This book is so cute and the illustrations are really wonderful. It is an easy read and your 5-6 year olds will soon pick up the words. It is my 3 1/2-year-old and 5-year-old's favorite book.

I believe that this book will mean as much to them when they are adults, as Three Billy Goats Gruff means to me. It is a fun read when you change your voice. I really enjoy it myself. Never boring no matter how many times you read it to them, and it teachs a great lesson to boot.

Like a spoonful of sugar, this fun book on manners makes lessons go down with giggles. With lots of monster exaggeration ("spaghetti sauce on our hair is nice", "stop eating my socks!"), these monsters portray typical etiquette and behavior situations that children encounter. They say please, thank you, and excuse me, return borrowed items, pick up their toys, do their chores, bathe, and exibit good sportsmanship. Sometimes they forget their manners and gobble and grab; sometimes they remember and politely pass the peas. Sometimes they quarrel; sometimes they hug. The illustrations of three lovable, silly monsters are colorful and playful and provide lots of visual humor. In the classroom, this book can be a springboard for discussion or for role-playing good and bad manners. This book is a hit with kids!

Quick, name the most unmannerly group of characters on earth. No, besides a bunch preschoolers overdue for a nap. Monsters, right? According to Bethany Roberts, even monsters have manners sometimes. This book, written in verse, shows monsters at their worst and at their best. For example, "They might be very messy, / and leave things where they drop. / But they sometimes clean their rooms / and dust and scrub and mop." Every activity the monsters do is something kids can relate to, such as tearing up toys on bad manners days, and happily putting them away and repairing the broken ones on good manners days. Andrew Glass's monsters are warm and fuzzy. No need to worry about nightmares from this book. In fact, these monsters are an awful lot like little kids, who may sometimes forget their manners, but sometimes they don't.

I really enjoyed Tynia Thomassie's "Cajun Through and Through," a children's book with illustrations by Andrew Glass. The book opens with "A Cajun Glossary and Pronunciation Guide" for those readers who may be encountering terms like "fais do-do" and "gris-gris" for the first time.

The book tells the story of Ti-Boy and Baptiste, two rural Cajun brothers who are being visited by Remington, their cousin from the "big city." At first, Remington has trouble fitting in with his country cousins. But ultimately, they find common ground and realize that Remington is, like the title indicates, as Cajun through and through as his cousins.

Thomassie evokes the vernacular speech of Cajun country throughout the book. Sample dialogue from the boys' mother: "Yo' cousin Remington's comin' from d'big city to visit fo' a spell." The book is very funny; especially hilarious is Remington's reaction to a crawfish meal. The artwork is fun and colorful; Glass does a particularly effective job of rendering the boys' facial expressions throughout the twists and turns of the story. Highly recommended.

As a displaced Cajun in Ohio, it's important for me to pass the heritage along to my children. I have three boys and they loved Tynia Thomassie's previous tales of Feliciana Fedrya LaRoux - and not once did they complain they were "girl" books.

"Cajun Through and Through" features three male characters that illustrate the constant struggle within this culture of who is a "real" Cajun - and for the most part, Cajuns live in the city, in the country and some don't even live in Louisiana! Mais oui!

The market for Cajun-oriented children's books has just begun, but whether you want to enhance your own Cajun or Acadian heritage or you want to expose your children to a real American culture that suffered ethnic cleansing (no, that's not in this book - but you can learn if you want to go further), a proud and practical people - this is an awesome book.

Andrew Glass' illustrations are colorful and whimsical and enhance the story beautifully.

Tres bon!

I have read this story to my third graders for the past few years and they absolutely love it. This is a great story for March. Use as an introduction to the folklore of leprechauns. This story keeps my students' attention until the last page.

The Gift is fantastic! While reading this book, my fourth grade students sometimes roll on the floor in fits of laughter and sometimes sit quietly with eyes glistening. It is beautifully written with an important message about family, love, and roots. Unfortunately, the original art in it is GROTESQUE, probably to blame for its being removed from print. I BEG A PUBLISHER TO GET IT BACK IN PRINT--without illustrations!! I KNOW it will be a big seller!

Inspiring to see combinations of leadlight, painting and all the variants of slumping and etching/sandblasting. So many fantastic ideas, traditional and contemporary.Great to see a book that shows ideas suitable to apply to large scale projects as well as smaller jobs. Best glass book I've found so far.

Author, Kathy Price takes the reader down to the bayou for this marvelous Cajun rendition of the ever popular, Bremen Town Musicians. Meet four elderly, musically inclined friends, a mule, a hound, a rooster, and a cat, in all their craggy glory, trying to save their hides by traveling to New Orleans. "We is goin' to Bourbon Street to bebop and jazz. You can carry a tune and you have a bit of the torch in your song, so come wit' us, and we'll mardi gras and hi-de-ho." But along the way they come across a crawfisher's shack. Inside they spy a table filled with food, and "four roughnecks eatin' wit' jackknives and thumbs." And since it was dinnertime, and they were mighty hungry, these four old friends decide to sing for their supper..... Ms Price's clever retelling is filled with captivating imagery and magic, and with its energetic, rhythmic Cajun dialect, just begs to be read aloud by an enthusiastic storytellier. Andrew Glass' bold, bright, and exuberant illustrations enhance the text with playful humor and witty detail. Perfect for youngsters 4-8, The Bourbon Street Musicians is a manic, rollicking, fun-filled romp. "As grass is green, sho' nuff, y'all."

A truly remarkable book! Once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down. Original, creative, heartfelt and sincere toasts. "Crisp Toasts" is the answer for "those of us" who don't know exactly what to say and when to say it. It gives you direct guidance on helping you find the "perfect" toast for the "perfect" couple. Sincere and meaningful examples are given, some serious and others funny, and insight as to which one is appropriate depending on the situation. I have recommended it to many friends and relatives. What a wonderful reference book to keep throughout the years.

We read this book as a family. We all loved it! From youngest to oldest we were laughing out loud. Great fun!

Imagine this: you're turned into a donkey by an old hag. Then the most beautiful girl you've ever met turns you back into a boy! The only problem is that you are completly naked! All of this happens to Dan'l Pitt of Coven Tree, New England, in this humor packed thriller of a book. The Devil's Donkey is for everybody, because Bill Brittain puts humor, horror, and fantasy all into one book.

I found this book by chance and bought it as a gift for my little sister, and she loves it! The stories are scary and weird, but not horrifying (like some scary books for "children"). And they are great for reading out loud and are not too scary to be used as bedtime stories. Also, most of them have an interesting or surprise ending, which is a big plus when you're trying to entertain kids! I highly recommend this for younger scary story fans!

The story of the husband and wife who switched jobs for the day has been a favorite of mine ever since I was a small child. I've read many versions of it. This version is humorous with bold, colorful illustrations. Unlike most other versions, the setting is in the USA. It's a delightful book to be enjoyed by many.

There is a wonderful irony in the fact that just this book has been published at just this time. In the last three months there has been a great deal of news about the willful and savage destruction of Buddhist art in Afghanistan by the so-called Taliban. Colossal statues carved from living rock (one of them being the largest stone statue then existing in the world) were deliberately blown to smithereens to satisfy some sort of incomprehensible politico-religious bloodlust. The colossal statues stood in the Bamiyan valley. Their atoms are now indistinquishable from the other trillion grains of sand scattered about the foot of the Hindu Kush.

But now, just as one starts to comprehend the staggering degree to which all mankind has been impoverished by these heinous acts, Richard Salomon and his colleagues at the University of Washington and the British Museum offer back to the world something else nearly lost but now recovered -- and by doing so they manage to rekindle at least a little of one's faith in the fundamental decency of mankind. A mere one hundred miles east (and slightly south) of Bamiyan and the now-vaporized collosal statues was found a cache of Buddhist literature written on birch-bark scrolls dating from the first century A.D. They are said to be "the oldest Buddhist texts ever found, as well as the earliest surviving manuscripts in any Indic Language."

There could hardly be any writing material more perishable than birch bark, and these manuscripts were crumpled up and stuffed into earthen jars in a way hardly conducive to their survival. They were acquired by the British Library in 1994. Had they not been, one can easily imagine the maniacal thrill the Taliban would have derived from destroying them along with all the other "unacceptable" art they stumbled upon.

Though on the surface, fragile, crumbling manuscripts and colossal statues cannot be directly equated, I think the apparent difference in size and vulnerability between the two actually makes this story more intriguing. Logically, the statues should have survived but did not; the far-older manuscripts, which have been steadily disintegrating for two thousand years, did! For once it was not the giant statue that got to exclaim, "Look around, ye Mighty, and despair!"

True, by the time Saloman and his colleagues got hold of these manuscripts and began to unroll them, they faced the mother of all jigsaw puzzles, and some pieces were gone forever. The team has now spent years fitting them all back together, devising scholarly restorations of the lost portions of text were possible, and making a comprehensible translation of what emerged.

The present book is intended to be an exhaustive, definitive restoration and translation of only one small component of the total manuscript cache. Indeed the reconstructed manuscript translated here is a bare 44.4 cm by 27 cm in size, and contains only forty four-line verses. In contrast to its physical size, however, is the text's enormous pupularity within Buddhist literature. It is known to have survived in at least two other Indian language versions, Pali and Sanskrit. It is unquestionably one of the loveliest and most evocative statements of the Buddha's teaching about solitute and the role he expects solitute to play in the practice and spiritual growth of his followers. Thoreau, who had a great affinity for Indian literature, would have loved it -- as does nearly everyone else fortunate enough to encounter a sensitive translation.

Saolomon's translation of this elegant sutra is reassuringly familiar to those students of Buddhism who already know an earlier version of it. Though there are minor variations and differences, one's confidence in the reliability of all other received Indian texts (which have been translated and recopied endlessly over the years) is greatly reinforced. Together with the other texts found with it, this cache also helps one get a fix on what literature was apparently regarded as important to literate Buddhists two millennia ago, and just what traditional writings were by then finding their way out of India and onto the historical road to central Asia and beyond. Judging by the quality of this select library, Ghandara, already known to be a flourishing center of Buddhist art, must also have been the site of much very advanced Buddhist teaching, writing, etc.

Make no mistake, this book is devoted largely to scholarly issues, and the bulk of it will be of interest primarily to scholars. However it is also a fresh look at a significant segment of Buddhist literature, derived from the earliest source the world is ever likely to recover. The scholarly preoccupations (paleography, orthography, phonology, morphology, etc.) are informative, but the sutra itself is the real payoff for those whose zeal encompasses merely a serious interest in Buddhism. The thrilled reader stands awestruck by this miraculous feat of ressurection and restoration, and he eagerly awaits publication of the other associated texts, many less well known. When complete, this triumph of Buddhist scholarship may well appear to the intellectual world to assume the proportions of the most colossal of all sculptures, and could have a far deeper impact on our minds and lives.