still has power to change our culture: the evolutionary implications of the ice ages and the corollary age of the Earth. Like poor Louis Agassiz, who propounded the ice-age theory but rejected Darwinism, an amazing number of people today still stand with one foot in religion and one in science.

Splendid Little Book On The Discovery Of The Ice Age.......2003-09-06

Edmund Blair Bolles' "The Ice Finders" is an insightful little book that gives a slight, yet penetrating, overview on the sociology of 19th Century science. Here Bolles is interested in the impact creativity has on science; or more simply put, how imagination coupled with facts can propel scientific research. Here he has interwoven the careers of the three who were most responsible for establishing the fact of an Ice Age Earth: the "politician" Charles Lyell who advocated a uniformitarian view of the Earth that was often at odds with "professor" Louis Agassiz's vision of a catastrophic Ice Age that had covered the globe, wiping out life, and finally the "poet" Elisha Kent Kane, who found evidence for the Ice Age in the massive continental glaciers of Greenland. Bolles is interested not only in the facts behind the development of an Ice Age scientific theory, but also in the motivations of all three men, which led them to accept parts of the geological and climatic evidence that they had observed. Although Agassiz was the first to recognize the possibility of continental glaciation, it was only after Kane's observations of the Greeenland ice sheet, that geologists and others recognized the possibility of an Ice Age. Bolles' narrative is told in a crisp, lucid style that occasionally sounds like a well-written mystery. Although this is not the definitive history of science tome on this subject, it is nonetheless a fascinating little book that should be of interest to anyone intrigued with 19th Century exploration as well as the history of 19th Century science.

Showing how science is made.......2002-02-02

Dava Sobel's Longitude seems to have established a new trend for science and technology writing. Instead of trying to produce broad histories, more books are coming out that focus on a specific area or development.

This one, for example, covers the development of the theory that there was once an "ice age," an era when glaciers covered much of the earth. This was heady stuff for the geologists of the 1830s, already reeling from evidence that the earth was millions or billions of years old, rather than the thousands indicated by the Bible. In fact, one of the tales of this book is the sometimes irrational resistance of established scientists to this radical but evident new concept, as Louis Agassiz turns himself from an establishment figure into a maverick by championing it and guardian of the orthodoxy Charles Lyell, author of the authoritative textbook of geology, first resists it and finally adopts it in a way that suggests he was right all along. The making of science is not always a pretty sight and is often rather different from the tidy displacement of an outdated theory by a more current, better supported one. It's frequently much more of a fight than that, and the theory of an ice age is an example of such.

But that's just one of the threads of this book. The other is the adventure of explorer-poet Elisha Kent Kane, who ostensibly seeks the remains of Franklin's polar expedition, gets stuck in the ice for two years (a harrowing experience related in painful detail), and finally returns with clear documentary evidence of the massive ice formations that Agassiz needs as the final justification for his theory.

The two threads are related in episodes, which gets a little confusing, particularly when one notes that the Kane expedition narrative covers a time period well after most of the Agassiz narrative. However, one quickly gets used to this and moves on.
All in all, it's a very interesting story that shows how science is made.

A good, fast read.......2001-09-15

This is a fun little book about the discovery and eventual acceptance of the theory that glaciers used to cover entire continents, creating interesting geologic formations that had been puzzling natural historians before the mid 1800s. The account rotates among the stories of three Europeans who contributed to the discovery. This is not academic, history of science writing, so don't expect precision. Go elsewhere for a well-referenced version of events. Instead, Bolles takes the liberty to interpret what the characters were feeling when they uncovered bits of information and how they reacted to arguments with their collegues ... and these are what makes it such a great read. The fact that one of them was trapped on an artic expedition for an excruciating amount of time also helped keep my attention.

Book Description

This text provides a firm grounding in the laws and principles of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics that are essential to the study of physics. It presents the subject in a remarkably fresh, clear, and understandable manner, and is based on the most up-to-date research in the field. This sets the text apart from other books serving the same course market, as does its unique approach, which treats thermodynamics as an application of probability theory. Problems are included at the end of each chapter, and supplementary sections include review questions, exercises and solutions. The scope and variety of these problems also contribute to the work's value. Intended for use in upper undergraduate physics courses, the text is also suitable for electrical engineering and chemistry students. The material is presented at a high level, yet the mathematical foundations are compatible with students' understanding. An accompanying diskette--IBM PC version--provides helpful experience with computer approaches to the material.

Customer Reviews:

modern approach.......2002-12-08

Many stat mech courses still use leaden, old-fashioned texts like Ma and Pathria that start by teaching thermodynamics, and that obsess on old issues that no one cares about any more. I strongly recommend that teachers using such books get out of their rut and look at a modern presentation. This book is very clear in its approach: thermodynamics is a consequence of statistical mechanics, not a separate subject, and there are no new fundamental laws. Thermo is discussed only after the foundations of stat mech have been laid out. It's also very good about introducing topics of more current interest (e.g. there are examples or problems involving stars, polymers, surfaces...) Finally, there are lots of worked-out problems in the back of the book. It's not a very advanced book (it starts to fail when it attempts to tackle superfluidity, renormalization group, etc., because it takes much more space to do this properly than is available). But the first 3/4 of the book is elegant, logical, complete and clear. It can be used for an undergrad or beginning grad class.

Deep, Original, Example-Rich, but also a bit Remote.......1998-02-16

This book was chosen for my undergrad thermo course for it's depth and originality, even if (as with most texts) use of it in teaching might benefit from providing alternate and simpler ways to introduce some of the key elements. Dr. Garrod is aware of contemporary developments on a variety of fronts, and hence provides handles that are absent in many of the texts currently available. More importantly, about HALF of the book consists of worked exercises. It has potential for both graduate and undergraduate applications, in which worked exercises and instructor material might be used to augment respectively the second and first halves of the book.

Book Description

Mabel Stark was the greatest female tiger trainer in history. During the golden age of the big top, she was the superstar of the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus, and one of America's most eccentric celebrities. A tiny, curvaceous Kentucky blonde in a white leather bodysuit, Mabel was brazen, sexually adventurous, and suicidally courageous. It is 1968. Mabel, nursing her most serious mauling yet, is just turning eighty and about to lose her job at Jungleland, a Florida game park. Devastated by the loss of her cats, she looks back on her life and her five husbands: the fifth -- a cross-dresser whom she married without bothering to divorce the other four -- would one day be tragically mauled by her one true love, her ferocious yet amorous 550-pound Bengal tiger, Rajah. Starting with her escape from a mental institution to begin her circus career as a burlesque dancer, Mabel's exquisitely voiced confession is a live wire of dark secrets, broken dreams, and comic escapades. It is a brilliant, exhilarating story of an America before television and movies, when the spectacle of the circus reigned and an unlikely woman captured the public imagination with her singular charm and audacity.

Customer Reviews:

Good fiction; uncomfortable semi-reality.......2007-09-09

What a very peculiar novel. For one thing, when I bought it, I didn't realize Mabel Stark was a real person - and that kind of threw a shadow over the whole book. This is just too salacious and crazy a story to feel entirely comfortable as a fictionalized autobiography, especially when the subject is A) only moderately well-known, and B) only recently dead. 1968 isn't yesterday, but I'm sure there are still people alive who knew and maybe even worked with Mabel Stark.

Since the author admits in the afterword that he changed certain things to fit the story, as well as filling in blanks, how much of this is real? What about the numerous, and rather descriptive sexual details? As a piece of fiction it's a very enjoyable, if episodic book, with a unique narrative voice - but as "fictional non-fiction" it's a bit...iffy.

Wow, what a great read.......2007-03-04

I thought this was a wonderful book. It's written in the first person and I loved the voice that Robert Hough created for Mabel Stark. I recently read Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen, I really enjoyed it and wanted more circus stories. I read Circus Fire by Stuart O'Nan, a non-fiction account of the Hartford big top fire in 1944 and unfortunately it did little to satisfy my quest for more circus stories. The Final Confessions of Mabel Stark was very satisfying. Houg does a great job of describing circus life and all of the trials and tribulations that the fictional Mabel goes through. I thought it was great!

EXCELLENT!.......2005-05-13

This book was excellent. It's the sort of book you think about all the time until you can pick it up again.

BUY IT!

The golden age of the circus and its lion tamer.......2004-11-04

Possibly the greatest tiger trainer of all time, certainly the greatest female trainer, Mabel Stark rose to the top of her profession during the heyday of the circus, the 1910's and `20s. Tiny but fearless, she drew huge crowds, particularly for the wrestling act with her 500 pound Bengal, Rajah, conducted in a leather jumpsuit which became her signature costume.

Canadian author Hough's well-researched debut novel (which won Ontario's Trillium Award) is full of the rough and tumble of circus life. As involving as it is informative, as moving as it is riveting, the book takes the form of a memoir, or confession. It's the end of a career that spanned five husbands and rose from carny girlie shows to top billing at Ringling, followed by a long denouement as a trainer at JungleLand animal park. It's 1968 and Mabel is facing her 80th birthday.

"Still, I'm not a complainer, never have been never will be, so I'll skip the drawbacks and jump to the thing I do like about aging. The mind gets supple. Believe it or not, it does. You start seeing around corners. You start picturing what's behind you without having to crane your neck (which you can't do anyway, seeing as it's getting stiffer by the day). It's the one recompense of being aged and wrinkly and sore: you learn the trick of being in two places at once."

Time, she says, changes with age. From a forward march it becomes an accumulation, then something different again: "like gumballs in a penny machine, all mixed together, jumbled up, rubbing the colour off one another." Age has affected how she sees her "greatest sin," the event that divided her life into "before" and "after." "Then one day I woke up and my worst sin had come unhobbled in time. Started wandering, it had. Suddenly it was something I'd always done, something I'd always been capable of doing. Suddenly it was a part of me."

Mabel anchors the narrative in 1968, moving between past and present. But mostly she keeps the flow chronological. An author's note at the end describes Hough's major sources of research and his considered departures from known fact. It's known that Mabel was a nurse before she became a carnival dancer, but how she got there is vague, though at least one source says she had a nervous breakdown. Hough provides her with a boorish husband and has him commit her, mostly because she found sex with him abhorrent. The horror of marriage is only exceeded by the sadistic therapy, and Mabel uses her God-given wits to get as far from both as possible. Sensing what the one kindly doctor wants to hear from her, she eventually convinces him to help her escape and thanks to another man, finds herself a carny show job.

Men are the pattern in Mabel's life. An orphan, she's spent her life looking for love. Though she never develops much interest in sex, men mark the high and low points in her life. Cats are the constant. When lion trainer Louis Roth falls for her, he gives her her heart's desire - a chance to work with the big cats. From there it's onwards and upwards, except when some man shoots her down. And all the while, she's building toward that day in 1927 when her life changed forever, when she did something so awful, it takes most of the book to get there.

"The thing that scares me the most? The thing that makes me jittery, that makes me dart for one of Dr. Brisbane's pills, that makes me contemplate rash actions: What if neither God nor luck has anything to do with it? What if we make our own luck? What if everything that happens to us happens because we wanted it that way?"

An awful thought for a woman who's had a lot of luck, good and bad, and it's a fear she develops throughout the narrative as impulse and timing combine to send her soaring and tumbling. Mabel's personality drives this unsparing, tumultuos story, full of love and loss, but weighted with her inability to sustain happiness.

Hough steeps the story in circus atmosphere - the ego and competitiveness of the performers, the strict pecking order, the downtrodden workingmen, the animals, the day-to-day tribulations of life on the road in all weather. The tedious hard work of training and the sudden heart-stopping tiger maulings. It's an exotic and exciting picture of the circus' golden age and one talented and tormented (and well scarred) star. A wonderful novel, which marks the debut of a writer to watch.

mabel was my kind of gal.......2004-07-03

I gave this book five stars because I think its an origianl work and since this is huegh's first novel I'm super impressed. This is a fictinoal bio told in the first person. Mabel's expressions and emotions are laid out for the reader in a wonderful style. The story courses back and forth from present day 80 year old mabel to 20 something novice learning the ropes of big cat training. The reader is taken on the road with the circus and mabel and experinces the ups and downs of her affairs and her tiger act. A good portion of the story is spent with Raja mabel's true love a six hundred pound bengal tiger. The story is compelling, at times humorus, and bitter sweet.

The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book)

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Love Circus/Carnival Books?
Wow, what a great read!
disappointed but did finish it
decent read
A female tiger trainer in the golden age of circus

The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book)
Robert Hough
Manufacturer: Grove Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Historical | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Developmental Psychology | Psychology & Counseling | Health, Mind & Body | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0802140432

Book Description

In the 1910s and '20s, during the golden age of the big top, Mabel Stark was the superstar of the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus, and one of America's most eccentric celebrities. A tiny, curvaceous Kentucky blonde in a white leather bodysuit, Mabel was brazen, sexually adventurous, and suicidally courageous. The Final Confession of Mabel Stark is Robert Hough's brilliant, highly acclaimed novelization of her fantastic life. It is 1968 — Mabel is just turning eighty and is about to lose her job at Jungleland, a Southern California game park. Devastated by the loss of her cats, she looks back on her life and her five husbands: the fifth would one day be tragically mauled by her one true love, her ferocious yet amorous 550-pound Bengal tiger Rajah. Starting with her escape from a mental institution to begin her circus career as a burlesque dancer, Mabel's exquisitely voiced confession is a live wire of dark secrets, broken dreams, and comic escapades. It is a brilliant, exhilarating story of an America before television and movies, when the spectacle of the circus reigned and an unlikely woman captured the public imagination with her singular charm and audacity.

Customer Reviews:

Love Circus/Carnival Books?.......2007-08-26

Well, I do, and I absolutely loved this book!!!! I bought it on a whim when I was in a very large book store in Portland, OR. I put off reading it for a few months and then decided what the heck, it looked entertaining. Wow, did that turn out to be an understatement. It was one of those books which you can't put down, but then you are so sorry when it ends because it leaves an empty space in you, one only a really GOOD Book can fill. I have loaned it to several of my girlfriends and everyone of them raves about it. We all know it's not the "True Life" story of Mabel Stark, but the bits of truth that are there are as fasinating as the fiction. I now trust my "whims" when looking for a good book to read, which is an ongoing search as I read daily, sometimes 2 books at a time. Next to playing with my grandchildren reading is my favorite way to pass the day and sometimes even the nights.
Suzanne Himmelberg/Missouri

Wow, what a great read!.......2007-05-19

I thought this was a wonderful book. It's written in the first person and I loved the voice that Robert Hough created for Mabel Stark.

I recently read Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen, I really enjoyed it and wanted more circus stories. I read Circus Fire by Stuart O'Nan, a non-fiction account of the Hartford big top fire in 1944 and unfortunately it did little to satisfy my quest for more circus stories.

The Final Confessions of Mabel Stark was very satisfying. Houg does a great job of describing circus life and all of the trials and tribulations that the fictional Mabel goes through.

I thought it was great!

disappointed but did finish it.......2007-03-27

This book has all the makings of a really great read, and it does start off that way. The character of Mabel tells her own story in first person and most of it has a ring of authenticity.

Unfortunately, however, the author had a pre-occupation with what Mabel's sex life may have been like. We read how she had good and bad sex with all her husbands and, in one passage, even with her favorite tiger. Much of it seems gratuitous, as if the author couldn't imagine much of anything else that might be interesting in the life of a female tiger trainer in a traveling circus in the early- and mid-20th century!

I'm no prude (understatement) but with all the material that someone should have been able to use to flesh out the life of such a potentially fascinating character, the one thing we get over and over again is her sex life. I guess that's why it's called her "Final Confessions", but what a disappointment. There was so much to work with here, and most of it went ignored.

decent read.......2005-03-11

I got this book hoping it would be a romp through the carnival world at/around the turn of the century. There is some great stuff in the book about Mabel and her tiger training, but I was hoping for more from the rest of the carnival. 3/5 of the book is quality, but the rest is a little long in the tooth. I had fun reading the book but I was glad when it was over.

A female tiger trainer in the golden age of circus.......2005-02-27

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The Final Confession of Mabel Stark
Robert Hough
Manufacturer: Atlantic Monthly Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000VYLYNM

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