I enjoyed this book so much, I created focusyourday.com and focusyourday.org to pay tribute to the book. You can see the current day's message there to get a sample of the book. I highly encourage you to get a copy for daily reading. This book made me a happier person and I have to read it again. It reduces the stress of living life!

This book has changed my life for the better! I highly recommend it. I have purchased several copies. I buy a new copy whenever I have worn out the previous copy or given it to someone in need. I have been reading this daily devotional for at least three years. I will continue to read this book over and over again because it is that good!

My husband and I have prayed together for the 40 years we've been married. This daily spiritual reader has given our prayers a new dimension and depth. We're giving a copy to each of our eight children for Christmas, hoping they will each enjoy it even though each will "hear" it from a different perspective.

My dad was in the 531st and as many soldiers did, only touched on a few thing's here and there. This book put's all the pieces together. I knew that his unit was important but, "DARN". I really recommend this book to anyone who wondered just what the hell these guy's did.

The appeal of Ken Garn's account for me is that this is the definitive account of the enlisted man's WW II told by an enlisted man. There are many stories and histories by historians and retired generals, but they gloss over what the man under fire on the beach was thinking about. The story telling is straightforward, personable and engaging.

A good read, given the rising interest in WWII. An amazingly detailed memoir of a man who survived four assault landings and seven campaigns in a special engineer unit which prepared invasion beaches for troop landing, including D-Day. It resonated with this vet of that war, but others will find it compelling as well.

This book is unlike any other Travel Planning Book. It is descriptive and puts you right in the heart of the atmosphere! I picked this up on a whim with my traditional Frommers Travel Guide. I hardly have used Frommers at all for this upcoming trip. This book is all I need!!!! My husband and I have been reading the "itineraries" aloud to each other in anticipation of our trip. That way we can pop a post-it flag on the activities that spark our interest and plan out our own custom itinerary a few days before leaving. I love this book and guarantee our weekend trip will be more memorable because of this book!!! If you are planning a trip to New Orleans, buy it - you won't regret it!!!

This book turned a stroke of bad luck on our honeymoon into a honeymoon we will remember. Our original plans were to do a 7-day cruise, but after flying to Miami and getting an hour out to sea, the engine on our ship broke and the whole cruise was cancelled. We flew back home the next day and decided we would drive to New Orleans. We picked this book up that night and it helped us plan an entire new honeymoon at the last minute. We stayed at the Hampton Inn as described in Itinerary 16, which is just a block and a half from the French Quarter. Thursday morning we took the excellent Cemetery and Voodoo walking tour found in Itinerary 6. That afternoon we had our own perfumes and colognes created for us at Bourbon French Parfums (Itinerary 3). Friday we attempted to follow Day Two of Itinerary 16. The Zoo is gorgeous and very romantic, but don't get fooled into taking the timeshare tour that they will offer you at the harbor where you get your zoo\aquarium tickets. Saturday we stayed at the Victoria Inn from Itinerary 27. What a great place! It's beautiful and moderately priced. The Bayou boat tour (also Itinerary 27) was the highlight of the trip. We got to see dolphins swimming right along the boat! That night's dinner at Restaurant Des Familles was very good too. All of these ideas came from this book and helped make our honeymoon a romantic and memorable one. If you ever plan on going to New Orleans, or returning, this is the book to have.

We are new to the area and too busy to explore without something too reference. This has made exploring our new town very easy and exciting. I recommend this book for people coming to New Orleans for a long weekend.

Like Helen Keller, Taha Hussain overcame the challenges of his blindness to be an inspiration to everyone who knew him. Born in 1889 in a small village in Egypt, the 7th of 13 children, and blinded in his early childhood by a mistake of the local barber (and village surgeon!), one would expect Taha Hussein to become just another statistic. Instead, his brilliant mind led him to receive the highest levels of education in Egypt, followed by a PhD from the Sorbonne University in France, and achieve wide recognition and honors as a writer, faculty member, dean, minister of education, and a Nobel prize nominee in literature. There are few human beings who overcome adversity of such magnitude. Taha Hussein's autobiography is unique and sometimes controversial, but certainly an inspiration to anyone who reads it. This edition, which includes all 3 parts of his biography now joined in one book, is well worth it and a must read.

This is a must read for those interested in Egypt and Egyptian culture. It is an absolute classic, wonderfully written and well translated. The story of a poor blind boy with incomparable talent and motivation, It is also a beautiful love story, cross cultural marriage, conflict between civilizations and the push and pull between the sacred and the secular. Taha Hussien rose from very poor and humble origin to the heights of Egyptian society.

Each of the three parts of this book was translated by a different person, as a result it takes a bit of time to get adjusted to the new style as well as a new phase of the life of Taha Hussien.

The first part of the book, specially with the third person style can get a bit tedious but if you perceiver through that you will get the double reward of enjoying the book and learning more about this truly unique man.

Dolphin Days is a great book about a guy who researched dolphins. It explains their behavior and scientifics without getting boring. I highly recommend it!

As a graduate student in Hawaii, I was fortunate enough to have encounters with dolphins on several snorkle outings. It is certainly a special experience, but stop reading here if you think I am about to launch into a new-age rant about "...how dolphins are helping humans to evolve"!

Norris presents an accessible description about dolphin behavior and the science involved in that study. Although I have a science background, I know little biology, and yet Norris clearly presents this work in terms I could understand, and that any thinking person will be comfortable with. I have since purchased other books by Norris on dolphins, and schedule snorkle trips everytime I visit the Islands. If you have seen the latest IMAX movie "Dolphins" (dedicated to Norris), now is the time to read the book!

If you are picking up this book, you most likely have read its companion, THE GOLDEN AGE. This book continues the exploits of the children introduced in the first volume. Veddy, veddy English. Completely delightful, though.

I am not sure today's children would enjoy this book. The 19th Century British-isms will probably be quite tedious to any but the most precocious of children. And nothing really "happens" so to speak. No adventures of overwhelming magnitude. Rather, the children's imagination governs what happens throughout the book. Small things are turned into events of great importance. Children brought up with video games will most likely be bored. But for an adult, ahhh! This is a find. It will make you yearn for the idyllic childhood you never had or anybody had for that matter.

Each chapter is like sunlight shining on a bead of dew in April. Or something similarily poetic. Grahame's the better writer anyway.

I'm sorry to see that Grahame's "Dream Days" is so unavailable. It's a deeply enjoyable book that demonstrates the power of "stories" to pull us out of the here and now and make us to stand up straighter, to imagine ourselves as knights and ladies. Grahame's book would be great for older children (young ones may find themselves fidgeting - there is a certain amount of description and archaic language). Adults may actually enjoy this one more than kids. Reading it brought back to me the days of my youth, when a good story could fire my imagination for days, and the characters lived right along side of me, as sort of doppelgangers. This story reminds me of E. Nesbit, another great Edwardian children's writer. Children should read these books, they are well-written and can help foster a love for the "right word" and the well-turned phrase. Try to find a copy with Parrish's illustrations. This whole book is just a wonderful aesthetic experience.

A young SDA minister with promise of being a premiere evangelist eventually turning on the very church he loves, finds God's love in the midst of his bitterness. This is the story of John Osborne. In this book we see how God led John from a rebellious youth to a minister of the gospel. Just when it appears that he is on the road to a successful ministry, he is derailed by long standing bitterness harbored against his bretheren and joins up with dissident organizations. It is only reading a small pamphlet left in his production trailer that he realizes his error and begins on the journey back home. For anyone who has suffered resentment or bitterness because of things that have happened to them in the church, I strongly encourage them to read John's story. As his heart was warmed by God's love, may yours be also.

This is excellent for beginning readers and writers of poetry. In the essays at the beginning, Koch is successful at convincing the reader that poetry is not as hard as we make it out to be. If we relax and don't allow ourselves to be intimidated, we can enjoy poetry. The rest of the book is devoted to groups of poems, each by one poet, thereby allowing the reader to get to know writers' styles. At the end of each section is a poetry writing exercise asking the reader to write a poem in the style they have just read. These are excellent exercises for broadening anyone's writing; they have certainly broadend my own writing. The only criticism that I have of the book is that the poets included are mostly men. I would think that it could have been more inclusive of women, especially the confessional poets such as Plath whose style new poets may grasp. Overall, this is a great book for teachers, writers, and readers.

This is an excellent book for beginning readers and writers of poetry. Koch introduces the reader to poetry as an art form that can be accessible if one does not make it too hard; he makes poetry less intimidating, more comfortable. He tries to explain how we can understand it without feeling stupid. Then, he groups poems by poet so that the reader can get to know each poet's style. Finally, each section is followed by an exercise directing the reader to write in a given poet's style. I have found the exercises thought provoking; they have broadened my own writing. My only criticism is that most of the great poets represented are men. The same could certainly be done and very successfully with more women poets, especially the confessional poets such as Plath. Overall, a great book for teachers, for writers, and for those who would like to know more about poetry but who need some convincing.

Am daunted, in the task of writing a review, by the fact that the previous reviewers all got it exactly right! The late Kenneth Koch (1925-2002), whimsical poet, teacher, and enthusiast for the evangel of poetry here gives us a book ideally suited for any poet or reader from high-schooler to nonagenarian.

The first 135 pages of the book are something of an instruction manual, or an explanation of why poetry seems so strange at first. He patiently explains the obvious : sound matters as much as sense; words have musical value; there is a "poetry language" -- or perhaps several poetry languages? -- that we discover through reading anything & everything in sight. He comes up with the happy comparison of poetry as language being put through a synthesizer!

He speaks of the need to build up a "poetry base" through much exposure to the poems of the past and present; he "opens up" the Wallace Stevens poem "Anecdote of the Jar" and makes enchanting a poem that irritated me on previous readings; he makes apposite remarks on revision and inspiration ...

The latter half of the book is a neat -- but not quite comprehensive, as Koch himself admits -- anthology of poetry from across the globe, & encompassing three millennia. From Li Po (Li Bai) to Lorca, from Sappho to Snyder, from Ovid to O'Hara. Senghor and Cesaire are alongside Ashbery and Wallace Stevens. Marvell and Shakespeare, Whitman and Hopkins and several in between, before and after. Most of the poems are suffixed by a comment by Koch of less than a page (except for Keats's "Bright Star" which he allows to shine by itself!). Especially good, I thought, his brief note on the sonnet by George Herbert, "Prayer," which I have been trying of late to memorize.

Excellent reading for the train, the waiting room, the bed, or whatever region of the house you call your workshop or study!!

This is an easy,fast read and gives lots of examples of how compound interest works for you.It inspires you to believe it is never too late to start saving.

The author relies on Austin's newspaper (no longer in print) called the Reese River Reveille to describe what every day life in Austin was like, from its founding in the 1860s to about the 1950s. Most of the book focuses on the 1860s, when Austin was founded as a mining town. The book then discusses its growth and development, the struggles of its inhabitants in an isolated location, and the hopes for Austin's own "place in the sun" as a premier western town.

The book is easy to read and very enjoyable. Having spent about a month in Austin this summer, I was pleasantly surprised to find this book in my college's library. Recommended for anyone interested in frontier history.