literature

This is one of the best mystery books that I have read in a long time. The characters were very believable, and the story line made me keep turning the pages. This mystery is phenomenal without a predictable ending! A must read.

A great mystery read, one that takes off with a great story line, and plot. An excellent read, and it will keep you guessing. And this story line is so great it will keep you at the end of your seat! A must read for anyone that loves mystery books. Like Mary Higgins Clark, Kathy Perry, does a great story line in the way she writes. This is a 5 star and a must read!

This is a great read. I like how the author Kathy Perry, wrote the story line. All though the book she had the turns and twists going! But, WOW! The way she made everything come together in the end was magical! This book rates 5 stars from me. I never left my seat until the entire book was read! I JUST COULDN'T PUT IT DOWN.! I hope this goes to film for this would be one best seller. I can't wait for the sequel,I hope another cliff hanger, what a plot! I am looking forward to "Brotherly Love." Thank you for this wonderful read.

This book is a must-read for teenagers and for their parents and teachers! Teens' voices are heard as they are - unedited, uninterpreted. And what they have to say is more profound and more interesting than you would think! I also love the art and the poetry - it can speak louder than words. The author's information is real and down-to-earth and truly helpful. And the book is not just anecdotes and theory, but it also contains exercises so that it can be used as a workbook (also great for adults dealing with stress and anger!). Easy to read and very worth-it!

This is a totaly awesome book it has so many cool insights of so many different teens. This is a good book to read if you need advise or just to realize that your not alone in the world when it becomes different and unknown. I hope that all teenagers read this book, because everyone will get something out of it!

This book gives insight to the real teenager and thoughts they may not normally share in a verbal manner. It is honest and expressive in a way that kids can relate to. What a wonderful reading for both adults and kids.

I was laughing so hard that I woke up Shari AND both dogs!

A longtime friend of mine, who works as our school's counselor--and who gets to borrow the books that I write about--has occasionally asked me very sweetly whether I could find more funny books for our students. J.T., this one's for you!

"We built countless ramps with old boards laid on barrels or boxes, at the bottom of a hill if possible, and we would try to jump over things with our bikes.

"Remember, these were one-speed fat-tired bikes with a crowned-up, castrating brace bar and the things we tried to jump were fences, wooden walls, barrels, bikes, each other. On one memorable occasion Alan--after carefully calculating distances and angles--tried to jump his stepfather's Ford coupe end to end. He didn't...quite...make it and left a face print on the windshield of the car, but that might have been because he was distracted by the scream when his mother came out just as we finished the ramp and Alan made his jump..."

Now, I can remember some of the "really neat stuff" we did when I was young: There was a telephone cable hanging from a wooden utility pole in this vacant lot filled with mounds of dirt left over from digging foundations in he neighborhood. It made for great swinging (à la George of the Jungle) until Jimmy Dean got a concussion by swinging straight into the pole. There was "skitching" --kids in Beatle boots grabbing onto the back bumper of any car that was cruising through the snow-slickened parking lot behind Modell's. I can also recall the thrill of aiming our banana bikes full speed over the edge and down the big drop-off at Sunshine Acres Park. But my sitting here today (in one piece) attests to the fact that I did NOT spend my impressionable years hanging out with Gary Paulsen and his buddies:

"Alan, again after carefully calculating and measuring..., decided that if you got up to twenty-six miles an hour and angled a ramp to ensure (that's how he put it, 'to ensure') that you got at least seven point six feet in the air, it was possible to do a complete backward somersault and land on your wheels upright. Alan, having gotten at least seven feet in the air after a screaming run down Black Hill, landed exactly, perfectly upside down, bicycle wheels straight up, spinning, in a cloud of dust and gravel."

Decorating the cover of HOW ANGEL PETERSON GOT HIS NAME AND OTHER OUTRAGEOUS TALES ABOUT EXTREME SPORTS is an illustration of a young man on snow skis. He is wearing one of those old leather flight helmets (à la Snoopy) and flight goggles, and he is being pulled through the snow behind a sporty automobile that dates back to my father's adolescence. The young man is Angel Peterson who in 1954, inspired by a newsreel proceeding the Saturday matinee, decided he'd break the speed record for skiing despite being a thousand miles from any hills. Such was passion for scientific curiosity (and impressing girls) amid the "Brain Trust" that hung out with the young Gary Paulsen.

"Alan tried once more, getting a lift from an unsuspecting truck by hanging on to the rear corner and hitting the ramp so fast that it gave way and he went through it like a tank, barrels and boards and splinters flying everywhere."

"Wayne completed the only true backward flip off a bicycle but he didn't take the bike with him..."

Of course Shari, ever-the-mom, shakes her head, appalled by what I'm reading her from the book--a sure sign that this book will be absolutely worshiped by young boys. (Shari says that's why I like the book so much.) No, really, it's a book for girls, too. (Rosemary, who can tell you about trying to bounce through the air from the trampoline to the rope hanging from the tree, is going to love this one.) In fact, the only fault that I can find with the book is its size: One hundred and eleven pages is way too brief for so funny a book. Guess I'll just have to read it again...right after I take my government surplus target kite out in the next heavy wind and see if I can...

It's the 1950's and Gary Paulsen and his friends are 13 years old. For whatever reasons, they chose this year to be the year of "extreme sports"-Paulsen's term for the outrageous dares they took.

These days, extreme sports refers to organized teams and individuals who participate in sport activities that involve rules, certified equipment, and lots of padding and head gear. For Paulsen and his buddies, the equipment was usually purchased at the army surplus store and converted to fit their needs. Their padding and head gear? Didn't exist.

They jumped off of things, help onto things, went fast, went high, broke records, turned, twisted, and rolled along all in the name of "What's the worst that can happen?"

Just one page into this autobiographical sketch of life at thirteen, the reader can perfectly imagine the northern Minnesota town in which Paulsen grew up and can picture the adventurous, comical moments that made up this crazy year of his life. The dialogue brings to mind so many young adolescent boys, all trying to fit in another ten minutes of fun before their parents call them to dinner.

These stories are laugh-aloud fun, and they make the reader want to go out and put some wheels on something!

This is a great book for the average male reader who needs a quick funny read. This book tells the story as it unfolds of thirteen year olds back in the fifties after the Korean war and how they spend their spare time. These daredevils perform the unthinkable just because they don't have anything better to do. Gary Paulsen twists a wacky sense of humor into this piece that will keep your side splitting with laughter. A must read!

Barry Farrell died too young, in 1984. This book will keep his memory alive for those who learned from his lapidary prose. I wish I could have been one of his students--but in a way, having read his work, I feel that in a way, I am.

I've been reading with enormous delight this collection of articles by Barry Farrell. It's a posthumous collection by a brilliant writer who died in 1984. What an unexpected thrill it was to discover this book's existence. It helps bring back to life an unfortunately neglected writer. I knew him briefly (too briefly) -- a fine guy. Barry Farrell's bracing journalistic style and humanity take the reader back to a better time in journalism when writers cared deeply about their subject matter.

Certainly I'm not an objective reviewer. I attended Barry Farrell's classes at UC Santa Barbara in the 1970s -- and was, I believe, rather a disappointment to him -- but he nonetheless became one of my most important role models as a writer. What I've long regretted, however, was not having more of his writing on my bookshelf. Barry mostly published in magazines, and so it's been hard even for those of us who are devoted to his work to find and collect any significant fraction of his lifetime output. I own and cherish a few aging magazines featuring his writing, but these bits and pieces barely scratch the surface of his 30 fruitful years of shoe-leather journalism. This book, then, is a wonderful and long-overdue development. I had read perhaps a third of these pieces, and was delighted to discover them anew. The other two-thirds of the book was an absolute delight, each page a treasure of flowing language and unerring eye for detail. Of course, it also brought back to my ear Barry's voice, and images of him I'll always carry with me: coffe at the outdoor cafe in front of the library at UC Santa Barbara after class, or the time he cajoled Joan Dideon and John Gregory Dunne into visiting our small class of 12 or 15 students in the English Department's spartan conference room. So, take it from a blatantly partisan -- but completely sincere -- reviewer: buy this book! For heaven's sake, if you love great non-fiction writing -- if you are devoted to writers like Joan Dideon, John McPhee, the non-fiction of Wallance Stegner, and other master wordsmiths of our age -- you will not be disappointed.

The title says it all- a small book filled to the brim with all the things Hello Kitty fans are interested in, categorized, with adorable illustrations and great graphic design. The things and activities featured follow directly from Hello Kitty's heart and love of life- color, glamour, interest, travel, fashion, friendship. Sure to please!

Even though this book is for like ages 6-12 it's a great book for girls of all ages. It has tips on fashion, beauty, travel, and cool ways to decorate your room. If you are just loooking for a cute book with cute ideas, Hello Kitty's LBOBI is for you.

I thought I'd picked a winner and was right. My 11 year old sister loved it.

The book is a good one, it has advice ranging from friendship, to fashion, and even a little nutrition thrown in for good measure. All of the info is solid, thoughtful and heartfelt.

A lot of kids seem to be raising themselves these days, either through family breakups or just a lack of attention. While nothing replaces solid advice from a loved one, books on being a young woman can be quite helpful in sorting out the things children deal with growing up. This one certainly is.

Cute, fun, and helpful. This is a great gift to show you care.

There are few authors I feel everyone should read but no matter who you are Herbert Huncke should be read. He is one of the best storytellers/writers I have had the privilege of reading. His stories of sex, streets, drugs, life and friends bring a humanity to what may be considered by many obscure, degenerate, or just plain disgusting, but Huncke's stories I believe are non of these. They are filled with love, beauty, pain and always truth. He takes the reader into a world they don't always want to enter but when the story is finished we are glad we made the journey and had someone like Huncke by our side as a companion.

Herbert Huncke was the true beat. As WS Burroughs wrote, in The Herbert Huncke Reader, "Huncke had adventures and misadventures that were not available to middle-class, comparatively wealthy college people like...me....Huncke had extraordinary experiences that were quite genuine." The sad true is that Huncke was the type that Burroughs wrote about, but didn't like much. He was real. Burroughs was living on trust-fund money for decades (remember that the $200 a month WSB received from family in the 1950s was equal to thousands of dollars a month now-not a bad way to live). Huncke lived the life that others wrote about, but never live. While Burroughs ate steak and drank fine booze, Huncke was still wandering around Times Square. Read the original beat. He makes the other 'beat' writers seem like the middle-class dilatants that many of them were. Huncke never fought for the fame, the fortune, and the boys. He was just a "junkie on the prow." This book is truly hip.

Previously known for using the word "beat" to the fullest, thus inspiring Kerouac for an appropriation of a very hip literary movement, there was more to Huncke than just a "jive" talker. As we know, Huncke was a full time junky (what a rhyme!) who had more of an affect on Burroughs than any other beat writer. Likewise, Huncke spent most of his life helping out on the Burroughs' cannabis farm and taking care of Bill's wife Joan who harnessed a difficult benny habit. In Huncke's early years, growing up in Massachusetts and NYC, he used to entertain the boys at local cafeterias with his succinct yet street jargon-fulled stories; clearly he had a talent for story telling. This story-telling is pretty much what makes up the Herbert Huncke Reader. Starting with Huncke's journal, Herbert gets his feet wet with short-story writing, particularly focusing on introspective work-outs and clever anecdotes. Then the books moves to The Evening Sun Turned Crimson, another introspective composition altho mainly concentrating on structural pieces depicting street life, hanging with the beats, and drugs. Next to Reader introduces Guilty of Everything, a comprehensive series of interviews plus outtakes from other journals. Finally the book closes with Previously Uncollected Material, the chapter says it all. Sometimes moving other times raw and scatological, Huncke writes with a unique style that is easy to comprehend and is inspiring. Although not as transcendent as his contempoaries (Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso), Huncke's writing should not overlooked as "writings of a drug addict," or "a subordinate Beatnik." Huncke did have talent (most notably with recitations) and has definitely worked to the fullest by publishing what he could, despite his painful heroin addiction and ostracization. In my opinion he's a second Neal Cassady (more of a inspiring icon) and definitely had a major affect on the foremost Beat's writings despite his own sparse collection; that's why I think this Reader is important.

I read this book aloud to my sixth grade reading class. They loved it, and always wanted to hear more. Its also a great way to introduce students to some of the history of China, Japan and US involvement in the war there.

Boys can be picky readers, so I always take notes if they actually love a book. My 8 year old carried this book everywhere and told be about it every night for a week. Besides Redwall or Harry Potter, this is the first book he has raved about.

I told my young son about what a good book this was when I read it growing up, encouraging him to read it as well. He too enjoyed it, and I read it again in my fifties. Excellent book, would certainly encourage children to read it. Now in his teens, we still use a memorable quote from the book, "the heart understands without words".

Our class liked this book. We thought it was hilarious and gave a wonderful picture of how much a million really is. The kid tower was very imaginative and was an excellent example of a million, billion, and trillion. David M. Schwartz has a fantastic imagination. This book is great for little kids, because it shows there are numbers greater than a hundred. It's language is easy for kids to understand, and it contains many amazing facts.
However, older students dislike it, because it was too fictional. We felt it didn't explain these concepts well enough for us. Overall, we wouldn't recommend it for grades higher than fourth grade.

This picture book is a great pairing of engaging children's literature, detailed illustrations and a deep math concept. I love the way that Schwartz and Kellogg bring this book to life!
I love Kellogg's illustrating! I would just love to jump right into the pages and be a part of all the action. His characters are drawn with such unique faces. And each page is filled with numerous details and endless nooks and cranies. Each page begs to be explored over and over.
If you have never enjoyed a book illustrated by Steven Kellogg now is the time!
The writing in this particular book is also very well done. The little facts about the number 1 million are really interesting. For instance it would take a fish bowl the size of a city harbor to hold a million goldfish!
This book really helps kids and adults understand a very abstract concept. How many of us really have a good grasp on how much a million really is? This book definitely puts it in perspective!
Read it once and you'll have to read it again and again!

I really enjoyed this book and I like the way David M. Schwartz used kids as an example of measurement. I thought the story was cute and I think young kids will really enjoy this. This is a story that I read a lot when I was in elementary. The story shows a very creative out look on counting and makes a million look like a humongous number. I think kids can really learn from that and even makes it kind of fun to learn. Sometimes I even like to read this book over because it really is a fun book to read. The illustrations are also very good and I think they definitely add to the creativity of this book. I really enjoyed looking at them.

"The Hunting of the Snark" is a brilliant nonsense-poem. Yet Gardner has seen fit to put pretentious, geeky, ...pedantic annotations all over it. Now I like nonsense, but the vulgarly rational "sense" of some of these annotations irritates me. Do we really need to know that the word "BOMB" begins and ends with B (thereby relating it to the Boojum) and that OM is the Hindu name of God??? Do we really need to know of a political cartoon in which Kruschev says "BOO", and does Gardner have to tell us that he was trying to say Boojum??

Annotations should be done in the manner of Gardner's own annotations of Alice in Wonderland. Now those were annotations that made *sense*. Annotations that simply explained out of date concepts, gave relevant details from Carroll's own life, or obscure humour. That's all! That is what annotations should be like.

The pedantic geekery of these annotations remind me of the...games of Star Trek fanatics (or Sherlock Holmes fanatics).

The poem is brilliant, though; and the illustrations were funny, before the annotations over-analysed them.

This edition of Lewis Carroll's hilarious and haunting nonsense poem was originally published as THE ANNOTATED SNARK in 1962. Featuring Henry Holiday's original 1876 illustrations and a plethora of critical supplementary material, this is certainly the best edition of the poem currently available. Martin Gardner, who is perhaps best known for his ANNOTATED ALICE books, provides copious informative notes, many of them intended tongue in cheek, that explicate the myriad mysteries of Carroll's enigmatic sea voyage. Particularly noteworthy is Gardner's inclusion, as an appendix, of A COMMENTARY ON THE SNARK, a wonderfully loony "explanatory" essay by one Snarkophilus Snobbs that manages to brilliantly parody and demolish any attempt to provide solemn scholarly commentary on Carroll's silly but strangely disturbing work. Nonetheless, in his introduction, Gardner takes the time to offer brief descriptions of some of the more notable serious attempts to "force the whole of the SNARK into one overall metaphorical pattern." We'll never know exactly what was going through Carroll's mind when he created this epic journey--especially since the author himself claimed that the poem was devoid of any meaning--but the many efforts to explain it away are often ingenious and entertaining.

Lewis Carroll is brilliant in this piece. First of all the poetical music is perfect, absolutely perfect, and yet the words don't mean much. Many of these words are not even to be found in any dictionary. Be it only for the music, this piece is astonishingly good. But the piece has a meaning. I will not enter the numerical value of the numbers used in the poem : 3, 42, 6, 7, 20, 10, 992, 8, and I am inclined to say etc because some are more or less hidden here and there in the lines. Hunting for these numbers is like hunting for the snark, an illusion. But the general meaning of the poem is a great allegory to social and political life. A society, any society gives itself an aim, a target, a purpose and everyone is running after it without even knowing what it is. What is important in society is not what you are running after or striving for, but only the running and the striving. Lewis Carroll is thus extremely modern in this total lack of illusions about society, social life and politics : just wave a flag of any kind, or anything that can be used as a flag and can be waved, in front of the noses of people and they will run after it or run in the direction it indicates. They love roadsigns and social life is a set of roadsigns telling you where to go. Everyone goes there, except of course the roadsigns themselves who never go in the direction they indicate. Lewis Carroll is thus the first post-modern poet of the twenty-first century. He just lived a little bit too early.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Reading Tacitus' Annals I oft remembered Thucydides' account of the Peleponnesian wars. An important theme of the latter work was the corrupting effects of prolonged war on the morals and intellect of the Athenian people, who were ultimately degraded so much that they voted the destruction of the people of a small island just because they had chosen to remain neutral. Tacitus, on the other hand, seems to have dedicated himself in this work to examining the corrupting effects of absolutism on the Roman people after the fall of the Republic. He shows how absolute power brought out the worst traits in the character of rulers like Tiberius and Nero, who grew more and more tyrannical with every year on the throne, and how members of the illustruous Roman senate and other sections of the Roman political society turned into a horde of spineless sycophants, informers and debauches. There were still a few honourable individuals, but as Tacitus shows in an endless series of judicial and non-judicial murders, most of these paid the price of sticking to the ancient traditions of liberty and honour with their lives. Tacitus also deals at length with the relations of the Romans with the subject peo-ples. I may be wrong here, but it seems to me that in such passages Tacitus draws a parallels between the fate of these enslaved peoples and that of the enslaved Roman people -the first a slave to the Romans, the second a slave to the emperor and his bureaucracy made up of ex-slaves. Many subject peoples rebelled and some like the Cherusci under Arminius (towards whom he does not seem averse at all) could successfully preserve their liberty against the in-trusion of the Romans. Those Romans who dared defy the tyrant on the other hand, and especially those who could wisely remain independent and yet stay alive, were far fewer, Tacitus seems to imply. Insofar as it demonstrates how closely liberty (including liberty of thought) and morals are intertwined, this work is still relevant today as a central work of liberal humanism.

Tacitus Histories deals with the turbulent year 69AD the year of four emperors. Tacitus eye for detail which allows us to understand the personalities of Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespatian and their motivations and ambitions in this trully chaotic time in Rome's history. The sinister role of the Praetorians in these events is faithfully accounted. I found I could not put it down! Very readable compared to the Annals. The translation is first rate. The work is also supported by numerous foot notes and maps. Anyone interested in this period of Roman history must read this book.

The year 69 CE, called The Year of the Four Emperors, was awfully busy in the Roman Empire. The Emperor Nero had committed suicide in the previous year, the last ruler to have a family connection to Julius Caesar. His place was taken by Servius Sulpicius Galba, who was murdered early in 69 as part of a revolt by the next emperor, Marcus Salvius Otho. Otho himself committed suicide after being militarily bested by the next emperor, Lucius Vitellius. But by December of 69, Vitellius had been assassinated, and his place taken by Titus Flavius Sabinus Vespasianus, the general who had brutally suppressed the Bar Kochba rebellion in Judea. All this in less than 365 days.

Tacitus was a Roman conservative and, if his spirit could be summoned back from the dead, I would love to see him coming "From the Right" on "Crossfire." He was a tremendous writer, and "The Histories" are full of examples of this. There are his epigrams, such as his observation that Galba would have universally been thought of as worthy to rule had he never, in fact, ruled. There are interesting characters, like the great opportunist Antonius Primus, whose nickname translates roughly as "Beaky" because, well, he had a huge nose. There are a great many people mentioned in this work and therefore it needs to be read carefully, as it's hard to keep track of the Romans without a scorecard.

After the year 69, the Presidential election of 2000 seems pretty tame, doesn't it?