My church bought new missals and I was lost because the new books don't have the full readings in it. The book has every mass word-for-word. I am a Catholic...I don't know for sure if it is for all religions, but it is exactly the Catholic mass.

It also has an intro for each week so you know beforehand what mass is about. It also has a little background for each reading so you can make sense of what they are really trying to say. It does not have the songs.

The church rotates the mass every year, so there are four sections to the book. All you have to do is look up in the front of the book what year/date you are currently in and find that page to go from there. I never leave this book behind on Sundays. I'm in my 20s and it's very easy to read and follow along.

The photography in this book is excellent. The book is keyed to the Pacific Northwest, so those who live in or visit the area will find it very easy to use. The descriptors are clear especially concerning edibility. The book fits nicely into a day pack for all you hikers out there. I would highly recomend this book, it is probably one of the best books out there!

One of the contributors to this book, Chester Finn, puts urban education in perspective with the fact that in 1995 nearly 25% of the furnaces in urban schools were still coal-fired. Ravitch and her contributors assess new political and educational policy initiatives from a positive, clear-headed point of view, toward the goal of understanding what works well, and how to make that happen elsewhere.

The emphasis on school improvement, away from what Ravitch calls the "decrepit factory model of schooling," calls for a discussion of (i) the history of school improvement movements, (ii) the emergence of structural reforms in the early 1990s, including vouchers, contracting, charters, and deregulation, and (iii) specific examples of system-wide reforms from Chicago, the Milwaukee vouchers, and the Edison project. Good examples of deregulation include Texas Governor George W. Bush reducing state-imposed regulation on local districts from 490 to 230, and Michigan Governor John Engler a similar proportion.

This book grew out of a seminar hosted at New York University from 1994-1996. There is newer information available, for example, on the Milwaukee charters, but these contributors are not dated and convey their hopes and ideals about education fully. Chester Finn is always a pungent writer and worth reading. I especially liked Valerie Lee's chapter on the promise and results of Catholic school education.

I think Ravitch's contributions to educational reform are unique. Trained as a historian, she brings to the discussion of educational reform a new and refreshing viewpoint. You do not have to be a policy wonk to enjoy this book. END

Bartolomeo argues that the most significant contribution critics make to the early English novel is their inability to agree on a consistent aesthetic platform. Novelists themselves are just as generously inconsistent in their own prefaces. The diversity and dialogism of the critical debate reflects and supports the heteroglossia of discourse so crucial to the development of the early are novel. "Dialogue, within and among novelists and critics, favored options over absolutes, heterogeneity over consensus--thus enabling the genre that we twentieth-century readers think of as having risen in the eighteenth century to continue rising and to remain a genre in the making," Bartolomeo concludes (161).

The canonical authors seem to respond most imaginatively to the pressures of a genre that was alternately inventing rules and breaking them. Defoe's inconsistency, from the range of genres woven into his fictions to his conflicting truth claims for Robinson Crusoe, are "the inevitable consequences of combining, refining, and expanding the insights of his contemporaries. . . . Defoe necessarily tangled himself in contradictions which, in turn, foreground the combination of pressures on a serious and talented practitioner of a new and unstable genre" (45). Richardson has three conflicting authorial personas, each with a slightly different angle on the moral means and ends of literature, and Fielding also licenses inconsistency behind the mask of a complex narrative persona that reaches out of the prefaces and deep into the novels themselves. Building on his useful observation from Notes and Queries 33 (1986) that Johnson at different points identifies the readers of novels as "the busy, the aged, and the studious" and also the "young, ignorant, and idle" (qtd. 83-87), Bartolomeo paints Johnson as a cautious critic torn between "absolutely candid responses" and "a superimposed, moralistic self-discipline" (87). All three writers "strove mightily to mask a dialogic tendency that today's readers would wish to celebrate" (87).

The reviewers seem to flaunt rather than mask their dialogic tendencies in a dazzling array of motives, methods, and meanings. The only standard the reviewers share is a "stubborn refusal to evaluate all writers or all novels by a single standard. . . . The victory of diversity over consistency may strike the theoretical purist as contributing to a hopelessly compromised poetics, but it more than compensates for that in its support of a genre forever in the process of re-imagining itself" (160). The closest thing to a shared motive is the pernicious tendency to "stratify the genre and its audience, in order to establish and maintain authority over an elite class of readers" (114). Much like today's critics who assume the audience of popular culture to be passive and uneducated yet write for an audience of specialists, eighteenth-century reviewers assume the audience for fiction to be young, middle-class, and female, yet write for discriminating male readers who have no intention of cultivating the unhealthy habit of reading novels. The elitism of the assumed audience "shaded every negative comment on novels, novelists, and novel readers. Even when the critics explicitly addressed the clientele of circulating libraries and the authors who stocked their shelves, they were actually speaking to their own readers. . . " (118-19). Critics were especially cruel to female novelists: "As readers or writers, most women were noticed to remind men that they were beneath notice" (121).

Would that all modern critics could receive the obsequious respect Thomas Amory offers in the preface to John Buncle (1756): "I have only to add, that I wish you all happiness; that your heads may lack no ointment, and your garments be always white and odiferous: but especially, may you press on, like true critics, towards perfection; and may bliss, glory, and honour be your reward and your Portion" (qtd. 109-10). Until that happy day, let us rejoice with Bartolomeo that such sweet flowers are fertilized by the manure of so many well-meaning reviews.

Lays out the four gospels in four columns in chronological order of events, with Joseph Smith translation changes indicated by italics and cross-out. A wonderful way to study the gospels. A definite must for serious gospel students.

As a fomer New Yorker now living elsewhere for many years,I recently vacationed in NYC. I looked at several calendars and felt this one provided the most memories and excitment of our visit. It also gave me ideas for our next trip. If you want to feel the flavor of NY from a New Yorker's point of view, this is the one.

THIS WAS THE BEST BOOK EVER. and I don't really read a lot of books. You have to have a really good imagination, to write this book, and I couldn't even put it down. The end really surprised me, I would recommened this book to every one.

thought this book was very helpful for the step 1. very similar questions to the real thing

I've lost count of the number of copies of "No One Cries the Wrong Way" that I have handed on. I have given the book to people who have just lost a loved one, but I've given it also to those who are dealing with other losses. And it works. Father Joe's words are far-reaching, and he writes with such warmth and obvious love-both for God and for the rest of us-that he touches the heart. Although he centers on death as being the most devastating and universal experience, he does touch on other losses.

Father Joe writes that we-who we are, how we live-are totally intertwined with God. He relates our reactions to His love-that what we do is always a reaction to how we perceive God's love. We each will grieve, no one in the same way as another, and Father Joe teaches us that our grieving is our response.

The book is also practical. Father Joe not only gives us a lot to think about, he lays out concrete rituals that can help both individuals and groups, whether children, young adults or adults. In teaching, I've learned that ritual is important, as it physically ties us to our spiritual journey. I've used several of these rituals in my classes, and the response from the children is often relief, because the prayer services give them a context to voice their feelings, as well as permission to cry out, to ask why, and just to cry.

Each day Nora and Grampas wait for Bonnie to have her foal, But only Bonnie knows when she will be ready. At every turn of the page you wait excitedly for the foal, but each time it is still NO FOAL YET! When the family has finally given up and goes about its work, thats when Bonnie has the foal! FINALLY a perfect name for the foal that would come. A perennial favorate at our house read over and over, Bonnie is like a member of the family we care about and worry for as we wait for the foal to arrive. As always the pictures are wonderful and the story sweet.