Away

This book is so stupid! It keeps changing from one subject to another. NONE of the book makes sence. Probley because its told from a russian point of view. The book is set at the end of world war II, which is when all the russians stared to live in the german people's home. All the girl does in the book is wine about the russians. Do not read this book!

This book is filled with the authors own childhood memories of growing up in Vienna/AUSTRIA during WWII
It is the first of two books with this topic.(Maikaefer flieg and Zwei Wochen im Mai) Noestlinger gives an honest, often funny, and moving account of one girl growing up in times of war.

This is an amazing coming of age book about a girl growing up in occupied Germany at the end of WW2. Incredibly moving, this book is a great read for anyone who is-or has ever been-a kid.

This book--as do all of Cornyn-Selby's "books" begs the question: how could someone with such a poor grasp of English and earn the PhD she claims? At any ratem writing and English instructors will find it an excellent assignment: find the errors in punctuation, grammar, format, spelling...oh, right, the content. Appears to be cribbed from self-help books. Not an original thought to be found. Is this author for real?

What's in a name? Evidently, a lot! There are research studies in this book that I enjoyed reading about, but the best thing was the exercise to see if it might be a good idea for me to make a change. In fact, my professional name is a play on my nickname - easy for my circle to adjust to, and memorable when meeting new people! This stuff works and works well!

I haven't found any book that examined the affects a name change has on a person. We all have names and they influence us. 40% have names they don't like but HOW do you know if you should change? This is the only book that gives an exercise to tell you what you're in for if you change your name. I found it uniquely helpful and an all around interesting treatise on names in general.

I bought this book as a gift for someone who is a long distance grandma and thought it would be useful. I chose it after considering this and others available through Amazon. However, when I received the book I was surprised to discover the author peppers her writings and suggestions with Biblical references throughout the book. This is not something I particularily like and would have preferred for the review to indicate this. I have since returned the book.

This book is from a genuine heart! Janet Teitsort is an inspiration to grandparents who want to stay in touch with their grandchildren in a world that keeps families busy and pulled apart. Her ideas are tested and they work!

Practical suggestions about being an everyday part of your grandchilds life even though they live too many miles away to visit frequently.

I especially like the idea about buying books to send to small grandchildren and recording them on a cassette before you mail it. As the young child looks at the book their Grandparents sent them they can play the cassette and listen to Grandma or Grandpa read the book to them. It is a special personal way to share a book with children many miles away. It helps grandparents become something more to little children than just a picture in a frame.

With the book entitled "Sail Away: Storeis of Escaping to Sea," I figured it would be about people tired of the rat-race putting out to see for glorious adventures and exotic destinations. The first couple of stories held my interest. However, the last three quarters of the book is painful to read and contains material included for the sole purpose of making the book thicker.

I like this book a lot. The stories are gritty, dreamy, exciting, sad, funny, scary: there's a story for every mood and every kind of sea voyage, and each one of them is beautifully written. I also like the little blurb from the editors that comes with every story; and the photographs. This is a great book to give as a present: that's how I got mine.

An invigorating change from the current raft of "disaster at sea" books. The 21 stories cover the gamut from high adventure to psychological intrigue, from small boats to large ships, from contemporary to classic. All are engrossing and stimulate the full range of human emotions.

The first time i looked at this book, i was reviewing the children's library at the preschool where i work. i pulled it from the shelves as an embarassment to both cultures explored. For those who didn't know better, most African children don't spend their days shirtless, they go to the store, they attend school in uniform, and play modern games. An equally true reality is that of many White Americans whose lives are more like the "bush-boy" in this book. racism is not always deliberate but it's always wrong.

Using a unique style of arringing text and pictures, this book allows children to compare and contrast two very different cultures for themselves. The simplistic text is arranged in the center of the page describing daily events that happen in the life of a young boy. Two sets of pictures, above and below, surround the text. The top pictures display a boy doing an action in a small African village, while the lower pictures exhibit the same action being done by a boy in a United States suburb.
I belive this book is an exceptional teaching tool for younger children. It is an enticing introduction to the concept of comparing and contrasting countries. I like the simplistic language used that allows readers to delve into the illustrations to find similarities and differences between the two cultures on thier own. I would be a little careful using this book because of stereotypes that could be perceived. All parts of the countries might not be represented by the illustrations. A facilitator could help to point out that although the illustrations portray what it is like in some parts of the country, it could be very different throughout other parts of that country.

This is a wonderful book to share with children. The illustrations depict stark differences between a little boy in America and a little boy in Africa even though they are doing the same things. This is an excellent teaching tool to use when explaining to children that although we do things in a different way, we are all very much alike.

I enjoyed this final volume of Anna's tale, but I think it would have been better to use it to round out The Other Way Round. A lot of what was written was just trying to do "catch up" for new readers. The writer, it seemed, did not have enough "distance" from her mother before she wrote it. It appears as though she was working through a lot of "stuff" that should have been done before she wrote the piece. Still, I wanted to know what happened; it was just kind of boring and disappointing after the first two books.

It is a beautiful book,but it doesn't go along with the expectations of a person who have read it's other sequels. This is a one beautiful biography which holds you till the end.

What a wonderful book! I thought that this was the best of all three. I would like Judith Kerr to write another one even though it's a trilogy.

This book is valuable if for no other reason than its presumption that sexuality has a history, and its tracing of the emergence of modern forms of sexuality thorugh the colonial documents of the Spanish conquest of New Mexico. One should not be seduced by Gutierrez's title into thinking that his text is riddled with pithy and complicated observations about the intersection of race, power and sexuality. Rather, the text itself manifests and speaks quietly of new questions and possible answers to be gleaned from considering colonial conquest as a two-way event; one in which the conqueror is affected as much as the conquered. It is, I think, a radical idea to examine how the symbol/belief system of Pueblo indians interfaced and ultimately facilitated their conquest. Similar, it is interesting to observe the colonialist system of self-other become undermined by conquest, hopelessly buttressed by extreme racist measures, and ultimately falls, playing out an Hegelian dialect- the seeds of destruction are immanent to creation. At the root of the author's project is the notion that people are conquered, subjected, not so much by the sword but by the imposition of discourse, which as Foucault reminds us is always negotiated between power and resistance.

This book in not of the divulgative kind. It is more of a scholarly work. Sometimes too heavy, insistent and lenghty. But it provides a very intersting glimpse in the past of the SouthWest and the conflicts that the encounters between the indians and the spaniards caused. The inability of the spaniards to deal with ancient indian customs in one hand and the church and morals they brought with themselves, remnants of a dying world, in the other, the deception the indians suffered as they applied their own beliefs to the spaniards, the codes and whims that regulated the sexuality of these two vastly different worlds...it all makes for an exciting subject and a great diary of the life in the U.S a long time ago. The author doesn't portray the indians as free of prejudice like they would want us to believe these days, neither are the spaniards just mere enslavers and ill-guided colonists. The views are more balanced and make better sense. Even centering the thesis aroun! d sexual matters was very illustrative and rich.

This is an excellent book. While the book has received some criticism, anyone who has read them will realize that they have little value. The passionate nature of the attacks on this book make it obvious that the attitude they are written in is anything but scholarly. It's true that there are assumptions and subtleties that could trouble some people, but they should be no problem for the intelligent and alert reader. Note that most of the things that were questioned about the book were very clearly explained in the introduction of the text.

My book report was about this girl named Alison who hated her mother and had a gay dad and a okay stepdad . She also had a sister who had a friend who had an idea that could make things a disaster . Her horrible idea was if they signed up for the school play maybe they could end up with dates for the freshman dance,but things had been a disaster for her since her big sister Alison had left .Susan thought that doing this would make her look cool or as kids say "popular",and that is exactly what Susan wanted to be . Susan thinks that everything she tries to do leads to a big problem .

In this story the main character is a girl named Susan. Susan refers to be called Sibyl. She doesn' t know why she likes that name she says. The story is told by herself, telling about her life. I n the beginning she mentions she lives with her mom her stepdad Wally and her little brother. Susan is fourten years old and going to a private school called The Mother Of Sorrows. Susan is a very layed back kind of girl, until it comes to her best fiend Connie. Connie is a gurly girl. After school one day, Connie tells Susan that she needs to get a boyfriend. Also that the all boys school is putting on a play. She says that their letting anybody join. In Connie's head that means she is going to be thw star of the show. The only problem is that Susan thinks she is going down the same road of her sisters life. When Alison,her older sister, at the age of fourteen got into so many school activities. On the day of the show Alison shows up after 5 years. She is in bad shape with the smell of beer on her breath. Susan did so good in the play and her sister was crying because it reminded her of herself. Alison said that she had to go but Susan was not mad. Susan was hoping that that asn't going to be the last time she saw her sister. Susan did not know that it was. Later that week the family found out Alison had got into a car accident.

I really enjoyed this book alot. I reccomened this book to those who like mysteries and love and hate stories.

I often get YA books to review, but I usually glance and put them aside. This one caught me and I started reading. Couldn't stop until I'd finished. What a charming writer! Seems to me a likely successor to Judy Blume and Robert Cormier. This fast novel has all the elements of modern life's challenges (a distant gay dad, a lukewarmly welcomed but pretty decent stepdad, misbehaving hair that ruins more than a day, glasses you try to take off whenever dreamboat is around, an almost too-protective mom, and a sister who did everything beautifully, or did she?). It's the humorous tone that attracted me, but the sharp psychological insights are everywhere too. The suspense about missing Alison is relatively low-key, but manacingly present throughout. The ending worked perfectly, in the context of the protagonist's philosophy of life, which includes both randomness and acceptance.

As a writing instructor (online mainly), I'm going to be recommending this one for all YA writers to take notes from.

There were a few poems I liked in here, but unfortunately this book is less than the sum of its parts. The voice is smart but smug, which is still okay in small doses. By the time you finish the book, you're sick of it! It's repetitive and boring. The author may write in verse forms well, but "verse" isn't enough. There has to be wisdom (not cleverness) and humility and feeling in poetry too, which this book lacks. Overall, a disappointment. Try Rafael Campo or Brenda Shaughnessy instead.

This is not a rave or a slam. I agree with some of the comments by the other reviewers. Yes, Rachel Wetzsteon is a talented and smart writer. Yes, her poems can be clever and cold. I expect - and hope -- that she'll write better books in the future.

I enjoyed some of the poems, yawned at some. On the one hand they're intelligent, ironic, formally skillful, well-structured, smooth, controlled, never overwritten or sentimental. These qualities are valuable, especially these days, and shouldn't be taken for granted. On the other hand her poems take few risks, and can be too predictable, repetitive, controlled to the point of being bland, abstract, and unoriginal. A reviewer (in the Yale Review) once wrote that she's too derivative of Auden, and I have to agree. Her voice sounds particularly like middle and late Auden, with dashes of Larkin, Ashbery and Tate. (I like the odd combination of influences, though.) I look forward to the time when her own voice emerges, if it does. So far, I'd rank her in the middle of her generation of poets. (Obviously this will change, and obviously the whole generation hasn't emerged yet -- it could take 30 more years, if another Amy Clampitt comes along.)

By the way, I'm put off by the recent trend of using overblown jacket copy. Why is Wetzsteon likened to Dickinson or Bishop? This is false advertising, because she's not in their league. To be fair, few living poets are --- you can count them on the fingers of one hand. People should use such comparisons sparingly, and only after reading many, many contemporary poets, so that the accuracy of the comparison can be rigorously tested. Wetzsteon can be more fruitfully compared to Rachel Hadas or Andrew Motion, who share some of her virtues and vices, although I think she'll surpass them with time and hard work, and luck.

How Rachel Wetzsteon could be considered mentionable in the same breath as Dickinson only shows how silly people are determined to be when they finally discover a talented poet (which she certainly is). Few contemporary poets have her gift of memorable meter, and of thinking a poem from beginning to end, instead of pausing to "say". This is an enjoyable book, except when she tries to make clever turns of frustration-to-laughter ala Dorothy Parker. Parker wasn't really much of a poet, but she certainly was more amusing. Wetzsteon isn't blessed that way (although Dickinson certainly was), but she has a lot to offer. I hope she gets even better.

A factual depiction about a troubled soul, Edward Howard, the CIA and FBI. I particularly enjoyed it because I knew the person personally for a number of years and went to school with some of his relations. He was always somewhat of a mysterious person, always attending college someplace, but now it all makes more sense.

The story is about a spy that literally got away from the FBI - right under their noses. He is now (at least one thinks) living in Russia, which I am sure, does not treat him the same way it used to. Overall I felt the story was interesting, but did not come away thinking this guy did that much damage to the US. He just did not hold a very high position and he left after a short period of time. He was no Walker or Ames. Given this was the case my complaint with the author is that he tried to make the spying this lame did as something more exciting then it was, I am assuming to get more buss about the book. Overall the book is a fine effort, Wise has a lot of knowledge about the working of the intelligence agencies in the US and Russia and he likes to display that knowledge in the book. If you are a nut about true-life spy's then this is not a bad little book.

Knowing that a book is non-fiction always adds a greater sense of mystery and wonder, which is certainly true about this account of an American intelligence agent who defected to Russia. It is obvious that the author spend a great deal of time researching every aspect of the subject in addition to the intelligence agency in general. THere are a lot of amazing details about the CIA, FBI, and KGB that are told through this story. Some of the long descriptions may bore some readers, but I found the novel to be very well written and very interesting.