Ernest A. Choate's Dictionary of American Bird Names is a monument. It stands alone. There is nothing like it. It is indispensible for birders who wish to understand, and not merely know, the names and classes of birds. The dictionary offers etymological origins of every name as well as Latin and scientific counterparts. The book is ornamented with Thomas Bewick woodcuts. The jacket notes call the text "picturesque and richly anecdotal" and this is both true and understatement. Choate's dictionary has wit and authority in its linguistic details and in its fieldwork. The author is both a scholar and a birder and has managed to include mythic, historical, and common origins. Thus the book is not only a history of the names of American birds; it is a history of America. Included are a biographical appendix, a bibliography, and an English/Latin glossary. The book is sized to fit a pocket or backpack, and has been updated to reflect the changes made on the 1983 AOU Check-list. Peterson said "no informed birder should be without " this book. The truth is, rather, that no birder can be informed without it, and best of all, it is affordable, transportable, and a joy to read.

Ernest Raymond's novel is a charming and compassionate look at a forgotten scandal throught the eyes of the children who are the products of it.Travers and Gael know that there is some mystery attached to their dear distinguished 'Uncle' Lucy but when their curiousity leads them to start investigations on the matter they certainly don't imagine what they find out. How they deal with the facts and confront the parties concerned,is the subject of this evocative and winsome period piece. The characters are drawn cleverly and with love .This look at what happens to the victims of old scandals leaves the reader anything but scandalized ,in fact sympathetic and more than a little amused.It is an intensely human story and an enjoyable book, good for light reading.

A labour of love. Delicately paced, the artist/author reveals the story of a little English maid who marries a milkman, sets up home and tries to bring up a child in the midst of British history as it affects the common man on the street. I absolutely love the portrayal of Ethel and Ernest by their son, the author: affectionate, yet honestly observant and unsentimental. Their characters come through so clearly. For a son to write something like this must have taken many tears, laughing rememberances and open-mouthed moments of imagination. The historical and social detail is truly amazing - the War (complete with Churchill's speech), VE Day, the advent of television, the Labour/Tory division (even between man and wife), the man on the moon - and it never slows down the story, it just illuminates the relationship between this man and wife, full of love and the tiny conflicts of married life. I cried at so many parts. This is so touching, all the more that it is about two extraordinary "ordinary" people.

Actually, its a pleasure knowing that since I have bought this illustrated book, it has been passed on to friends of friends of friends! I havn't even seen it for a month. No one can resist this book, which is an affectionate yet honest look by the author/illustrator Raymond Briggs, who tells the story of the courtship and life of his mother Ethel and father Ernest, set squarely in a historical period of Britian. The historical detail is amazing - from the comic antagonism of the political attitudes displayed by his mother and father, to the harsh reality of facing World War II on families. But the story is told with such humour and insight, and with such a powerful undercurrent of sadness and love, that it is uplifting rather than depressing.

I noticed another reviewer said this book was hard to catergorise - and that is so. It is not a story with a particular point - the point, if any, is about life.

I've long been a fan of Raymond Briggs' beautiful and evocative illustrations. This is his most personal work to date. This is not about a magical snowman or Father Christmas -- this is about the artist's parents, good, hard-working people who survived the depression, the Blitz, post-war rations and a son in art school. Ethel and Ernest are the British counterparts to Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation" and their son tells their story lovingly and beautifully through his talent for illustration. This book would make a great gift for an Anglophile, a young person who should know more about his grandparent's generation and the hardships they endured, or for a member of that generation who might like to reminisce about the days before television when an indoor bathroom was considered a real luxury.

I really enjoyed this mystery. It explores its protagonists meaningfully, they aren't 2Dish as is usual in books in the popular genres (mystery, sci fi), and is also entertaining.

In the closing pages of "WE the Accused", dawn approaches over Tercanbury prison. The peaceful setting is rudely disturbed by the crash of the gallows trapdoor and the crack of the hangman's rope. Thus ends the life of a murderer who, as the author states, was an ordinary man who lost his way and floundered.

The book relates how an ordinary man yielded to temptation despite his conscience. It is set in England, in the 1930s or 1940s and tells how this man, a schoolteacher, is trapped in an unloving and unsatisfactory marriage and how he manages to fall for the attractions of a younger woman. Nothing unusual in this background to the plot, but the author very convincingly describes how the "hero" or "villain" gradually becomes drawn deeper and deeper into trouble, sometimes through his own stupidity (or greed/ shortsightedness); partly through the feeling he would never be caught, and partly because of outside circumstances.

To summarize: he murders his wife, gets caught, is tried and is hanged. His girlfriend almost shares his fate as an accomplice.

The story is based on one or more true-life cases just as Silence of the Lambs was based on a composite of several real life cases. It is interesting, compelling and convincing because it deals with an ordinary person, with ordinary problems and also because today the book is to some extent a "period piece"

I would recommend it to anybody intetrested in crime fiction. Readers of Messrs Ed McBain and Wambaugh would almost certainly enjoy it. Actually, it is surprising to me why this book has sunk into obcurity and out of print as it is well worth reading.

Philip Murton Johannesburg

A charming, heartfelt and moving story - a lovely memorial to the author's parents (and a reminder of how short life really is).

Ethel and Ernest are two rather ordinary people. They get married around 1930, live together in the same house for 41 years, have a son, and then die the same year. Neither of them does anything more extraordinary than live and love.

And that's more than enough. Briggs' story is little more than a series of snippets of conversation and events of a long relationship. We see Ethel and Ernest bond, bicker, and regret. We see the love they have for themselves, and how they adjust over time. There's a great conversation between the two while Ernest is watching the moon landing, and Ethel just doesn't see the big deal of it all. I was greatly surprised when the story was done and I felt real sorrow for the two of them. Briggs' artwork is really moving, and displays the changing of the times on his parents very well.

This is a nice, quiet, loving character study about two people who may not have lived an exciting life, but that's probably one of the things that makes this piece of graphic literature work best. Highly recommended to all fans of serious graphic art.

Raymond Briggs turns his fine artistic repetoire to some of the issues that matter most in this precious book. It is precious because it is simply the lives of ordinary people told in pictures and words with more power than a Hollywood blockbuster. Those who love Briggs for the Father Christmas stories will be reminded that this is also the creator of the Tin Pot Foreign General and a domesticated couple facing oblivion in a nuclear war. The messages remain as gentle and as strong as ever.
If you wish to raise your children as literate, peaceful citizens of the world then this book should find its way through your home... pass it on to others... if you can.

The english translation of Ernest Row's "Phoenicia and Western Asia" by the learned Raymond Weill is a complete accomplisfed work with its own index. Raymond Weill, Director of D'Etudes A L'ecole Des Hautes E'tudes and Charge' De Cours A' LA Faculte' Des Lettres De Paris, in the 1940's , which makes him very close to the excavations done by the French and German Argeologist between the two wars.Fifty years have passed since the book was first published in London, and the material is first to read. Weill takes us in his book from the fourth Millennium B.C. geographical setting of Phoenicia and its Syro-Palestine Plato to the Macedonian Conquest thru Egyptian and Hittite sources and then making use of the recent Ugarithic excavations ta Ras-Shamra. The absence of sources to the preiod of indpendance (from 1200to the early ninth century)can now be explained by the publishing of David Rohl "Pharaohs and Kings" in 1995 in which he concludes that the 21st and 22nd Dynasties were not chronologically sequential as is currently beleived, but partly contemporary hance eliminating at least a centuary of the conventional chronology of that epoch. Weill dwarfs the presence of the Israelites in the region prior to the ninth Century, still today confirmed by the State of Israels ' Archiological excavations, also clarified by Donald Redford book "Egypt,Canaan and Israel in Ancient Times. What is astonishing is the role played by Phoeniciain the early settlsments of the Mediteranian basin and the continuing uniterupted relationship with Egypt, and the role Phoenicia played in developing the Alphabet and its early use in lower and eastern Egypt (the Arab mountains of Herodotus and Sinai) which makes the theory of Emile Durzi of the Algiers that 'THE PHARAOHS SPOKE ARABIC ' a fact.