We have used several recipes in this book and find them extremely good and easy to make. Ingredients are very basic. My husband has a history of high triglyceride for which he is currently taking medication for. As a former cancer patient - have lowered the above as well as cholesterol levels. His physician is quite impressed. This is the only recipe book we use. We would highly recommend this book for anyone watching fat intake. I guarantee that you will be quite surprised in how satisfying the food is and you won't have that "hungry" feeling which leads to the dreaded snacks!

I loved the book because it uses recipes with all basic foods. There are no special ingredients to find and purchase. This book is a great way to introduce healthy, low-fat cooking into the average home.

I first became aware of the Judge Dee stories after reading the short story "He Came with the Rain" in a historical mystery collection. I loved the story so much that I promptly went to Amazon.com to find more Judge Dee novels and stories. This collection of eight short stories is particularly interesting as it covers about 20 years in Judge Dee's career through several of his postings. The stories are extremely interesting, both for the wealth of historical detail as well as the actual mystery content. Judge Dee as a District Magistrate is the leading civilian authority but I found stories such as "The Red Tape Murder" particularly interesting when he clashes with military authorities. This gives Dr. Van Gulik the opportunity to introduce snippets about ancient Chinese history, particularly about the clashes with Korea and the Tartar offenses on China's Western borders. This is a period of Chinese history where very little is known - almost a sort of Chinese Dark Ages - so it is wonderful to learn more about that time, also about the social customs of the era, which I found surprisingly modern, with the exception of the accepted practice of polygamy! If you are interested in historical mystery fiction, I would highly recommend the series. Also try the Sister Fidelma series about a mystery solving nun in Dark Ages Ireland - it is equally atmospheric!

The wonderful thing about these stories is the sense of time and place which comes through in all of them. We find ourselves easily transported to seventh century China, and the world of a highly organised empire, with its representative in the various cities which serve as venues for the stories, the Magistrate, in the person of Judge Dee.

Robert Van Gulick's picture of Chinese life, crafted from his own extensive study of China, both underpins and overlays these elegant detective stories. Those inhabiting these stories are truly the inhabitants of the places: walking through the streets, eating at the restaurants, working in the Tribunal, and interacting with all classes of their highly stratified society.

The characters are well developed, from Judge Dee himself to his various colourful assistants and lieutenants, who do most (but not all) of the Tribunal's leg work. Criminals, victims, witnesses, and others along the way complete the fascinating tableaux.

There are references to the various Judge Dee novels at the beginning of each story providing a context within the magistrate's career. Numerous line drawings by the author gently illuminate the stories.

This was the book more fantastic that I had read!!!!! This tell us about how a soul fell itself when your love is not recompensed. It makes a psycological interpretation of your mind in these so sad and difficult situation. It is a sensitive book for sensitive people!

This is not a reprint, but a new translation by acclaimed translator and author Tiina Nunnally of arguably the finest novel ever to come out of Scandinavia. It had a huge influence on European writers, especially in Germany, where teenage boys would carry around a Danish dictionary in the vain hope of reading Jacobsen in the original, according to Stefan Zweig, and where the novel has been translated at least 6 times. Read it and see where Thomas Mann got his ideas for "Tonio Kröger." Jacobsen, who was a botanist as well as the translator of Darwin into Danish, fills the novel with flowers and plants, and he knows whereof he speaks. Dive headlong into this examination of creativity vs. lethargy, atheism vs. faith, and the seemingly infinite ability of the hero to misunderstand women!

When I'm traveling, I like to have a book I can depend on. If I read that there's a ferry from A to B leaving on Sundays at 6am, then I like to know I can be sure it'll be there for me. If my travel guide tells me a hotel is clean but basic, I want to know what to expect. If it says a restaurant is excellent, I have to trust the writer's taste if I go there.

All of the above are the case with Mr Peters' book, which I've used over the years in various editions. This latest one is the best there is if you're heading for the Philippines.

This is the only guide you need to buy when you are planning a trip to the Philippines. The author is the same person who wrote the first 6 editions of Lonely Planet Philippines, which used to be the best guide on the Philippines, but if you are like so many people who are disillusioned by the 7th edition, buy this book. The book is well researched and not as biased as other guide books.

POWDERHOUSE is the second installment of Bjorneboe's trilogy,
generally known as "The History of Bestiality." The narrator is
a "renovation worker"--i.e., "sanitation engineer"--at an asylum
for the criminally insane in the south of France. The
institution occupies the buildings of La Poudriere, a former
munitions depot with a stone tower (the powderhouse), which is
surrounded by a large park; the renovation worker occupies one
of the outlying peasant cottages and has a delightful little
sunlit garden. Here he rests from his daily chores, eating
simple but satisfying meals, drinking a variety of wines,
entertaining guests, sometimes smoking hashish, sometimes taking
a hit of [a chemical substance], sometimes enjoying the embraces of a little brown
nurse and every night feeding a friendly hedgehog. His chief
occupation after cleaning the grounds is writing The History of
Bestiality, and his discussions with visitors deal either with
this theme or with the doings of madmen, yet the halcyon air of
the garden lends a pastoral atmosphere to the proceedings, an
idyllic enchantment to recitations of the most zealous campaigns
of carnage in history. Thus paradise, realized here and now, is
contrasted with the hell that has become the wide earth, and the
reading is oddly both horrifying and delightful at the same
time.

Bjorneboe gives more attention to form in this novel. He draws
a series of colorful characters with independent roles, creates
a bit of a ... mystery and devises a mechanism for the
insertion of factual horrors: Dr. Lefevre, the chief of staff,
believes that it is good therapy for residents of the
Powderhouse to deliver and hear lectures on themes that disturb
them. Thus three long lectures are laid out in chronological
order and provide a solid structure to the six-chapter novel,
leaving no gaps, expanses of uncertain time or cessation of
forward movement as in MOMENT OF FREEDOM.

The centerpiece is the second lecture, delivered by an inmate
named Lacroix. It has no title, but might be called "Sympathy
for the Executioner." Speaking from experience, Lacroix reminds
his audience that executioners carry out the will of society;
they are hired for their "special qualifications," paid with
taxpayers' money and approved for their performance. They
execute criminals legally condemned to [end of life] by a court, yet
they are shunned and despised by society. He then bemoans the
difficulty of killing people neatly, especially when they turn
to the executioner and ask for a speedy dispatch. Each method of
execution designed to be merciful, such as long-drop hangings,
beheadings and firing squads, proves to be unreliable, so that
the executed may struggle to live for a long time. For the
executioner these experiences are ultimately debilitating; the
profession brings physical and mental illnesses and often leads
to suicide. Approved by society, the executioner nevertheless
bears the blood of the human race and stands guilty before
humanity and before God; but who, Lacroix cries out in despair,
who thinks of him?

The speech is nothing less than a masterpiece of world litera-
ture, as piercing in its humor as Voltaire's Candide (1759) and
as consistent in its wrong logic as Desiderius Erasmus' In
Praise of Folly (1511). It takes the reader into an extreme
reach of black humor which passes beyond definition--something
way over the top, revoltingly gruesome and wildly hilarious and
close to the quick at the same time. After this, the novel tends
to get preachy, yet it deserves to be read for its entrancing
mood and its flashes of bitter genius. Once again, the work is
beautifully translated by Esther Greenleaf Murer.

I read this book in my early teens, and it made an enormous impression on me. This is the first book in the trilogy "History of bestiality" I read, I have also read the last two. This is painful book to read! Many times I wanted to throw away the book, and forget that all this pain, madness and evil existed, but I couldn't. In many ways I think it changed the way I saw the world. This is book is meant for a more grown up public than I was when I first read it.

Jens Bjorneboe, like the Russian dissident Yevgeny Zamyatin, believed in heresy. The autobiographical alcoholic hero of his novel MOMENT OF FREEDOM (1966) remarks: "What on earth would our beloved, stinking, beautiful Europe have become without our dope fiends, drunkards, homosexuals, consumptives, madmen, syphilitics, bed-wetters, criminals and epileptics? Our whole culture was created by invalids, lunatics and felons. There isn't one normal person who has done a useful or lasting thing: it was the normal ones who built the slave labor camps in both Germany and Russia." This wild thought echoes Zamyatin's famous literary declaration of 1921: "The point is that there can be a true literature only where it is made not by efficient and trustworthy clerks, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, skeptics." Both writers identified with the loner, the original thinker, the individual with the courage to question routine, dogma and well-established rules. Such an individual may challenge society, but also prove its salvation. Zamyatin characterized him as "a sailor sent up the mast, from which he can see shipwrecks, icebergs and maelstroms still undetectable from the deck."

As a Norwegian, Bjorneboe did not make his protest against a totalitarian government or even totalitarianism in general, but rather against the common urge to think alike, the herd mentality, the mass mind. His demon was what he called "the guardian type" (the term formynder-mennesket" entered everyday speech in Norway). This is the moral, political or social administrator, functionary or busybody who needs the system, the institution and the boss above him, who faithfully enforces the rules on people below him and ferociously punishes transgressors, mavericks and misfits. It's the little man who can be a big bully, a soul-killer or even, given the right circumstances, a body-killer, whether in an office, a university, or a scientific institution. In Russia they called such men "little Stalins." In America such men (and women) ticket your car, make sure you mow your lawn regularly and--but you know the type.

In the historical figure of Ignaz Semmelweis, nineteenth-century founder of antiseptic medicine, Bjorneboe found the perfect foil for his argument. Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician in Vienna, questioned the medically established definition of "child-bed fever" (a supposedly "non-contagious female disease common to the lower classes") and discovered the true source of the malady--infection from the dirty hands of the high-class physicians. From the moment of that discovery in 1846 to the end of his life in 1867 he was at war with the authorities, the recognized experts, the upholders of convention, who refused to accept his scientific data, to follow his hygienic methods, which eliminated the "fever" in his ward, or even to try washing their hands with the proper disinfectant, and therefore condemned 25% of pregnant women in Europe--hundreds of thousands--to death. The heretic-savior is denounced, fired and driven half-mad, while the respectable guardians of medicine murder their patients. Later Louis Pasteur confirmed Semmelweis' discovery, and procedures were finally changed.

Given this theme, the play SEMMELWEIS (1968) is unusually forceful, like all of Bjorneboe's works, though in the manner of a Greek tragedy the opposition to the hero is mostly offstage. Joe Martin's translation is crisp and efficient, but has irritating lapses of punctuation ("I know, I know Herr Doktor." "Then you should know something about women, shouldn't you Nasi?")Bjorneboe framed the period piece with a prologue and epilogue: contemporary students seize the stage (prologue), present an unscheduled play (the play about Semmelweis) and afterwards encourage the audience to discuss it (epilogue). Since the frame can change with the times, the historical material can be renewed in each country and period, and with it the basic argument. But here the translation drops the prologue, preferring to explain it at length in an introduction, which is strange. Otherwise it's a good job, and the Sun and Moon printing is beautiful. Martin is also the author of an important study of Bjorneboe, KEEPER OF THE PROTOCOLS (1996). The play should be made into a movie.

This chilling tale is classic Bjørneboe material. Based on the true story of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, the play shows the intelligent well-meaning individual pitted against the ignorant and inhumane forces of the faceless institution and small-minded peers. Semmelweis, an Austro-Hungarian physician, is today lauded as the father of modern antiseptic theory. During his lifetime, however, he was ridiculed, maligned, fired from his position, and driven to madness. The first to make the connection between the plague of childbed fever, which killed countless women, and medical students' trips between the morgue and the maternity hospital, Semmelweis found himself to be a voice crying in the wilderness. Doctors and medical students did not want to believe that they themselves could be the carriers of disease. They therefore branded Semmelweis a heretic and created a martyr to truth. In his preface to the work, Martin states: "As often is the case in Bjørneboe's work, disease is also a metaphor for the prevailing consciousness of an age. The 'doctors are the disease' here -- and so is the hierarchical form of society upon which they sit near the top rungs. Meanwhile anyone who pursues an inconvenient truth in such a society is paradoxically seen as 'sick.' That is, he is not normal because he is not part of the prevailing disease."

Class and gender politics are evident, as doctors seem unmoved by the deaths of the poor women who come to the lying-in hospitals. The disinfectants found in the janitor's closet are deemed inappropriate tools for the gentleman professional. Our tragic hero Semmelweis and the unfortunate patients are undone by the physicians' refusal to simply wash their hands - or even to engage in the scientific experiment of determining if such an act could make a difference in hospital mortality rates.

Martin's lively translation conveys the excitement and despair of this story of misunderstood genius. Bjørneboe himself deserves high praise for bringing this tale to life for modern readers, and for casting more light on our own human condition.

Wow! Margaret Read MacDonald's latest just quivers with energy. This book gives great tips for getting kids involved in storytime. There are songs to dance to (my personal favorites!), sing to, drum to, and act out, whether you're telling to a big group, a small group, all kids, kids and parents . . . you get the idea. There's such a wealth of information here, I can't wait for the school year to start so I can try out all these new stories. Highly recommended!

Each chapter in this book is filled with tales that encourage audience participation and interaction. The stories are simple to learn and to tell and involve all sorts of activities such as singing, dancing, drumming, acting and improvisation. Each story is accompanied by any necessary music and a list of materials or props. At the end of each story, MacDonald has included "Tips for Telling" which outlines a strategy for the storyteller and "About the Story" which offers some more information about the story. Each chapter begins with a short description of the actions required in the chapter and some behind the scenes tips for controlling the audience. In addition to the full-text stories that are included in each chapter, MacDonald recommends other stories that would be appropriate for the same actions. Chapters are organized to encourage the reader to take on more complicated storytelling roles as they progress through the book. Beginning chapters are dedicated to one action such as singing or drumming while final chapters include using actors from the audience and creating a story theatre. Another nice feature of this resource is that stories come from all over the world, from Thailand to Gambia to China. This would make these stories an excellent addition to a cultural or geographic study on a specific country. This book would be a great purchase for anyone working with children. MacDonald's comments make storytelling much less mysterious or frightening for those not used to performing in front of a group. The twenty tales included here, along with the many others that she suggests make for unending ideas.

I tend to be very wary of astronomy books. I enjoy going out at night and looking at the night sky, but don't like to get a whole lot more technical than that. After having learned to identify some of the constellations, this book provided me with the perfect next step. It gives you just enough background knowledge to make your tour through the sky infinitely more enjoyable. The author presents simple and easy to understand information on both classic and modern constellations. I would recommend it as the perfect "not too technical" book about the lore surrounding the night sky.

Cornelius tells the stories found in the stars in an entertaining, informative way. Each constellation is studied in detail-- from the meanings (greek, arabic, or otherwise) of the star names, to a description of the objects visible through binoculars, to the myths associated with the figures. This book is a must-have for any amateur or professional astronomer.

What a wild read this book is. The muse on fire, on wind, on helium. A weird and wonderful journey through the continuous month of August, with the lovely real variety of four original voices. I keep it by my bedside and read it daily!

The Actor's Guide for Kids

An honest handbook on the business of acting. Simple, easy to follow, and extremely informative.

Have questions about getting into the business, how to work in the business, and the tools needed to be a good talent? Wondering if your child is ready for Hollywood? This guide covers all your questions and more.

Every talent should read this book!