Stephen's Moon has been an inspiration to me. I read it only a few weeks after my uncle passed away, and it has helped me by reminding me that I am not the only one who grieves. After reading only two or three chapters, I feel like I knew Stephen. Marica is an excellent writer, and I would recommend this book to anyone who has ever lost a loved-one or known anyone who has.

Stephen's Moon is the best book I have ever read. The author captures the reader's attention from the beginning. I couldn't put it down. I felt her pain, I felt her sorrow - I was amazed at the whole book. I was proud of this mother for surviving and helping others through the loss of a loved one.

Marcia Carter writes "My son was my hero". Well, I believe she will become a hero to anyone who reads her story. Living through a tragedy no one would ever want to go through, she writes of the true meaning of love, and how a loved one will always live on in your heart. I have lost loved ones, but never a child, so I can only relate in certain ways, but I know we can all learn about compassion, and the endurance of the human spirit through her words. When you get this book, be ready to read, I stood in my kitchen from the first page, and didn't move til I was finished.

Into the Woods...How can you forget the name and all of its characters if you've seen it before, and if you have not, then it includes such timeless fairy tale names as: Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack (of Beanstalk fame), Little Red Riding Hood, and many others. James Lapine's brilliant script and Stephen Sondheim's astounding score are all in this book! Don't miss out on reading this fantastic book with your kids or for pleasure! This book is great for pleasure reading or if you are looking for an amazing musical to put on. Once you start reading this book, you won't be able to put it down! And if you liked the book...you won't hesitate to buy the video of the original Broadway cast and the CD or cassette! Having all 3 mentioned items and watching, listening, and reading over and over still isn't enough! You will love it too.

This is a wonderful play to introduce students to music, theater, Sondheim, and fairy tales. In my class we read many of the original Grimm Fairy Tales (Dover Ed.) and the Perrault Fairy Tales (Dover) discussing the tales, but also color symbolism, different forms of magic, totems, threshold creatures, etc. Pretty heady stuff for sixth graders, but they LOVE it! Finally we read this wonderful interconnection of Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, Baker and His Wife, Little Red Riding Hood, and more while they are on a quest tale to get things to undo spells. Everyone takes parts and it is AWESOME!! The book is certainly not just for kids, there are very dark themes underlying all of the "fun". These can be discussed and its great to see kids find more to a story than its literal meaning. The VHS tape is then shown, which can be ordered here. This is a taping of the Broadway stage production and is mesmerising. Students think it's awesome. (I do suggest previewing, though. The wolf certainly is "untamed nature" and his coat stops just above what probably should be hidden in a mixed group of sixth graders. :) We just fast forward those three minutes.) This is a great unit. If you would like more info, please contact me via e-mail. This is wonderful stuff, though certainly not Disney!!

This book is great to have before seeing the show or listening to the soundtrack... you'll completely understand what's happening in the story. I should also say, just in general.... Into the Woods is back on Broadway now, and I just saw it yesterday on its opening day with front row seats in the orchestra. I was worried the new production might not surpass the original, and that I would be disappointed since I love love Bernadette Peters and all... but it really blew my mind! The set and costumes were so much more appropriate, more fairytale-esque. There were lyric and staging changes, a little more dancing around, and Milky-White was alive this time which made her like another character. The musical has a lot of catchy tunes but also a good storyline, and though there is a lot of symbolism that if seen literally might not be appropriate for kids, they usually are too young to notice or understand it at all. So anyone can see it, and everyone finds it funny, everyone likes it. And the current production is better than you could have dreamed.

I say once you read this book I would say you would want to read the story more and more. Well I was Walking in the libary (Cerritos) looking for a scary book to read then in a while I saw this book called Scary Stories.
First I thougth it was a lame book but then I went Throught the book and then I was like wow now that's freaky man.But then after I check it out I thouth hey this is one of the freakest book I ever read in my entire life, so then I went looking for more.
The only books I read is three of this scary Stories books. But then I wonder why it did'nt make more.Scary Stories is one of the scariest books I read. It was even scaryer than that guy R.l Stine.But R.L Stine is still a good writer,but his stories aint as scary as Alvin Schwartz book's.
This book is one of my favorite books in the world. I am a guy who likes to read scary stories. I am a guy who dosent like to read books that are borning and that make's me want to fall aSleep.I also like this book because it's really not borning or stupit but it is cool.
I also really like this book because of all the pictures. The pictures are so scary and they look like they were going to jump of the book or some thing. The pictures of this book lookes like just the picture of a movie I watch called THE RING. But it is not close to be as the same becuase the ring is ten times as scary but lets not get of mind.

I remember when I got the first book of the series. I was little and looking through some old books my brother wanted to give away. I found it and kept it, although I didn't read it for a long time, the cover scared the b'geezus out of me. When I did read it, around the third grade or so, I loved it. It frightened the heck out of me and gave me nightmares. The most fun I had out of the book was sharing it with people, friends, cousins, ect. When I bought the rest of the series, everyone wanted to read them at SRR and I lent them out at a quarter each (hey, 75cents back then could buy an ice cream bar and a nutty buddy!). My mother always looked at me weird when she saw the books, she was like "how could you read that stuff?" and her and my dad would sit me down and have talks with me on how they didn't want me too interested in the occult or reading "books like that". Although I just ignored them, after all, they were the ones who bought me the books in the first place and continued to let me buy things like that, even though they were the ones who paid and took it to the checkout! Aren't parents funny?

Well...myself like pretty much every single reviewer on here are fans of this series from childhood. I read this trilogy sometime around 3rd grade. I remember sitting in my room with the lights off..with a flashlight and reading until I got frightened outta my jammies. The stories are so-so ,even as a kid the stories alone were just entertaining. The illustrations however..gave me NIGHTMARES!!..I mean c'mon just look at them..what 9 year old wouldn't get nightmares..they're extremely grusome and gross..I LOVE EM!!. I'm so glad I found this box set , when I was a kid my mother thought these stories were a bad influence on me because she found a collection of stories I had written that "disturbed" her , so she threw these books away. Reading these now at the age of 20 bring back the days when children's horror stories were actually scary instead of moronic (Goosebumps , ect)..where a illustration scared a kid to death rather than them just taking up space. I want my children to have these. Children need a good scare. Beyond the imagery of death and decay , alot of these stories can teach valuable warnings to children such as "don't talk to strangers" and "stay away from this" and ect,ect. It's sad i've read where these books are being banned for "warping the mind's of children"..ha the Nickelodean channel has been doing that for decades...allow your children to read these books. Horror literature for kid's doesn't get much better than this

James Behrens's Grace is Everywhere treats the reader to a delightful series of vignettes about real people and real events to convey powerful truths. Far from being a theological treatise or a philosophical discussion of ultimate concerns, the book's essence shows us simply and easily that God's love and grace are present at all times and in all places in our daily lives. What makes this book different from others with a similar theme or intent is Behrens's ability to relate concepts of such moment gently and clearly, at times even humorously, using his past and present as the backdrop for his insights. Behrens writes as if he were speaking with us; indeed, as if he's known us for years. Grace is Everywhere is a wonderful book. Read it and feel good.

Fr.Behrens has taken the events of everyday life in the Monastery and shows how they can relate to the everyday life of a lay person. With charm, and a keen sense of humor you follow the growth of a person as he lives the life of the Contemplative. This is a book that once you read it you will find yourself going back to it often.

My first visit to the Monastery of the Holy Spirit was in late 1955. To this day I can recall the peace and serenity that I enjoyed at that special place on that fall weekend in Conyers, Georgia 45 years ago. Father Behrens captures that same peace as he introduces us to the real-life characters he and we meet daily. He uses words as an artist would use a brush to paint a perfect picture in your mind of the good that is present in each person we meet. It is an easy-to-read book that you will want to read again and again. My wife and I enjoyed the book so much that we purchased four more to present as gifts to our friends.

I read this book some days ago, and I am deeply impressed on both the life of Crazy Horse and the way Ms. Sandoz told it to the reader. Since long I have been reading books about Plains Indians and their wars and had a special interest in the person of Crazy Horse. But I had not expected that this strange man, hardly to be understood by his own people, would have become so vivid to me. Ms. Sandoz book is by far better than that of Stephen E. Ambrose who often quoted her, because unlike him she was able to tell it from the Indian point of view and did not always evaluate what she wrote about. Crazy Horse was an Indian hero as out of a Greek tragedy alway doing the best for his people but condemned to be beaten by unmeasureably stronger forces than those of his people. I think he will keep in my heart and brain.

as a 50 year old man i was brought up thinking that indians were merely killers who took joy in killing any white man they found for no particular reason. after all that is what our school books ( at least back then ) and the movies said they were like. but after reading this factual book about the greatest warrior of the lakota, i have to say i was suprised to find that these people were not the same as i read about and saw on the movie screen. it gives one some insight into what they were really like. the way they lived, interacted with each other &other indians, fought, and died for what they believed. it tells about a great man who gave all for his people, and how he and the people lived in a time when the white man was pushing west. in my opinion i would say this book is more accurate than most of the books i have read on the subject. it gives one a feeling you are there experiencing what was happening at the time, and the fear and joy crazy horse and his people felt. it also shows that these people were not blood thirsty like we were led to believe, but human beings just like everyone else. with that , one can see why they did some of the things they had to do to survive. if you want to know what it was like to be an indian in the mid 1800"s or want to know what a real warrior was like read this book

It will be 3 years ago this February that I first read this book. I then bought the hard cover version so I could keep it in my library and read it over and over again.

Prior to this, my interest in Western history was confined to pioneers and cowboys. The Indians were just some folks who happened to get a tough break. This book though, opened my mind to a culture that I had never known or thought much about. Now I read every book I can get on the subject, and spend my summers touring forts and battlefields.

Since my first reading of Crazy Horse I have read a biography of Sandoz. I know that her research was maticulous and that she had a good rapport with the Indians who knew Crazy Horse and were still living at the time she was writing. Of course, since this is mostly an oral history it is hard to know what is actual truth and what is the myth which grew around the subject, but it doesn't really matter. No one can read this book without coming away with a new understanding of what it was like to live the free life on the Plains, and how devestating it must have been for those who lost it.

While Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, Volume 2 (POSA2) describes network and concurrency patterns, i.e. what infrastructure for networked applications you should provide before starting development of functional layer; this book is about the concrete implementation of above patterns as ACE Frameworks and how to apply ACE to build you own networked application. At the same time it is self-contained and if you do not have a chance to look at POSA2, this book will provide you with necessary knowledge of main network design patterns.
It covers the core ACE frameworks - Reactor, Service Configuration, Task, Acceptor-Connector, Proactor, and Streams- in great detail.
The book is well organized in form of "design pattern" - "chapter-per-framework" - with each framework overview, component description, example step-by-step how to use it, and summary. It makes the book easy to read and clear to understand. Sidebars focus your attention on tips and very important details of implementation. They can save time even for ACE developers, releasing them from digging through the ACE source code. So if you need a book "Inside ACE", you already got it. In my opinion, this book is all what you need to build real scalable network applications. Moreover, instead of thinking how to resolve platform-depended technical problems, such books force you to think what patterns suit the best for each particular case and what kind of networked pattern-oriented applications you could build more.

C++ Network Programming, volume 2, continues in the tradition
of volume 1, of doing an excellent job of explaining how to
program robust network software in C++ using the ACE framework.

The book is well-structured, and easy to read. Each section explains:

- the general concepts associated with a specific network programming
topic, for example reactive event loops, or asynchronous I/O
- the underlying operating system API's associated with each topic, for
example, for reactive event loops, the Unix select()
or the Windows WaitForMultipleObjects() calls
- the underlying design patterns for properly using these facilities,
such as the Reactor, Proactor, Service Configurator
- and the accompanying C++ class in ACE for using this design pattern

The text and code examples are very clear and easy to follow.
I particularly like the technique of using sidebars throughout the
text, which draws your attention to particularly interesting
nuggets of information.

My favorite parts of this book were the parts which covered in depth three
of the most core concepts in the ACE framework:
- the Reactor (reactive event loops),
- the Proactor (using asynchronous I/O for dispatching events),
- the ACE_Task (using concurrency/multithreading efficiently in an
object-oriented fashion)

Understanding these core concepts is essential for building
high-performance middleware and networked software. These concepts

were used extensively by Schmidt, when his team used ACE to build
The ACE ORB (TAO), a C++ CORBA implementation, so this book
will help with understanding some of the internal implementation
details of TAO.

For new users of ACE, this book is a good introduction, alongside volume 1.
For experienced users of ACE, this book is an excellent
refresher, and concisely explains many core ACE concepts, accompanied
with illustrative examples. This book will make an
excellent addition to the bookshelf of anyone serious
about C++ network programming.

Volume 1 explored the traps and pitfalls of developing efficient and portable client/server applications. It took a first principles approach to explaining how C++ could be used to encapsulate the lower level OS primitives to create classes that are simpler to use, less error prone, and cross-platform. In contrast, Volume 2 takes us one level higher in abstraction and presents a number of tried and true patterns for developing robust, cross-platform distributed applications. The authors provide a clear explanation of the consequences of different design choices for threading and event demultiplexing on the design, implementation, and performance of a distributed application. An example, a distributed logging server, is followed throughout the book to help explore the consequences of the different strategies on the example server. The mixture of well-explained concepts and example code give the reader a real appreciation for complexity of building such systems, and the patterns, and frameworks that can be used to manage this complexity.

To say this is just for users of the ACE framework would be wrong. The concepts are not ACE specific; rather they represent man-years in best practices of building distributed systems. However, if you are an ACE user, this will clearly explain some of the higher-level patterns and how/why they came to be.

In this somewhat puzzling novel the sun rises and it sets, six people grow together from infant children to old age, and the waves crash endlessly upon the shore. That is about as close as you will get to a plot in this book. Everything else that happens, school, marriage, even death, seem to be nothing more than passing intensities amid the overbearing silence that is the roar of existence.

I picked up this book after reading Mrs Dalloway. I loved Dalloway. It was the first Woolf book I had read and it blew me away. In comparison, reading The Waves was like taking a sandblaster to my eyeballs. She uses stream of consciousness as a medium to delve as deep as she possibly can into the intricacy of existence. Not much happens on a specific and literal level outside of the rising of the sun, but the endless poetry pouring forth from the perceptive cores (I'd say "minds" but I think it goes a bit beyond even that) of these six characters speaks volumes on the fearsome intensity of beauty, the vast complexity of sadness, and the endless endless isolation of the human soul.

It is at times so deep and so personal that I felt more than a bit uncomfortable reading it. The effort is well worth it however. Woolf more than any other author I have read, struggles to communicate the hidden message contained in all stories and books... A message forever clouded in meanings and phrases... Lost in its own words.

I was introduced to Virginia Woolf in college when I took an entire class devoted to her work. Although I had never read any of her work before, I quickly became a fan. My professor saved the best for last - The Waves. This book is the most poetic, most profound, most intimate book I have ever read.

No one speaks in this book. You follow the characters' lives from childhood to adulthood by entering their minds and listening to their thoughts. At first it is difficult to figure out what is going on. There is no narration except short poetic passages about the sea and the sun's placement over it preceding each section of the book (and each period of the characters' lives). By the middle of the book, you know who is speaking without reading the name of the character. You know how they think.

I strongly encourage anyone who is even slightly curious to buy this book. This small investment can change how you view the world. The Waves takes much longer to get through than some whodunit, but that's the beauty of it. My husband and I read a passage at night before going to bed. It's best when read slowly, with time to reflect after a small amount of pages. You'll be highlighting sentences that make great quotes as you go. What a glorious book!

You have never read a book like this. But don't let that intimidate. This is her most experimental work, but it is still much more accesible than many other modernists. Her sentences and paragraphs are intelligible; it's more the accumulation of pages that might begin to baffle some readers. Woolf obviously requires a good deal of concentration, but her best works are rewarding in a way that many difficult writers are not. (You won't need a professor nearby or a mess of annotations to guide you through dense thickets of allusion-filled, abstract prose.)

I consider this to be Woolf's greatest work. Mrs. Dalloway may be a more pleasurable read and more consistently a "masterpiece", but the Waves is often so intense and beautiful that it's devastating. In fact, there are times that one is a bit overwhelmed by the surfeit of emotion, poetic words, unremitting interiority.

My Woolf pix in order: 1. Waves 2. Dalloway 3. Jacob's Room 4. A Room of One's Own 5. Orlando

I personally feel that To the Lighthouse is more of a work to be appreciated than liked--it's simply too refined. And I couldn't make it through Between the Acts--too many upper class English people sitting around a table in the country sipping tea and performing their subtle, boring manners.

Wait, I can't end on a sour note: Woolf is a bloody delight!

I was reccommended to read Planet of The Blind due to my interest in writing stories about people who had disabilities and about by own disablility for I'm visually impaired myself and I have an interest in writing. So I read Steven Kuusisto's book Planet of the Blind and found it very facinating and inspiring! I highly reccomend it! I'd love to know what is he doing now and is he still writing and speaking of the book?

As a graduate student, who is being forced to look beyond the comfortable world of deaf to an unknown planet of blind, this was a book of frightening similarities. The road of denial, surreptious coping, and ultimate empowerment through acceptance are parallel on both planets.

A definite must read for baby boomers entering on the macular degeneration road to the Planet of the Blind!

As a legally blind person, who had totally blind parents, this vividly written book went a long way in helping me come to terms with my own situation. Like Stephen, for years I was in denial about my own limited vision and tried, successfully for a time, to "pass" as fully sighted. This is no longer possible and I have to face my own limitations head on, as Stephen finally does.

I recommend this book to anyone who would like to understand what living on the "Planet of the Blind" is really like, and for anyone who enjoys beautiful writing.

I think this book suitable for everyone not only for child but adult also can read it. My friend and I love this book and try to collect the whole of Pooh's series. But I think .. The house at the Pooh corner also lovely while The Tao of Pooh was very difficult to understand for child. However, I love it!!

I recieved this book (and its companion, the color edition of "The House At Pooh Corner") as a gift. I cannot speak more highly of them both. Unlike the editor at Horn, who found that the colorization detracted from the illustrations, I find exactly the opposite -- that the color lends depth and detail to the drawings, which are completely untouched otherwise.

The paper is crisp, semi-glossy, and brilliant white; the cover and page edges are guilded; the typeface is sharp and crystal-clear; and the full-color endpapers are truly magnificent.

In all and every way this is a truly magnificent and sumptuous edition -- with perhaps the single exception of price. And even then, with such a marvelous work, that is to be expected!

I first read Pooh as a child, when my mornings were spent with the Spotted or Herbaceous Backson, and my afternoons were spent doing Nothing. It was a good book then, which I really enjoyed.

But I don't do Nothing any more. Well, not so much. They don't let you. Now my life is spent going around and around the thicket looking for the Woozle, or going bump, bump, bump down the stairs, thinking that there must be a better way, if only I could stop bumping long enough to think of it.

Now I need Pooh. I need to be reminded that spelling isn't everything - that there are some days when spelling TUESDAY simply doesn't count.

Pooh and Piglet are wondering where you've been. Eeyore told them that you're not coming back. "They've forgotten" said Eeyore. "Typical," said Eeyore. "How Like Them," he said.

But you can come back, you know. You can find a Thoughtful Spot, or join an Expotition for the North Pole, or even drop sticks off a bridge.

Because the Forest will always be there, and anyone who is Friendly with Bears can find it.