The Singing Bird Will Come is a remarkable book by a man who is truly in touch with himself as he struggles with the reality of death. His strong desire to continue to celebrate life as he prepares to die makes a lasting impression on the reader. How the author comes to grips with communicating his journey is the focus of the book. He seems to follow Kubler-Ross's stages of death--denial, anger, bargaining with God, depression and finally, acceptance. He feels it is especially ironic that he has to come to accept his dying so soon after he had come to accept himself as a gay man. This story captures the well-balanced tension John Noonan experiences between continuing daily living and thinking of eternity. I recommend it highly for caregivers, service providers, and all of us who will prepare to die someday.

This compact little book includes postcards of six favorites from Audubon's watercolors in the Birds of America: Great blue heron, Wild turkey, American white pelican, Roseate spoonbill, Whooping crane, and American flamingo. The quality of the reproductions is very satisfactory, and the cards are well enough perforated to allow for easy removal without tearing into the images. The card size is small enough for postcard postage. All in all a nice value.

I was thrilled to find this book. You see, John Skoyles taught me to write poetry when I was a creative writing student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas back in 1979 or so. I had come to his class with the usual fistful of crumpled "free verse" teenage angst, having written the blurbs for the high school yearbook and for a few of those misty-photo posters they put in classrooms, and knowing he'd be super impressed. He gently corrected my impression of what poems are supposed to be like while making us search ourselves for the kind of imagery that deserves its own poem. I still have the notebook of recommended works and classmates' work from that course on my bookshelf. I've now made the happy discovery that his prose is just as good as his poetry.

This book is probably the most complete book with photos of South American birds. It's a bible! I can't understand why it's out of print...

This book contains whatever it is you want to know about the nameplate that took tranquil Eisenhower America by storm, weathered the 70's oil crisis and came full circle to find its roots again in the new millenium. It is packed with detailed information but allows you to also breeze through with highlights and pictures of the different eras of T-birds (such as the "Square Birds" or the "Bullet Birds"). Especially fascinating is the contemporary reviews of each new T-Bird model from the car magazines of the time. I would highly recommend this book to any car buff but especially those lucky people who have ever had the pleasure of owning one of these truly classic American automobiles.

Is Swift's A Tale of a Tub a great novel? Is Carlysle's Sartor Resartus a great novel? Is Tristram Shandy a great novel? Each of these works takes as its basis another form, whether the controversialist pamphlet, the philosophical treatise, or the biography, and comes out the other side with a new type of work, as well as a new work. These books occupy an originary and terminal position: they are the first and the last of their kind. For readers, these works are stones -- either the stones that become the foundations for understanding or the stones that drag them down. At Swim-Two-Birds takes as its foil the popular novel and the Irish renaissance myth discovery and the personal narrative. Why should a novel have only one beginning, O'Brien (aka Brian O'Nolan, aka Brian Nolan -- a man who got into university with a forged interview with John Joyce) asks? Why one ending? If, as some reviewers have suggested, you try to find the "structure," you're missing the point. Trying to mash this book into a novel's mold is misguided, and O'Brien will eventually make that clear. In fact, it is the story of a college student (fictional), who is writing a novel about a man (fictional) who is writing an Irish western (which cannot be). Additionally, the student's translation homework -- tales from the Dun Cow Book -- emerge in a full Lady Gregory parody and begin to interact with the other fictions, and the characters of the Irish Western themselves begin to resent their lots in life. The book plays games on so many levels that reading it the way one reads a novel is useless. This is not about information and straight lines, but about play -- sometimes rough and tumble and sometimes gentle. All of the narrators lie, by the way, and there is always one more frame of fiction beyond the one in action at the moment. Do not buy this book if you're intolerant of play. Do not buy this book if you look at books for "what happens." If, however, you're one of those who enjoys, instead of resents, reading milestones like Sartor Resartus or think that Italo Calvino is extremely sophisticated, this book (not novel) will be the greatest delight the 20th century can offer you.

I'M HERE TO TELL YOU: THIS IS THE FUNNIEST BOOK IN THE WHOLE WORLD YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF. But don't believe me -- Graham Greene, Dylan Thomas, John Updike, and yes, Jimmy Joyce himself all felt the same about this impossibly convoluted Irish stew of mythology, poetry, drunken banter, and scatological humor. The book is constructed (to use the term loosely) as a UC Dublin student's journal during his final year, including his "spare time literary activities" interspersed with his "biological reminiscences". The former consist of a series of fitful forays into ancient Irish mythology, coupled with a book-within-a-book (within-a-book) attempt to write a highbrow novel. The latter involve the narrator's recountings of his (mostly inebriated) carousals and daft philosophizings with his odd cronies, admixed with his tense and tenuous relationship with his straightlaced uncle, with whom he boards. But to concentrate on the book's plot or content, such as they are, would be pointless. The book's real magic lies in Flann's virtuosic use of unabashed verbosity, unblinking descriptiveness, and just plain words, words, words, to provoke laugh after laugh after laugh after laugh. Nobody -- not Sterne, not Joyce, not even Groucho -- could string together words as funnily as Flann. It's as though an Irish Robin Williams had been locked up in his room with a pencil, pad, pint after pint, and his own mad (but very well-read) imagination. Read this book, you could use a good laugh (everyone can use a good laugh). Just don't drink anything while you're reading, guaranteed it'll end up coming out your nose.

This just might be the funniest book of the 20th century. I have seen this book and read it and . . . do you know what I'm going to tell you, I have loved this book. Do you understand what I am saying? Now you go read your chapter 12 of Ulysses and many other passages that might incriminate my good author here by the proof of that book's very burdensome influence which became like a terrible complex for the man who became after the writing of this book the Dublin columnist known as Myles na Gopaleen but was at this time still the man of imagination, Flann O'Brien . . . and you come back here, with all your expectations about first novels and incomprehensible, overindulgent spaghetti-messes of plots . . . and try to tell me that every aspect, those and all the others, one might apply to this type of book that could have been fatal faults are here made in its favor by the undeniable force of its whole, a power that cannot be denied in the same way that a frigging cloud cannot be denied to resemble a plate of hot mashed potatoes or what-you-will . . . you come back here and try to tell yourself that you didn't like it . . . and then I will ask you to kindly try to read it again, this time with your skull-boned eyes open. P.S. This is a much better book than The Third Policeman.

....This set of audio tapes was a disappointment to me. I had wanted a set of bird songs to accompany my new Peterson Eastern Birds field guide, 4th edition.( Previously, I had owned the 2nd edition and its excellent, page-coordinated, accompanying tapes and had used them for years.) I bought this new set of audio tapes blind, so to speak, because they were shrink-wrapped with no real description visible. No one in any of the retail stores I consulted knew anything about them nor was willing to break into the shrink-wrapping.
....Birding by Ear, Eastern/Central is actually a 3-tape short course in identifying bird calls. It is essentially useless for field identification. To make use of this set of tapes, one would have to sit down and listen and listen and listen to interminable commentary by a sonorous male voice introducing bird calls in clusters that are of minimal use because they are grouped by similarity, which often doesn't translate into geography or habitat. The second side of the third tape is a "review" that is actually a test.... one must listen to a series of unidentified songs and try to remember what they are, after having spent the hours required to listen to the other 5 sides of the tapes.
.... The up side of this set of tapes is that the bird song recordings are excellent. They include both the song and the call. (But they are useless in the field in this format.)

If you live in North America east of the Mississipi and want to identify birds by ear, read on...

This audio set is a very well thought out and produced tutorial for introducing beginning "ear" birders to the world of birding by ear. The audio quality is excellent with several renditions of each song and call. The pace is well suited to the target audience - only after repeated listening will you want to skip ahead through sections. The groupings of similar songs seem well designed, and reflect situations in the field that pose problems. Each song is described verbally, with an onomatopoetic description. I wish the CD were coded so that sub-tracks could be accessed directly without the introductory descriptions, but the design of this set isn't as encyclopedia of song, rather as short course in learning how to identify song.

Buy this and the "More birding by ear", listen to them for 10 - 30 minutes a day (great drive time listening), and master the art of birding by ear!

Great learning tool for the novice and a great reminder for the seasoned veteran.

I looked at nine or ten bird books over the weekend before finally deciding on this one. I like it's compact size, durable cover and it's very complete index. The most important reason for my decision, however, is the fact that it shows pictures of both male and female birds where the female bird's plummage and head differ from that of the male. None of the other books I checked showed female birds or only showed them in very rare instances. I also like this book because it shows most birds in both standing or swimming positions and also in flight. There are also occasional drawings of chicks.

The text that accompanies the pictures is necessarily brief but covers: Latin and common names, description, food, range, migratory pattern, habitat, voice and similar species. Also included is a "Systematic Checklist" so you can keep a "life list" of all the birds you've seen. There is a guide to identifying birds by visual categories (swimmers, birds of prey, waders, perching birds, etc), size, tail and wing patterns. The last part of the book contains maps illustrating each bird's range which makes it easy to compare the habitat of, for example, an Olive-Sided Flycatcher with an Acadian Flycatcher.

Obviously this is a guidebook and not the type of book you sit down and read through, but I have found myself reading the entries for the often amusing "voice" sections. Here's the one for the Chestnut-Sided Warbler: "Song, similar to Yellow Warbler's; 'see see see see Miss Beech'er' or 'pleased pleased pleased to meet'cha;' penultimate note accented, last note dropping." Hey, someone who knows what "penultimate" really means!

The Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds is the best such guide you will find. The nice thing about birds and birding is that there are few enough species out there that you can get virtually all of them in one regional guide.

This book is outstanding. It relies on illustrations rather than photographs to show markings and other details used to ID birds in the field. I find that photos are often sub-standard, not showing characters essential for identifying birds due to the position of the bird, markings of the individual chosen for inclusion in the book, etc.

In this book each entry includes a bird's common and scientific names, a brief physical description of the body and coloration, a drawing(s) of the bird, a brief description of habitats where they are likely to be seen, a blip about their geographic distribution, notes on their song, and reference to similar species (if any). The entry also refers the reader to a map number that shows the summer and winter ranges for each bird.

This is "the bird book" to have for birds that live east of the Rockies for the novice and experienced birder alike. If you've never had much luck figuring out which birds you are looking at try this book.

5 stars all the way!

Note: if you travel much throughout the USA, you ought to pick up the Peterson Guide to Western Birds as well -- it is the sister book to this one. With both of those books in hand you will be in good birding shape.

Alan Holyoak, Dept of Biology, Manchester College, IN

Being a nature freak myself, I enjoy just leafing through this guide to look at all of the wonderful species of birds that there are, just in Eastern North America. Peterson's genious and talent are very evident in this book. His drawings show his meticulous efforts to help educate beginners and pros alike about the wonderful world of Ornithology. Although the gull and warbler section of the book are quite lengthy, they are so important because of the great diversity of those species. This is a fantastic companion on family trips, especially those that are out of your normal realm. I first used the field guide in my junior Honors Biology class when we watched in the fall for the migrating geese and ducks and also in the spring for the returning travelers. Peterson specifically notes the identification arrows that can eleviate confusion about certain members of the same genus. Also, his range maps assist in answering questions about the whereabouts of certain birds at certain times of the year. I love to feed birds in my backyard while identifying all of my visitors throughout the summer. His checklist is also very helpful. My most thrilling birding moment was when I saw a pair of bald eagles hunting for fish within two miles of my high school! To see them in the book and to see them in person are two completely different things. Also, another area of interest is the description of the calls of birds. I always wonder how someone could come up with words to describe the sound that a bird makes. But Peterson does a wonderful job in describing these tones. Another helpful entity is his overhead views of the larger birds, like eagles and hawks.
All in all this guide is one of the most helpful guides I have ever used. This is the perfect type of company that you should take on your vacations, camping trips, and outdoor activities. Not only does this guide help to identify birds in their natural habitat, it also helps people appreciate the gifts that nature has to offer. Peterson's descriptions are unmatched in the world of birding and birdwatching. From mergansers to kites to finches to exotics, this guide covers all birds, all in one cover.

This book is a thinly disguised attempt to convince children (indoctrinate them is more fair to say) that their pay is also "theirs." Reaganomics and trickle-down economics is being sold through this children's story.

The fact of the matter is, money is PRINTED by the government, and it's the property of the government...whatever you don't pay in taxes, you're allowed to keep. The valuable services that government provides don't grow on trees--they're paid for by the efforts of the American worker who should be thinking about the greater good of the farm in the story, not how to escape the responsibility of being a worker.

I'd recommend reading Animal Farm by Orwell to your children instead of this Reaganesque book--THAT book clearly shows the responsibility of all workers to the common good, and the need for submission to the government and its leaders for the benefit of EVERYONE in the community, not just the people who want to work hard and leave everyone else behind.

Just look at the cover and it makes you want to pick it up! The book is beautifully illustrated and alive with color.

John created a great story for us to read to kids. The book is fun and entertaining but sends a valuable message to kids about saving for the future. Don't we all wish we were given this message at a younger age.

Kids will love it, as well as you!

Finally a book that is fun and well illustrated, with a creative twist to teach kids the value of saving for the future. It promises to be any kids favorite.

This sentimental gem by the author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm glows with familial warmth and the true spirit of Christmas. A frail ten-year-old girl named Carol (because she was born on Christmas Day and her mother heard the carols from the church next door) plans a memorable Christmas for a poor family of 9 children who live in the back alley. Carol wants nothing for herself this year, since she feels already blessed by the riches of love from her own family.

Quaintly narrated with occasional old-fashioned words to remind us of its century-old setting, this book may not appeal to hardcore 90's school kids, who prefer action and popular slang. But the messages of family unity, bravery in the face of hopelessness, and cheerful self-sacrifice provide inspiration, especially during the holiday season. Perfect to be read aloud a chapter at a time--promoting intergenerational literary pleasure and special family memories.

This is one of the books my third-grade teacher read aloud to us after recess to ease us back into our afternoon studies. It took at least a week, perhaps two for her to work her way through the story, which many of us had not heard before (unless we had an older brother or sister who had heard her read it during a previous year and came home to retell it). Some of her book choices appealed more to girls, some more to boys, but this one, I remember distinctly -- more than forty years later -- kept all of us attentive.

The story, set in the 1880's, is simple: after several sons, a family finally has a little girl, who is named Carol because she is born on Christmas morning when the sounds of the choir singing a carol came floating in the window of the house. Sadly, she has an illness (unnamed) that the she and family must accept is incurable and will be fatal. Although she has just about every toy imaginable, and the continuous attention of her parents and older brothers, she longs to do something for someone else and decides, after a bit of thinking, to throw a birthday party (i.e., Christmas party) and invite the poor Ruggles children who live in the lane.

It can not be denied that the story is dripping with Victorian sentimentality and that Carol is almost too good to be true, nor can it be denied that it is effectively told and will touch all but the hardest hearts. The image of the Ruggles children wrapped in blankets while their mother washed their clothes in anticipation of the party is but one of the vivid vignettes in this delightful book.

Along with the Nativity story and "A Christmas Carol", put this on top of the list for holiday reading. As my third-grade teacher (long-departed) proved, this is a wonderful read-aloud story.

I first heard the Birds Christmas Carol when I was in grade school a long time ago. Our teacher was new to the area and I think she read the story to us because there was a little girl named Peoria. I loved the story from the very start. A few years later my parents purchased a house to renovate and I found a copy of the book in the attic. This was about 1954 or so. The publishing date in the book I discovered was 1888. I treasured this book and read it every year right after Thanksgiving. It always brought tears to my eyes. After I married I thought I packed all my books and stored them in my garage. I really didn't have time to look for or read the book for a few years and one day my son and the littled boy next dood apparently were playingg with matches and burning pages of books in my garage. I was most upset when I felt my old copy of the Birds Christmas Carol was burned up. This was about 1970. Recently, my daughter was searching through some old books at my mothers house and what do you know. She found my cherished copy of The Birds Christmas Carol intact. I have purchased a new copy to read to my children but now I can read my original copy to my grandchildren. I will alway cherish the story.I will always cherich my first copy of it that I have recovered after all these years.