This is an adorable book to have in your child's sports library. And if know of any kids who love Green Bay's famous Packers, this is a wonderful gift. It's also a great gift for anyone - adult or child - who is a Dallas Cowboy's fan. And of course, you are the one who helps Green Bay beat those Cowboys! All the Way - Green Bay!

If you want to make the big bucks sueing the deep pockets because there are a lot of stupid people in this country then this is the book and class for you! However, if you subscribe to the outmoded idea that personal responsibility for you actions is a value worth having then I would skip this subject.

Joe Green is known to most as an outstanding British scientist who played a key role in our understanding of the role of vitamins in human health. His passion for literature is manifold - his encyclopedic book on detective fiction is available in many reference libraries to the connoisseurs of this genre. But we think that Joe will be ultimately remembered as the author of the definitive works on the life of Jews in London between the wars. This minority played an important role in the formation of the modern British culture and society in general. Joe was an integral part of it and his superb command of the history and the English language makes this book not only full of interesting facts but a truly captive reading beyond those of typical history books. His autobiographical approach makes you laugh and cry as you race through the pages. The price of this hardcover book is high but you will be keeping it on your bedside for many years as great fun to read.

Okay, I give this book 4 stars because it's a joy to read when you're in a hurry to get other things done, mainly because the book only has an average of 4 words a page, and if I ignore the illustrations (Not easy - read on to find out why) I can finish the book in within one minute. Also, I got this book cheap but in near mint condition at a second-hand books store, so I'll go easy on it... Oh, yeah - the four-words-a-page-average also helps out if you somehow got yourself into a bet with a friend that requires you to read a whole book in a minute.

But the best thing about the book is it's illustrations. It's wonderfully done, and the puppets that we see on the show are well drawn (yes, this one has illustrations of the puppets and not photographs of the puppets). The illustrations are bright and are accurate enough so that you can tell which's a illustration of which puppet. Mathieu has done another great job at illustrating this one.

The only thing to remember when you're getting the book (and this being my only major gripe of the book) is that you're _not_ getting a novelization of the episode on TV. The differences, unlike those of Marc Brown's D.W. books, are major. Never mind that the plot is about the same - in the TV show, Leona did not go into Gawain's world and cause the knights and spectators to clash among themsleves, nor did she wonder into a fairy tale neighbourhood and cause the fairy tale characters to clash among themselves either. And Dr. Nitwhite (whom I, like many others, are fond of calling him Dr. Nit-wit) wasn't even in that episode, as far as I can remember, yet he still makes an appearance in the book.

In a nutshell: Nice book for toddlers or to have as backup in case of those dreaded I-can-read-a-whole-book-in-a-minute bets, but not for those who want a novelization of the episode.

My four year old son finally has a book that he feels confidant enough to read to any person that he might come across on the street. He is so proud that he can read the book, and is now able to correctly read these words in other books as well. It is so nice to have a first reader that is truly a first reader.

This delightful book contains only six words, which repeat over and over, so even non-readers will be able to "read" it back to you after only a couple of hearings. The story -- based on an episode from the wonderful new PBS show, Between the Lions -- is great fun, and Joe Mathieu's clever illustrations -- as always -- are amusing for both kids AND adults.

Skillfully written; shrewdly argued, but the premise just doesn't hold up. A few businesses could economically cut greenhouse gas emissions and will learn this sooner or later. This reduction, however, is a trickle in the ocean. Kyoto is only marginally more valuable. The only way to prevent global warming is to remove greenhouse gases from the air or otherwise cool the Earth; a multibillion dollar decades long research project is needed. The really interesting topic for Dr. Romm's next book could be why the conferences and media coverage about global warming never seem to mention this fact.

The book should enlighten those equating the green movement with adverse economic impact. It simply doesnt have to be the case. Companies like Shell and Dow are realizing, the early birds will gain serious competitive advantages when adopting "cooler" operating philosophies including: lower operating costs in general, increased productivity, and lower carbon costs when they ultimately get implemented. Numerous verified examples are provided that cement what should be a common sense belief that reduction of waste (all types) lead to leaner more competitive companies.

I approached my own boss with these ideas and received a chuckle in response. Its an uphill fight out there, hopefully the more people become informed, the easier it will be. This book is a great one to hand to a nay sayer. (I plan on sending a copy to both my boss and President Bush for Christmas)

By Stephen Corrick Reprinted with permission...Joseph J. Romm was an Assistant Secretary of theUS Department of Energy. He obviously learned his lessons well. Hisbook, Cool Companies, makes an overwhelming case: Not only willreducing greenhouse gases not hurt companies' ability to compete, the action of reducing greenhouse gases (and industrial energy waste generally) offers the single easiest productivity booster, and among the shortest payback periods of any available to American industry today.

Cool Companies offers insights into the detailed processes by which all company sites-from industrial giants like DuPont and 3M all the way down to individual apartment owners-have used greenhouse gas emission reduction to drive many more dollars to their bottom line.

The only question one is left with after Romm so effectively makes his case is why the coal and oil companies are playing Chicken Little and screaming that reducing greenhouse gases will hurt American business. Obviously, the only American businesses they are referring to must be their own. The Wall Street Journal and the American Chamber of Commerce would be well served to get the true picture and start representing the needs and interests of the majority of their customers-whose interests, at this point, are often diametrically opposed to those of the fossil fuel industry.

Warmed over Maugham, with a touch of Goethe.

My grandmother sent me this novel ten years ago. I read it in day, and ten years later reread it in a day. It is a good visual novel that digresses into the small-time life of turn-of-the-century Scotland while creating a modestly suspenseful plot centered about the tribulations of an alienated youth compelled to live as an outsider amongst modestly eccentric personalities.

Yet the moral aspects are done better by Maugham (Of Human Bondage), while the visual images of windy crags and intense emotion are done better by numerous people, especially Goethe.

A fun, but second-rate novel.

Randomly picking this book from the shelf in the library, I knew nothing of the novel or author, and was hoping I had not picked a second-rate novel. Pleasanlty, I was surprised! The plot is realistic centering around a richly developed Catholic boy. Though book one was somewhat slow developing the plot and characters, books two and three were well worth the wait and made me anxious to continue reading. However, I was somewhat dissapointed with the anticlimax end, but you'll have to read it to see for yourself!

I started because I couldn't find the book I actually wanted to read, and to my surprise, found that it was an engrossing and well-written novel.

It reminded me, as it did the reviewer below, of Maugham's excellent "Of Human Bondage," but I thought it was actually better. It lacked the cynicism of Maugham's book, and instead of endless philosophizing, it simply provided the reader with good thought-provoking material and left him to draw his own conclusions, if he wished.

It was also consistently enjoyable, though some sections were rather depressing.

The characters were realistic and vital. Most of them were multi-dimensional, while a few of them were deliberately done in one dimension. As in real life, one was constantly changing one's opinions about the characters. It was unusually good in this respect.

The plot, finally, was engrossing and, again, realistic. I recommend the book, noting that in my opinion at least, it is far superior to the author's most famous work, "The Keys of the Kingdom."

-Stephen

I read this book because it takes place in a geographical area in which I am interested, the Palo Alto/East Palo region of the San Francisco Bay Area. Unfortunately, there is little local flavor in the book, and what is included is just as often inaccurate as correct. One character takes the BART system down the Peninsula when going home from San Francisco; this is fantasy, pure and simple. There also are discussions of "mergers" between affluent Palo Alto and struggling East Palo Alto, an eventuality that is not only politically unlikely but hindered by the fact that these two cities are located in different counties.

Aside from this, what Green essentially provides here is a portrait of a number of desperate young African American Stanford students and their sometimes shadowy worlds. There isn't much plot here, but the character portrayals are interesting enough to make the book worth reading.

I think NOT! However, it could happen if all the craziness that takes place in this novel were to indeed take place if the wealthy folks of Palo Alto started an effort to push out the poor folk of East Palo Alto. A good read.

Ambition can be a dangerous thing. And these five young, black, beautiful, and upwardly mobile graduates of Stanford University are certainly ambitious.

There is Steve, the politician with the white wife and the dark secret; Frankie who drives a mercedes, and supports a crippling cocaine habit; Daze, who is beautiful, and terribly selfish. Then there is Karyn. There was a time when she had everything. But she killed her father.

And Gina. Poor Gina. She loved the world too much and it didn't love her back. So she let it destory her. For all of them there was champagne and strawberries. And the fear of looking back...This story is one wild and exciting read!

LeFanu is by many considered the foremost of Victorian ghost story tellers, but (and I may now be incurring in literary sin) although his writing skills are undisputedly of the finest caliber, I did not find his stories as poignant and spine-tingling as Edgar Allen Poe's or his style as graceful and fluent as E. F. Benson's, for example; in fact, I'd say there is something a little bit too elaborate and artful about some of the passages in this book as if LeFanu had thought it worthwhile sacrificing the pleasure of reading to the exquisiteness of his occasionally almost labored literary expression. There are actually instances in which I find it difficult to picture the scenes and characters in the narrative - take the descriptions of the inside and outside of Gylingden Hall (story 2) or of Sir Ardagh's castle (story 4) - though I recognize that such impressions may of course be unjust and ensue not from the text but from the limitations of the reviewer himself.

The first and last of the four stories collected in this Dover edition are definitely the most exciting and convey a feeling of completeness which is rather absent from the second and third tales. A very striking feature of the story "Green Tea", for instance, is the razor-sharp precision with which LeFanu distinguishes between subjective and objective psychic realities, and between suggestion and predisposition. The reverend in the tale has suffered damage to the subtle involucre protecting his physical body against unwanted sensory impressions and the leaking out of vital force, and so has become permanently exposed not to hallucinations but to involuntary contacts with entities or energies pertaining to the lower psychic realms, the intimacy of which most of us are mercifully spared. The problem seems to be mendable by physically occluding the fissures produced in his natural defense and thus restoring his involucre to normality, but the reverend himself sees these deeply disquieting trials as a personal chastisement from God - an interpretation of the facts which is always a valid possibility - and eventually succumbs, not to the charges of the enemy but to his own weaknesses and inclinations. A complex and fine plot, indeed.

The story "Green Tea" should be carefully examined by all whose job it is to treat or otherwise help people who suffer from psychic disorders or claim to be haunted by hallucinations - and by those, of course, who love to spend a couple of hours by the fireplace with a mug of hot chocolate and a good yarn.

This is another great find. Joseph Sheridan LeFanu was an Irish writer in the 19th Century. This thin selection of short stories is a tasty little collection. It is a forgotten art form: the ghost story but LeFanu does it quite well. This is Victorian age literature with guts. The tales are spooky but also reveal human psychology in the way great literature should. This is a classic of a bygone era. I will think twice when I hear footsteps in the attic and no one else is home. Many themes of suspense and terror are set down in these tales. Freddie Krueger can not hold a candle to tales like these.

This is a nice change of pace for readers of mysteries,
because it is about a Michigan game warden, and he works
in that "far off" world of the Upper Peninsula. This is
a nice introduction to the rather different life of a
game warden, who sometimes has to work like a regular cop,
but who also has to give priority to the well-being of
the wild animals he is to protect.
And how many game wardens, let along cops, get to work on
tracking down poachers whose ranks include professional

killers of protected animals, foreigners, IRA terrorists,
and whose enemies include tight-lipped FBI agents and
Native Americans?
This guy has a maze of enemies whose relationships equal
those of a soap opera, and he has to sort through them like
the best of our detectives.
The story revolves around a mysterious explosion at an
unusual federal animal research lab on the shores of Lake
Superior, where 2 people are shot at close range, but where,
at the same time, 5 timber wolves escape. And when our game
warden arrives, he finds the place guarded by FBI agents,
with help from the Fish & Wildlife Svc and other strange
people. Plus, as he pokes around, he bumps into an Ojibway
game warden, who shouldn't even be there, but our guy, Grady
Service, hears about a very unusual "blue wolf" which is among
those escaping animals.
This is a nice, intricate mystery involving a large number of
people of all kinds, and it all takes place in the beautiful,
and sometimes lonely, U.P. of Michigan about the time deer
hunting season is to begin. It makes for a complex set of
characters, and this hero's march through the wilderness,
both natural and political, makes good reading.

One thing that I find interesting with this novel is that it is set in London. All of the other Conrad novels I have read so far have dealt with the sea or foreign lands. The exotic quality found in his other novels is still present, as the London Conrad describes is as mysterious as the jungles of Africa and the tropics of the East Indies.

This novel also focused on a broad range of characters, unlike some of his novels that set out to tell the story of a particular character (e.g., Chance, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim).

The story involves espionage and deception, as secret agent Adolph Verloc executes a mission to bomb a place of science (supposedly the Unabomber's inspiration). Adolph the spy/family man, Stevie the slow brother in law and unknowing pawn, the Professor with his suicide bomb, and the deceived wife Winnie are just among the unusual characters Conrad creates.

I especially liked the character Winnie, as her mounting suspicion and eventual realization of her husband's profession and his horrible act provided a moral viewpoint from within the novel (more or less in the form of revulsion and outrage).

Conrad's style of writing can be difficult at times, as he often provides lengthy narrative that can be overwhelming at times. However, acclimation to his style mitigates this, and the results are rewarding.

I really enjoyed this book, and highly recommend this and Conrad's other works.

As I read through the "critical" comments of high school and college students who are assigned to read the works of Joseph Conrad then fuss and fume at the very idea of it, I find myself deeply disappointed by their lack of appreciation for the subtleties of great literature. They have little time or patience to devote to an author who provides his readers with so much vivid description, building toward a stunning and inevitable climax. In the "Secret Agent," Conrad points to the frailties of the human condition, the large forces of nature at work that conspire against the simple and downtrodden man trapped by his own cunning devices. Mr. Verloc is a simple, plodding peasant; and just why he embraces the anarchistic cause is never made clear to the reader, but no matter. He is trapped in a sterile nightmarish world where the idealists and the self-proclaimed revolutionaries are as morally bankrupt and empty of human emotion as the system they purport to overthrow. Conrad's characterizations are brilliant. His use of dialog and description, a hallmark of the early twentieth century realists, and the grim ending to this novel is a masterpiece of understatement. It is too bad that fine old classics of literature like this one and the more famous Conrad novella "The Heart of Darkness" must be subjected to the vapidity and sophomoric opinions of a generation of students weaned on MTV, the Simpsons, and thirty-second TV soundbytes.

The funniest, strangest, or worst (depending on how you look at it) thing about Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent" is that it makes light of a situation -- terrorism -- that maybe was not a big deal at the time it was written but nearly a hundred years later has become a fearsome world problem. The terrorist activity described in this novel apparently is based loosely on a real incident, but Conrad avoids specifying any actual political motivations and instead makes his story as basic and general as possible.

The "terrorist" is a most unassuming man named Mr. Verloc. He runs a stationery and news store in London where he lives with his wife Winnie, her mother, and her mildly retarded brother Stevie. For the past eleven years he has been drawing pay from an unspecified foreign Embassy for occasional information on the activities of an anarchist organization, the "local chapter" of which is comprised of a bunch of malcontent duffers whom he has managed to befriend. An official at the Embassy, Mr. Vladimir, thinks Verloc is not very bright and plans to use him as an agent provocateur to get the anarchist organization in trouble. He suggests to Verloc to blow up an unlikely but symbolic target, the Greenwich Observatory; as the source of the prime meridian or zero-degree longitude, it's like the seam of the world. Using a bomb made by another of society's outcasts, a creepy fellow known only as the Professor, Verloc enlists Stevie's help to carry out his scheme.

Fast forward to immediately after the (unsuccessful) bomb blast: Police Chief Inspector Heat is investigating the incident, reconstructing the crime back to its source, and, interestingly enough, competing with his own superior officer. The post-blast events are where the novel really develops unexpectedly, in which we see what kind of tenuous relationship Verloc has with his wife, and the cruel treachery of one of his dishonest comrades. The structure of the novel is remarkable in the way it establishes the chronology of events, sets the pacing, and lets the scenes unfold as naturally as if they were being staged.

I found this novel to be a lot of fun and, despite the serious subject matter and the fact that it was considered quite violent for its time, actually kind of funny. I see it as not an attempt at a spy story or "thriller" but rather an early example of black humor, in which the narrative is filled with wry wit and each character is given a certain comical edge as if Conrad were making subtle fun of the whole business. It is a book that defies expectations, discards formulas, and immerses itself in the tremendous possibilities of the creativity of great literature.