I purchased three "Build Your Own Talking Clocks" this past
x-mas. One for me and one each for my grand children, ages 5 and 11 years. December 26th we three sat together at the kitchen table and built our talking clocks. The directions and parts and abilities all went together without a hitch. When completed each clock worked and was a great functioning momento of a good time had by all. Highly recommended!

Here's another great aid for understanding the life and works of one of most ignored genius. Great story on great painter. Plentiful of color reproductions, abundant in information, great source for studying tormented painter. Worth every minute spent on reading. By the way - was he alcoholic? Nenad from Croatia.

SHOW ME HOW TO FIND PAUL BUNYON STORY WHERE HE COME FROM AND WHERE DO HE LIVED

Detective Martin Beck is back at work after a near-fatal event at work. A team of colleagues is attempting to solve a series of bank robberies that they are convinced are related. Beck is in the process of solving another case. His work and conclusions are more intriguing than that of the others and finally solved but not prosecuted. All crimes eventually can be all tied together even though they are not officially solved. The crimes are set in the Stockholm of the 70ies and integrated in Sweden's social problems of that era.

While I was expecting a masterpiece along the lines of Henning Mankell's criminal investigator Wallander this book did certainly not live up to my expectations. The stories are very fragmented, the sudden shifts from one story to the other are deliberate but destructive to the reader. I did not get hooked onto the book at all - because of its fragmentation it totally lacks suspense. It is hard to relate nowadays to the social problems of the time and they seem to overshadow the story lines in many instances. I concluded for myself that I could not get interested because of too many contemporary references, which will not make this mystery a classic of its genre. While Martin Beck fills the role of an interesting inspector he is pushed to far into the background even though he is supposed to be the novel's hero.

I have recently become a fan of this series of twelve detective novels, written in the late 1960's and early 1970's in Sweden by husband and wife team Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Wahloo, who died in 1975, did some reporting and the no-nonsense style of these novels reminds one of good reporting.

The Locked Room is somewhat unique to the series, in that the authors frequently shift their focus to the minor characters and criminals, in omniscient narrator style, giving the reader more perspective than is usual. The novel involves two crimes, a bold bank robbery in which a bank customer is killed, and the discovery of a retired man's decomposed body in his apartment, which appears to be locked from the inside. Beck, who recently returned to the force after recovering from a shooting, is assigned the locked room case and we see him trying to fit the pieces together of a seemingly impossible crime to solve.

A NY Times critic has recently praised the grim realism of these novels; if Beck drinks too much coffee on an empty stomach, his gets sick. After a broad daylight bank robbery, the police get starkly different eyewitness accounts, leading to a morass of seemingly unrelated clues, some of them way off. The reader is constantly reminded that in the real world, this is how crimes are really solved by big city police forces.

Some readers are a little put off by the Socialist leanings of the authors, which rises to the surface occasionally as they discuss current events of Stockholm 30 years ago including strikes, poor health care/benefits for workers, etc. However the rantings never seemed to me to get in the way of their story, and the novels are all written in a lean, sparse style with few wasted scenes or verbal flourishes. I recommend the series highly, beginning with the great Roseanna.

The seventh Martin Beck novel. Recovering from his misadventures in "The Abominable Man", Beck takes up a seemingly unsolvable case: a friendless, elderly miser, shot one time in the head in a one-bedroom apartment, with locked doors and locked windows, and no gun in sight. Meanwhile, his colleagues are investigating the high-profile shooting of a security guard during a daring bank robbery conducted, apparently, by a beautiful blonde woman.

Although the authors begin to get a little too heavy-handed in their social commentary, this is still one of the better Beck novels (in fact it is regarded by many as the best, though I think its predecessor is better.) The dual plot structure and the improbable connection between the crimes make for a great thriller. The characters are engaging, and the ending is wonderful. Read it.

I included a number of recipes from this book when I recently cooked an 8-course dinner. The recipes are challenging, but the process for each dish was explained clearly. In the end, the dinner was magnificent. This is a book that will find a prominent place on the shelf of any gourmand or Francophile.

In this book, Beck offers us an interesting alternative to typlical postmodern thought and theory. He elaborates on Giddens' concept of «reflexive modernity», treating it as the state of flux in which we presently live. This transitional phase between industrial modernity and the next modernity is marked by the radicalization of modernity, the integration of risk into the social "order" as well as the fall of the welfare state and the uncertainty that follows it. Beck also analyses social and political tendencies angainst reflexive modernity as well as its effects on the political systems in the western world.

Beck's analysis is, for the most part, clear and consise, save for chapter 4 where he examines possible outcomes for the next modernity (a little to philosophical for my taste). The remainng chapters define reflexive modernity (chap. 1), counter-modernization (chap. 2), sub-politics (chap. 3) and the effects of reflexive modernization on the (western) political system (chap. 5). The book ends on another (overly) philosophical examination of the role of doubt.

While the book was helpful in learning basic geography of eastern Europe and had many humorous comments, I had a hard time getting past the blatant sympathy for communism. The section on the Soviet Union, for example, described the "widespread discontent" brought about by Stalin's collectivization of agriculture. A cartoon showed a sad farmer wearing a barrel with little straps. There was no mention of the tens of millions who died as a result of the intentional destruction of their seed grain, nor any mention of the purges or slave labor camps. The authors implied that while communism was "unpopular", capitalism produces "unemployment, homelessness and destitution".

America was described as an empire exactly analagous to the Soviet Union and it's puppet states.

The authors did concede that Joe Stalin had corrupted the idealistic dream of Marx and Lenin.

The history of eastern Europe is extremely confusing. Some pieces of land have changed hands more times than anyone can remember, and the whole Yugoslavia thing sends most people reeling in confusion. This book gives a broad, *basic* introduction to eastern Europe: who lives there, how they got there, how various empires have played Monopoly with them, and where they're going now.

This is not a comprehensive text -- it is a summary guide! Some have tried to read more into it than appears on the surface, but I'm stumped as to how one can do that given the very basic information presented.

My biggest complaints are: 1) the authors left vast gaps in some very important periods (such as World War II), which leave one wondering how the story got from "A" to "B"; and 2) Russia gets the lion's share of attention, where the remaining eastern European countries have only a few pages (or less) devoted to them. I understand that the small size of the book made it necessary to save space, but perhaps a bit more balance could have been achieved.

Overall, a good *basic* introduction to how things got the way they did in eastern Europe. If you're like me, though, and love to have details about things, you will probably be happier with a more "scholarly" history book on the subject.

OK, I know this isn't the most in-depth and accurate book on Eastern Europe (nobody claimed it was textbook level), but it is a good overview for someone who is interested in the basics. I was given a copy due to my job (all I can say is I work for the government), and I found many interesting tidbits in it that I didn't know. I have traveled and lived throughout the region, and wish I had found this book years ago as it would be helpful for those not familiar with its history. And please don't criticize any events or issues that may have been left out, all written history has its shortcomings and inaccuracies! Overall, this book does a grand job and showing how Eastern Europe got to its present state!