Away

The 1986 playoffs were some of the best games that baseball has seen. Authour Mike Sowell has tried to capture the excitement and suspense of those playoffs in "One Pitch Away"

While not a bad book, one can't help leaving this book feeling that much more could have been done with it. The problem I have with the book is that 2/3 of it is spent interviewing the players of those playoffs. I didn't really care about hearing about Doug DeCinces and his investment company. Sowell probably could have gone into greater detail about the whole season and the effect the 86 playoffs had on baseball.

Not a bad book, but there are better.

Without even being a huge baseball fan I was intrigued by this well told story of the 1986 League Championships and World Series. The history of the games was very dramatic and well written. It also gave very in depth and personal accounts from the players of those series and the impact they had on their lives. It told of the heartbreak and happiness that one postseason could inflict on so many people.

This and his best book, "The Pitch That Killed" are great baseball books. What has happend to Mike Sowell? Why are these great books out of print? I was amazed by the in-depth research in both of these books, and I want to read more by this writer. Does anyone have news about this author and what he is currently working on?

As a big Sweet Valley fan I have read the odd jr series,especially as my neices own them.This is a story about the twins"running away" only they are found in,like,an hour and have not left home...These books are often anti-climax,but I think that is ok.The author is attempting realism,and to be real to the way kids really behave.

Elizabeth and Jessica are having weekend guests. But Eric and Welsley are very bad! So, the twins decide to run away from home! I think that they feel very lonely. What pretty girls they are!

Elizabeth and Jessica are having weekend guests. But Eric and Welsley are very bad! So, the twins decide to run away from home! I think that they feel very lonely. What pretty girls they are!

How could I give 5 stars to a boozy little clod of memoirs like this? Easy. Since there are probably thousands of books written about the Beatles, it stands to reason that there must be a few good ones in the bunch: and I've looked for them. THIS is one of those few: it actually tells stories we haven't heard before, with the impressive authority of Allan Williams, a clubowner and crucial promoter of Merseyside Beat music. His barstool companion chat about the old days fills a long volume of stories that are Fun, Fun, Fun! in a grimy, speedy sort of way. I recommend this book to just about everyone, because it's just plain fun, with enough bittersweet musings to make the whole thing edifying to read. But I especially recommend it to people who HATE the Beatles, because you will see them in appealingly different ways from the Legend: awkward, goofy, drunk, mean, broke, cheap, powerless, and vulnerable. All too human. As is Williams himself, who proves to be utterly empathetic as well as entertaining, and who hopefully made a bit of money off this book. Every modern rocker who reads this should end up enthralled by the unexpectedly punk rock early years of these stone gods. Even a disinterested nonrocker would find the hardscrabble life of Williams to be intriguing and a little bit heart-wrenching. This book surpasses in scope all the typical "chronicle of (x) times with the Beatles" and proves to be an intriguing illumination of success, failure, aspiration and hope. It's a tragedy that it's out of print while so many tiresome retellings of the band's halcyon days go on and on in endless repetition. Buy this one; it's well worth it.

I first heard of this book back in 1976, John Lenon said in an interview how the Hamburg days were his funnest as a Beatle, & if anyone wanted to know about them they should get this book. Since then 2 other books have come out about the period,"Beatle", by Pete Best, & "The Beatles Live", by Mark Lewisohn. Taken all together, the 3 books paint a vivid picture of one of the greatest stories in rock n roll history,(a side of the Beatles that Brian Epstein did his best to hide from the public when he took over from Williams as their manager)by the way, in the film "Hard days night", the character of the Beatles manager was based on Alan Williams, not on epstien.Alun Owen, the screenwriter for the film is also a godparent to alan williams kids. Epstein brought the Beatles to America, but 4 years earlier it was Williams who had brought them to Hamburg,where they played 6+ hours a night & forged the sound that would take over the world. But to his credit, it was Epestein who saw their potential as the greatest act in all of rock music, not Williams.

Full of lovely sentimentality and regrets and selfpity - a first hand document written by one of very few people who were right in the epicentre at the scruffy start of the neverending everfascinating Beatles saga. And Allan certainly has a sense of humour. His memory may be not completely focused on all accounts, but he was there, which most weren't (for example the endless list of pompous stamp collecting biographers who just knick stories from Allan, May Pang, Fred Seaman, Derek Taylor, Neil Aspinall, Astrid Kirchherr, Yoko Ono - and from John, Paul, George and Ringo). Whether he actually was in the position to give the Beatles away to Brian Epstein or not may be debatable, but he knows how to tell some very good stories. This is one of ten, possibly twenty, published sources needed to get a fair kaleidoscope of different angles on the four personalities who made this quartet. The rest is just recycling really. Why in the world would you waste time on fifth-hand interpretations when you can have it straight from the horse's mouth?

"Those Who Walk Away" is a concise, fast reading novel of low-keyed suspense. The background is an appropriately gloomy wintertime Venice. Ray, the key character, has lost his wife to suicide. Ed is the unforgiving, not to mention self-centered, father in law who blames Ray for his daughter's death and tries to kill him. Ray pursues Ed through the canals, back streets, cafes, gondola rides and fancy hotels of Venice to clear his conscience and calm Ed down. The embittered Ed has none of this and chases Ray in the same fashion. Both find atmospheric Venetian "hiding places". To use a movie term, Highsmith makes use of an excellent supporting cast: Signor Ciardi, Inez, Luigi the gondolier and Elisabetta almost steal the show from the main characters. Highsmith also pulls the reader into the plot quickly, a talent of hers. We are involved from page one! The ending, which no reviewer should reveal, is smooth and satisfying. To fully enjoy the tale, the reader must surrender credibility on 2 points: 1) Those "meetings" between Ed and Ray are truly coincidental and 2) The Venetian police, as personified by Detective Dell'Isola, ask few questions and press few charges. I would give the author her license on those points and enjoy "TWWA" on its own merits. A closing question: Did Ray really let a nice Italian girl like Elisabetta get away? Did he ever go back to Venice to see her just once more?

I have just read this novel and I must admit that Highsmith's good reputation is justified. Even if it isn't comparable with first class literature, for example a S. Maugham's novel with a really valuable background, P. Highsmith's detective novels collection is praiseworthy. I would say that 'Those who Walk Away' is worth reading. She is able to transform a simple story into a thrilling plot. Here it is the question of an breath taking pursuitbetween a revengeful father and a despairing widower in the obscure lanes of Venice. I would value it as one of the best second class literature.

The novel deals with the dramatic and obsessive attempt of a man, whose wife has just committed suicide, to convince his father-in-law that he is innocent of his wife's suicide although their marriage was a failure. The plot is wonderfully interwoven into a great thriller. The brutal and vicious fight between the two men, Coleman and Ray, makes the attentive reader sit up and read on. The novel also includes a vivid description of the setting of this novel: Venice! The world of the two artists seems to be a very stark contrast. Both are trying to be very strong and represent their interests passionately.

I love to read interracial romance. I researched this book. I read all the reviews and even searched for it on other readers WMBW lists. However, this is not an interracial romance. Dispite the cover, both lead charaters are African-American. I thought that might be of interest to some of you out there.

The plot--very weak. It can barely stand on it's own feet. The author makes no real character establishment. I don't really like Grayson. He's very particular, and lets face it, nobody talks like that! The author tries too hard to convience us that he is well spoken, but is comes off as silly.

Sorry, Kim Louise, this was a very dull book. I fill like I wasted my time. Ms. Louise could learn a lesson or two from Serissa Glass.

Kim Louise's second novel 'A Touch Away' is a good read. Sonji Stevens has waited 15 long years to return to college to get her degree. She knew that returning to school at such a late age might bring headaches and obstacles. But she never expected that one seemingly immovable obstacle would be her tough take no prisoners English professor. Sonji panics when she finds out that she cannot get out of the professors class, but she is determined not to let this set her back. Handsome professor Grayson Gilmore is aware of the names his students call him behind his back. He is a tough task master who does not tolerate coming to class late or handing in work less than he believes his students are capable of.Sonji's new found friends, Andromeda (called Andi) and Sebastian are the ones who alerted Sonji of the infamous Professor Gilmore or "PG", i.e, 'pretty God-awful', as he is sometimes called. Andi proves to be a good friend as she helps Sonji get through the process of late registration and settling in to college life. When Andi finds out that Sonji has no one special in her life she sets out to fix that too. At Andi's urging Sonji signs up for e-mail at 'BlackLuv.com.' "BlackLuv is'true love." Thus starts her adventure with her unseen soulmate 'Osiris' who only knows Sonji as ' Nzinga.' Life is not easy at school. Sonji's fellow student and friend wants to be more than just a friend. She gets guidance from Osiris for an assignment and the professor accuses her of cheating. Unhappy students accuse Professor Gilmore of racism. Is is possible to betray an invisible dot.com lover? Osiris may be her soulmate but Sonji is not immune to Professor Gilmore good looks and hot stares. Ms. Louis has done it again. 'A Touch Away' has believable twists. I read this novel in one evening because held my attention 100%. Vannie(~.~)

Why did I find it so difficult to put this book down? Because it was...of the CHAIN!! I would recommend this book for all who are insightful or for those who are in search of a good read. A Touch Away engulfs its audience into the lives of Sonji & Grayson and refuses to let go untill the very end (which has a little suprise in its own). You would think that a 19 year old college student wouldn't have time to do any "extra" reading but this book is SOOO good that you will find yourself MAKING time to read it...it's that good!!!!!
Bravo Ms. Kim Louise!!!

Trying to comfort a distraught bride whose matchmaking scheme has gone awry, Lt. Com. Trevor McQuillen tracks down her missing matron of honor, Viv-but accidentally drags the wrong woman to the wedding. ICU nurse Christy Russell insists on helping Trevor find the real matron. She soon learns that her attraction to him is very mutual- but that he doesn't share her views on marriage! Funny and sensual, Donna Kauffman's CARRIED AWAY is an affecting blend of humor and true-to-life conflict.

This book is pretty good and only takes a few hours to read. Like others in The "Wrong Bed" series it's shockingly funny. The wrong bed scene is hilarious.

The subplot with Vivian & Eric is a bit too much, is this plot from another book the author wrote? They need their own book, if they don't already have it, to take care of their unfinished business.

This is Christy & Trevor's story and too much of Viv & Eric's baggage is all tangled up in the main characters relationship.

What a fun read. A real Blast. Loved the characters and thought the story line was fun. Lots of laughter and lovin'. I really enjoyed this book but then all of Donnas' books are so great. I have read everything she has written and look forward to each and every book she publishes. WOW what a writer. I am constantly surprised by the different styles she can write. Everything from paranormal to sexy hot Blaze books. If you have not read this author you MUST ....

Thanks again Donna for another fun read.

Another reader in Florida...or where ever I am at the time...

My parents wrote this book and it is horrible. I don't think it would help anyone with a divorce.

I think anyone who is either homosexual, heterosexual or bisexual should read this book because there isn't a person in the world whose sex life would not be improved by this book

My wife and I were literally in the process of filing for divorce, someone recommended to us this book and we are now still married happily as ever (and with a better sex life)

Sharon McCone drinks to much!

The 22 books to date in Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone series span from 1977, so this is one of the earlier ones (1984) in a set that obviously has staying power. Our leading lady is a full-time employee of a law firm where she handles investigations along with more routine paralegal work, but she seemed pretty free to roam around as she chose, with or without a paying client. Sharon's a just-thirty single private eye in the mode of Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone or Karen Kijewski's Kat Colorado and reminded me of both of them, although indeed Sharon may have come first.

Our copy of the hardback was just 150 pages long, so it wasn't too long nor too complicated a tale. There seemed to be few recurring support characters and most of the story took place in California, but away from home base in San Francisco. The plot featured a couple of murders and some older questionable deaths spiced things up a little, but in general we found the book, while reasonably enjoyable, a little lackluster by modern standards. We might be inclined to check out a more recent work and see if that might be more satisfying before reading the set from the start forward. So -- not bad, but a rather typical entree in the female private eye genre...

Investigator Sharon McCone receives a call from a famous photographer, asking her to find his missing roommate. She has a hard time discerning exactly what their relationship is, but proceeds on her investigation. She traces the missing roommate to her hometown and then finds her dead. The suspects range from the photographer himself to several of her co-workers at a Hospice where she used to work and where several people died under suspicious circumstances. As usual, McCone tracks down the murderer, but not before putting herself in danger and picking up a new boyfriend along the way. This is another solid entry in this long-running series.

This is really 3 1/2 stars. The subject was engrossing, the story of the rivalry between the heroic Frenchman and the brilliant but cheating Japanese researchers interesting, the history of the plague informative. BUT it was very condensed; the chapters were quite short and needed fleshing out.

I did like the organization - alternating between a breakout of the plague in modern India and the one that struck turn of the century Hong Kong. Particularly disturbing were the tales of modern plague and the rather easy conditions needed to engender such a horror.

The author did not spend enough time with the main story. He concentrated on colonial conditions, the prejudice of the imperialists, the still-existing problem of health in the 3rd world. But the heart of the story was the rivalry between the two researchers and the plague itself. This could have been a brilliant book - instead it was only above average. Pictures and a bibliography are included.

Edward Marriott's book is an interesting, well-written, anecdoctal account of two rival scientists studying the plague that struck Hong Kong in 1894. In the light of present day news stories of mad-cow disease, SARS, and other exotic ailments that possibly could pose a pandemic threat, Marriott's book is especially relevant.

Marriott brings the rat-infested harbor area and the exceedingly crowded, poor districts of the city to vivid life. The stark pictures of those soon-emptied areas, so quickly deserted by panicked residents, are chilling to view.

Recommended to all readers, and especially to those involved in public health issues.

Plague, commonly known as The Black Death, has occurred in three major pandemics, and this is a fine history of the latest, which started in China in the late 19th century and spread worldwide from Hong Kong. Investigations into the nature of the disease in 1894 culminated in a contest between two early microbiologists, Kitasato and Yersin, a tale with obvious modern parallels. This historical footnote is one of the major themes of the book, but the author then follows the spread of Plague from Hong Kong to India and on to America. It has become entrenched in various wild animals worldwide. This is a great medical history, and one of the best of the rash of books on "killer diseases" that currently flood the market.

Wise Blood (1952)(Flannery O'Connor 1925-68)

All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. -Flannery O'Connor

Wise Blood is Flannery O'Connor's grotesque picaresque tale of Hazel Motes of Eastrod, Tennessee; a young man who has come to the city of Taulkinham bringing with him an enormous resentment of Christianity and the clergy. He is in an open state of rebellion against the rigidity of his itinerant preacher grandfather and his strict mother. So when one of the first people he encounters is the blind street preacher Asa Hawks and Motes finds himself both attracted and repelled by Hawks' bewitching fifteen year old daughter Lily Sabbath, he reacts by establishing his own street ministry. He founds the "Church without Christ":

Listen you people, I'm going to take the truth with me wherever I go. I'm going to preach it to whoever'll listen at whatever place. I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.

As you can guess the church is singularly unsuccessful, although he does attract a couple of other crackpots: Enoch Emery a young man who works at the zoo and longs for a kind word from anybody; and Onnie Jay Holy, yet another rival preacher who believes Motes when he says he's found a "new jesus."

While at first this cast of bizarre characters, ranging from merely repugnant to truly evil, and the scenes of physical, moral and spiritual degradation through which they pass all seem to be just a little too much, the reader is carried along by O'Connor's sure hand for dark comedy. The book is very funny. But as the story draws to a close, O'Connor's true mission is revealed; Motes loses his fight against faith and he achieves a kind of grace, becoming something like a Christian martyr to atone for his sins. O'Connor has something serious and important to say about the modern human condition and the emptiness of a life without faith. That she is able to disguise this message in such a ribald comic package is quite an achievement.

Reading the book inevitably called to mind Carson McCullers' dreadful book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), which made the Modern Library Top 100 Novels of the Twentieth Century list. It too is a Southern gothic, populated by dismal misanthropes. But it is devoid of humor and has nothing to say about the characters and the world they've created. Wise Blood is a superior novel in every sense and really deserves that spot on the list.

GRADE: A+

The Violent Bear It Away (1960)(Flannery O'Connor 1925-68)

From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away. -Matthew 11:12

Flannery O'Connor wrote with one of the most distinctive voices in American Literature; a kind of grotesque amalgam of Jonathan Edwards, Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allen Poe, and William Faulkner. She perceived the world in starkly Manichean terms, as a struggle between the forces of Light and Dark, Good and Evil. The Violent Bear it Away is a psychomachia--literally a battle for the soul--the story of a backwoods Southern boy named Francis Marion Tarwater (see The Violent Bear it Away and The Bible by Angela Lucey for more on this). The boy's great uncle, an Old Testament style patriarch, kidnapped him away from an uncle, George Rayber, and has raised him to be a prophet of God. Upon his great uncle's death, Tarwater rejects the prophetic mission and heads to the city to live with his uncle, who tries to wean the boy away from the teachings of the great uncle. Through a series of increasingly violent actions Tarwater is eventual driven back to the woods and a final acceptance of God and his own role in God's plans.

This is powerful stuff, O'Connor felt that exaggeration and caricature were more likely to reach a modern audience than more subtle styles ever could. Combine that with her vision of violence as a sort of crucible which forces the individual to make a final choice between Good and Evil, and you've got the makings of a truly disturbing fiction. The book will surely not appeal to all tastes, but it is undeniably affecting and thought provoking.

GRADE: B-

...can be found in Flannery O'Connor. But don't be deceived, she is not an easy read. Her stories are disturbing and her characters are often grotesque, yet the reader undoubtedly knows that the author loves her characters very much. We never feel that a bitter, misanthropic creator is behind the stories, and this is the same view that O'Connor has of God that is put forth in her stories. Reading Wise Blood feels like going fifteen rounds with Mike Tyson, and making it to the final bell. Although the reader feels battered and beaten up afterward, you also feel saved. This is the feeling most of O'Connor's stories leave with the reader, and it is a result of her deeply held faith. These stories are some the strongest affirmations of faith to be found in a disturbing, modern world.

Granted, some stories do not leave the reader with the idea of grace that Hazel Motes attains at the end of Wise Blood. O'Connor, herself, said that the old man in "A View of the Woods" is pretty as close to damned as any of her characters. But most of characters, we know, are saved, no matter how pretentious (the woman in "Revelation" for example), or misguided in thought.

The stories, despite their ugliness, are almost transcendent in where they leave the reader. In short, they are beautiful, and a testament to her faith.

O'Connor did not write for celebrity, impressive money, or so that she could look glamorous, sleekly pasted on the back jacket photo. Maybe she knew one day we'd have Danielle Steele for that. As it was, her photos of herself were not something she admired. She wrote because she had talent, and she felt to do less would be do to a disservice to her gift. She wrote for love, but not for sex. She writes characthers who search for love, for understanding of identity, wisdom, or redemption. As Ms. O'Connor knew, all of us who inhabit creation are weak and flawed. She turned her creative and spirtual sights to showing us how we flawed creatures do what we do and how we damage ourselves. O'Connor writes of suffering and love and faith, in spite of all that seems crude, awkward, and yes, grotesque, in our world. She isn't EASY to understand the way a romance novel is, or an adventure story. She's not writing that kind of book. What she writes in multi-layed, but it was not, to O'Connor's mind, subtle. Still, O'Connor writes prose that pulls you along as a reader, that she manages to encompase a tone or atmosphere in places that feels as though it would explode. That's not bad writing--that's good, because you read it, and you know that you're getting something profound, even if you're not sure what that is right at that moment. O'Connor believed in God, in that kind of love. She knew how sickly we humans approach it. She attempts no less than to draw us to an eternal message. She's not anti-religious in that message because she's writing about the weaknesses of those who fail in their station, in what they were called upon to do, with what gifts they were given. That type of message may not be in fashion now, no more than it was when O'Connor wrote, but that does not make this fiction "poorly written." O'Connor was not a fast, sloppy writer. She honed her craft. These works will give you as much as you can put into them, and then some. The purchase price on this one is more than repaid by the intense value in the meaning of the work.