Paper

I go back to this book over and over for its marvelous approach to creating "painted pictures" in paper collage. Her technique is simple and enjoyable - really just cutting shapes and painting and assembling - but the result is sophisticated, beautiful paper collage. Anyone interested in paper sculpture and collage needs to have this book.

Coming from an english professor, this book is a masterpeice. Hawkins writes short stories beautifully. I highly recommend this book. If you are familiar with some of his other works, such as "Wedding Night," you will not be disappointed. In "Wedding Night," Hawkins creates a character that can be related to all people. He uses symbolizes remarkably.

This Raggedy Ann adventure comes complete with the illustrations of Gruelle and the classic color known and loved by Raggedy fans for generations. Here Raggedy and her boyfriend embark on a walk in the woods and find a magic wishing tool enables them to help Marggy find her lost father in the wild woods. A beautiful story evolves.

Ibby Greer's PAPER FACES: A BABY BOOMER MEMOIR is the best book of poetry I've read all year. Greer has a winner with her blend of free verse and autobiography. Her craftsmanship, imagery, and sense of detail shine through. If you grew up in the 50s or 60s, you're sure to love this book.
Becky Mushko

for lovers of toni morrison, for lovers of fiction that vibrates your imagination...this book is truly amazing. a story of a young girl growing up in an italian-catholic neighborhood in chicago. the book does not run in a linear fashion timewise, so don't be worried if you are confused at first. stick with it...the payoff is huge intellectually and emotionally. the imagery and characters are the work of a master.

If you need some real fishes for a science fair at your children school, a great craft for rainy days or decorate a Beach Party or Under the Sea Party, you will love this book. I made the fishes for my daughter birthday and we all feel that we are inside a aquarium. The children loved it.You will too. I bought two for the party and now I will bought two more for my son's school project.

This is a great book that shows you how to easily create 8 different flower types. It is in full-color & includes instructions for roses, tulips, daisies, irises, daylilies, posies, cactus, & lotus flowers.

Each flower is demonstrated step-by-step with written instructions, illustrations & photos. Flower assembly includes cutting, gluing & folding. Conveniently, templates are provided in the back for each project.

Following each flower style is a gallery featuring beautiful & creative design ideas. These delightful galleries really helped inspire me with table decorations, boxes, bouquets and gift ideas.

I highly recommend this book for all skills levels & ages. With this book anyone make impressive paper flowers. I made a few of these easy pieces and even my husband was impressed.

Children love to make things, and the skills they gain from creating are not only physical, but intellectual and emotional as well. In my first grade classroom, I have used this book extensively. The projects are appropriately challenging, which is an essential criteria for happiness as has been documented in the nonfictional book, Flow, and other psychology books. Each craft appeals to children. Crafters can make postcards, wrapping paper, frames, spinners for games, calendars, Christmas decorations, personal stationery, wall art, imitated stained class, wall paper borders, monster feet, animals, scenes for stories, a variety of fun masks, crowns, puppets, puzzles, books, albums, gifts for special occaisions, and more. The techniques needed are carefully explained and illustrated in a step-by-step process. Beautifully photographed pages accomodate the crafter so that the finished projects are visualized throughout the volume. This is a great book to be used at home, school, church, scouts, and anywhere else where creativity is fostered Crafting and artistic skills contribute to the feeling of contentment in all people. Confidence is enhanced by the process of doing and finishing projects. Instead of watching television, get out a craft book like this one and make things happen !

Andrew Levy, in books like Values Chauffeur You, Curve, and Curve 2, has quietly been producing some of the most fascinatingly meditative avant-garde writing around. In this ninth collection, Levy sets out with an ethics of observation and agitation, observing with no definable goals but with a
quasi-Buddhist, quasi-materialist calling to be in the world, moment by moment, recording its contradictions and, when there is beauty, its necessity: "A surfer in methodological self-consciousness/ forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting/ to wipe this clear screen with/ some cloth of disparity/ What we will try to become, that labor/ curious about each." The idiom of the long title poem, taken up in much of the book, is somewhere between Williams's Asphodel and the fluid, polyglot and cross-cut rhetorical strategies of Barrett Watten's Progress. Levy never sounds entirely like he's speaking to
one singular figure (like a Flossie), but his poem-including-history seems poignant in a way that suggests modernism, though it never entirely submits to the rigors of method or foregrounded structure "to convey, translate, transfer/ colonize the writer's fairness." Indeed, Levy can be willfully
transcendental, but takes explicit shots at the way Dialist proclivities have become class-defined within American culture: "A memory of light/ The turd of transcendence establishes a hillside estate:/ Transcendence Hill Club/ Croquet is the game of choice." The essay that follows upon the 80-page title poem, "An Indispensable Coefficient of Esthetic Order," is beautiful.

These "last" lyrics, and the essay on aesthetics that appears as a postscript, present a complex, invested mind at play among words, trying to find a way to "do what you're thinking."

This short review is from "Books on Bosnia" published by The Bosnian Institute. Combines travelogue, cultural history and political analysis to give an atmospheric and nuanced account of Yugoslavia at the point of its collapse