I really enjoyed this collection of short stories. Often I would stop reading and think to myself, "Why is this so familiar?". This book was actually published in the US under the title London Transport....and I had read it! In this collection Maeve Binchy looks into the lives of the many people who come and go on London's underground every day. This book offers up a wonderful cross section of society and engaging characters. Binchey is at her best describing people and their frailities. There are no clear cut heros or villians, rather the people are infused with a humanity and humor that carry you along. If you're a Binchy fan this is a must add to your colection (unless you already have London Transport). A treat to read and to reread.

This is a great book of short stories. If you like Maeve Binchy's short stories you will have a wonderful time. But be warned, this book has been published in the United States as "London Transports." If you've read one, you've read the other

Exactly what I was looking for! Creating a Private World is filled with beautiful pictures of cream colored fabrics and walls, lacy windows, draped bedspreads and delicately set tables.

The color ideas can leave you calm and soothed, passionate, nostaglic, or inspired. I originally planned to sit down with a cup of tea and look through each page- but no- I started bursting with thought, looking through my fabric collection and searching for new ways to decorate each room. Needless to say my tea was cold but my mind was soaring.

Obtaining this look is not something you run out on a shopping spree and purchase everything all at once. It takes time and carefully selected pieces to blend together beautifully.

Creating a Private World is a fantastic beginning. This way you can see what styles you like and what would work with the spaces you have. It' s also a very nice read and to thumb through at the end of the day.

I purchased this as a treat for myself, along with Victoria's Romantic Country Style, and Victoria's The Charms of Tea.

A little at a time I'll create my own Private, Intimate home.

A beautiful gift for a friend or loved one~ or yourself.

This book comes from a beautiful series. Each book is wonderfully produced with gorgeous photos, high quality paper, and pretty end-papers (haven't seen any of those for a while).

Each photo is someone's way of creating their own private space - or a space that intimately reflects their personal interests. The text on that page, tells about the person, sometimes telling the evolution of that private space.

Sometimes it is just a corner, or a desktop - but a reminder that we need places that belong to us alone.

Beautiful ways to do our just Being. Remembering just Being is an art form.

I was recommended by a professor in the university to read this book (I am a student studying Victorian Literature) in the first place, and after reading it, I found this book so informative and easy-to-read that it has now become one of my 'handbook' for the Victorian era. This book tells you in nearly every aspect but in a very concise way how the Victorians back then think and believe. I personally think that this is more than just a book about some history and facts of the people living in the 19th century England. Upon reading it, readers will surely be able to appreciate the works of those Victorian writers/poets more because they can then really comprehend how the Victorians' lives and beliefs were like, and how and why they would behave the way they did, and most important of all, that they were not as old-fashioned and conservative as contemporary people think they were.

First published in 1957 with the intent to show some of the roots of the "modern mind" (which was then still recovering from McCarthyism), Walter Houghton's book more than accomplishes its stated goals. THE VICTORIAN FRAME OF MIND is divided in to three parts in which Houghton examines Victorian emotional, intellectual and moral attitudes. He bases these discussions on the premise that 1830-1870 was an "age of transition," and that the Victorian English were the first to think of their own time as "an era of change FROM the past TO the future."

The Victorians found the pace of their life compared to that of their grandfathers to be inordinately fast, they both lamented and welcomed the breakdown of old regimes and the coming into its own of the Industrial Revolution. Darwin's theory of evolution made thousands of them quake in their boots--even though so many of them were raised on a wrathful God more than a loving God, the prospect of no God at all sent many running for the metaphorical hills. Throughout the book, Houghton extensively quotes the Victorians themselves (e.g. Ruskin, Arnold, Carlyle, Charles Kingsley) and it is shocking and uncanny how many times what was written a good 150 years ago resembles what you might find in the press and literature of today. This from 1851: "everybody has his own little ISM . . . by which the country can be saved." How about this line from Carlyle's PAST AND PRESENT: "we have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings."

A key to understanding how Victorians thought about themselves and their world, Houghton points out, lies in accepting the many contradictions and tensions of the age, most importantly their overwhelming optimism balanced against their high level of anxiety. Of the book's fourteen chapters, particularly interesting and provocative are those on "The Critical Spirit--and The Will to Believe," "The Commercial Spirit," "Dogmatism," and "Hypocrisy."

Houghton admits from the start that he's out for the "general sense" of how people thought, and he narrows his purview even further to the literate classes. He therefore makes many sweeping statements that could still meet with criticism--even with the quotations he provides from the writers of the time. THE VICTORIAN FRAME OF MIND is still a useful background text for scholars, though it might put off those with ISMs on their shoulders. Moreover, it is a rich and engaging book for the student or amateur of the Victorian era, which, while different in several important ways from our own American society, is all too eerily similar when you come right down to it. Highly recommended!

I live just a few miles from Oxford, Ohio and Miami University, where Dr. Green does his work when he's not away from civilization, and have sailed or swam many times at Acton Lake, which he uses in an early chapter to introduce the science of limnology, or the study of lakes.

This is a complex and ambitious book, and the result is thoroughly engrossing. It is an introduction to lake science, an adventure tale, and an account of how a scientist plans and executes his work, but these are just at the surface. It is also a personal exploration of the author's own memories and motives. Ultimately, it is a book about what moves mankind to keep learning and exploring, presented using the author as his own example.

Wondering about the powerful emotional draw that Antarctica exerts on him, the author is reminded of his boyhood, when Great Lakes winter storms would transform his town's landscape with a featureless cover of snow, allowing him to explore what became, in his imagination, an unexplored land. He describes the beauty that can be found, if one will allow himself, in the terrifying nothingness of the universe, whether it be seen in the vast coldness of space or the inhuman bleakness of an ice-covered continent. Some of his colleagues found Antactica intolerable, probably for the same reasons. He writes...

"The ice seemed a reminder of the universe at large, of the universe as accident, as matter blown and strewn and expanding, 'heartless' as Melville had described it, all moon-filled and dry, hung with poisoned worlds, incinerating stars, vacuums of frozen light. Loneliness, the warm sun as memory, as myth, the blankness of white landscape, in which we see no trace of ourselves, no artifact of our genius and cunning...". Reading this, I was taken back to my own boyhood to find my love of exploration awakened as I stood studying the cold and vastly distant stars from by back yard, and felt the fearful thrill of being sucked upward into the eternal void...

As a classicist and poet, I am shy - if not wary - of "hard science". I stumbled upon this book by accident, browsing the non-fiction shelves in the public library. It is unique! I have ordered it - and I'm not even quite finished with it - I am reluctant to finish this first reading, although it is five-star enjoyment. Water Ice and Stone is a "braided river" (read it and you'll see why the phrase is in quotation marks) of a) Green's personal passion for his field and his subject that took him to the Antarctic lakes again and again; b) scientific explanations of that field that are accessible and fascinating without being either patronizing or unscholarly; c)the personal reminiscences and experiences that led to his choice of profession and to the Anarctic; d) the daily observations, colleagues and acts of living while he was there; and e) the beauty and wonder and astonishment and inspiration that this world we live in has to offer any of us who will take the time to look, to understand, to see. The book is science and it is poetry; it is wonder and it is analysis; it is a marvel. My highest acolade for books in fields that I did NOT take up is: it makes me almost wish I had become a.... Water, Ice and Stone left me an almost-geochemist.

For example, read the FM Tao chapter for an excellent discussion on the solvent effect of individual water molecules, which paradoxically can cause gas-to-solid conversions in the atmosphere, resulting in aerosol (fine particle) pollution, which is an invisible human health threat worldwide, but especially in the US.

The chapter by FM Tao is very good. It examines a number of interesting phenomena that occur with only a few water molecules, including remarkable gas - to - dissolved solid transitions that occur in the atmosphere, and are a key element in aerosol formation in the atmosphere, which has been implicated as a major factor in fine particle pollution. Fine particles are very toxic and have been estimated as causing as much premature mortality in the USA as traffic accidents do!

So, there is a connection here between understanding the first events in aerosol formation, and a major public health problem in this country!

What a wonderful dictionary for elementary school age children. I wish I had bought it a year ago. The print is large and well spaced and that makes it easy for younger students to find words without help. There are colorful photos and illustrations on every page. The definitions are easy to read and understand. There are photos of the presidents and maps in the back. A really nice addition to our children's library!

It has just about everything a kid needs to know! In the back, it has all the presidents listed, an atlas of the world, weights and measures, and more! It is the best dictionary ever made!

Dr. Marcos Calderon knew how independent and headstrong his little sister was. He knew something was wrong, but she would not confide in him. So he called in a favor to Che, the one he trusted most!

Detective Clay Blackthorn (aka Che) posed as the new security manager at Porto Sereno, where Marisol Calderon lived. She kept busy with her salon business and was all Marcos had warned him of. It quickly became obvious that she had a stalker. She received phone calls, flowers, and messages daily. Each were more bold than the last. clay's cover did not last long. Marisol quickly found out that Clay was a real cop. But he kept quiet about her brother sending him. If she got wind of that he would find her door slammed in his face! One problem was that there were few suspects and all of them were checking out clean. Another problem was that Clay and Marisol were getting too close to each other. Desire was hot between them. But Clay had long ago vowed never to trust women again!

***** This book is awesome! I began the book and did not stop until the last page had been turned! Marisol is no helpless damsel in distress either! She packs some mean defense moves of her own (unfortunately for Clay). I am hoping this author means to give Dr. Marcos Calderon his own story someday. I see lots of potential there! :) An excellent book to lose yourself in. Plenty of romance and excitement! *****

Clay Blackthorne, half Argentian, is a cop but as a favor to a good friend he agrees to go undercover to discover who is stalking Marcos' sister. He must approach this task very cleverly as Marcos insists that his sister would not appreciate interference in her life from her family. So Clay sets his plan into action as the new security guard at her apartment complex and goes to the most obvious place to meet her....her beauty salon.

Marisol Calderon had moved from Venezuela to live in Miami and she is determined to make a success of her beauty salon. Her recent male client looks out of place but yet she can not help but to notice his good looks and before she realizes it they have a date. But because of the stalker threatening her she can not help but to suspect his sudden interest in her.

Ohh la la!! I loved the hispanic spice in this great story. With a plot that held my interest from page one all the way through to the endearing epilogue. The hero and heroine's attraction heat up the pages with a fair amount of sexual tension. It was quite enjoyable!

Victoria Secunda is a thorough hard-hitting researcher and writer on topics everyone knows exists but rarely want to admit. This book examines the impact fathers have on daughters -- whether the father is actually present or not. The research looks at several different types of fathers -- including the absent father, and the one who has died. The impact plays out again and again in the woman's adult relationships in life, unless she can recognize it and confront it.

Perhaps the most telling and helpful bit of information (which can be applied to your relationship with anyone, not just your father) is that you don't have to confront the actual person in order to let go of the emotional baggage. Usually a physical confrontation is an excuse to tell the other person how they are wrong rather than resolve any emotional issues. Very true words!

Reading this book was such an eye-opener. It made me identify areas of my life deeply influenced by my relationship with the first man in my life. The truth in its pages was crushing at times, but also a wonderful challenge.

For a new runner like myself, with a super busy schedule, this book is a wonderful companion for starting and maintaining the running life. It is easy to read with great visuals and tips on how to fit running into your busy life. Whether you are running for fun, staying in shape or training for a marathon, this book can help you achieve your goals.

This book was the best down-to-earth, usable book on running that I've found. It's no-nonsense advice will have you running and enjoying it. I don't run marathons, but I do run to stay fit and this book really got me motivated! It has some fantastic tips you can use right away.

The Women's Guide to Non-competitive Running is GREAT!