This is an excellent bok that you will never want to stop reading! It is about two gangs, the Sharks and the Jets. The Jets are Americans and the Sharks are Puerto Ricans. This novel takes place in New York City. Both of the gangs attend a commuity dance to plan a fight, and Tony, an American that used to lead the Jets, falls in love with Maria, a Puerto Rican. Maria's brother is Bernardo, who is the head of the Sharks and despises Tony. How will they solve this? This book is basically a modern version of Romeo and Juliet with changes in characters, and it is definitely something that you should read!

West Side Story by Irving Shulman is an excellent book about two rival street gangs in New York City. The Jets are the white gang; the Sharks are the Puerto Ricans. Barnardo, the leader of the Sharks, has a younger sister named Maria. Problems arise when Maria falls in love with Tony, a member of the Jets. I've seen the movie and read the book. I love them both.

Personally I think that this is proboly the best book I have ever read. This Story tells a tale based on a modern day Romeo and Juliet. Although the story is based on the dramatic story Romeo and Juliet, I find A West Side Story well writen and very touching. The book is set in New York City, and tells how two rival gangs (the Jets, and Sharks). The 2 gangs are fighting over a section of the city. When one member of the Sharks finds love in one of the Jets' sister, the Jet gets very angry. In a street fight the Shark kills his lovers' brother, the shark retreats to a local hide out. later that night the Shark is gunned down by a rival gang member. In the end the 2 gans realize that there is no reason to fight. I love the book.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a scary tall tale told in the quiet town of Sleepy Hollow. It all starts out when Ichabod Crane(an intelligent school teacher) goes to a party at the Van Tassel's house. At the party a mean guy named Brom Bones tells a scary tale, about a headless horseman from the Revolutionary War. It was told that he roamed the night looking for his head, which he lost in battle. That night Ichabod had to ride home, he was very frightened. Lets just say Ichabod was never seen again, the only thing found the next day was his hat.
The legend of Sleepy Hollow is a great thriller. You can tell the tale at night, when you have a sleepover, or around a campfire. The book has a good story line and can be easily followed. I hope you don't get too scared when you read about the Headless Horseman...

Have you ever heard of the Headless Horseman? Have you ever heard the stories about him and how he attacks people in the woods? Have you ever wondered whether or not the story is real?

Find out for yourself by reading Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I enjoyed reading this book and i think anyone who has a liking for mysterious legends and superstitions should read this book beacause of the interesting legend the town believes in. There are few characters to keep track of and the story is not hard to follow. The book is long but the reading goes quickly.

The story is set in the late 18th century in a town in New York called Sleepy Hollow. The town believes in a legend of a headless horseman who rides through the woods at night anf attacks people. The main character is a man named Ichabod Crane who is a schoolteacher from Connecticut. He moves to Sleepy Hollow in search of work and ends up going from home to home working as a tutor. One of his students is 18 year old Katrina Van Tassel who comes from a wealthy family. Ichabod gets the idea that he will try to marry Katrina in order to obtain the family's wealth. However, Katrina's boyrfriend Abraham "Brom Bones" Brut has other plans for Ichabod. As the tension rises, Ichabod continues trying to win Katrina until a breathtaking surprise appearance by the town's legend creates as mysterious an ending as they come.

The book has many strengths and few weaknesses. The author manages to create a mood in the book that keeps you always on th edge of your seat waiting for the legend of the Headless Horseman to come into play. The story is simple and easy to follow but is still very interesting. The characters are developed well and have personalities that you can understand and relate to. One such character is Brom Bones who is easily seen as an arrogant egotist. The only weakness of the book was one based on my personal opinion. The end of the story leaves too much to be concluded for my liking.

All in all, this book was a great story. The author wrote the characters in such a way that you had definite feelings towards each one of them. Also, the story line was definitely not without surprise. But if you want to discover what surprises I am talking about then I suggest you read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Will Moses' illustrated retelling of Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow rivals Arthur Rackham's near century-old version as the best edition of the book ever published. The Rackham version, with its moody, archetypal illustrations, has the slight edge, as it contains Irving's full original text in addition to Rackham's spectacular artwork.

However, Moses's simplification of the narrative is masterfully executed, and the colorful, playful, and numerous paintings which adorn the book have a warm period charm of genuine Americana. Moses portrays the Hudson River Valley as a lush expansive valley not unlike the Garden of Eden on the first day of creation. Happy farmers, their wives and children, cows, geese, ducks and pigs frolic together amid fields of wheat and corn; galleons approach dramatically from the river; and the Catskill Mountains, sun, and sky suggested an infinite panorama and endless horizon full of promise.

The story tells us that the Dutch colonists were a superstitious lot, and that the Sleepy Hollow region itself was or seemed to be under a spell of some kind. The farmers and their wives suspected witchcraft; strange music was heard in the air; visions were seen; and the inhabitants themselves lived their lives in a kind of continuous dreamy revery. These tales and superstitions give rise to the legend of the headless horseman, said to be the ghost of a Hessian soldier who lost his head to a canon ball in the war, and now nightly prowling the region in search of it. Moses' nocturnal landscapes of the swamps, hills and the Old Dutch Cemetery under a bright harvest moon are particularly effective. Significantly, these stark, haunted landscapes do not violate the spirit of the book, but enrich its sense of wonder.

Moses' Ichabod is a cheerful but somewhat hapless fellow, confident and foolish in equal parts. His Katrina is a strong but innocent blond beauty, and a friend to children. Brom Bones is an appropriately square-shouldered, square-jawed hooligan, rowdy and full of mischief, if not absolute spite.

Anyone familiar with the tale knows that it is not a horror story but a folktale, a fireside spook story, and a 'legend' as Irving, writing here as Diedrich Knickerbocker, himself called it. This edition of the book is appropriate for children but is equally suitable for adults. Highly recommended.

I use this book to teach business process management for the MBA class. It does not have the depth or rigor of a textbook, but does a decent job of addressing the major issues.

I got this book based on a friend's recommendation because I was struggling with a process design application called iGrafx Process (also available from Amazon).

I learned that there is much more to process design than basic models based on entry, task, validation and exit criteria. For example, performance measurements and performance efficiency were two areas where this book strengthened my understanding of process design and implementation. They also and enabled me to effectively use iGrafx Process to its fullest.

Other chapters that taught me a lot addressed improvement planning, continuous improvement and process benchmarking. I was able to immediately incorporate the knowledge gained into processes that I was developing, and it made a significant difference in the quality of my work.

The best chapter, in my opinion, was in installing the improved processes. I gained a lot of knowledge and techniques for overcoming barriers and how to objectively measure the degree of improvement. This was reinforced by material that is provided in the appendices, including case studies and an excellent description of Six-Sigma analysis.

Overall, this is a valuable book to anyone who designs or implements new processes, or reengineers existing ones. Most of my work is new design and implementation, so that was the context in which I read the book. If I were assigned to a reengineering project this would be the first book to which I'd turn for guidance and information. It earns a solid five stars and a permanent place in my professional library.

Extremely useful as a practical implementation guide

King's book deals with the performance of Arthur Conan Doyle's short play "A Story of Waterloo" by eminent Victorian actor Henry Irving and a devastating review of this production written by George Bernard Shaw in 1895. The play is about an old and feeble soldier who has played a heroic role at Waterloo and pathetically dies while reliving his finest hour, thereby bringing the house down (in the theatre, that is). King uses this intersection of two remarkable theatrical careers to consider the Victorians' retrospective glance at the Napoleontic wars, the nature of Irving's performance, which by modern standards would be inconceivably sentimental, Irving's relation to his audience, Shaw's development as a critic and playwright, Irving's leading lady Ellen Terry and her son, the theatre director, designer and Irving acolyte Edward Gordon Craig. An instructive and entertaining read for anyone with a broad interest in the theatre and (cultural) history. Highly accessible, but marred by some unnecessary excursions into academic obscurities that the opening chapters had led me to believe were going to be avoided. Still, fascinating stuff.

The Price is a well thought out story of human growth. It is a story of family relationships, particularly one that has collapsed over the years. When forced to come together once and for all, the brothers reunite and are able to find some common ground if any over the price of their own old furniture which is to be sold to a dealer. Far more prominent in this novel is the lesson that relationships need love and attention to flourish, and one cannot put a price on them. This book is fabulously written by the famous author, Arthur Miller who has also written such reknown plays as Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. If you didn't pass up a chance to read those classics, you won't want to pass up a chance to read this one.

When talking about this play, arthur miller said "I don't write plays to conform to critical essays. I write about what interests me. That is my strength and that is my limitation." Yes, it had a very similar plot to DEATH OF A SALESMAN, but the character's, specifically the main character, were very different, which changed the theme of the play. I loved it. It made me think...got me more involved then death of a salesman did. It took serveral readings to get the full jist of it. Victor's sacrifice was for love: it didn't matter if there had been no love in his family--he brought love to it.

Miller's play surrounds the moral development of two brothers: one a dutiful policeman (Victor), the other a successful yet selfish surgeon (Walter). Their most recent encounter takes place during the sale of family furniture and heirlooms -- post a long and silent gap in their relationship catalyzed by an angry family breakup that completely separated the brothers.

During their encounter, Arthur Miller poignantly brings out each brother's personal ethics, and what moral debts each feels the other owes. The 'furniture' and it's price to be sold, which is their central concern (in addition to dealings with the only other two characters in the play - an appraiser (Solomon) and Victor's wife (Esther)) , is merely a bargaining object between the two - a prop - with which each may discover more fully the other's thoughts and ways of being, and somehow, at the end of the day, find some sort of salvation in each other.

Miller's play does have room for updating the "Say! What a swell..." type of older american-english diction for flow. This may be especially encouraging to those who may find some of the colloquialisms inappropriate.

The reader must keep in mind that this is not a novel, and really should not be read like one, word for word. This is more a basic screenplay type, where improvisation by actors who truly understand the characters - and Miller's intent - will ultimately bring the true and dramatic color to a wonderful and thought-provoking story.

This book is about a man who runs away from his father because the father does nothing but yell at him. This book is one of my favorites, even though I gave it a four, because it had a lot of action and it made me want to keep reading. Although I still think that the orignal was one of the better ones that have been written.

The book "Rip Van Winkle" is about a guy named Rip and his father, Dame, who thinks that Rip can never do anything right. Dame is always yelling at Rip. Dame really got mad when Rip sold part of the family property, so he went away for awhile and met some strangers and started to drink quite a lot of beer. You have to read the book to find out what happens next.

Several of these other reviews are for a different version of this story. The one I am reviewing is an "All Aboard Reading" version. It is definitely written for beginning readers (1st-3rd grade)

This version is a good introduction to the classic Washington Irving story. I do not like the way Rip's wife yells at him to get to work or how Rip is only "maybe...a little" sad when we finds out that his wife has died after his long sleep. Neither Rip nor his wife were the most exemplary characters! :-)

Still, that is the way the story was written and can be a good launch into a talk about character.