This is certainly the best book that writer Guiliano has ever been involved in. It is interesting to hear about this untold side of John Lennon's family life, straight from a real member of that family. Nice.

This is a very interesting book about the family man John Lennon. His sister Julia tells all the true about the relationships between John and his mother, his stepfather, his little sisters, the tragedy when their mother was killed by a drunk policeman, and the beginnings of the group that four years later became the greatest phenomenon of the popular music, The Beatles. Also, Julia remembers for us, the phone conversations with John in the late 70's, near to John's death, and the feelings of all family when John was tragicly death by the gun of an out of mind man. Great book.

"Every Child a Light: The Pope's Message to Young People" combines excellent full-color photographs with excerpts from the discourses of Pope John Paul II. The book is edited by Jerome M. Vereb. This book is full of visual appeal. The photographs, which show John Paul interacting with children of various ages, are crisp and full of life. The Pope is effectively depicted as a caring and joyful man.

The book is beautifully designed. The Pope's word's are arranged as poetry on the pages; this nicely complements the photos. The text is drawn from the Pope's global ministry.

The content of the words themselves is often rather bland and vague. Controversial topics are generally avoided. Sometimes the messages are a bit mixed. In one excerpt, for example, the Pope seems to be taking a multifaith tone, praising children for offering each other "a hand / with no regard for color, / social condition, or religion." Elsewhere he seems more theologically exclusive. For example, he claims that "a generous 'yes' to Christian faith / is the purest sense of the fullness of life"--a statement which I'm sure those of other faiths would dispute!

Still, many of the statements are relevant and inspirational to young people of any faith or culture. He tells young people, "The future belongs to you; / for you are the leaders of tomorrow" and challenges them to be "men and women of high principles / and hopes." But the book as a whole is, in my judgment, mainly relevant for Catholic children and adults.

Not only did the photographs in this magnificent production touch the heart, but the words of the Holy Father are emblazoned in our minds for all to see for years to come. His holiness shows his tenderness and love of children in the words and pictures, revealing his compassion, humor, and child-like love.

This book is beautiful from several perspectives. As a Catholic, I delighted in the glimpses of the Holy Father's journey through time and around the world. While certainly not a photography connoisseur in any sense, I thought the photos themselves were works of art and their large glossy reproduction enhanced their effect. I really enjoy the weight and texture of large 'coffee table' books printed on such good paper. The text accompanying the photos was a great, if (necessarily) short, history of the Pope and the Vatican up to 1996, which does not stray too far into debate over politics / theology / Church policy, without making the mistake of avoiding mention of controversy all together. I find myself going back to look at particular images, as they convey a great sense of the Church alive, even in countries where she is persecuted. The book as a whole left me with a much more visual sense of the Pope's mission and a greater respect for him as a man and a pontiff. I loved this book and while I don't, unfortunately, own it yet, I will buy it if I get the chance.

This photojournalistic presentation of the pontiff is the best tribute to this spiritual giant of our day. An award-winning news photographer and an accomplished journalist together have brought out the best of Pope John Paul II through this documentation in words and images. There are, as many as 135 previously unpublished photographs in color, of the Pontiff from 1978 to 1995. Each of these photos by Gianni Giansanti, is a work of art in itself and all of them together take one deep into the personality of the Pope. The text written by Marco Tosatti who has accompanied the Pope on his pastoral visits for 14 years, is filled with information unavailable elsewhere. The book is organized into three sections: the Vatican, Private Life and Papal Travels. There is also an introduction that gives some biographical details of the Pope. This book paints a complete and true-to-life portrait of a Pope who has made a remarkable impact upon our times.

As I first time reader of Fielding I found this book unexpectedly comical. In the same line as going to church to hear a boring old pastor and finding your self humoured throughout the sermon. The charactors keep their distance through the third person narrative which allows the reader to judge, pity and find in the case of Fanny and Joseph perfection which is annoyingly unreal.

As for Parson Adams he well may be a saintly man but surely someone other than myself finds his lack of tact, condenscending tone and total innocence extremely irritating.

This is an incredible book about real friendship,chastity and honesty written in the most humorous fashion.Fielding brings out the true values of friendship beteween Parson Adams and Joseph and true love between the latter and Funny.He points out the sad but true "false" nature of the upper class and brings out questions about real life.I like this book because it encourages chastity and esteems honesty.

This Book is better than most. Deffinately better that the other 6 books I have read about the Kabbalah.

I highly praise the author and publisher for the following note opposite the contents page. I wish other authors and publishers were as responsible. "Neither the author, nor publisher is responsible for any harm caused to anyone unsertaking the exercizes and meditations in this book. Anyone who has suffered from a mental or emotional illness should seek medical advice before attempting the exercizes."

One minor nitpick: I do not agree with linking Tarot cards with the Kabbala. But then I wasn't there in the middle ages when the Tarot cards were invented. ;-)

If you have questions or comments. E-Mail me. Two Bears.

Wah doh Ogedoda

Paul Roland's small book about Kabbalah contains all the important points to get a person started in the practice of Kabbalah written in clear, concise English. Unusual is his inclusion of simple but profound meditations for self exploration of this ancient mystery system. He also uses just enough of the original language to teach and give the reader the flavor without overwhelming him or her. I would recommend this to any new student of Kaballah. It also contains ideas to supplement the knowledge of the more experienced reader as well. I look foreward to reading Mr. Roland's book on dreams.

I must admit that I skipped some of the chapters about the politics of war so I could focus on the stories of the families. These are the untold stories of WW2: a little Polish girl running up and down the railway station searching for her father; a family sent to a labor camp, doing the most humiliating arduous work. These families suffer, but there are stories of hope and love written in, keeping you interested. The pictures put some faces with the stories too.

Fifty eight years after the end of WWII, the holocaust remains under constant public scrutiny while most other of the almost innumerable atrocities of that great conflict continue to be either ignored or pooh-poohed by those who continue to rationalize them for personal political reasons. Because of the incessant yowling about the holocaust, people tend to forget that many people suffered on all sides during the war. Jews were neither the only victims, nor were they even the war's chief victims.
Of the belligerents, Germany, Russia, and Poland suffered the greatest human and material losses. Of the three, only Poland was blameless in the end for the death and destruction wrought by a war which passed over its territory twice in five years.
Most of us have at least heard about the massacre of Polish officers, professionals, and intelligentsia by the Soviets at Katyn Forest. Had it not been for a fortuitous find by German forces occupying that part of the Soviet Union and the meticulous way in which they handled it, we might today be saying that Katyn was just another one of Hitler's monstrous crimes.
In Katyn:The Untold Story Of Stalin's Polish Massacre, Allen Paul puts human faces on the victims by introducing us to some of them and their families before the war begins and then following the odyssies of the families and their men as both are arrested and deported as war begins and the invading Communists seek to purge Poland of class enemies and those who might in the future oppose them. (One family lives out the war in the German General Government, but the man of the house had been arrested in Lwow by the Soviets and eventually became a victim of the murders collectively known as the Katyn massacre.)
Particularly grim are the chapters which recount how the (male) victims are led to believe they are being repatriated, are prepared a feast, then led away afterwards to their horror and dismay to the killing fields at Katyn. The methodical and inhuman way of dispatch is almost sickening but the real shock comes when the bodies are discovered by the Nazis after they invade the Soviet Union. Most are virtually fused together and partially mummified by being tightly packed at burial, many stacked in the burial pits like so much cordwood.
Shocking, but not surprising given Stalin's treatment of his own people, is the way Polish women and children are literally dumped in the steppes and in Siberia and expected to fend for themselves in the harsh, unforgiving climate.
The families of Paul's focus do eventually make it out after suffering the greatest hardships. The author has met these survivors, of course, and their narratives put some meat on the dry bones of history. Millions of other Polish deportees never made it home.
Allen Paul's book is a chilling indictment, not only of Stalin and his murderous NKVD, but also of US and British diplomacy which failed to take any steps to ameliorate the conditions of Poles who had been arbitrarily arrested and summarily deported. The weakness of Churchill and Roosevelt in the face of Communist demands began with the suppression of evidence of Soviet culpability for Katyn and their failure to support postwar Polish territorial integrity at the Teheran and Yalta conferences. It then continued with tacit support for the postwar dispensation in Poland in which hundreds of thousands more were murdered by Stalin's henchmen, leading ultimately to the Iron Curtain and forty-five years of the Cold War.
You can tell by the tiny number of in-print books on this subject how little historical relevance the Katyn murders are given. I invite you to read this book. It may give you a whole new perspective on WWII and the moral dangers of alliance with the devil.

For those who like fast-paced witty dialogue, cruise through Jennifer Labrecque's latest escapade. Jennifer blasts through the cop stereotype. This time the hero is a true Y2K man who deals with a group of incorrigible kids in a funny, sensitive manner. Her kids are right on the money. So plan to sit back and have a good laugh.

"Kids+Cops=Chaos" by Jennifer LaBrecque. Detective Sloane Matthews objects to his latest assignment of going undercover as a nanny to the three young children of suspected Pre-Columbian artifact smuggler Max Cheltham. When he gains employment at the Cheltham home, Sloane, who has no experience with kids, feels like the Ransom of Red Chief until he meets the aunt of his charges. Now he must deal with Aunt Jo Calhoun who has left Sloane's heart in chaos worse than the three caballeros. Humor+fun=entertaining tale.

"Moonstruck" by Sandra Paul. Dee Evans is the perfect executive secretary never letting emotion get in the way of doing the job. So when insanity struck her, she rashly mooned her staid boss, Jason Masters. An outraged Jason orders Dee to learn who would disrespect the boss even if he thinks the butt looked cute. Like any good secretary, Dee figures how hard can it be to keep her boss in line, but love interferes with her office duties making that one impulsive act seem conservative. Readers will cherish this amusing romance.

Both Duet tales are quite humorous as situations impact the lead males into realms they never faced before. Jennifer LaBrecque and Sandra Paul maintain the amusing yet high quality of this strong imprint.

Harriet Klausner

Stories by Sturgeon inspired movies, episodes of Star Trek, & even the New Twilight Zone. I'm not a Sturgeon fan, but I'm baffled by how an award winning author (indeed an author with an award named for him) who had links to the media is disappearing. Talking about the author is Very relevant since this & other such collections are about keeping his work in print. Anyway this a mixture of fantasy, SF, horror & Mainstream. The standouts are said to be the title peace (Killdozer! is mentioned a lot in MST 3K's early seasons) "Abreaction", "The Chromium Helmet", & "Mewhu's Jet". This collection gives you a good feel of this stage of Sturgeon's career. If you like Sturgeon or just have an interest in older science fiction & fantasy this is worth trying out

This is the third volume of the serieis and I'm reading the fourth now and I have to say that if you have ANY passing interest in science-fiction, literature, basically anything related to writing and the art of the short story, you owe it to yourself to hunt down these volumes, they're about the best service the publishing industry has done for one of its writers in years. You won't get genius each time but each volume has its own gems to treasure. This one has of course the masterful Killdozer among other things, the stories are branching out more here, most are touching in some way but all are at the very least entertaining, my favorite might just be the unpublished "August Sixth, 1945" which distills brilliantly the thoughts of a generation realizing the power they had with atomic energy and coming to grips with just what it meant. You can see a shift in his stories at that point and especially with the later "Thunder and Roses", as with most science fiction writers, the future was now and it wasn't all rosy and they felt they had a duty to show that it could be good that the shining stuff they showed in their stories could come true. Sturgeon believed that because he believed in people and he loved everyone and nothing shows that better than his stories. Read them and you come to know the man. And he's worth knowing.

Have you ever met someone and felt that you've known each other for a long time? That's how I felt about Kitty (this book's heroine). And like Kitty, I fell in love with Virgil and her quirky father. Just like Kitty, there is something mysterious about Virgil that I can't put my finger on. He's got a looming past in Romania, and Kitty has her dysfuntional family to deal with.

Anyway, at times this book will jerk a tear, or erupt a laugh. I enjoyed my time with Virgil and wish it could have gone on another 200 pages!

Readers not familiar with the works of English author PaulBailey should treat themselves to a few hours with this perspicaciousand highly original writer. His first novel, At The Jerusalem,captured three British awards; he has been cited by the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1980 and 1986. Mr. Bailey's initial United States publication, Gabriel's Lament (1987), traces the life of a young man who is systematically abused by his father and winds up eventually exposing his father's misdeeds in a book. Kitty And Virgil, the author's first novel in seven years, deals with misdeeds of another sort - those perpetrated under the Romanian regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. Kitty Crozier is an identical twin whose sister, Daisy, was a bit of a hellion as a child but has now morphed into complaining adulthood. An employee of London publishers, Kitty first sees Virgil Florescu through sedative drowsed eyes from her hospital bed. She notices there is "a glint of something like silver in his smile." They meet again in Green Park where Virgil is employed as a grounds keeper "picking up litter from the grass with a long spike." Eventually, she invites him to her home, and thus begins one of the most unique love affairs in literature. A tragicomic figure, a refugee and poet from Romania, Virgil escaped the tyranny of his home country by swimming the Danube, first to the border, then to Italy, where "he had slept in fields, washed in streams. Virgil is surely one of the author's finest creations, imbued with self-knowledge, a splendid, effervescent joy, and brio. However, Virgil is plagued by thoughts of his father who committed heinous crimes during wartime - the barbarous slaying of Romanian Jews during World War II. Somehow Virgil feels he must make reparation for these acts. On the other hand, Kitty's father is an aging, ridiculous dandy who once worked as a male model, married well several times, and now shares lodgings with an acerbic butler. Dialogue in the hands of Paul Bailey takes effervescent life, especially in the scenes during which Kitty takes Virgil to meet her father. The comparison between Kitty's father and Virgil's is eloquence itself. Presenting pathos, parody and humor in one slim volume could not have been accomplished save by an author with Mr. Bailey's gifts. Kitty And Virgil heightens awareness, disturbs, and entertains. It is one more star in Paul Bailey's crown. END