This book is wonderful and very inspirational. The stories make you feel warm and definitely make you think about the world. The stories are very uplifting and a big joy to read.

This is the third book of Ms. Anderson's that I have read and am once again amazed and inspired. Her stories are stories of beauty, faith and love and each and every one cannot help but fill one with faith and hope.

"For nothing is impossible with God." We are reminded once again, the love that God has for us and we need only ask and we shall receive.

My favorite story was Triumph In The Sky, the story of a baby's journey to receive a liver transplant and the pilot who aided him on his journey.

Miracles do happen. As Joan says, "His light is eternal. His love prevails."

All the stories are beautiful and I recommend this book highly. You will be changed - you will be left thinking and you will be crying and smiling and at peace.

If you ever questioned your faith, this is the book for you! Being able to read these incredibe uplifting stories,it will encourage your heart and enlighten your faith.Joan Anderson has been blessed with a wonderful gift. As long as she is writing, I shall read.

This little gem delivers responsibly on its subtitle and should be in every "certified" therapist's waiting room: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Risks and Benefits of Psychotherapy But Didn't Want to Have to Pay a Therapist to Find Out. Women in particular who are either considering some form of therapy or analysis or are recovering from (all too common) retraumatizing psychotherapy will also want to read the equally hard-won wisdom shared in books such as In Session by Deborah Lott, Mockingbird Years by Emily Fox Gordon and A Shining Affliction by Annie G. Rogers. If you are considering therapy while finding yourself asking "Is it me or is it you?" -- also take a quick look at Stop Walking on Eggshells by Randi Kreger and Paul Mason. In any case, Joan Mazza's gift is priceless self help.

This is a terrific book and a must-read for anyone interested in therapy for any reason. As a consumer of psychotherapy and psychiatric services, I know how hard it is to find and evaluate appropriate care, and I wish I had this book when I was first looking for help. Mazza's clear and easy-to-understand descriptions of the astonishing range of approaches to therapy and mental health are fantastic. They also provide a critical reminder that any one person or system of thought cannot provide all of the answers to life's questions. I have read other books by Joan Mazza and have heard her speak. Her commitment to helping people gain and maintain personal autonomy is admirable and inspiring.

I wish there was such a book when I was working in the mental health field. Joan Mazza's survey of psychotherapy covers in brief just about every area of a wide topic,and the extensive (30 pages) bibliography then directs the reader to more comprehensive treatments. This is a book for the 21st century: Ms. Mazza clearly lists patient's rights and responsibilities, stressing the importance of personal empowerment, over "victimology", i.e. passive surrender to mental health experts. I highly reccommend this book to anyone actively seeking direction for their own mental health work. If anything, the wide array of possibilities can be mind-boggling; I found it inspiring.

I had this book for a long time and just never was drawn to it. After reading THE SAI PROPHECY, I felt a real need to read it. It answered questions I had not even formed, and led my mind to solutions and possibilities I had never imagined. A real catalyst and a must for every woman on a spiritual search. Thank you, sister Boryshenko!

Honest self-examination without self-absorption. I highly recommend this book to any woman -- particularly any mid-life woman -- who is exploring what it means to be a spiritual creature, and any man who looks at the women in his life and wonders what might be going on for them.

A brilliant and thoughtful book which should be read by all women seeking to explore their spirituality, as well as validate themselves as women in a patriarchal society. The book is also interwoven with deeply personal anecdotes.

It keeps getting better with each page. If you're like me, and you're not all that familiar with the real Shakespeare, you'll find this a truly illuminating read. It's accessible, it's fun, and it sure is a better beach read then anything else you're likely to find this summer. What a terrific surprise!

Great reading in any type of weather. Witty, intellingently presented. Great choice of words. Makes William Shakespeare really a "Bill" who did write ABOUT the masses FOR the masses. Sharp focus on many of the plays that used to give me problems in analyses. Explanation flows effortlessly and make a great deal of sense, when presented with actual monologues! So few bucks for such insights. When Mr. MacKechnie urges his readers "onward" I was ready! JGRAINGER, PHD.

What a find! I bought this book on the recommendation of Joan Plowright's foreward and am so pleased I did. Mackechnie's book not only gathers an amazing amount of Shakespearean monologues, but he dissects them with considerable insight and wit. He guides you through each speech with so much info: why, where, who, that it all makes perfect sense. Any acting student would benefit not only from the technical wisdom but from the anecdotal wisdom as well. Apparently Mackechnie has worked with Laurence Olivier, Anthony Hopkins, Plowright, Ian Mckellen, among others. Highly recommended.

This book is about a young orphan who learns things about life. Like that ppl love her.its also about her life before and after her adoption These books make u happy and want to cry all at the same time they r wonderful for kids of all ages not to complicated but still the best. its also very adventourose

Aggie's Home is about a twelve year old orphan, Agatha Mae Vaughn. Aggie's mother left her on the steps of an orphanage when she was just a baby. Later, she gets sent to an orphan asylum with a cruel woman in charge. Aggie breaks a lot of rules, and after four years, the woman, Mrs. Marchlander, has had enough of her. So she sends her west on the Orphan Train. Aggie desperatley wants a home where someone will love her. Will she find one?

Aggie was left on the steps of an orphanage when she was a baby. Now twelve years old, Aggie is headed west on an Orphan Train. She was sent away from the orphanage because she broke too many rules. Aggie wonders if anyone will want her, if she will find a home. This book in the Orphan Train Children series was very good.

What a wonderful idea! So many good suggestions that I am able to use daily with virtually no cost in dollars or time. Had I known before that getting in shape could be so easy I could have saved years of frustration. I like Joan's advice so much that I am ordering books for all my customers (I am a business owner). Highly Recommended. :-)

I have all of Joan's books, because she actually makes exercise fun, but this may be my favorite. I kept thinking I was too busy to exercise and have instead found that I can add together exercise "minutes" to make up a great fitness program. Who knew I'd be exercising in the shower with my wash cloth???? P.S. This book is my new favorite gift item. I bought it as a birthday gift and for both mothers and fathers day gifts, and everyone loves it.

I just got this book yesterday and I am really enjoying it. I didn't expect it to be so funny! (I always like a bit of humor along with my exercises.) I am an aerobics instructor so I read a lot of exercise books. I can already tell this is going to be one of my favorites.

I think I'll just go and "floss" my thighs now...

I got this book as a tech student and it is great if you study this book you should have no problem passing the certification exam. It is packed with alot of info. I really like how the explain the answers. Instead of just telling you the right answer it also explains why that is the right answer. I would recommend it to any tech student.

I have just finished recertifying and most of the questions in this review book were either word for word or a rearrangement of a question from this book. I have taken and passed the CST exam twice using this book as my primary source for study material. My advice as a surgical tech of 16+ years - Buy this book now, you won't be sorry !

Because of the many multiple choice questions and catagories of this review book; all subject matters and possible test questions are covered throughly. By repetatively performing the various test and reviewing the answers I got wrong, I felt well prepared for the certification test.

This book is basically a manual for Unicode 3.0. It is not a light read but well worth the price and then some just for the glyphs from all of the various scripts that Unicode supports.

At 1040 large (8.5 x 11) pages it is the ultimate guide to unicode. With information on scripts and glyphs I had no idea even existed.

However if you are just getting started with Unicode I would recomend you get Unicode a Primer written by Tony Graham from M&T books. If you understand or feel you are starting to understand Unicode then The Unicode Standard Version 3.0 is the best comprehensive reference on the subject out today.

Consider it an overview of the developing UNICODE standard. As such, it will serve the engineer working on software in English and many other European countries rather well. It will be a good _starting_ _point_ for engineers developing software for other languages.

This book is essential for software engineers, at least for the next ten years or so. All programmers should understand characters, and UNICODE is the best we have for now. Even if you don't need it in your personal library, you need it in your company or school library.

The standard is flawed, as all real standards are, but it is a functioning standard, and it should be sufficient for many purposes for the near future.

The book itself is fairly well laid out, contains an introduction to character handling problems and methods for most of the major languages in use in our present world as well as tables of basic images for all code points. Be aware that these are _only_ basic images. For most internationalization purposes, be prepared for more research. (And please share your results.)

**** Finally, UNICODE is _not_ a 16 bit code. ****

(This is well explained in the book.) It just turned out that there really are over 50,000 Han characters. (Mojikyo records more than 90,000.) UNICODE can be encoded in an eight-bit or 16-bit expanding method or a 32-bit non-expanding method. The expanding methods can be _cleanly_ parsed, frontwards, backwards, and from the middle, which is a significant improvement over previous methods.

Some of the material in the book is available at the UNICODE consortium's site, but the book is easier to read anyway. One complaint I have about the included CD is that the music track gets in the way of reading the transform files on my iBook.

This is not just a reference for computer people, but for anyone interested in alphabets, symbols and character sets.

Central to the book, taking up the larger part of it, are the tables of the characters themselves, printed large with annotations and cross-references. If you enjoy the lure of strange symbols and curious writing systems then browsing these will occupy delightful hours.

For the Latin alphabet alone there are pages of accented letters and extended Latin alphabet characters used in particular languages or places or traditions: Pan-Turkic "oi", African clicks and other African sounds, obsolete letters from Old English and Old Norse, an "ou" digraph used only in Huron/Algonquin languages in Quebec, and many others, particularly those used for phonetic/phonemic transcriptions.

The Greek character set includes archaic letters and additional letters used in Coptic.

Character sets carried over from previous editions with additions and corrections are Cyrillic (with many national characters), Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Arabic (again many national and dialect characters), the most common Hindu scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam), Tibetan, Thai, Lao, Hangul, Bopomofo, Japanese Katakana and Hiragana, capped by the enormous Han character set containing over 27,000 of the most commonly used ideographs in Chinese/Japanese/Korean writing. Then there are the symbols: mathematical/logical (including lots of arrows), technical, geometrical, and pictographic. You'll find astrological/zodiacal signs, chess pieces, I-Ching trigrams, Roman numerals not commonly known, and much more.

Scripts appearing for the first time this release are Syriac, Ethiopic, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherookee, Runes, Ogham, Yi, Mongolian, Sinhala, Thaana, Khmer, Myanmar, complete Braille patterns, and keyboard character sets. And yes, there are public domain/shareware fonts available on the web that support these with their new Unicode values.

There are very good (and not always brief) descriptions of the various scripts and of the special symbol sets. Rounding out the book are some involved, turgid (necessarily so) technical articles on composition, character properties, implementation guidelines, and combining characters, providing rules to use the character properties tables on the CD that accompanies the book. After all, this is the complete official, definitive Unicode standard.

Of course this version, 3.0, is already out-of-date. But updates and corrections are easily available from the official Unicode website where data for 3.1 Beta appears as I write this. My book bulges with interleaved additions and changes. And that's very good. Many standards have died or been superceded because the organizations behind them did not keep up with users' needs or the information was not easily accessible.

Caveats?

The notes on actual uses of the characters could be more extensive, particularly on Latin extended characters. More variants of some glyphs should be shown, as in previous editions, if only in the notations.

Some character names are clumsy or inaccurate (occasionly noted in the book), because of necessity to be compatible with ISO/IEC 10646 and with earlier versions of the Unicode standard. For example, many character names begin with "LEFT" rather than "OPENING" or "RIGHT" rather than "CLOSING" though the same character code is to be used for a mirrored version of the character in right-to-left scripts where "LEFT" and "RIGHT" then become incorrect. And sample this humorous quotation from page 298: "Despite its name, U+0043 SCRIPT CAPITAL LETTER P is neither script nor capital--it is uniquely the Weierstrass elliptic function derived from a calligraphic lowercase p."

Firstly I did not want to read it. It was based on a movie, how good could it be? But a friend convinced me, that it was worth reading, so I gave it a try and realized it really wasn`t that bad. It was quite OK actually. Willow, a newlyn (smaller than humans or daikini as they are called here) comes across a daikini baby girl. He wants to return it to daikini, but on his "quest" it becomes known, that the baby it princess Elora Danan - a sacred princess that the prophecies say will save the realm. So he has care for her and keep her from the evil sorceress-queen that wants to kill her. And so his real quest begins. It is a magical story, a little dark at times, but it suits it and makes it even better

that was such a great book i found my copy in a used book store and at first i really didnt know what to expect but it turned out ok after all

It is an excellent book for those first trying their intrests into the fantasy category. Lots of action, adventure, romance, laughter, good and evil. Especially if you have seen the movie, you've gotta read the book.

In addition to being an expertly written whodunnit, I especially enjoyed the geographical description of the small Bishop Hill community and environ. Any native such as myself will easily recognize the dump, steeple building, colony school, the B&B, the Filling Station along with many other sites. The acknowledgements of helpers Lloyd and Donna Anderson, Sheriff Gib Cady and Sharon Wexell were of particular interest to me and shows the local flavor provided as the title aptly tells.

Three months after their marriage, Joan Spenser and police lieutenant Fred Lundquist are finally going to visit Fred's parents in Bishop Hill, Illinois. Not a traditional honeymoon perhaps, but after Fred's mother (an Alzheimer's sufferer) witnesses a murder, it goes completely upside down. Though it is obviously a local, Fred's mother cannot remember who the murderer was. What's worse is that the murderer does not like the idea of a living witness, so it is up to Joan and Fred to protect Helga, preferably by finding the murderer.

I must say that I absolutely loved this book! The author does an excellent job of capturing Bishop Hill and its Swedish traditions. The characters are wonderfully three-dimensional, and I think that she did a wonderful job of sympathetically portraying a family working with an Alzheimer's sufferer. Plus, the story is gripping and believable, with detectives who are human and quite believable.

Am I gushing about this book? You bet! This is a great book, and I highly recommend it to everyone.

I believe I have read all of Sara Frommer's books and they have never failed to delight me. Witness in Bishop Hill is every bit as good as all the other ones and it gets into some different, and not normally mined material, than might be expected in "cozy mysteries."
I am a writer too (author of Safe Sex in the Garden) and a few years ago I was talking to another writer I know, Vicki Leon, author of all the terrific "Uppity Women" books. Vicki was working on a mystery of her own (I think it will be called Nero's Mother, and ought to be out next spring). At any rate we were talking about books and writing and she told me that she had just read as close to perfect a murder mystery as she had ever encountered. Coming from Vicki, that's pretty high praise. It turned out that she was referring to Murder in C Major by Sara Frommer. Vicki was surprised (and impressed!) that I had already read Murder in C Major myself.
If you enjoy books that are finely crafted, where there are no excess words, no filler materials, nothing but the best stuff.....and if you've never had the pleasure to read one of Sara Frommer's novels, do yourself a favor and buy one. Her books are sold as cozy mysteries and I suppose they are, but I feel that they are much more than that. I have recommended these books to everyone I know who reads and appreciates good mysteries and they all thought they were great. Frommer's characters are real, you care about them, fear for them, empathize with them. By all means, do read Witness in Bishop Hill. You'll see what I mean.