Paris

Synopsis: "Ah, Paris. The city of light... and, of course, romance! When Family Voyager magazine sponsors a Mother of the Year contest, with a trip to Paris and a shopping spree as the prize, the response is overwhelming!

"Finalist #1 is Roxanne Perry, a single mother of four, who isn't positive wealthy entrepreneur Christopher "Kit" Lawrence is right for her, but his matchmaking father certainly thinks so!

"Callum Fox had no idea he was a dad, but after some quick calculating he decides to pay finalist #2, single mom -- and former lover -- Jody Reilly, a visit she won't soon forget!

"Kylie Birmingham has no time for frivolous activities like traveling and romance. But her meddling mom, finalist #3, has plans. She thinks pilot Wade McKinnon is perfect for Kylie, and everyone knows Mom is always right!

"Falling in love has never been this exciting ... or unpredictable!"

I was really looking forward to reading this collection, which contains authors by three authors I regularly read. I really enjoyed Hoffmann's "Mighty Quinns" series, and Diamond's Nowhere Junction collaborations are some of the funniest "Duets" I've read. Shalvis usually manages both sex and spark in her books.

Unfortunately, I found the Hoffmann and Diamond contributions to be somewhat ho-hum. It's a challenge to write for a collaboration like this -- you have to build great characters and a decent romance in a limited amount of time. Unfortunately, "Romancing Roxanne" and "Daddy Come Lately" just didn't provide enough of either. Both failed to provide enough humor or tension to really fulfill me as a reader.

Shalvis' contribution, "Love is in the Air" is by the far the best of the three. The tension between the characters is great, the secondary characters are a hoot, and the romance builds satisfactorily (or as satisfactorily as you can get in a novella). It's a snappy, fun read with some characters that will stick with you.

I'm keeping this for "Air," but otherwise it didn't meet my (admittedly high) expectations.

I love this author and cher but this book was not very well writen. ALso it was a little boreing.

Nothing special: these are nude women, mostly plain women, some are even far beyond the aesthetic elegance of slender, trim, shapely glamor models to be well padded women. Dressed for glamor and strutting sexy, but still just ordinary women - some are pretty,mind you, but lots were not young hotties. Black and white photos. Mostly shot in cramped quarters. Some are actually more original than a lot I've seen but the norm is "Wow, look, I'm a woman." showing it all. In the end: interest for people like artists looking for more variety than the before mentioned skinny-busty-young pretty dolls that are the norm. Most modern bikini shoots offer more sizzle and exhibit more raw sex. Keep in mind this fellow worked during an age when Playboy was often criticized as porn' and Playboy and most modern men's magazines are far more racy - and in color. Not bad, but not a gee-wiz wow-gotta-have-it book either. I found the censorship (earlier pics were air-brushed to remove "offending" material) interesting and I didn't recognize any of the gals, so I wasn't hooked on any glamorous babes. Nice, interesting for men who aren't prudes about female nudes and like women of all types. Mostly European white gals, at that, which means (sigh) little overall variety. Will interst scholars of nude photography and nude fans who like all decent nudes a lot more than any other clique.

This is a fairly slim volume of photos and text on many of the major or influencial buildings and monuments in Paris. There are about 2-3 entries per page, with each entry containing a small black-and-white photo and brief text.

The concise text is informative and focused primarily on the architectural history of each structure, usually including the name of the architect and highlighting the significant architectural aspects of the structure. The choices of structures reviewed is a good mix, including both major structures and minor, but influencial, structures.

While I did learn a few things from the book, I would have appreciated a much more in-depth study of each structure. The photos are also often tightly focused on individual structures, making it difficult to understand the structure in relation to its context within the city. The book is organized by time period, rather than geographical location, which also makes it harder to follow the tapestry of each quarter and how the buildings flow into and influence each other.

As I know, this paperback is the first publication about Post Soeharto period which written by foreign (non-Indonesian) authors.

Probably because of I am not a politician, I'd never heard about all authors. But my hunch tell that mostly come from Murdoch University - Western Australia, which have several specialist researches about Indonesia instead of have some well-known Indonesian experts there. So the authors could ask something, consult or gather feedbacks, opinions, and advices from them directly.

So this book is good enough to learn how Indonesia could be look from overseas

I tried this based on my enjoyment of a short story by Mr. Brett in an omnibus of mystery stories. The writing style is quite breezy and readable, a good summer book. But the characters, with only a couple of exceptions, are not particularly likeable and the plot is very unlikely. This is not in the league of a Morse mystery - it's more of a British Columbo, only without giving away the mystery in the frist act.

A fun read, but not a great read.

This book is a succinct statement of the role and funcitoning, policies and procedures of the Paris Club as distinct from other clubs such as the London Club. For the most part I would recommend it with the qualification that readers should do more research on a major part of this book, namely, its discussion of conditionality. Conditionality is a set of criteria to which a borrowing nation must comply, in whole or in part, in order to be treated as "creditworthy". The 'prime directive' of official banks such as the IMF and World Bank is not necessarily to close the gap in a nation's balance of payments, not to remove the deficit, but rather to transform, littlt by little, command economies [i.e., socialist ones] to market economies. Conditionality as stated in the book under review leaves out the main conditions with which a borrowing nation must comply: elimination of consumer subsidies; deregulation of imports and exports, privatization of public sectory enterprizes, elimination of tariffs on imported goods, making it easy for foreign firms to settle into a borrowing nation, making bank interest rates mover closer to the rate of inflation, devaluation of the nation's currency. The treatment of 'conditionality' in this book glosses over the meat on this table. I did not expect this gloss because the book came under the auspices of Princeton University's Department of Economics. I was quite disappointed. The real role of official banks is political - not economic. Economics used politically is what this global world is all about, and Princeton should not gloss over this aspect of transnational development in a post socialist world.

The book cover description is rather accurate. It DOES describe sexual situations involving minors, which some might consider to be treacherously close to paedophilia. So this erotic novel won't pander to everyone's tastes.

I'd also like to let interested readers know that the novel is set in Victorian times, so the prose is very prim and conservative. For instance, sex in the book is described as "a poke".

In summary, the sexual situations were to my liking, but the descriptions simply weren't vivid enough for me. There wasn't enough descriptions about how the characters felt or the sensations they experienced.

I'm a great fan of the French 16th century & bought this knowing little about the book. I consider myself well educated in French literature & history, but, this book is tough going and dry for me. For example, I have a basic understanding of humanism but could not debate Erasmus's constribution to this philosophy. You really have to know your stuff to read this.

"Imagine you are getting a haircut. You hold a picture up beside your face, telling the beautician to cut a bit more here or feather the bangs, as in the photograph. In one salon you hear the voices of several women telling you that you really ought not to have your hair cut as short as the model in the picture" visiting Associate Professor in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies Susan Ossman challenges readers in Three Faces of Beauty (Duke University Press, March 2002). In another salon, a beautician may strive to reproduce the pictured hairstyle as faithfully as possible; in another, you are the focus and asked to "please put away that awful photograph - would you not rather simply look like the real you?"

In her latest book, Ossman explores and compares the atmosphere, discourse and activity in a variety of beauty salons in three cities, which the publisher describes as "a unique approach to understanding globalization and cultural change based on a comparative, ethnographic study of a nearly universal institution: the beauty salon." She conceives of herself a "butterfly hunter" tracking elusive and fleeting images of beauty from Paris and Cairo with their "long histories as hubs of commerce, fashion, and scholarship" to Casablanca on the "outskirts of fashion," seeking to capture these images as representations of globalization and modernization.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews conducted between 1993 and 1996, she treats beauty salons as public fora and as centers of empowerment for women that challenge tradition and mediate global trends into local practices. Choosing three cities outside the United States for her research, Ossman explores international perspectives on globalization as distinct from Americanization.

The return of beauty salons to Afghanistan, where they were banned under the Taliban, makes Ossman's new book especially timely. As images of Muslim women receive increased public attention around the world, Ossman's research uncovers practices that may seem exotic in the West, such as the publication of fashion magazines for veiled women.

Calling Three Faces of Beauty "a delightful and insightful read," past President of the American Historical Association Natalie Zemon Davis of Princeton University finds that "Susan Ossman lets us hear women's hopes for beauty and difference - out of or under the head shawl."