Boston

The Z was Zapped is an alphabet book. The book presents the letters in different acts. One act per letter. The book starts out with a picture of the letter of the letter A with rocks falling down around it. You turn the page and the text says "The A was in an avalanche." On the opposite side of the page, there is the picture of the letter B. The picture has the letter B getting bitten by a bear. This format continues through out the whole book. Once you understand how this book is laid out and why it is done this way, the book makes sense. Initially, if you are unaware of why this is happening, it might be somewhat confusing as the pictures do not seem to go with the words. The artwork in this book is fabulous. The pictures are black and white sketches done in pencil. There is an incredible amount of detail in these pictures. Readers will gain some knowledge of new words which the pictures help to clearly illustrate the concept. This is a wonderful book.

This is a classic amoung alphabet picture books. I have always loved the simplicity of alphabet books. Sharing them with children is more fun than anything. But Allsburg takes the fun up a notch with exciting illustrations and a witty humorous twist to the traditional alphabet book. Though his drawings are in black and white because they were done in pencil, Allsburg captures the reader and the audience in a refreshing rendition of this beginning reader collection.
As a liesure artist, I find Allsburg's work very refreshing. His illustrations are detailed and realistic. In this particular collection, Allsburg demonstrates mastery in shading and form. I love his illustrations. Any child that loves to draw will be inspired by Allsburg's work.
I also love the way Allsburg's illustrations bait the reader to guess what words are used to describe what is happening to each letter. By strategically placing the words for each illustration on the back, readers are encouraged to say what they think is happening. Dialogue is an exciting way to learn reading. By encouraging this kind of sharing, Allsburg has created an excellent book for children learning to read.
Allsburg is an inspiration to young writers and artists. This is not his first children's book and only adds to an already growing collection of fantastic works. Every teacher, babysitter, storyteller and parent should keep this one handy as well as a pad of paper and plenty of extra pencils. Once you've read The Z Was Zapped you will want to put your hands to work as well.

Chris Van Allsburg had produced another invaluable children's picture book. Each letter depicts an action beginning with it's letter in a fun way. . . the M is melting, the N is nailed. The illustrations are Van Allsburg's infamous black and white trademark, but still intriguing to children and adults alike. A must have book.

Excellent read which will appeal to all baseball fans. Olivieri does a fantastic job at bringing the reader inside the clubhouse and experiencing the locker room subculture. Pretty good gig for a baseball fan right out of college to become a part of the red sox and make a positive impact on the players performance. He brought great insight without being disrespectful. i wanted to keep reading and will look forward to a follow-up book. highly recommended!

I literally could not put this book down. Okay, so im a huge baseball fan and sure, I adore the Red Sox..but the perspective you get from a regular guy on the inside of the very private world of professional sports is enlightening and a joy to read.
Moreover, it describes how and where an organization--through its many quirks--succeeds and fails.

This tome is like a real-life version of something like the "The West Wing", where you get an inside look at the inner-workings you're not supossed to see. Mr. Olivieri shows how a team operates beyond the sports pages and delves into the sociology of a pro sports team--how the management, the players and the folks like Olivieri try to keep the team one step ahead of the competition. I felt like the view of this storied franchise was unlike anything I had read or heard of before.

Would love to see a series on this in other facets of life written in such a down-to-earth manner.

The Red sox used cutting edge technology to gain an edge...frankly, tech like this should have been emphaiszed more then, as the current management relies on it.

I would recomend this book to any baseball fan, any sports fan, and to anyone in management who should see how operations function at the fox-hole level operate.

I loved this book! I had a hard time putting the book down. The book was interesting, funny, well written, and a quick read. The club house and personal stories were hilarious. The thing I liked best was that Olivieri brings you through the process of what it's like to go from being a fan, to a stranger in the club house, to a part of the team. After reading it, I bought one for my Father in-law,(a fellow believer)for Christmas. You'll love this book too.

"Steel Toes" rocks. This sequel to "Another Day in Paradise" starts off with Bobby Prine, dopefeind and convicted felon, surviving a race riot and escaping a gladiator camp in Indiana (circa 1975). Bobby hits the road in a hemi cuda, along with a couple new crime partners and gets back to business - drugs, sex, violence and crime. This book spans from prison, to an Indiana militia compound, to New York's nightlife, to Boston's criminal underworld. Told from Bad Bobby's POV - brutal, funny, scared, hard on himself and others, Bobby pulls no punches. One of the best scenes is when a college chick that Bobby is falling for takes him to the ballet - and he actually digs it. This ain't no cheesy crime fiction, this recurring character moves, sounds and acts like a bonafide life born-to-lose anti-hero. I'm sure major chunks of prose and most of the cast hail from Eddie Little's real life experiences - They're too good not to have. I'm hoping for a third installment of Bad Bobby, like Vachss's Burke, this is one character I could follow for volumes.

"Steel Toes" is the continuing saga of Bobby Prine, the young criminal whom Eddie Little introduced us to in his first novel, "Another Day in Paradise." This sequel opens with Bobby, now 18 years old, having failed at escaping from a gladiator camp in the midwest. But Bobby's got heart, he won't give up. He fights his way through a race riot and finally scales the walls with a couple homeboys. Bobby and his boys hit the road in a souped-up Hemi Cuda and from then on the story is non-stop action. Bobby goes from an Indiana militia compound, to hanging with junkbond salesman in New York, to the criminal underworld of Boston. He hooks up with Syd and Billy Bones, two great characters from his first novel, and gets back to business. Cashing bogus checks, doing burglaries, packing heat, shooting dope and falling in love. Eddie Little has done it again, writing a crime novel that is not only entertaining, but deep. The characters and description is great, you can tell Eddie Little has tread the rough ground of which he writes. Bad Bobby Prine is better than any "recurring" character I've ever followed in other crime novels. I'm waiting for a 3rd installment, this dude keeps you on edge, I could follow bad Bobby for volumes.

No kidding, Eddie's first [Another Day in Paradise] is fantastic. Having said that, I think his latest is even better. The voice is more refined, where it's still all tough, but with more focus. And I found a lot more hope in this one. Rock on, Eddie!

An amazing, thought-provoking book, "Jennie" is the fascinating story (actually a composite of several case studies of the time period) of Jennie, a chimpanzee raised as a human as part of an experiment to see how chimps acquire language. Because one of my main interests is language, I found this book extremely interesting.The research presented in this book (which is based upon real experiments) has major implications for both chimps and humans. As a story, "Jennie" is weak in parts: the characterizations can be sketchy and in some places the presentation of the information (diary entries, interviews, etc.) seems kind of gimmicky. However, this should not deter you from a most interesting read. "Jennie" shows the human side of scientific research (except, of course, for the little fact that the book's main character is a chimpanzee).. It's about the malleable nature of perception. It's about evolution, and ethics. This book raises many more questions than it answers-- and that is what it is designed to do, as the most meaningful gift a writer can bestow is to make his readers think. After reading this book, I found myself questioning exactly what my relationship, as a human, is to the world around me.

Preston uses the points of view of several different characters through their journals or scientific writings to give an account of the story of Jennie, a chimpanzee taken into captivity by an American scientist. Through these varied perspectives and with a touching story, Preston raises all sorts of questions about what sets humans apart from animals, where God fits into the natural world, etc...there's all sorts of fuel for thought. Excellently written, thoroughly researched, and an all out great book. I'm a more complex thinker for having read it, and I've recommended it to many of my professors and friends.

I will admit up front that I am a sucker for a chimp story. I think it's due in part to an overdose of "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" and re-runs of Daktari at a very tender age. But this IS an excellent novel. Preston is one half of the team that wrote "The Relic" and several other great thrillers. this is much more gentle fiction than any of those. It is character and issue driven realistic fiction. Jennie is a chimp who is raised as a human child. The story is told as if it were a true history and the viewpoint is split. There are interviews (using sign language) with Jennie, exerpts from her "father's" book, newspaper articles, and other interviews. The story's flow is surprisingly smooth for all that. At turns funny and heart-breaking, Jennie won't leave you along once you pick this novel up. It's short, but block off some time...it's a page turner. And the denouement, while not surprising (what always happens when the wild enters surburbia?) is all the sadder for its inevitableness.

most enlightning book of poetry i've ever read in my life. it speaks of the hardships an up and coming poet goes through. A must read for all poetry fans

Read these poems. With titillating line breaks and inspired diction, these fine young men and women breathe new life into contemporary poetry. Beautiful, Sublime, Outrageous, Subversive, and often times Meta, this book will tickle your soul just like Grandma used to do with her fresh lemonade and lectures on the inherent disasters lurking within American Imperialism. If I had to choose between a bratwurst and this book, let me tell you it would not be an easy decision. But ultimately I would put down my spicy pork sausage and pick up these Magnificently Potent Poems.

Thank you for your time and I sincerely hope you have a wonderful day.

these unknown authors have found a way to look at the wolrd in a way i have never seen before, and although i will never truely be able to understand their vision i am luck to have been able to see just a small part of it.

The first mistake the publisher of It Happened in Boston made was to continue to market it only as a mystery novel; the second was to let it fall out of print. Greenan's book is one of the funniest, cruelest, most audacious, and most moving books I remember reading when I was a teenager. Already out of print then, the book had attained cult status in Boston. I received a battered copy from a friend in Cambridge and read it cover to cover in a couple of days. Reading established literary classics, you always have to wonder how many other masterpieces are lost to time. It Happened in Boston is one such masterpiece. If Russell Greenan is still alive (I hope he is), he should know what a following he has and how much his books are still appreciated

Imagine my surprise to see that at least 11 other people have even read "It Happened in Boston?", let alone reacted to it as strongly and positively as I did. I read it as a teenager when it first came out - my father had ordered it from his book club - and I was completely hooked. It had never dawned on me that the hero of a novel could in fact be the villain as well (I later read "Crime and Punishment" and found that it was a fairly well-established literary convention). I remember filming this book in my mind over the next few years, always with different leading men and women, depending on who was most popular at the time, and frequently changing the plot to make it more "cinematic" - and I haven't read the book in about thirty years, although I still have it, so I'm interested to see how my mental movie compares with the incomparable original. It also compelled me to read all of Greenan's subsequent books, all of which are only slightly more conventional thrillers, and some of which (particularly "Heart of Gold" and "The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton") are quite unique. Most of them are set in Boston, which is where I've been living since reading "It Happened in Boston?" (not entirely a matter of cause and effect), and his feel for the atmosphere of the city - at least as it was in the seventies - is flawless. Greenan's books all deserve to be reprinted.

I just finished reading the new Modern Library edition of "It Happened in Boston?", which I had first read 35 years ago. It still seems as startling as it was then; all these strange characters, and the mad protagonist. What a feat of imagination! I had actually expected it to feel somewhat dated but it didn't - quite the contrary, it seemed completely of the moment. I think this edition should find a new audience, among readers who did not exist when it was first published.

From the other Amazon reviews I expected a better novel. This one toys with the reader. The story is a series of well-written vignettes, but the package as a whole doesn't make sense. I think the author wrote it to make various points, but failed to write a coherent, believable story.

Small-town police chief Ben Truman discovers the body of a Boston prosecutor in a deserted cabin. Ben teams up with Boston police to investigate the murder. It leads him to the seedy Mission Flats district where the now-dead prosecutor was investigating several gang-style murders. Before the investigation ends, death and betrayal spanning over twenty years are revealed.

This is a very complex and emotionally involving debut novel from William Landay. The first third of the book was a little slow going because there were three deaths taking place approximately ten years apart. It got a little confusing about which characters belonged to which time period. Once you get all the characters straight you are in for a flawless plot that questions more than just right versus wrong. The characters are colored in shades of gray, rich in dimension, and possess all the frailties of humanity. You never know if they are speaking the truth as they see it or the truth as it really is. Here you have a novel with a plot within a plot and secrets within secrets.

Excellent debut novel. Highly recommended.

I always like to be surprised by a debut novel, and when it is a mystery novel, all the better. Mission Flats begins twenty years ago when a cop is murdered in a bar, and his killer commits suicide by jumping off the Tobin Bridge in Boston. Then we go to Versailles, Maine, to the murder of a Boston district attorney, found by Ben Truman, police captain a town where not too much happens. Back and forth to Maine and Boston, until we slowly learn how and why so many characters are linked. The ending was a knock-out surprise, and well done by the author. The mysteries and secrets in this book are exquisite for a debut novel, and you will not be able to rest until you know them all. The mark of a good book for me is that I thought about the characters for hours after I finished the book, and as a voracious reader I was not ready to start a new book until I could let them go.

If you're a dog parent, you tend to know the green spaces around where you live, but when you go afield, you need a guide. This book is invaluable for telling you where to take your dog in Boston and the surrounding towns. If you have a dog and you are looking for an apartment or for real estate in the Boston area, you absolutely need this book.

The only criticism I have is that the book is retriever-centric, meaning it favors parks with bodies of water and ball-throwing possibilities. Different types of dogs need different types of parks; some need good squirrel-chasing capabilities, some need a large fenced area so they can run, some need to be able to swim, some need puppy play-groups, and some need to go where other dogs don't go. The book's ratings favor swimming possibilities, but if you read the descriptions, you can get a sense of whether or not your dog will like a given park.

My wife and I love your book. We have visited 10 of the parks you list. However, please warn your readers that there is an adjacent rifle range in the Dogtown walk in Gloucester. If you have a dog that is frightened by gunfire, thunder, or cars backfiring then stay away from this walk! Our Bearded Collie ran away when the rifles started firing. We were very fortunate to find our dog (although about 4 miles away) in about 4 hours. I would not want this to happen to anyone else.

As the owner of 3 dogs this is the best book I've ever bought. My copy gets so much use that the pages are starting to fall out. The ratings of the different parks/areas a perfect. It is a wonderful reference for finding places where dogs can run leash free.

I really enjoyed the book, but it's the shortest "Little House" book ever written. The story ends abruptly when a family friend leaves to join the war; I would have liked to see the story continue on, like maybe what happened to the friend, whether he was killed in battle or came back to marry his sweetheart, etc. I'm assuming there just wasn't enough information available.

It is !814 and Charolatte Tucker is 5 years old. Charolatte lives by Boston Bay with her many brothers and sisters. There is plenty to do, visit Papa's blacksmith shop and play with the brothers and sisters! I enjoyed tis book very much but it fades when compaired to the original Little House Books. But over all I suggest you read theis book.

CHarlotte Tucker is Five years old and lives with her mama and papa Her Twelve yeared old brother Lewis who teases her, Tom whose seven and Lydia nine and little Mary whos not even one yet, Charlottes days are busy from helping mama in the garden to visting papas blacksmith shop or hearing mamas storys . Soon Charlottle goes to school and learns her ABCs , Theres one funny part where mama is making pounded cheese and red powder gets into the bowl and it tasted awfull ! Charlotte is a brand new American girl and she and her young country have a lot to learn!

A Decent book, very interesting read. The style in which the story is told is very engrossing as it is told from the first person. The one drawback to the book is that it is based on one persons recollections and biases. With the exception of the Plymouth mail truck robbery most of these crimes were standard criminal enterprises, hardly crime of the century material. Of the crime he boasts the most of, a Brinks hold up, Cresta ended up going to prison. This is the story of a man who thought he was smarter then he was and in the end, was too smart for his own good.

Very enjoyable. I agree with other reviewers about its
contents. My vote to play Phil Cresta in a movie is
Robert Di Nero. Looking forward to the movie.

I read until I finished (3am), because I couldn't put it down. It is a very well written, interesting, and entertaining story of an lifestyle that is often contrived or overdone by others in the genre. The no-nonsense, unapologetic tone is definitely fitting of the central figure, Phil Cresta. I give my highest recommendation, which doesn't show itself very often. I can't wait for the movie, and you shouldn't either. Get a copy, block some time (I doubt you'll be able to put it down either), and enjoy.