In the book The River Road by Karen Osborn, Kevin, a father says, "You think you know people, but when something like this happens, you really don't know anyone at all." Surely this new book by Karen Osborn clearly and unfortunately illustrates this point all too well.

The River Road, told from the point of view of the three main characters, immerses readers in the story of two brothers who are in love with their neighbor Kay. Friends since Kay moved into this rural Connecticut area, David and Kay become lovers during college leaving Michael out of their customary threesome. As younger children, the three of them played childhood games and survived the angst filled world of high school in part because of their strong ties to one another. But then a tragedy occurs leaving parents and these young adults to wonder what went wrong and what really happened. As the remainder of the book attempts to unravel the mystery and what led up to this tragedy, readers have a front row seat as family and friends become accusatory and introspective, The book, told partially through flashbacks culminates in an ending which depicts how individuals suffer after a tragedy and the indomitable spirit to survive and love again. Certainly for those who enjoyed The Pact by Jodi Picoult concerning teenage suicide, this book will serve as a comparison to the repercussions that can occur when young adults fall in love.

Previous to reading The River Road, I read Karen Osborn's second book, Between Earth and Sky, that was set in the late 1800's in New Mexico. Told in the form of letters by a woman pioneer to her family in Virginia, Osborn presents strong women characters and wonderful descriptions of the land. While she does an equally fine job in this book of describing the characters and description of rural Connecticut, The River Road is a much sadder and more intense book in comparison. One can only wonder how life can spiral so badly out of control for something like this to happen.

Kay Richards and brothers, David and Michael Sanderson have been friends since childhood. But one tragic night changes not only their lives, but the lives of their families and even the town they live in.

In one careless moment, a life is lost and nothing will ever be the same.

We get all sides of the story as it unfolds in alternating chapters told by Kay, Michael and Kevin (the boy's father). They all loved David and his death affects each in different ways. What first looks like an accident takes an unexpected turn and there's a police investigation and then a trial.

The verdict is riveting and so is this well written book.

This fine book held me in its grip from beginning to end. The writing is unobtrusive and I was lost in the lives of the characters, until I realised that something unexpected and subtle was being achieved: an examination of the fine line between love and decency, and the unacknowledged capacity for harm in us.

This is collection of short stories that offers a wide mix of speculative genres. Fantasy, SF, horror, and just plain weird. The stories run the gambit and most are good. "Jeo Defined" and "Moon Warrior" were excellent stories and well worth purchasing the book. Even just the so-so stories were enjoyable and all the authors are names to keep a look out for. In the end, this is a book of up and coming writers and a few of them will no doubt be big names someday.

I didn't know what to expect from this collection of short stories but I was happily surprised. The stories cover a wide range from fantasy, science fiction, and horror to those hard to classify strange stories. Each one is worth reading. My favorites were the one about a radio personality who was singing the Siren's song and the one about a criminal who is forced to undergo "augmentation" to control him. Some wild stuff for a great read.

I picked up this book (in Hungarian and English) with such high hopes and great expectations. It sounded magnificent: a secluded castle at the foot of the Carpathians, a beautiful woman long dead, a secret about to be revealed. I was sadly disappointed.

Instead of taking us back to the past and dramatizing in scenes what could have been a wonderfully engrossing story, Sandor Marai (no relation!) keeps us firmly anchored in the present where one character delivers a book-length monologue to a second character, informing this second character of what he already knows for the benefit of the reader. Surely this method of storytelling was already dated in Marai's day. Why he chose to employ it is beyond me.

I'm not a fan of flashbacks, but, in my opinion at least, this story would have been greatly enriched through the use of a frame. In a frame, we begin in the present, then return to the past for the body of the story, and finally wind up in the present once again for the conclusion.

The use of a frame also would have allowed us to get to know all three main characters: Henrik, Konrad and Krisztina. As it is, the fascinating Krisztina is long dead when the story begins and Konrad barely gets to utter ten words. The bulk of the book is taken up with Henrik's rambling, and sometimes dull, monologue. Had we been allowed to know all three characters, to experience their needs and emotions, the book would have come to life, the story would have been transformed.

I do have to give credit where credit is due: there are some very lovely set-pieces and Konrad certainly has more patience than I. I would have said, Jó éjszakát! (Goodnight! in Hungarian) after an hour of Henrik's tirade; poor Konrad endured it the whole night long.

Marai has taken a magnificent idea and deprived it of all story tension, characterization and surprise. I just don't feel it was a very good choice.

Needless to say I thought the novel wonderful, especially the elegant and understated way Marai ends it, and the hypnotic use of repetition and motifs.

I think the translation is beautiful, although it is a shame it is from the German rather than the original Hungarian. Also, a literal translation of the title, "The candles are burnt down", might have been better than "Embers", not least because it is also a line from near the end of the novel (p. 208).

I think that the trouble with how the reviews have dealt with it are that everyone thought it a "jewelled antique" (New York Times), rather than as a piece in its own time. Márai was a serious and prolific writer and a deep thinker. He was born in Hungary in 1900 and reared in a part and age of the World where philosophy and its bearing on history and culture were meat and drink.

Marai wrote this in occupied Hungary in 1942, sitting between two warring ideologies of mass action: Leninist-Marxism and National Socialism. Superficially, the two main characters embody the opposing moralities of martial virtue and artistic sensibility. However, at a deeper level, they both oppose the two ideologies which were tearing Central Europe in half. They both exhibit a belief in the importance of the individual over the herd. Márai is showing his fellow Europeans that you can have honour without militarism and passion without mass slaughter. The General cites Plato (p. 109) but Márai's stance towards him is pure Nietzsche:

"Things do not simply happen to one . . . It is not true that fate slips silently into our lives. It steps through the door that we have opened, and we invite it to enter." (p.170)

There can be little doubt that Nietzsche at his best would have classed both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as the triumph of the most cruel herd-instincts (of course, being a madman with a distaste for logic, he was not always at his best).

Equally fascinating is Márai's obsession with notions of silence and what is sayable. It is also a keynote with the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was born in Vienna in 1889, and only published one, rather technical book in his life, so it is doubtful Marai had come across him. However, one theme in that book is to be found in Embers.

Wittgenstein had been presented by Bertrand Russell with several problems in philosophy which can be summed up as follows: there is a problem with talking about how language manages to describe the World. The problem is that when one tries to describe how it does, one is still using language. One can invent a new language to describe how the old language does it (e.g. in logic, one uses second-order logic to describe how first-order logic works). However, this presents us with a new problem: how does the first language relate to the second? One can again invent a new language (e.g. third-order logic) to do this, but again you just kick the problem up to a higher level, and so we have an infinite regress.

Think in terms of pictures. If one draws a picture in an unfamiliar style another person might not understand how it picture the objects it is meant to. To solve this, one might draw in the corner how the picture is to be understood, e.g. by doing a sketch of the first picture, and then a sketch using a more common style, and then lines connecting the relevant points to show how the one maps onto the other. However, if someone asks how the more common style is to be viewed, we are in trouble. We could show how that maps onto another common style, but if they are unfamiliar with any style, the one thing we can not represent to them in the picture is how pictures work in general, i.e. we can not represent Representation itself.

Wittgenstein got around this: he said that attempts to talk about Representation always ended in senseless statements. They are senseless in that they do not strictly say anything at all. However, what they do is "show" us something about language, by the very fact that they appear to say something significant and philosophical, and yet actually say nothing at all. By reading the senseless statements of Wittgenstein's work, one is climbing up a ladder to a place where one can see things clearly. Once one is at the top, one sees his work as senseless, and one can throw away the ladder. In summary, all the really important things can not be said, they can only be shown. Now look at a random selection from Márai, mainly from chapter endings:

"As if one of them were in the other's debt. It could not be put into words." (p. 47)

"They both sat in silence, watching the flames, until the manservant came to announce dinner." (p. 79)

"Each at his end of the table, they raise their glasses in silence and drain them." (p. 93)

"What can one ask people with words? And what is the value of an answer given in words instead of in the coin of one's entire life?" (p. 163)

"The men take leave of each other with a handshake, a deep bow, wordlessly." (p. 211)

"But like every kiss, this one is an answer, a clumsy but tender answer to a question that eludes the power of language." (p. 213 [closing sentence])

Note that they had both read the novelist Kürnberger, Wittgenstein using a quote from him for the motto to the his book,

". . . and anything a man knows, anything he has not merely heard rumbling and roaring, can be said in three words."

Compare this with Márai's,

"It's as if those few words had captured the whole meaning of life, but afterwards one always talks about something else." (p. 32)

It is ironic, that I have just run out of words myself.

One knows when one reads a great contemporary book - after completing the first reading, one goes back to page one and immediately rereads it. Thus one picks up all the nuances and innuendos embedded in the books structure and thoughts that were missed in the first reading. In my lifetime, there has been only two books where this has occurred. One was "The Plague" by Camus and the other was Saramago's "Blindness". (I am tempted to add Thomas Mann's books but they were so exhausting in reading that one needs a break before the next crack at it.)

I now add "Embers" by Sándor Márai to these other two aforementioned great books. A once in a lifetime experience.

To begin with, Márai is Hungarian - that country whose language is completely different from other European languages except Finnish. There are just a few such professional translators, so we have to exist with a translation of a translation - from Hungarian to German to English. Though one trusts the translation has lost nothing in the process, one always has nagging doubts, especially it comes to nuances and innuendos. This may account for the 13 years that have gone by since his suicide before we have seen any work of his in English. That may also account for the fact that he is a writer who should have received the Noble Prize but did not.

The story line is most simple. ...It has been said, this book was just one part of what was to be a huge study in family relationships over generations covering the two world wars and several governmental upheavals both of which play in the background of this novel. The reader can only put down this slight volume wondering "what's next?" Were there to be two more volumes presenting two other viewpoints on the same subject by the other two players in this betrayal? Or is this just one segment of generations to come, influence by this event. Perhaps this very event is the cumulation of a multitude of preceding events. One cannot help but speculate. Speculate and hope that there are more writings of this ingenious writer that have yet to be translated. Let us hope so. In the meantime we will live with our own imaginations working overtime with what Márai has stimulated us to think about.

This is a novel not only about existentialism in its very essenc and plot but is existential in and of itself...

Every once in a while, I love to just sit back with a short, fun mystery like this novel. Goldy, a single mom and caterer, finds herself in the middle of a sinister murder plot by catering a wake for one of her son's former teachers. Goldy knows all of the usual suspects, and the handsome sheriff can't help but ask Goldy for her help. This book is a lot of fun, and the recipes sound wonderful! Can't wait to continue reading the series...

This was a a light, entertaining book and and fun murder mystery. The first book in the series, we are introduced to Goldy Bear (Whose real name is Gertrude Bear Korman). Goldy has started her own catering business, to support herself and her son, after divorcing her abusive ex husband. While catering a funeral, Goldy's ex father in law is poisoned, and Goldy's business is shut down. In order to clear her name and get her life back, Goldy decides to investigate the crime.
Chock full of interesting characters, a possible love interest and as an added bonus, some terrific sounding recipes. I can't wait to move on to the next book in the series.

Catering to Nobody starts with a clever title and never lets up. The main character, Goldy Bear, is a former battered wife who finally divorced her abusive doctor husband and sets out to make her own way in the world with an upscale catering company. In addition to her business, she must deal with her nearly teenaged son and help him cope with the divorce. In this entry of the series, Goldy has to deal with her ex-husband when his father is poisoned at a funeral reception she is catering. Soon Goldy realizes that the only ay to save herself and her business is to solve the mystery herself-- and along the way she meets handsome police officer Tom Schultz, who reappears in later books in this series. Goldy is a character with whom many of today's women can identify. The recipes add another dimension to the book -- try them yourselves

There are some good photos but they are mostly OUTLAWS and why in the world didn't the publisher just call it OUTLAWS MC? I was under the impression this was going to cover all 1%ers it didn't! AFFA

One percenters are outlaws, this is an interesting read about a very interesting subject. Don't miss a rare Harley Davidson Novel "THE SECOND COMING OF AGE" by: Vedrine

Michael Upright's One Percent is a captivating book for a number of reasons.

First of all, the book offers a rare view inside the world of the Outlaws. People outside the biker community seldom (if ever) gain close access to this type of club. The intimacy reflected in Upright's photos is proof that he succeeded in gaining the group's trust. He earned it. This isn't tabloid voyeurism. This is an objective look at a complex group. The Outlaws are very much human in Upright's portraits.

The photographs themselves are stunning. For those who love motorcycles, the book is an homage to bikes and bikers. For those who aren't particularly into bikes, you will be. Upright's photos make these machines look like trophies of the American highway.

Finally, the photographs are spectacularly reproduced. I am often disappointed by the quality of photography books--the photos appear dull and somewhat lifeless. The photos in One Percent are clean, clear and crisp. I enjoy the incredible detail more with every read.

I highly recommend One Percent. It's a fascinating look into the fringe of society as told through the lens of a skilled photographer.

I ordered what I thought was the paper back version of the book, but received the study guide. Please be more honest, and discriptive in your listings.

I was disappointed when I received the workbook not the textbook for "The American Nation". Your description should have stated "workbook" in the description.

I was never really interested in world history or any other kind of history but American History. I think America has the most interesting history in the world! I love this textbook because it makes learning easier and straight to the point. In fact, this year I am actually loving history! I mean, the Constitution and everything is wonderful and this book makes it easy to understand. The authors must of spent a lot of time writing this textbook because it is so easy and i love looking into it! oh, one more thing i wanted to say to the authors - "Thanks for making history fun this year, you guys are the best textbook writers ever!"

This book is closely integrated with Davidson's Principles and Practice of Medicine.
It has numerous multiple choice questions (MCQs).

Drawbacks:
1. Explanations are brief.
2. It uses the old style of True / False questions. I still don't know why the British medical exams have not changed for a long time! The North American system uses MCQs where there is only ONE best answer.
3. MCQs assess only factual information. They're not like the USMLE-type questions, where you're given a case scenario, and then you'll be asked about the next step i.e. real-life situations.

This book will be of more value if the True / False MCQs are changed into single ONE best answer, and if there are extended matching questions.

Chapters include:
1. Genetic factors in disease.
2. Immunological factors in disease.
3. Climate & environmental factors in diseases.
4. Diseases due to infection.
5. Diseases of the Cardiovascular system.
6. Diseases of the Resp. system.
7. Diseases of the alimentary system.
8. Diseases of the liver and biliary system.
9. Nutritional factors in disease.
10. Disturbances in water, electrolyte & acid-base balance.
11. Diseases of the kidneys & genito-urinary system.
12. Endocrine & metabolic diseases.
13. Diseases of the blood.
14. Oncology.
15. Diseases of connective tissues, joints, & bones.
16. Diseases of the skin.
17. Psychiatry.
18. Diseases of the nervous system.
19. Geriatric medicine.
20. Acute poisoning.