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For ten years Rachel has built a new life creating an image of strength and powerful sexuality. The mask had become to convincing, in fact, that she even fooled herself into believing the Belinda Rachel of her childhood bad been banished forever. Now she plans to attend her high school reunion to taunt, tease and leaving hanging the three men she blames most for her miserable childhood. She left her small town of Braemer a fat, shy girl. She returns a svelte sex kitten. Those who were responsible for voting her "Most Likely to Die a Virgin" would be panting for her attention.
In her new life in New York, Rachel always maintained the upper hand, never letting anyone too close. Typically, when a man started to get even remotely close, she dumped him. The one man she dated for a month soon say through her tough veneer and quickly departed rather than live with the vulnerability beneath her exterior. Therefore, she was ill prepared for her reaction to the charismatic, sexy man who rescues her at the side of road.
Garrett was immediately enamoured with the beautiful woman standing over the wounded black lab at the side of the road. Amazed by her resourcefulness, Garrett admired the way she used her pantyhose as an emergency bandage, and quickly put his veterinarian skills to work helping with the hurt dog. When Rachel mistakes him for her high school nemesis, Garrett doesn't volunteer that he's not Carl, but Carl's elder brother. The dazzling woman before him conceals vulnerability that touches his heart, and from the first moment he sees her, Garrett determines to make her a part of his life. Even if he has to help her with her plans of revenge.
RECKLESS will delight romance lovers with his enticing plot and vivid characterization. Kenner has a knack for creating characters that really pull the reader into the story. Walking a bit on the wild side, RECKLESS combines the wanton and the wild with the vulnerable and the shy to create a remarkable tale of love. RECKLESS is very highly recommened!
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The Red Trailer Mystery does get confusing and could have used a map, but the author summarizes the action periodically, and it sounds natural and helps develop the reader's comprehension and critical thinking.
I think this series gave me an appreciation in my adult life for the benefits of family, community, and enduring friendships.
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There's stuff such as the sailing ship (Eclipse) that was hit by a meteorite out in the Pacific Ocean. The funniest entires in here are real life grave stones such as Here Lies the Body of Jonathan Blake, Stepped on the Gas Instead of the Brake. You'll also see photographs of stuff like the world's biggest broom and smallest violin as well as hotels shaped like elephants. Read about the guy who returned a library book his grandfather borrowed that was 145 years overdue and was fined $22, 646. There's so much to see and read in this huge encyclopedia. You have to own it.
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It is written in non-technical language and includes a plethora of illustrations, some of them humorous. It provides enough information so that reader can deal effectively with professionals, should that become necessary. While it mainly focuses on the traditional septic tank, it also describes many alternatives which can be used in situations where the standard tank may not be applicable.
There is also an intriguing history of sanitation. I was fascinated to learn that the re were flush toilets in the Indus Valley (now Pakistan) in 2500 BC!
Also included is an extensive bibiolography, including web sites, and a list of suppliers of various secptic-related products.
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PS... even more fun is seeing the old pictures of Julianne Moore and Meg Ryan, both major characters in the 80's...
The book is chock-full of pictures of cast members, and includes special sections on As The World Turns weddings, personal anecdotes from the actors, and features pieces on former ATWT actors who have achieved superstardom. A wonderful feature of the book is a complete cast list.
If you watch As The World Turns, you must add this book to your personal library.
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Southern Living has collected their best recipes from the past thirty years, including, apparently, quite a few from those blissful years in the 70's when the future seemed to stretch on forever and we felt no guilt about indulging our taste for lots of butter, eggs, and heavy cream. The recipes are all fantastic and relatively easy to prepare, and some, such as the Baked Spicy Beef Chimichangas have been updated to suggest spraying them with cooking spray and baking them, rather than deep frying, to lower the fat content, though the frying instructions are still included. None of the recipes, however, include any nutritional analysis.
What I find most surprising is the extent to which the baking recipes, especially, have not changed with the times. I had hoped the book would help me update some of my S.L. favorites by suggesting some options for reducing the fat and cholesterol while still remaining delicious. Alas, of the 25 recipes for cakes (excluding jelly rolls), nine still call for at least one full cup (one-half pound) of butter. Some also call for six eggs. No options are suggested, though there must be some which would not compromise the recipes too much! When one adds to this the fact that the microwave is seldom, if ever, mentioned and that none of the recipes seem to indicate whether something can be frozen or for how long, the cookbook feels a bit dated, not completely in tune with today's greater health-consciousness and S.L.'s older readership trying to be more conscientious about food preparation.
Some of the recipes are incredibly easy to make (Bibb Salad w/ Raspberry Maple Vinaigrette; Jalapeno Coleslaw) and taste fabulous. Others, like the Almond Braid, seem more complicated but turn out great and taste wonderful. This is because Southern Living creates their recipes from the point of view of the average cook in the average kitchen, so the instructions always make sense, use techniques and equipment I am already familiar with, and are easy to follow.
I have made many of the recipes in this cookbook and every one of them has tasted great and gotten rave reviews. My only complaint is that there are too few recipes. I highly recommend this book!
Be careful about lending out the book. I made the mistake of showing the cookbook to coworkers - now I am "allowed" to take the book home at night, but someone else always wants to borrow it to get the recipe for Black Walnut Cake or Mississippi Mud Pie, etc. Everyone comments that the ingredients are commonly available. Some recipes are simple, some require more time. But if you have a hankering for a certain dish, you know you can trust the Southern Living recipe!
This would be a great gift for a new cook (I can imagine no better way to build an instant reputation as a "great cook") or for the cookbook addict who adores great food.
p.s. I am not tied to the magazine or the publisher.
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At 1040 large (8.5 x 11) pages it is the ultimate guide to unicode. With information on scripts and glyphs I had no idea even existed.
However if you are just getting started with Unicode I would recomend you get Unicode a Primer written by Tony Graham from M&T books. If you understand or feel you are starting to understand Unicode then The Unicode Standard Version 3.0 is the best comprehensive reference on the subject out today.
This book is essential for software engineers, at least for the next ten years or so. All programmers should understand characters, and UNICODE is the best we have for now. Even if you don't need it in your personal library, you need it in your company or school library.
The standard is flawed, as all real standards are, but it is a functioning standard, and it should be sufficient for many purposes for the near future.
The book itself is fairly well laid out, contains an introduction to character handling problems and methods for most of the major languages in use in our present world as well as tables of basic images for all code points. Be aware that these are _only_ basic images. For most internationalization purposes, be prepared for more research. (And please share your results.)
**** Finally, UNICODE is _not_ a 16 bit code. ****
(This is well explained in the book.) It just turned out that there really are over 50,000 Han characters. (Mojikyo records more than 90,000.) UNICODE can be encoded in an eight-bit or 16-bit expanding method or a 32-bit non-expanding method. The expanding methods can be _cleanly_ parsed, frontwards, backwards, and from the middle, which is a significant improvement over previous methods.
Some of the material in the book is available at the UNICODE consortium's site, but the book is easier to read anyway. One complaint I have about the included CD is that the music track gets in the way of reading the transform files on my iBook.
Central to the book, taking up the larger part of it, are the tables of the characters themselves, printed large with annotations and cross-references. If you enjoy the lure of strange symbols and curious writing systems then browsing these will occupy delightful hours.
For the Latin alphabet alone there are pages of accented letters and extended Latin alphabet characters used in particular languages or places or traditions: Pan-Turkic "oi", African clicks and other African sounds, obsolete letters from Old English and Old Norse, an "ou" digraph used only in Huron/Algonquin languages in Quebec, and many others, particularly those used for phonetic/phonemic transcriptions.
The Greek character set includes archaic letters and additional letters used in Coptic.
Character sets carried over from previous editions with additions and corrections are Cyrillic (with many national characters), Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Arabic (again many national and dialect characters), the most common Hindu scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam), Tibetan, Thai, Lao, Hangul, Bopomofo, Japanese Katakana and Hiragana, capped by the enormous Han character set containing over 27,000 of the most commonly used ideographs in Chinese/Japanese/Korean writing. Then there are the symbols: mathematical/logical (including lots of arrows), technical, geometrical, and pictographic. You'll find astrological/zodiacal signs, chess pieces, I-Ching trigrams, Roman numerals not commonly known, and much more.
Scripts appearing for the first time this release are Syriac, Ethiopic, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherookee, Runes, Ogham, Yi, Mongolian, Sinhala, Thaana, Khmer, Myanmar, complete Braille patterns, and keyboard character sets. And yes, there are public domain/shareware fonts available on the web that support these with their new Unicode values.
There are very good (and not always brief) descriptions of the various scripts and of the special symbol sets. Rounding out the book are some involved, turgid (necessarily so) technical articles on composition, character properties, implementation guidelines, and combining characters, providing rules to use the character properties tables on the CD that accompanies the book. After all, this is the complete official, definitive Unicode standard.
Of course this version, 3.0, is already out-of-date. But updates and corrections are easily available from the official Unicode website where data for 3.1 Beta appears as I write this. My book bulges with interleaved additions and changes. And that's very good. Many standards have died or been superceded because the organizations behind them did not keep up with users' needs or the information was not easily accessible.
Caveats?
The notes on actual uses of the characters could be more extensive, particularly on Latin extended characters. More variants of some glyphs should be shown, as in previous editions, if only in the notations.
Some character names are clumsy or inaccurate (occasionly noted in the book), because of necessity to be compatible with ISO/IEC 10646 and with earlier versions of the Unicode standard. For example, many character names begin with "LEFT" rather than "OPENING" or "RIGHT" rather than "CLOSING" though the same character code is to be used for a mirrored version of the character in right-to-left scripts where "LEFT" and "RIGHT" then become incorrect. And sample this humorous quotation from page 298: "Despite its name, U+0043 SCRIPT CAPITAL LETTER P is neither script nor capital--it is uniquely the Weierstrass elliptic function derived from a calligraphic lowercase p."
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I cannot say that the challenges I faced at 23 resembled Paige's in any form or shape - but the emotional roller coaster, the confusion, the soul searching - those were all so familiar, so real.
The Book is now on loan to my sister-in-law who is actually 23 years old. Her perspective will be interesting.
Two thumbs up.