This is a very cute book, and a fun keepsake. The personalized stickers -- which I was very pleased to see arrive about seven days after I mailed in my info -- blended in perfectly with the book's kid-friendly illustrations.

I would have given this book an excellent rating if it hadn't been for the typo I found ("unknown" was spelled wrong in the middle of the book). I find this totally inexcusable -- after all, this book is intended to be one of a child's first reading books where he or she learns to recognize and sound out words, and eventually spell them out.

I would like to see the company reissue a corrected version of the book, and send stickers to correct the misspelled passage to anybody who requests one. I called the publisher requesting they send me a sticker with the correction and have not received any sort of response.

Your child learns the value of family and friends and is the guest of honor at a surprise birthday party. What a fantastic way to celebrate this special day ! You may also personalize the book with the chld's name, as well as, family, friends, and hometown. When you receive the book, simply fill out the perforated information card, tear it out of the book, and mail it to the address shown on the card. Within one to two weeks, you will receive a sticker sheet with all of your child's information that includes simple instructions on putting the stickers on the book. After placing them in the book, they blend in with the graphics of the book to become a permanent part of this unique keepsake.

A fascinating and socially important case, but yikes, this is a dry and wordy book! Amazingly, the author never tells us what happened to the "heroine" after the trial--did she die? When? How? Is she still alive, and some 160 years old? Get it out of the library and skim it if you're interested in French political history, but this is not a book you can buy to read over and over.

If you think the O.J. trial was "The Trial of the Century" and said a lot about 1990s America, you should read Edward Berenson's study of 1914 France. I have used this book for class assigned readings and students, beyond the O.J. comparison, have, like myself, found this book to be a compelling, fascinating account of why, on the eve of WWI, the French found more to be at stake in this case. That a society woman defends herself in charges of murder by using mainstream assumptions of gender, that she was too feminine to have intended to kill, will cause many to question the use and significance of gender constructions. Does Madame Caillaux deserve her fate? Berenson lets you be the judge. It's defintely a thought-provoking, enjoyable read. A well-crafted work of microhistory, where the proceedings of the trial form the external structure, but a longer history of the Belle Epoque informs our understanding of each day's events and our assessment of the "star" of the day. This book can be savored by a wide audience, which is why I have had community college students read it.

This is a very terse book. The stated purpose, according to the authors (Kevin Gaston and John Spicer at the University of Sheffield, UK) is to "cover as much ground in as few pages as possible." It succeeds, to a limited extent, by providing an outline to key issues associated with biodiversity research. It supplements this skeletal approach with numerous references for additional reading, and a few URLs. While there is a clear need for a succinct reader on biodiversity, I cannot recommend this book as a good introductory text. It tries to be too broad (including, e.g., biodiversity below the earth's surface) rather than being more informative on a focused range of topics. As a result the coverage on many of the topics is maddeningly shallow - for example, 1 page on species-area relationships, 1/3rd of a page on local versus regional diversity (without reference to alpha, beta, gamma diversity), a short paragraph on patterns of diversity with productivity, and a discussion of endemism without reference to historical or spatial isolation. One way the 113-page book might have been better executed in comparable length is by omitting the marginally informative 5th chapter on "maintaining biodiversity," which uses 1/6th of the book's length to outline the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Despite these crippling problems the book does convey many of the critical issues facing scientists, environmentalists and policy makers in this poorly understood (and frequently misrepresented) subject. The first 3 chapters provide a useful overview of the elements and surrogates for biodiversity, historical diversification, and some of the challenges to mapping biodiversity at a range of spatial scales.

If you have a child that has ever been to a Derby, watched one on TV or loves horses this is a great keepsake book. The pictures are colorful and bring Churchill Downs to life. This may in fact be one of the only, or at least one of the few, Kentucy Derby books available for children of this age range. You can remember this book again and again the first Saturday of May as you and the gift recipient experience the greatest two minutes of racing!

Gaston Means was a bagman for Harding's Attorney General Harry Daugherty's Justice Department and a private investigator for Mrs. Harding getting the dope on the President's activities with Nan Britton. Means kept diaries and told his story to May Dixon Thacker after he got out of jail in 1928. She seems to have believed him. The book went through eleven printings from 1930-31, so it must have been a big story then.

Net/net, Means protrays Mrs. Harding as a wacko who all but tells him she killed her husband to save him from the gang who manipulated him and the scandal that inevitably broke. My interest in the book was less about Harding himself but how it relates to three books, "Carter Beats the Devil", "The Jazz Bird" and "Roscoe", all of which touch on the era. I suggest the following:

Harding and "The Duchess" did not share the romantic feeling Glen David Gold suggests; they hated each other.

George Remus probably did pay $500,000 to Daugherty through Jess Smith (who later committed "suicide" but was probably murdered if you believe Means' intimations).

There is as much chance that Gaston Means' story is the whole truth as there would be if William Kennedy's Roscoe told it!

Ce dictionnaire est absolument a eviter. Les definitions sont obsoletes et il n'y a aucun vocabulaire un peu moderne. On a l'impression de lire un livre tout droit sorti du XIXeme siecle! Exemple de traduction: all the world over = par toute la terre !

A eviter absolument

This dictionary contains a plethora of easily found phrases, and often have I vainly searched for a word, such as "calmande," for example, and have found in in Cassell's. It is not the most modern of dictionaries, and as a previous reviewer said, for more modern translation, a dictionary such as Collins-Robert is useful. But for reading most French literary works, Cassell's is quite sufficient and often extremely useful.

I disagree with the previous reviews. A bilingual dictionary is rarely of use to a writer, and is of use to a reader only as a complement to a pair of good single-language dictionaries. Although it may fail as a tourist's companion, the Cassell's serves my purposes as a reader well. The many dated idioms/definitions are rarely archaic, and don't detract from the clarity and completeness of the text; what's more, the understanding of a word requires some knowledge of its history. "All the world over," by the way, is translated "dans le monde entier."

Being a Phantom of the Opera phan I thought that my collection of phantom-related books would not be complete without this book. I was very wrong.

If you like Freud, then you might like this book, but I was very disapointed in it. The majority of this books is made up of Hogle's personal veiws on what he believes the story and it's characters to represent, rather than having solid evidence on their meanings or roles, and Hogle's ideas on each character's sexually driven psychology. Hogle seems to believe in fact, and voices throughout this book that the Phantom story is about nothing more than sexual themes and sexual repression, often discribing characters in a highly adult-minded light. I am an adult and even I found myself quite shocked and at times even disgusted at the way Hogle turns the deeply moving story of love into something dirty. Not a book suitable for even teenage readers.

Hogle's book is written in dense professorial language. Readers will need an outstanding education and exceptional literary sensitivity to understand what the good professor is trying to exposit. One professional reviewer mentioned that the author's approach to his subject was "strenuous and original". I couldn't agree more. "Strenuous" completely describes not only this work but also the process of deciphering what it is that Hogle has to say. While it is an in depth and intensely researched look at the implications of this story for western society throughout the past century, it trades psychological insight into the cultural phenomenon for a more contextual social analysis. The personal psychological impact of the story for readers is something he seems to approach only distantly. Also, Hogle can be repetitive with themes during the course of his analysis of the subject. I have praise only for his commentary on the original Leroux novel, which is insightful and meaningful. His commentary on the remainder of re-adaptations of the original novel ranges from good to weak. This is nowhere more apparent than in his discussion of what he calls, "the most important... renovelization of the original book" referring to the novel by Susan Kay. Here he attempts to prove, in less than four pages, a thesis that is both absurd and ill supported, despite the importance he himself has attributed to this work. Overall, his book is something that those persons enraptured with the story should avoid and that literary scholars should approach with appropriate discernment.