Boston

This book is the story of a girl named Enid, who is just like a regualr kid the way kids actually are, and not the way that they are usually portrayed by adults. She and her babysitting charge (he wants ot be called Terrific) go everyday to the park and meet and befriend a variety of real life people. The characters, setting, and situation are just like real life, but not so ordinary that it gets boring. Many ages would like this book, but I think the reader will appreciate it more if they are older (around 9 or 10) and have a larger view and better understanding of the way life is for different kinds of people.

The book I read was Taking Care of Terrific and the Author is Lois Lowry. This book is a wonderful book to read. It all starts out with a 14 year old girl named Enid. Enid is a wonderful girl who has a mother, father and a housekeeper, Mrs. Kolodny. Mrs. Kolodny gave Enid a message about babysitting for the Cameron's family. Enid went to the Cameron Family and the boy she had to look after was Joshua but his nickname is Tom Terrific. So Enid and Tom Terrific go to the Public Garden together and when they get their they meet a guy named Hawk. Hawk plays the saxophone. Also in the Public Garden are bag ladies. These bag ladies are homeless people who have no where to go. Enid asked Hawk why the bag ladies were so sad. They then started a discussion about why the bag ladies are upset and Hawk said probably because they had no root beer popsicles. So right then Enid had an idea to go on strike for rootbeer popsicles and that is what at Enid and Tom sit in the Public garden and draw pictures together of trees. Also Enid broke most of the rules that Joshua's mom made for him to follow. Enid also taught Joshua how to make prank phone calls. The next time Enid babysat she took Tom Terrific to the Public Park, Hawk was there too. They wondered if the bag ladies would like to ride on the swan boats that floated in the lake in the middle of the Public Garden. Hawk asked all the bag ladies if they would like to have a ride on the swan boats and they all said yes. My friend Seth Sandroff helped us with it. We drew out our plan and got all the bag ladies loaded up into swan boats and gave them a ride. They showed the homeless all a great time. I liked this book because it was entertaining. I liked the fact that Enid was interested in making people happy and having them experience new things. I liked that she took a chance of getting into trouble to make a little boys life brighter and more exciting. I would recommend this book to anyone.

At age 24, I often find myself thinking back about the books I read and loved as a child. I could never remember the title of one of my favorites, a story of a babysitter who took her charge to the Boston Common and eventually hijacked the swan boats in the park lagoon. After at least two years of asking my peers if they remembered that book (most of them did not) I decided to hunt it down with the only keyword I remembered from the title -- Terrific -- and to my delight I found it! That the book has kept with me this long proves what a great read it really is. A must for city children, but also for midwestern kids like myself looking for a window to an entirely different world.

This book did not have a great story line, but it was well written. The characters were interesting and the dialogue was fun to read. Over all I enjoyed the book and went on to read the others in this series.

This book is very good! I think it is quite humerous! Anastaisia goes to a modeling shcool and has a run-in with an old enemy and meets some new frends! I really enjoyed this book, you will to!

This a neat tale of a kid, his friends and their pets. It has a positive message of affection, and the graphics and colors will hold your kids' interest after many readings. The text has a nice flow to it as well.

Although the story of children losing their beloved pets may sound disheartening, Austin From Boston is a joy. Watching the children play with their pets brings back great childhood memories. Not only are you reminded of growing up with pets, but more importantly, growing up with friends. My children and I found ourselves drawn to the characters Sean and Katie. If you are looking for a good "bedtime" book, Austin From Boston comes highly recommended.

Reading this new "elemental" murder mystery by this talented and inventive physicist-author was again a treat. By now, reading how retired scientist Gloria Lamerino is coping with a blooming romance in middle-age, while immersed in crime investigations and targeted by murderous threats is like visiting with old friends. In her fifth mystery the author involved scientists and scientific uses of the title element (Boron) only incidentally, Alas! But she managed to come up with credible lethal mixtures of old history and passions enabled by the new (journalists and librarians searching the internet, nuclear power and nuclear waste, role models for coed highschools). The gentle mixture of the traditional (old friendships, family, love of food) and the novel (female scientist becoming a police technical consultant in her retirement) and the unexpected plot twists make this a wonderful read, with plenty of food for thought, for all ages.

When her fiancée died a few weeks before the wedding Gloria Lamerino packed her bags and moved to California where she taught physics at a major university for thirty years. Upon her retirement, she moved back to her home in Revere, Massachusetts when she meets homicide detective Matt Gennara. For the first time in three decades, she is in a serious relationship while also serving as a special science consultant to the police.

Matt and Gloria are eating dinner at the home of her good friends Frank and Rose Galigani when the police suddenly show up to take the son John of their hosts in for questioning in the death of his ex-girlfriend, Angel Fiore. Even though circumstantial evidence points to John as the murderer, Gloria knows he didn't do it and sets out to prove it with a little help from Matt.

Camille Minchino is a dynamite writer showing readers that life including sex remains strong after fifty. The heroine is gutsy and smart, as she is not afraid to find a killer among a plethora of suspects. The plot is intricately woven with enough red herrings purposely placed into the story line to keep readers from guessing who the real killer is. The BORIC ACID MURDER is a who-done-it that keeps the reader's attention so they won't miss out on the real clues hidden in the overall tale.

Harriet Klausner

I'm not the biggest Fischler fan out there (he tends to write in empty platitudes), but this book is definitely worth checking out. Some of his rankings are kooky (Bucyk over Espo, Neely not in the top 20, saying that Tiny Thompson was the best goalie in Bruins history aside from Frankie Brimsek even though he rated both Gerry Cheevers and Ed Johnston ahead of Thompson), but that would be the case with any such list. It's a great generator for discussion, and the bios for each listed person have some neat anecdotes. There are no new revelations about Ray Bourque or Bobby Orr, but there's good information about some of the old timers like Bill Cowley, Cooney Weiland, and Frank Frederickson. If you're a fan of the Bruins, this is essential. If you're a fan of hockey history, it's also worth picking up.

Stan Fischler is a dedicated hockey enthusiasts who's Boston Bruins: Greatest Moments And Players is a wonderfully written survey providing unique insights into one of professional hockey's most legendary franchises. Fischler covers the Boston Bruins' 75-year history through informative profiles and anecdotal stories of success and talent that went into the making of one of hockey's greatest teams. Boston Bruins is "must" reading for all hockey enthusiasts in general, and every Bruins fan in particular!

The author is attempting to define a form of Confucianism for non-Chinese. One of the main problems is translating the Confucian notion of ritual/etiquette into Western ideas. Neville relies on Fingarette's study, "Confucius The Secular as Sacred" to do this: basically by using a much wider concept of ritual, referring to all the *signs* in our relationships: signs of friendship, love, commitment... it goes beyond courtesy, to a definition of roles in relationships, although these can be very flexible.
Next Neville, who is a Christian, attempts to reconcile Confucianism and Christianity, and to do this he looks for some form of transcendence (an absolute beyond the perceptible phenomena) in Confucianism to match the transcendent Christian God: Hall & Ames have shown that such a transcendence does not exist in early Confucianism and I don't think that Neville succeeds in proving that they are wrong. He does point though to the Neo-Confucian concept of "principle" that is transcendent since it structures all things and man. This then could be a bridge towards Christianity.
Well the great thinkers (Neville, Hall & Ames) have given us a green light: we can be Western Confucians!
Thomas

The author believes that Confucianism is pertinent today. He presents Confucianism by themes instead of by Confucian teachers, like Philip Ivanhoe in his "Confucian Moral Self Cultivation." It is an erudite book with many references that I have found helpful in my study of Confuciansim. I've purchased and studied some of the books he used as references and have found them helpful. I found Chapter 7, "Motifs of being", and Chapter 9, "Resources for a conception of selfhood," particularly thoughtful. You should be warned that the author is a college professor and writes like one. I highly recommend this book if you want to consider Confucianism as a living system and not just an historical study.

These are fun puzzles, challenging enough to be amusing, but not so difficult you want to give up on them. New Englanders may find these particularly enjoyable since many clues and sometimes entire puzzles are Boston-related. The spiralbound books are easy to handle and write in, and all puzzles are "one pagers" so there's no turning back and forth.

When I was in the Peace Corps in Africa, my friend's mom used to clip and send the crossword puzzles from the Boston Globe. I was hooked! They're the best--interesting, just the right level of difficulty to do with the morning coffee. I end up looking up a word or two each and time and learn something, but they're not so hard I can't finish them. I was delighted to find collections of them.

This 3rd book of the Boston Jane trilogy is great! Jane Peck is now settled into her life on the bay. Her house is almost finished and she has made friends with the new families that have arrived on the bay. Everything is going great until Sally Biddle arrives. Jane Peck who has survived a sea voyage, living in the wilderness, and has made friends with Indians, finds out that her worst fear is Sally Biddle, her old school mate. When Sally arrives at Shoalwater Bay, now a thriving settlement with more women and children, her main goal is to make Jane's life miserable. With her false charm she turns away some of Jane's friends - even Jehu, the man Jane loves. Then Jane finds out that her claim could be taken away. To top it off many of the new settlers want to put the Indians on reservations and get rid of them. As Jane struggles to convince the people that the Indians are friends and deserve to be treated as humans she realizes you have to work hard for what you believe in. You'll have to read the book to find out if Jane can be happy even with Sally around and if the Indians get pushed of their land or if they get to stay and work with the white people side by side. If you like historical fiction, adventures, or just good funny stories this is a really good book to read.

This book is the third book in the Boston Jane trilogy (first is Boston Jane: An Adventure, second is Boston Jane: Wilderness Days) They are all really really good, but this one was great! Jane must face her finishing school nemesis, her ex-fiance who hates the Chinook Indians, and the threat of having her land claim taken away. At the end of the book, I was left hoping for more!!!! Read this book, but it might be easier to understand the characters if you read the other two books first. So get cracking, because you're missing out on something you don't want to miss!

As the third book in Lucy Boston's "Green Knowe" series, readers who are moving through the books chronologically may be a bit surprised at the extreme change of formula in the story that dictated the two previous books. There is no Tolly or Grandmother Oldknow and their discoveries of past inhabitants of the house, but rather two elderly women who rent the house and send away for a niece and two children from "the Society for the Promotion of Summer Holidays for Displaced Children."

Thus "The River at Green Knowe" is definitely moving in a different direction from the previous books, and continues with Boston's decision to set most of the scenes upon the river, as Ida, Oskar and Ping explore the flooded areas and the islands around the ancient house, often meeting strangers who are just as Displaced as they are. The adventures that they experience are dreamy and mysterious within the shrouded waters and woodlands, and one is never quite sure whether they are dreams or reality save that all three of them experience them.

These exertions are also different from Tolly's adventures in that they are more magical experiences rather than ghostly, and therefore need readers to suspend disbelief a little further. The fact that the children's experiences are all quite separated from each other and episodic also makes them a tad uneven. Some are based more on naturalistic themes, such as an overgrown river-side house, witnessing a pagan-festival in a time-travelling moment and meeting a busman who wandered into the woods and decided to remain there always, whilst others are of the extraordinary type: an island of winged horses, a giant who doesn't know what laughter is but eventually joins the circus, and one of the children shrinking down to mouse-size. Needless to say, Boston's style is suited best to the more natural occurences that just border on the supernatural. To me at least, the others come across as a little *too* odd.

However, there is a theme that hasn't been addressed before that pushes through: that of adult disbelief in Green Knowe's magic. Beforehand, all strange events were simply taken in their stride by Tolly and Grandmother Oldknow, whilst here Boston explores the idea of grown-ups not being able to see what the children can. Green Knowe is contrasted against the reality of adult ignorance, whether it be through a frightened, confused message in a bottle, or through Boston's first two comic figures Maud Biggin and Sybilla Bun, who cannot see the truth in front of them even when they've been searching for it.

It all goes hand in hand with Oskar's comments on thoughts being real, and Terak telling the children he is so big that no one sees him. Boston weaves these ideas through her narrative with ease, and as always her poetic language is utterly beautiful. I don't think Oskar or Ida were quite as well defined as Tolly or as Ping becomes in later books, which is a shame as they had the potential to be fascinating - and they don't appear in any later books. However, keep a look out for a dark figure examining the the house that *does*.

In this third of the Green Knowe series, Tolly Oldknow and his great-grandmother have presumably gone off to Cornwall for the summer (as they talked of doing after Tolly found the lost Oldknow jewels in the previous volume), and the mysterious old house has been rented out to Dr. Maud Biggin, a lady archaeologist, and her friend, Miss Sybilla Bun, who loves nothing better than to cook for people. Seeing the large amount of space the property offers, Dr. Maud invites her great-niece Ida to visit and writes a charitable society to send two displaced children to keep her company; the chosen pair are Oskar, a Hungarian whose father was shot by the Russians, and Ping, a Chinese refugee. The children immediately make up their minds to explore the river that flows past the house, and in doing so they meet with some very strange adventures. There's an almost dreamlike quality to many of the things that befall them--the discovery of a vine-draped Georgian ruin and of a former London busman who has become a hermit, a nighttime romp with a herd of winged horses, Oskar's temporary shrinkage to field-mouse size, an encounter with a live adolescent giant and his mother, a brief journey to the distant past to view a pagan ritual--and it's not at all clear how much of it really happens and how much they only imagine. None of the Oldknow ghosts makes an appearance, which is unfortunate, but perhaps inevitable, since the children aren't from "their family." This is a particularly good book for dreamy, imaginitive children who have a knack for suspending disbelief, though not my own favorite in the series.

In this, the third of the Green Knowe series, Tolly and his grandmother are away (presumably in Cornwall). Two women have rented the house for the summer and ask three children to stay. Ida is the niece of one of the women, Ping and Oskar are refugees. The children are turned loose on the river, where they have many fine and imaginative adventures. These books are all quite wonderful. This one is actually in print. The others can be found at public libraries. Don't miss them. the next in the series is a Stranger at Green Knowe, also in print.

It is perfect and very entertainig book about Boston, written by a cab driver, very intelligently and informed. It has a long list of referenced books indicating the amount of effort and study put into it.It is very interesting, like the reader from Germany, I also started and I could not put the book aside until I finished it. It makes your mind twist when you start to know about things that you see everday or you walk by it. I never knew what the word "smoot" on Harvard Bridge was about although I step on it every day. From the old Sahwmut Bank logo I always thought that Shawmut was an Indian tribe. I thought blackstone river or vally was called blackstone may be because the stones were black and many other similiar associations. What about Quaker Lane in downtown. Well I am not going to tell you what is in the book, you need to read it but it is full of suprizes, at least for me it was. Now like they say when you meet someone after you had a telephone conversation, "I can put a face to it". Since I read the book it is "Frogg Lane" for me not Bolyston Street. It is just great, I conragulate Mr. Kelley. very nice book especially for people who are new to Boston and needs to catch up with its history to own the heritage. I read other books like Architectutral histories, topograpies etc. this one is juicy.

What They Never Told You About Boston... is a fantastic book filled with all kinds of tidbits about Boston's history. Names of streets are explained, significance of buildings, even words and phrases that had their origins in Boston! Misunderstandings are cleared up; for example the first white settler in Boston was not a Puritan but rather the Reverend William Blaxton, an Anglican minister, and Shawmut is not the name of an Indian tribe but more or less means 'the place to find boats.'

This is an enlightening read for those interested in Boston and her history, well-written and for the most part, extremely well-researched. (There are so many people and institutions who claim the first computer that I doubt MIT or Harvard can truly state that that honor is theirs.) I only wish that it was longer -- I zipped through the 101 pages pretty quickly! I enjoyed the book so much that I brought it to Germany with me, and use it in my teaching about English and America!

Don't expect deep philosophy or great revelations, but if you're a Bostonian you owe it to yourself to read this book. Many amusing stories and triva about Boston. Walt Kelly (no, not the Pogo dude) is a good storyteller, and has obviously done a lot of research.