Five stars plus! I am thrilled that Patrick Dennis' "Little Me" will be re-released in October. Bar none, this is the FUNNIEST spoof I have ever read. Although I liked "Auntie Mame," it pales in comparison to the tale of stage and screen star Belle Poitrine. I laughed out loud several times every page. I have lent this book to friends who share my enthusiam for this utter masterpiece of satiric "celebrity autobiography". The many photos interspersed throughout are wonderfully done also. Feeling down? Need a lift? This extravagantly witty book will do the trick! Put it this way: "Little Me" out-cartoons New Yorker cartoons. I have no higher praise! I would give the book ten stars if I could.

"Little Me" is a lavish autobiography of an completely fictional (but wonderfully imagined) movie actress. This book is a witty parody of every self-serving and self-deceiving memoir ever penned by a movie star (and their "ghost writer"). On the surface all is respectability, but between the lines it's bawdy and gay and very funny. We are treated to hundreds of photos, including Belle's favorite leading man "Letch Feely" and her "pals" Carstair Bagley (cum Charles Laughton) and "Helen Highwater". One of the daffiest elements is the excessive use of "quotation marks" to set off "Hollywood lingo" -- all of which is very familiar to the average movie fan. (I recently discovered this same bad habit in a movie memoir entitled "A Cast of Thousands" by Anita Loos. She wrote it in the 50s, so I'm pretty sure Dennis was parodying her use of quotations.) Patrick Dennis got is so right that he even has Belle referring to her child as "Baby Dearest" -- and this was YEARS before the tell-all book "Mommie Dearest!" Read this book out loud and you and your friends will be laughing out loud!

Five stars plus! I am thrilled that Patrick Dennis' "Little Me" will be re-released in October. Bar none, this is the FUNNIEST spoof I have ever read. Although I liked "Auntie Mame," it pales in comparison to the tale of stage and screen star Belle Poitrine. I laughed out loud several times every page. I have lent this book to friends who share my enthusiam for this utter masterpiece of satiric "celebrity autobiography". The many photos interspersed throughout are wonderfully done also. Feeling down? Need a lift? This extravagantly witty book will do the trick! Put it this way: "Little Me" out-cartoons New Yorker cartoons. I have no higher praise! I would give the book ten stars if I could.

I found this book buried among a bunch of unread books during a recent move and did not even recall buying it. The cover and title caught my attention so I started to read it and could not put it down. The main character, Susan Given, a DA, was interesting to say the least. She is on the edge of a breakdown, more than likely from being overworked, and decides to take a friend up on a vacation offer. She ends up on an island where she befriends a native named Ascension, only to bear witness to his killing weeks later. She returns home to NYC, only to have to end up dealing with the same people from the island in the long run. While I felt that a little too neat and convenient as far as storylines go, I did find it ingenious. Susan has to deal with an impending divorce, an overzealous boss, raging hormones in her two daughters, an oversexed niece, and an array of other problems all at once, including a serial killer aptly named Rice Krispies. I would definitely read another "Given" mystery and plan to order Given the Crime right now.

Ten weeks have passed since Susan Given, head of the Manhattan District Attorney's Asset Forfeiture Division, barely survived a harrowing experience (see GIVEN THE CRIME) that would have broken a lesser person. Still, every evening Susan suffers from a recurring nightmare in which a hulk tries to kill her. Her former spouse, TV psychiatrist Dr. Hugh Carver, adds to her problems when he threatens her with a custody suit. Realizing that his star attorney is not quite the same. Manhattan DA Bill Archibald arranges for Susan to meet with psychiatrist, Dr. Imogen Blythe, who blithely tells Susan that she needs a vaation.

Susan flies to the Caribbean island of St. Stephens. However, Susan's idyll vacation goes astray when she becomes lost while parasailing. However, worse yet is that she crash lands near where the local drug lord, Crimson, is taking care of business. Feeling that she is a witness to a murder, he plans to kill her, but she is rescued before he can carry out the deed. Susan leaves paradise for the safe environs of Manhattan, not knowing that Crimson plans to follow her in order to silence the only person he believes who can destroy his empire.

GIVEN THE EVIDENCE, with the second appearance of Susan Given, is an exciting tale that blends elements from the legal procedural with that of a thriller. The story line is fast-paced on both islands and the support cast has fully developed characters. However, Susan is the show as her fears and motivations propel the novel forward in a jocular but dire manner. Margaret Barrett and Charles Dennis have the beginnings of what is hopefully a long running series.

Harriet Klausner

Ten weeks have passed since Susan Given, head of the Manhattan District Attorney's Asset Forfeiture Division, barely survived a harrowing experience (see GIVEN THE CRIME) that would have broken a lesser person. Still, every evening Susan suffers from a recurring nightmare in which a hulk tries to kill her. Her former spouse, TV psychiatrist Dr. Hugh Carver, adds to her problems when he threatens her with a custody suit. Realizing that his star attorney is not quite the same. Manhattan DA Bill Archibald arranges for Susan to meet with psychiatrist, Dr. Imogen Blythe, who blithely tells Susan that she needs a vaation.

Susan flies to the Caribbean island of St. Stephens. However, Susan's idyll vacation goes astray when she becomes lost while parasailing. However, worse yet is that she crash lands near where the local drug lord, Crimson, is taking care of business. Feeling that she is a witness to a murder, he plans to kill her, but she is rescued before he can carry out the deed. Susan leaves paradise for the safe environs of Manhattan, not knowing that Crimson plans to follow her in order to silence the only person he believes who can destroy his empire.

GIVEN THE EVIDENCE, with the second appearance of Susan Given, is an exciting tale that blends elements from the legal procedural with that of a thriller. The story line is fast-paced on both islands and the support cast has fully developed characters. However, Susan is the show as her fears and motivations propel the novel forward in a jocular but dire manner. Margaret Barrett and Charles Dennis have the beginnings of what is hopefully a long running series.

Harriet Klausner

It is rare for me to have such unbridled praise for any individual writer, but Metzner is quite simply a shining intellect - a hero among others.

Anything with the name Ralph Metzner even remotely attached to it is a safe buy. Metzner brings vitality and encyclopedic awareness to every project. An elder statesman responsible for such dramatic shifts in consciousness within this nation and throughout the world, buy his works and read them with pleasure.

What is striking about this work is the respect he brings to the subject and the well-constructed tapestry of thought contained within the pages.

Also, the design of this book is beautiful.

Solid content with the stamp of greatness. Palatable to the senses and nourishing to the neurons.

Cannot go wrong here!

This book discusses Ayahuasca from a variety of perspectives: historical, religious, chemical, cultural, horticultural and experiencial. The way the book is structured it would be easy for a reader to skip over the topics that don't interest them. All of the information is presented in a thorough, well-written, and objective manner offering some conclusions while at the same time allowing the reader to form their own.

Most interesting were the 25 or so personal accounts, 3-4 pages each written by people who appeared to Americans/Westerners who took the drug for religious/spiritual purposes and in a religious/spiritual setting. It was clear, based on their mindset (objectives and beliefs) and the religious setting that Ayahuasca seems to somehow create a religious construct through which a person can work through personal issues or sort through personal beliefs. The experience seemed to have a profound affect on most of these people.

Overall, I got the impression that Ayahuasca was not connecting these individuals to something divine outside of themselves, but rather that it was freeing the brain up to explore the subconscious/ID in order to resolve problems or explore issues in the persons life.

Well worth reading if you're interested in this sort of thing.

This book is a basic necessity regardless of where you live. It contains practical ways of dealing with and preparing for critical situations, and makes you realize just how easy it would be to find yourself in those situations. If you are going to leave your house, have it in your car. If you are going to go to the park, have it in your lunch bag. And, for goodness sake, if you are going to venture out more than a few minutes from the general population - car, foot or bike - have it close at hand.

This is it, the original desert survival book, written by the man who did all the field research himself. Buy it, read it, and keep a copy in your car. It's full of useful information which may save your life.

Cottrell's modern day Huck Finn saga is extremely well written & accessible on every level. Not nearly so simplistic as it seems, the author clearly has a grasp of the literary South. Anyone who enjoys becoming enraptured by the power of a crafty storyteller should hope this is not the last we hear from this master in the making.

The cleverly wound tale of the travails of one Patrick Gunn, a young teen growing up the hard way in the contemporary southern U.S. We follow him as he struggles to maintain his moral balance in spite of his family and trailer-trash buddies. There are obvious similarities in the plot to Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn but the book will work on the reader on more than one level and stay with you for quite a while. The prose is told in the easy slang of the South. The lazy pastoral setting of most of the early and middle part of the story set up the looming evil that the reader fears building, it's almost a relief when it comes. A highly satisfying novel. Bob Juliano raj@nebula.ispace.co

In bookstores and libraries, literary classics are a dime a dozen. There are so many different editions available of each that the problem becomes one not of finding a good read but of selecting the edition of it that's right for you. Charles Dickens is perhaps the most popular of the past masters. All his books are enormously entertaining, whether he's writing about the tragedies of this world or its travesties. His eye for the ludicrous is faultless; his representation of it in print is perfection. He never fails to paint on the canvass in our mind, with a few simple strokes, a comic character that resembles someone we've met somewhere, sometime in our lives. His characters are so real that he needs to do nothing more than describe their appearance briefly and then let them speak for themselves. They speak with all the dignity and importance we all feel in ourselves, yet they unwittingly disclose for the reader all the foibles we all possess ... and mistakenly think known only to ourselves. Likewise, when introducing tragic characters, Dickens prefers to offer brief but unerringly accurate descriptions of their build, demeanor, and dress, and then allow their own words and actions to speak for themselves. His creations elicit mirth and misery in us without fail as Dickens masterfully plucks the strings of our hearts.

Unlike most writers, Dickens is equally at home in both the short story and the full-length novel format. This is because his novels were serialized in periodicals in their first publications. Only later were they edited for book form. "Sketches by Boz" is an offering of Dickens's first attempts at writing for a living. It consists of 56 passages, most of which can be read in a single sitting of less than half an hour. These are divided into four sections: "Our Parish", "Scenes", "Characters", and "Tales". Of these, only the last contains fiction. The 44 nonfiction accounts are just as entertaining as their made-up brothers. In fact, I found them even more fun to read at times. Dickens only thinly disguised the identities of his victims while lampooning them, and as editor Dennis Walder so rightly points out, many of these descriptions would surely result in lawsuits for libel if they were published about public figures today.

This was my first experience reading a Penguin Classics edition of Dickens, and I was extremely pleased with it. The editor introduced "Sketches" with a few notes of academic and historical interest, a particular one of which I found to be of great interest as it finally answered a question I'd had for half my life: namely, where Dickens had acquired his nickname of Boz. But more important for today's reader of Dickens is the "Notes" section at the back of the book in which Mr. Walder defines Dickensian slang and explains the author's references to people, events, and places of early nineteenth century London. Much of Dickens's wit is lost on today's reader without such disclosures.

One of my favorite ways of reading a classic author is to collect all of his or her works and then read through them at a leisurely pace in the order they were written. I did this with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with the intention of noting how his style developed over the years. I was surprised to find an unexpected benefit of that project: I was transported to those times and felt as I imagine one of Doyle's contemporary fans must have felt as he read each new Sherlock Holmes story. After finishing Doyle, I immediately began collecting Dickens for a similar project. "Sketches by Boz", being a collection of Dickens's first literary efforts, was of course the first in this series. The second Dickens book is "The Pickwick Papers", of which I have the Library of the Future edition. But after reading the Penguin Classics "Sketches", I'm determined to first replace "Pickwick" with the Penguin edition. The Penguin books are reasonably priced and well worth every penny.

This was a wonderful collection of all of Charles Dickens works! I highly recommend!

This book is just so full of useful information and details. It has a lot of problems for which most of the solutions are supplied. Man, I love differential manifolds after spending some quality time with this book.

Each of the books in this series were well written, and thought out. I believe that this series could really help better the understanding of what role Radiation Therapists have and play in the treatment of Cancer and Aids patients. My sincere appreciation goes out to Charles M. Washington and the group of contributors for their role in the education of Radiation Therapists. As a student therapist I found the book essential to aid in my studies and boards, I feel that this has impressed upon me to be a better therapist

Why does everything in America face its greatest challenge from the moralizers and the moral crusades that tilt in all directions here? This book will not answer exactly that question, but it will open your eyes to the incredible extent to which Americans have lost all sense for when it is appropriate and when it is inappropriate to meddle into the affairs of others. We have weather meddlers announcing every little storm to us on the evening news and reminding us to button up when the cold snaps start. We have a meddlesome health and nutrition racket that is official information on the evening news every day and an emotional testament in the mail every week. There is almost nothing to eat if you are too weak willed to resist the food moralizing industry. We have education moralizers in greater number than we have teachers. We have so many meddlers in the education game that education has become all but impossible. Then there are the meddling attorneys who see every misfortunate experience as the violation of some kind of right to pleasant times, or at any rate as an opportunity to meddle with the laws by testing and straining at them and the sanity of juries together.

This book is welcome relief. The subject matter is of extreme importance. Plato and Aristotle are in agreement that a portion of the state must meddle into the affairs of its citizens. There is no doubt, as the authors point out, that there is virtuous meddling. But there is also a point at which meddling is a vice. There can be no doubt about that either.
In one chapter, the authors look at the ideologies of meddling. I found this valuable. They show that the so called right and left in politics is a terribly specious distinction in the understanding of cultural affairs. Meddling ideologies are shared by most sides in all affairs of state in America today. Even the libertarians are not above meddlesome intent. The work is well done. It deserves five stars for its subject matter and writing alone. But it is a book on the right topic at the right time. For that it deserves an extra award for timeliness and pertinence. The chapters outlining the types of meddlers and their means of self-promotion and self-justification are simply engrossing.

I read the Thoroughbred Legends book on Exterminator and in it, the author mentions a book that she enjoyed in her earlier days about this old time racehorse, written by Mildred Pace. I found it had been reissued and was available on Amazon. However, this new version of the book was re-edited to be suited to adults who were just learning how to read, which I believe is a great idea. Long syllable words are replaced by short syllable words and sentences are very short. But understand that this is early elementary level reading.

The concept of the new version is great, but if you are interested in learning more about Exterminator, this one probably won't be satisfying to you.

This is the only book I remember reading as a young child. I probably read it 20 times. I have no idea where my old copy is, but I'm ordering one for me and one for my nieces. It was a GREAT story! Both happy and sad.

I first read this book as a child of about 8. Throughly enjoyed the story then. Remembered that it brought tears to my eyes each time I read it. Although it's been many years since I've read the story, I'm sure it still has the same impact. Waiting for the book to arrive so that I may enjoy it again. Great read for all ages.