I finished the Kindling last night, and loved it soooo much. The cliffhanger really made me want to read more. This is a really great book to read anytime, for anything. I suggest that anyone who wants a good book should read the Kindling.

The first book in a trilogy, The Kindling is an engrossing read with compelling characters. I immediately felt attached to this "family" of children trying to survive in the aftermath of a plague-like "Fire-Us" that killed off all the adults and was completely caught up in their struggles and hopes. It's a story so absorbing it's tempting to read the book in one sitting. The book, however late it keeps you up, is not only a page-turner, but a richly imagined account of a world that is somehow recognizably ours even as it has been made strange and often menacing. The Kindling plays on the fantasy all children have of being in charge of the world (there's something thrilling about the idea of scavenging for food and salvage in the unpeopled strip malls and abandoned houses of post-apocalypse America without adults to supervise or set rules even as such "hunting" (as it's called in the book) is a life-and-death necessity for these kids), but given the damaged landcape and psychologically scarred inheritors of this world, that fantasy is turned here to something perilous and completely absorbing. That the authors have made this world so strange, familiar, and utterly convincing is a testament to their fine prose and deep powers of imagination. We care about the way their characters must face this world and themselves in order to survive and when they take to the road in search of answers, we go with them, attuned to their every action and nearly breathless for their survival and success. I can't wait for part two!

Nancy Armstrong's influential book, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, connects the rise of the novel with the history of sexuality (ie. gender difference) and the rise of the English middle class. Armstrong's three part explination for the rise of the novel acts as a correction of Isaac Watts' influential triple rise thesis in his study, The Rise of the Novel. Watts connects the rise of the novel to the rise of the middle class, the rise of Puritan values, and the rise of literacy. Armstrong's emphasis clearly differs from Watts insofar as she defines the novel as domestic, women's writing. Armstrong not only redefined Watts' history of the novel, but created a new space in the academic debates about domesticity. By stating the domestic novels were bound up in (indeed antecedent to) the formation of gender difference and the middle class she grants more power to domestic novels than previous ciritics had allowed. Armstrong's analysis of novels (though her writing also has illumunating sections on eighteenth century conduct books and educational theory) begins with Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Jane Austen's Emma, in which she notes the importance of a woman's qualities of mind, as opposed to rank, and how Austen's writing worked to standarize the English language. The study contiues with a history of unions (combinations) in the early ninteenth century, and then moves onto examine the Brontes and how Victorian novels construct the domestic space as one in which women have the power of survelliance, as well as the Vicotrian phenomenon of a character's desiring the one person they are not permitted to obtain (Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights). Her study concludes with a discussion of the process and importance of reading itself. I highly reccomend Desire and Domestic Fiction. It is well worth the read, especially for people who care about the history of the novel, redefinitions of the political sphere and a political and cultural history of sexuality and domesticity.

I have not been this pleased with a book purchase in a long time! I read a piece in The New York Times that sparked my interest and purchased Field Guide to Stains. And let me say, that the stain removal techinques I've tried really work! What's more it's an interesting read and the close-up photos of the stains are not only hilarious, but very useful for identification. This book will get a lot of use around my house.

This book along with Dave Hunt's book, Y2k: A reasoned response to mass Hysteria should be read by all Christians who have bought into the Y2K Madness that is occuring in the evangelical churches today. We need to get back to getting the gospel out, not preparing for the end of the world.

I read this book about 5 years ago at JNU, New Delhi and found it to be very good at historical analysis of culure and narratives, especially seen from a women's point of view. I also liked the way it focussed on literary "genres"--and their role in the politics of conduct. I recommend it to those interested in cultural analysis, feminism, historicism, and narratology.

I think this book is a good book to read because it gives a lot of information about the Navajo way of life. I also liked it because it makes you want to know what is going to happen to Kee and his family. They are captured by the U.S. government and made to walk out of their sacred land to a fort controlled by the government. They have to do many things differently. They have to build new homes and grow crops from a place that does not supply the right materials for them. Kee learns many things on the walk and at the fort. You will never forget it once you've read it. And if you read it, you will find out if Kee's family will be free. By David Umphres, 5th grade

"Here is intellectual leadership at its best" gushes Rey Chow, a cronie of Nancy Armstrong's, in her intemperate review of Armstrong's minor monograph on photography and realism. Chow seems to suggest that this is not just another tenure-grabbing piece of academic fluff, but, rather, that Armstrong has altered the world forever: "By foregrounding visuality, she radically reconceptualizes the relationship between realism and the modern, bringing about a paradigm shift with which scholars will have to reckon in the decades to come." Whoa, Rey! Let's not get carried away paying back Armstrong for her good reviews of your work! Chow's inflated rhetoric leads one to believe that we've entered an entirely new dimension of experience, a new understanding of the world that will leave us all dumbfounded and amazed by the newness of a once puzzling universe. She seems to think that a new revelation has been lowered from Heaven to cast light upon a previously murky world, and the notion that photography has flooded modern consciousness and the modern novel is somehow startling in its implications. "As much a model of critical imagination as it is of scholarly integrity, this book accomplishes what only the rarest of books do: it teaches you how to think." The ultimate scratching of the academic back: thanks for forming my brain, Nancy. Before reading this book I was ignorant. Now I can think. Cheers. Ah, yes -- by using the now hoary marxist-feminist device of concentrating on the controlling gaze of the viewer ("visuality"), by insisting on the material realm (even if only as "the real") in contrast to the spiritual realm, by tossing around a few of the usual post-structuralist devices of distancing the object and reconstituting it within a new context, she garners the acolades of her cronies as the Great Remaker of Modern Thought. Wow! This book is, in essence, more a testimony to the nature of contemporary academic politics and buddy systems than it is to anything else, and all of the praise heaped upon it cannot change the fact that it will have only as much influence as a few professors can wring out of it in their seminars. Good luck, people.

Can the first reviewer seem more jealous and heated about the fact that his academic career has met its demise some time ago? It's ok, just try again. Hey, anything is possible. Why dont you meet Professor Armstrong beforee being so rude. Get out of your cloud of mediocrity. Read this book!