Now Los Gatos in Spanish means The Cats. I just would like to say Waaaaasssssssssssuuuuuuppppppp to all my homedoggs. EEEYA I have learned a lot from the grate scool district. It is absolootey the best in the wurld. YA! I go to highschool and I is gettin the beest education that this here town can offer. bi guyz

I moved to Los Gatos in 1996. Before I read this book I had virtually no idea of the town I lived in. Now I understand it very well. It's actually interesting! By the way, this book was obviously created as a labor of love by someone with a genuine interest in their community.

This book displays a wonderfully compiled history of Los Gatos. The photography is beautiful, and just about every fact is historically accurate. A good section of the book is where the buildings are shown today downtown, and then their original use is displayed below the photo. Anywone who lives in Los Gatos or anywone who loves Santa Clara County history will love this book!

Pedro's Journal by Pam Conrad is a heartwarming story about trust. Pam really brought out the characters by using lot's of detail.

Pedro is a boy who went sailing with Christopher Columbus. He's the only person on the ship who knew how to read and write.

Pam kept you reading by her creative chapter endings. She changed font and size when writing about what the characters were saying and thinking.

Anyone who reads this book will say it's hard to put down. Don't miss this good chance to read this outstanding book.

Pedro's Journal was read by my 5th grade classes to learn more about Christopher Columbus and his journey. It was perfect for a class of mixed ability readers, it's history was well researched, and it engaged the students. We used it for a Literary Circle book. I highly recommend it for Social Studies, Language Arts, or an example of journal writing.

I read selections of this book out loud to my fifth grade Hispanic students who were intrigued with the young sailor and his experiences. It lent a "you were there" aspect to the study of history and it provided a model of diary style writing. This book was recommended by our history series.

Conrad's account of his return to Tasmania is a delightful journey in time, place and language. Tasmania's special place in history and geography is depicted in the special style that can only be invoked by the self-exile. His prose is rich with metaphor in dealing with his own life, Tasmania's physical features and the society English society imposed on it. Raised in a suburb north of the State Capital, Hobart [the world's most southern such], Conrad's childhood environment was overshadowed by the looming, capriciously moody Mount Wellington. Everything else about Tasmania was "Behind the Mountain."

Conrad is expressive about what it was like to be raised in a place that even the rest of Australia seemed to have forgotten - it was left off school maps of the Last Continent. As the site of imprisonment for the most incorrigible of Britain's transported felons, its white inhabitants later tried to erase their own history. Isolated, then, in place both globally and socially, its people clung to the only culture they could derive - the "home" that was England. Even when the rest of Australia sought ties with the Americans, Tasmania remained locked into their version of the "old country."

Conrad breaks the mould of that image. He's frank about the white's treatment of Tasmania's Aborigine population and culture. He contrasts the outlook that named and respected every mountain, stream or other physical feature of the island. The Parlemar people were rounded up in a series of paramilitary exercises, the most notorious that of the Black Line. The surviving Aborigines [some suicided from seaside cliffs] were exiled to Flinders Island and other off-shore sites to rot and die. Even their corpses were desecrated by amateur "anthropologists" keen to depict them as sub-humans, well deserving extinction. The eradication was absolute - Tasmania remains the only Australian State with no surviving indigenous population.

Conrad journeys over the island by bus and aircraft [he is unable to drive]. The jaunts confront us with bizarre naming practices the island was subjected to by white settlers. No Aborigine names were applied until the State's Hydro Commission attempted some restitution while building dams in the mountains. The attempt is simply a final instance of the paucity of knowledge of Aborigine culture. His tours take us to Port Davey, a week's walk from the nearest road end, and the distant, disreputable Macquarie Harbour. His map shows the anomaly of this extensive estuary with its entrance but 60 metres wide. It was truly the end of the world for many convicts who laboured their lives away under assault by winds originating off the South African coast.

His candor in descriptions of his life and his family is refreshing. He aspired to the exile he entered with unwarranted enthusiasm. The book opens with the conflagration of his childhood artifacts. He is later as disturbed by this sacrifice as we are while reading it. His evocative metaphors evoke the remorse to follow him as he recovers or recreates those childhood losses. The memories he solicits show a level of confusion about his own identity - at one point unable to discern whether the image in a photograph is himself or his father. Life on the Apple Isle could lead to such vague self-persona given the paucity of information about his roots. An alcoholic grandfather had simply been made to disappear by the rest of his family.

It's trite to state that any examination of one's roots can lead to disillusionment. But Conrad's return to this remote land provided an improved sense of self-identity. He returned to learn more of his natal surroundings than would have been possible had he not left. He demonstrates that all he learned during his journeys didn't require a comparison to his adopted land to be valuable. Every place he visited or researched provided new elements of his self-awareness in their own right. The book is an object lesson for anyone who has left home for other venues. Read it to learn of this faraway land, the brilliance of its re-discoverer, and perhaps some insight into your own outlook about where you are. It's a rewarding journey.

Behind the Mountain is a unique creation, more than a close, personal look at a most unusual place, Tasmania, "an appendix, an after thought" to the mainland of Australia. It is also the memoir of a brilliant, scholarly self-exile's return after twenty years and his coming-to-terms with the people and places that made him who he is.

Conrad had "escaped" from Tasmania at age twenty to attend university at Oxford and to start a new life. He had burned in the back yard all his diaries, exercise books, and "anything that might incriminate [him] by attaching an identity to [him]." He had left his home and family behind, intending never to return, believing that "Home was where you started from, not where you stayed." Twenty years older when he writes of revisiting Tasmania, he has discovered that despite his attempt to escape, "Tasmania had set the terms of [his] life. The home you cannot return to you carry off with you: it lies down the at the bottom of the world, and of the sleeping, imagining mind."

This search for identity and roots informs his travels within Tasmania and gives the book an immediacy and liveliness lacking in so many other studies of place. Tasmania, he explains, is "an offshore island off the shore of an offshore continent," its residents therefore the "victims of a twofold alienation," with nothing between them and Anarctica, the end of the world. Conrad turns his eagle eye, his thoughtful sensibility, his absolutely limitless vocabulary, and his extraordinary skills at description to the recreation of Tasmania from the air, from the water, from the farm, from the mountain, and even under the ground, all in vivid word pictures. You will travel with him, and experience the great good fortune of seeing the island through the eyes of a gifted and introspective native whose twenty-year absence has given him a perspective on life in Tasmania that enable him to communicate it with "outsiders."

Best of all, Conrad permits the reader to share his discovery that he had "placed [his] trust, mistakenly, in the myth of self-invention. You created yourself, and did so out of nothing." Instead, he finds, "we are all still pioneers, required to colonise the piece of ground which chance assigns us, to make it our own by shaping it into a small, autonomous intelligible world....[Tasmania] was the landscape inside me: the space where I spent my dreaming time....Tasmania had set the terms of my life."

This is absolutely the best book about opera that I've ever read, and one of the best books (about ANYTHING) that I've ever read. . .EVER! Conrad really knows how to describe the psychological and emotional chords that opera strikes in its most ardent fans, and he made clear to me why I am an "opera addict" (i.e., why this unique, wonderful, and yet preposterous art form has meant so much to me for so many years).

Sometimes 'A Song of Love and Death' is a bit over the top, but then so is its subject matter. Peter Conrad's subtitle, 'The Meaning of Opera' could be expanded to: 'The Meaning of Opera to me, personally. Here's what it feels like to experience opera, up close, and in your soul.' The last chapter, 'The Ecstasy and Agony of Song' would also make a good alternative title. If you want to know what opera 'feels' like, read this book. It's my favorite, with the possible exception of Father Owen Lee's writings, even though the author makes fun of one of my favorite singers for baring his chest on stage.

If you are looking for a thoughtful, immensely readable alternative to 'A Dummy's Guide to Opera', read 'A Song of Love and Death'. It's the closest you'll ever get to 'reading' the liebestod.

I read this book for a course on the sociology of deviance, andfound it a valuable resource. It traces the historical developement of deviant 'sicknesses' such as opiate addictions, mental illness, homosexuality, and attention deficit disorder. The book examines how these forms of deviance were understood historically, and how they came they came to be understood as forms of 'sickness.' Conrad and Schneider examine medical model of understanding deviance, which is currently standard, from a removed and critical perspective. In the forward (of my edition) Joseph Gusfield puts it thusly, "They treat the medical model as something strange, not as something that is 'taken for granted' as 'normal.' When a body a body of thought or phenomemon is taken as problematic, as something to be explained, its naturalness, its claim to 'reality,' is called to account." This book does an excellent job at calling the claims of the medical model into account. This book offers new perspectives on hot-topics, is well organized, and is extremely well-researched. I would warn people that it is dense reading, and some people may find it hard to get through. I would especially recommend this book to any who would form a stance on any of the following issues: drug use/abuse, mental illness, juvenile delinquency, homosexuality, and medicine as a means of social control.

This book gives wonderful insight into the lives of so many from long ago. It is very well written with great illustrations. It gives a remarkable account of the struggles as well as the everyday life of an outstanding man, who gave inspiration to so many, especially his family.

I'm a huge fan of Hitchcock and I've read quite a bit about him. I picked up this book in London and enjoyed it immensely. I like how Conrad uses works from the entire Hitchcock canon (not just critical favorites) to illustrate the central themes of his films. The fine line between sex and death, Hitch's mistrust of authority figures and organized religion, his love/hate relationship with the idealized "Hitchcock blond", the often even more perverse nature of his favorite source material ... it's all here. There are a number of other interesting topics as well: food, music, Hitchcock's dark sense of humor and penchant for practical jokes ... well worth the read for any Hitchcock fan.

A wonderful book for moderate readers. Great for all ages. It explains how early sailors believed the Atlantic Ocean was cursed.A very exciting book!

I have always loved the style and social politics of the Regency period (the time of Jane Austen.) But when I read "Sense and Sensibility" in 7th grade I found the first few chapters lifeless, dull and hard to read. Two years later I was encouraged by a friend to give "Pride and Prejudice" a try. I did and have since become a complete Janeite. I am now able to peruse joyfully through "Sense and Sensibility" with a new understanding and appreciation of Jane Austen. The reason? "Pride and Prejudice" is fresh, witty and is a great introduction to Jane Austen's writing style without the formality of some of her other novels (unlike S&S and Persuasion Austen does not give us a 10 page history of each family and their fortune.) If you have never read Jane Austen or have read her other novels and found them boring, read Pride and Prejudice. The characters, and the situations Austen presents to them, are hysterical and reveal a lot about Regency society and morality. This book perfectly compliments a great writer like Jane Austen and is essential to every reader's library. The Penguin Edition of the book is stellar and I personally recommend it not only for the in-depth and indispensable footnotes, but also for the cover that is non-suggestive of any of the characters' appearances. In summary "Pride and Prejudice" is a great book for beginner Austen readers and seasoned fans, and Penguin Classics is a great edition for fully enjoying and understanding the book.

Pride And Prejudice, written by Jane Austen, is an amazing work on the nature of love. Austen uses beautiful language and intriguing characters to tell this story of courtship in a time when reputation was everything. The main character, Elizabeth Bennet, is a clever-witted woman who manages to gracefully glide through the lines set up by society. Although she does not always come off as lady-like, her charm and confidence demand the reader's respect. She is surrounded by a cast of diverse characters, creating a riveting plotline. Her mother is a rather quirky character who wants nothing more than to see her daughters wed. Her father, on the other hand, is a sarcastic and intelligent man who favors Elizabeth for her wit. These characters are brought together with the Bingley's when Elizabeth's older sister, Jane, falls for Mr. Bingley. Here, we are introduced to the stubborn and proud character of Mr. Darcy. He seems to be above everyone else and completely opposed to the idea of love.
When Elizabeth Bennet catches Darcy's eye, however, a battle between the mind and the heart begins. These two chracters are faced with the obstacles set up by a strict, Victorian society. Their largest obstacle, however, will be to overcome their own pride and prejudice, and discover their love for one another. Is this a battle that the heart can win?

It is unfortunate that most first time readers of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE see it merely as one more book to be endured in 11th grade English. However, most soon enough catch the magic of an author (Jane Austen) who can weave a spellbinding tale of love, romance, satire, and passion while all the while poking a not so gentle thrust at the social mores of the early 19th century. This book is no frilly ancestor of a Harlequin romance, even if it shares with the dim-witted heroines of Harlequin a time-honored plot of lovers who meet and find an instant dislike that later morphs into enduring love. PRIDE AND PREJUDICE starts off with that basic premise, but what sets it off as classic is what goes on behind the lovers, Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy. A careful reader usually notes the society in which Elizabeth and Darcy play out their little games of cross-purpose verbal repartee. The world of Austen's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is a society ruled by conniving and single-minded women who see men only in terms of the size of their wallets. Whenever a new bachelor appears on the scene, the women of the novel (with the exception of Elizabeth, of course) immediately try to guess his income so that they can decide if one wishes to marry him. His age, his looks, his habits are much less significant than his income. A fat purse compensates for a fat head.

Modern readers typically call such schemers 'golddiggers,' and according to modern values, perhaps they are, but these readers ought to judge the book's morality against the age in which it was written. Austen (1775 - 1817) lived in an England that prized manners and breeding over all else. It is no surprise, then, that since the reclusive author felt most comfortable only in the company of women, that she would limit her book only to the thoughts, feelings, emotions, and habits of women. In PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, men are never permitted to occupy center stage, nor are they shown interacting independently with other men. If a man is present in any scene, so must a woman to control and observe his actions. Men--even the eventually triumphant Darcy--are generally portrayed as vain, sycophantic, sarcastic, and totally aware that they they are prized only for their money.

The world of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, especially if one has seen the fine film version starring Greer Garson, is one that seems to have been built for women to inhabit. All the women wear flouncy, bouncy dresses with huge flowered hats that Scarlet O'Hara might have worn in GONE WITH THE WIND. Even those ladies that complain of poverty never lack the funds to afford those outrageous outfits. Further, Miss Austen stages a ball in just about every third chapter that permits single women to size up eligible men. As these dandefied women and uniformed men speak to each other, the modern reader probably will be surprised at the excessive politeness and deference tossed unerringly about. This strict adherence to a surface morality ought not to fool the reader into assuming that the characters are as inwardly noble as they are outwardly polite. In fact, behind this massive wall of formal phrasing and good manners lies the same fears, jealousies, and general backstabbing that pervade a modern disco. What gives PRIDE AND PREJUDICE its perpetual charm is the biting irony that causes the reader to wonder: 'Did that character say what I think he (or she) just said?' The modern reader can best appreciate Austen's wit if she can read between the lines to sense the tone of the moment. If such a reader can see that this book is a polite if powerful indictment of a way of life that even Austen wished to poke fun of, then perhaps this reader can appreciate the charm of a book that grows with each successive reading.

"Persuasion" was Jane Austen's last novel, and the more sober and pensive quality of the book, as compared to some of her earlier works, most notably "Pride and Prejudice", reflects her maturity both in age and as a writer; no one in their early 20's could have written this book. The heroine of "Persuasion" is Anne Elliot, seven years after she rejected, at her family's insistence, the young man she had fallen in love with at 19, when he was just starting a naval career and was too poor, in the eyes of her pretentious relatives, to be considered acceptable marriage material. Now he has returned, financially secure and promoted to captain, and she finds herself still in love with him. Without giving away the rest of the plot, the book gives a powerful argument for following one's heart instead of the prejudices and snobbisms of society. Anne does not have the same appeal to many modern readers as Elizabeth Bennet; she is more shy, retiring and reflective. But as the book progresses and she finds the strength to act on her feelings, she grows in personality and character. This final work by one of the greatest writers (and my personal favorite) in the English language is a lasting testimony to her incredible talents as a novelist.

I know a lot of teens who, when I tell them I am reading Jane Austen, say, "What are you thinking?" because they have read Sense and Sensibility first, before trying any of her easier works. Persuasion is the easiest book of Austen's to get into, to follow, and to love. She makes the characters real by explaining them in many situations. When I read this book, I instantly became friends with Anne Elliot, the family outcast, because she was an outcast. Then she became even more my friend when she became the beloved and desired friend and love of Captain Wentworth. I loved seeing Anne go through the difficulties of dealing with her past actions, and instead of wanting to go back and change the past, she wanted to go forward and decide the future. Austen masterfully portrays all of her characters, and I would love to go to Lyme and see where Anne met her cousin, and to Bath to see where she and Captain Wentworth decided their future together. Persuasion is my favorite book of Austen's, and if you read it, it will be yours, too.

This story is heart-wrenchingly agonising. This is a good thing! Never have I been so moved by a love story. When Anne and Captain Wentworth finally overcome their own guardedness and the pressures of society and re-declare their love for each other...... It is the most wonderful scene ever written. I have never read a more wonderful love story. I think this to be the most romantic of Jane Austen's novels. The mercenary marriage market Jane Austen ridicules in "Pride and Prejudice" is portrayed in a darker and more destructive light in "Persuasion". Two lovers torn apart by a society fixated on class, wealth and position, only able to find happiness together once this obstacle has been overcome, but in the mean time..... OH THE HEART ACHE!!!!! I recommend this one for a rainy day when one can lie in bed, or sit in the favourite arm-chair, and wallow in the brilliance of this timeless and heart stirring romance. Don't forget your tissues!