This book is a precious book for children of all ages. As a mother and teacher I recomend this book.

This book has changed the way I look at flowers. I can now duplicate them easily using this technique, while at the same time maintaining the realistic look. It was great fun. Joan Shay is an artist.

Lucky Bear is one of the first books my first graders read. It has just a few words on each page, very good picture clues, and a cute story. I highly recommend it!

I enjoyed this great collection of golf stories. One would have to buy dozens of books to have access to these wonderfully written pieces otherwise. Conveniently organized into different categories for easy reference. This book takes you back into some of golf's greatest historical writing as well as a taste of some of the best contemporary work. I'd strongly recommend adding this gem to your library.

Exceptional photography by Walter Pfeiffer brings the beloved Goebel figurines to the page in amazing detail, while Joan N. Ostroff and Manfred Arras economize on words to convey the essence of the art so many of us collect. These are the best 320 pages you can own if you simply love looking at Sister Hummel's little children. This is not a price list or catalog, but rather a masterful presentation of the best ceramic figurines anyone could hope to own.

The third chapter alone, "The People Behind the Figurines," is worth every penny of the price of this book. The Goebel tradition of fine craftsmanship is articulated in photo essay form. Master sculptors, moldmakers, casters, assemblers, kilnsmen, glazers, and painters are captured like never before, and the complicated and many-stepped process of making the figurines is brought to your study for thoughtful appreciation. As many as forty molds are required to make some of the pieces, shedding light at last on why these beautiful little children can cost more than your new wide-screen TV.

If you collect Hummels, you owe it to yourself to buy this book. You'll love it as much as you love any of your figurines.

I absolutely loved all three of these stories, and I can't wait to read the rest of the Mac Allister books. One story reads right into the next, and they all end on a happy note. It is good to know that the family stories continue into the next generation. It does not leave you hanging and wondering what happens next.

This is a very interesting yet fairly perdictable story of a young girl, Maggie, who is forced to visit her father and his new bride at Christmas. She would so much rather spend it with her Grandmother. Maggie trip turns out to be more fun than expected. She likes her new step-mom, meets a famous boy actor and becomes good friends. They get involved in a plot to help Truly , also a new friend to expose her crooked manager.

This book does a wonderful job of dealing with the bitter-sweetness of weaning. My daughter and I throughlly enjoy reading it over and over again!

This book is a unified collection of scholarly and thrilling essays on the history and development of the Italian diet, the geography of food and eating, the symbolism and changing historic meanings to Italy of agriculture, shopping, cooking, and eating, and thoughtful and thought-provoking discussions of ritual and the enormous changes that modernity has brought. In addition it includes serious and well-thought-out discussions on the meaning of food to humankind.

Camporesi, a Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Bologna, informs the reader in his first essay, "Bread and Death: Food and Peasant Rituals in Italy" of something that may come as a surprise: "the fearful threat of famine continued to hang over people's lives until the middle of the nineteenth century," and what is thought of today as the "Italian national diet" was in fact a late nineteenth- century invention. Before then, the peasants of Italy were frequently hungry, "thrift was the iron law of the table," people lived frugally on some bread, maybe a little wine, greens and root vegetables, maize and chestnuts, snails and frogs, fish occasionally, a little pasta, very little fruit, and very little meat. Dairy products and eggs were limited to what one's one animal (or much less frequently, animals) could produce.

Industrialization contributed greatly and decisively to the expansion of the Italian diet, and what we think of today as Italian food owes much to the ninteeeth century's embrace of railroad and steamship.

Camporesi has an unromantic and passionate interest in the social history of the Italian peasantry. In "The Two Faces of Time: The City Calendar and the Country Calendar" he explores the myths and ritual of the clock and the calendar, and his focus on the diet and practices of the peasantry threads through each essay.

An essay of particular interest to students of food history, food geography, meaning and ritual is "Dietary Geography and Social History," a remarkable study which includes a discussion of the geography of fats and oils (no small thing in a country that is the world's largest exporter of olive oil). There are essays on the contrasts between city and country cooking, and bourgeois cooking in the nineteenth century. One of Camporesi's pet topics, "Shopping for Food" includes a plea to "touch, sniff, handle, and swallow." He rejects grocery-store modernization and standardization (and food as status symbols), and wants food to be sustenance and sensual essential, "the umbilical cord that must never be cut." Food is too important, he asserts, to ever be "still life."

There is much to this careful and scholarly book that will thrill and educate, as well as surprise. There's a glossary of Italian food names, a bibliography (most of the books are in Italian only, though), many pages of endnotes, and a good index. Great stuff.

She was blond, beautiful, and had the longest legs he'd ever seen, but was Dr Joy Barlow really good for what ailed the architect Declan Harris? He'd been working night and day since his partner had died in an accident, and now this psychologist was pleding with him to change his life, trade his aspirins and antacids for an easier pace! Joy melted into the heat of Declan's brash, knock-em-dead smile, but did she dare accept his invitation to dinner...and anything else he had in mind? She'd never felt this cherished before, but even his searing kisses couldn't silence her doubts. She wanted his passion, his strength,and his kissable lips on hers, but she needed his respect just as much-and Declan seemed unwillng...or unable...to give her all his love. But once they'd embraced by the light of the blue moon, could they put their ghosts to rest and join their hearts forever?