As a professional musician I was prepared to totally hate this book. I was pleasantly surprised at the good solid advice this book offers. I am not a fan of the Suzuki method. I've walked out of many children's music programs embarassed at how poor the quality of the performance was. Then I had my own child, and even though I am a professional musician I had no idea how to raise my own musical child. My parents didn't have any answers, they happened to make me a musician all by accident. Whatever your goals and motivations for exposing your child to music this is a good book to get you started in the right direction.

RAISING MUSICAL KIDS received a starred Library Journal review in the December 2001 issue. The review concluded: "Cutietta's [book] will be one that parents refer to again and again. An authoritative addition for parenting collections in all public libraries."

A "starred" review means it is a recommended purchase by libraries.

Finally! A book for parents that explains the sometimes confusing world of music education. This book takes a parent through early childhood activities, choosing a private teacher, how to get you kid to practice, to understanding the expectations of high school music programs and careers in music. Well-written, research-based but easy to read, and illustrated with cartoons, this is a must for every parent interested in sharing their love of music with their children. I highly recommend it!

Extremely readable story of how Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt came to write "The Fantasticks," the longest-running musical in history. Full of interesting back-stage stories and details on how the famous songs and lines came to be written. It's about the show, but it's also about the people who made it happen. It's a little portrait of life among theatre people and beatniks in late 1950s Greenwich Village.

There are many reasons America has fallen in love with this play. The most obvious being the story. It is a play bringing simple innocence into a seemingly scandelous love affair. It is a heart-warming musical not quickly to be forgotten. Yet, what i love most about the play is who Luisa is and can be made to be. Her monologue preceeding "Much More" has served me well in audition after audition and this play will go on as a classic in musical theatres everywhere. A must-read for play lovers.

I sailed to the Arctic on the Regina Maris in 1997, a couple years before Oxenhorn took his trip. Not quite the book I would have written, but I started out with greater expectations of discomfort and hardship. After all, it was the Arctic. Nonetheless, Oxenhard paints an accurate picture of life on a tall ship on the frigid edge of the world, and, more importantly, gives a true recounting of the deep personal changes that take place in everyone aboard on such a voyage. I sailed with many of the characters in the book, and would disagree with the more negative of Oxenhorn's descriptions of them, nonetheless, he does give a good feel for some of the friction that occurs on a long trip under difficult conditions with no privacy. Its a great pity that the good ship Regina Maris no more. I believe that everyone who sailed on her to the frozen north came back a deeply changed and better person. This book is perhaps the next best thing.

The late Harvey Oxenhorn secured an enduring legacy through his captivating, detailed account of his apprentice voyage on the tall ship, Regina Maris. He painstakingly chronicles all facets of life during the nine weeks spent traversing from Boston to the Arctic Ocean, recounting sights, sounds, encounters, and experiences at sea and on shore in various ports from Newfoundland to Greenland and back again.

The result is not one of those irritating "look, look at me" travel books or the ramblings of a self-absorbed trekker who intimidated his editor into leaving in the most boring of details but a refreshing recap of life at sea, warts and all..

Mr. Oxenhorn, motivated by a journey of spiritual discovery, soon finds his preconceived notions of life at sea challenged not only by the mundane, repetitive tasks that consume most hours, but also by his inexperience and fears that he must confront whether scaling the vertical matrix of ropes and sails or keeping watch in the middle of the night in all kinds of weather and knowing that his decisions and observation will affect the well-being of the crew and ship.

As the story unfolds-and more so as a novel than travelogue-Mr. Oxenhorn constantly finds surprising aspects about his crew mates that force him to reconsider them, and himself, in the context of this expedition and extrapolates from these experiences a growing sense of self-mastery and awareness of interdependence.

As he recounts late in the book, "But again, the main point wasn't the rules themselves. Nor was it to demonstrate someone's authority. . . Rather, it was to break down the habit of mind that makes exceptions and desires special treatment. To replace it with a heart called unity."

Though this notion may sound a bit like the process used to mold soldiers in boot camp, his ruminations regarding interdependence reach a deeper resonance when he argues, both convincingly and cogently, that "We have made ourselves responsible for the life that ours depends on, from copepods to whales. To think differently about these animals is to think differently about ourselves as well. From now on, we must all stand watch. One tribe. One family. One crew."

Mr. Oxenhorn takes great pains to present his facts and details with care, clearly having spent many hours researching and documenting his observations about everything from various seabirds, to the construction and operation of tall sailing ships, to traditional navigational methods involving sextant and compass and stars. His narrative jumps to life as he describes what it is like to be sailing on a wooden ship among "tabular icebergs twice the length of football fields and seven stories high."

The point of the expedition was to study whale populations, and the author provides enough information about whales, their place and role in the marine environment, and how humans have affected (almost always badly) the balance of nature. He provides just enough details about how the research is conducted, what key findings are made, and what sort of future might be in store for the whale populations. Mr. Oxenhorn does not come off sounding like a overzealous, gung-ho Greenpeacer hunkered down in a Zodiac; rather he applies the same sort of calm logic to why we must carefully manage the oceans as agrarian essayist Wendell Berry proffers.

Likewise he captures both the ugly and shining sides of human behavior and interactions aboard ship and shore, pulling no punches even from his characterizations of Captain George Nichols, with whom Mr. Oxenhorn butted heads----and came away chastised more than once----the mates, or his peer crewmates. More than once, I cringed at some of these depictions, wondering if the author might be overstepping his rights, but he never fails to reveal the good, sometimes surprising, qualities of his shipmates.

If I had been Mr. Oxenhorn's editor, I might have asked for more explanation of some of the nautical and sailing terms that pepper the chronicle, maybe a glossary for those of us who will never experience firsthand such an adventure. The map inside the front cover is useful, but not nearly detailed enough, and without including the longitude and latitude lines, a puzzling lapse I would attribute to the publisher, it's not easy to track the voyage sequentially. (Most chapter titles follow this convention, for example, "17 July. 63◦N/54◦W."

Those minor points aside, "Tuning the Rig" is the kind of book that causes you to postpone your own chores while you read about the myriad tasks of "field day" or the duties of the "galley slave." I cannot say that I now have the urge to spend two months at sea on a tall ship, but I am grateful to Mr. Oxenhorn for his splendid account. Had he not been the faultless victim of an automobile crash, Mr. Oxenhorn, who is also a published poet, might have made quite a name for himself.

And Patrick is never faint of heart. Witty, wise, deeply moving - usually all in the same 1 act play. And you get 7 plays here. My ex still hasn't given this volume back, and I hardly have the heart to ask for it, as I wish hir all the best, and this is the best... OK, I've changed my mind, either put out or give me one of my favorite books back you cur!

So concludes a wisecracking AIDS recluse in the last of these hilarious and heartbreaking one-act plays. Each one covers a decade in the lives of American gay men, from the sophisticated closets of the 1920's through our grimmest hour in the 1980's. Patrick may see little progress toward liberation, whether political or personal. But each decade is etched specifically and urgently, by a master playwright. You'll shed many a tear over this one, half of them from laughter.

Once again R.C. Harvey has laid bare the skeletal structure of what makes comics a truly great medium of personal expression and artistic accomplishment. His insightful and often poignant anecdotes help bring the casual comics reader to a level of deeper appreciation and reverence for what many people regard as "kids stuff".

Most touching is his examination of George Herriman in Chapter 10. His ability so see beyond the surface "gags" and expose the boundless themes of love and pain truly make Herriman the metaphysical poet that Harvey titles him. Harvey's own observations are particualrly powerful and coalesque into not just an observation on the art of the funnies or the medium of comics in general, but serve as a reminder that all art is a personel expression and that these "comics" can be a bridge to a deeper understanding of human nature and American society.

I read this book 6 years ago - had a great impact on my life. Intelligently written with a strong Biblical foundation.

This is a refreshing way to spend your time listening to some of the best interviews from the show. I like the show but sometimes don't have time to catch it on NPR. This audio set gives me lots of the memorable interviews I've heard or partially heard over the years. It's a great collection of some of the folks who are major influences in their work. The inquisitive and probing questions of Terry Gross really open up conversations with the likes of Tracy Ullman and Dennis Franz, they sound like us. These are wonderful snippets of real life.

I must confess to knowing next to nothing about the history of Latin America. Oh sure, I can give you the names of the Conquistadors, and rattle off the names of the "freedom fighters" like Bolivar, O'Higgins and such, but when it comes to detail about the revolutions South of the US, I was completely ignorant! This book has changed all of that, and I am very grateful to the author. He has presented the liberation of the southern hemisphere in a quite lucid way, with excellent writing and fantastic character sketches of all the major players. This is not dry, dusty history, but history come alive with vivid prose and descriptions. In a book that's not exceptionally long, you get a rather detailed retelling of the various wars for independence in Latin America, with emphasis on the men who fought them in a leadership role. Your interest is captrued from the beginning, and is tightly held until the end of the work. I now know much more about our neighbors to the South than I did before, and I am grateful to the author for that knowledge. This ia a book that I can highly recommend!

This book is a need item to help trouble shoot problems with boiler, DA tanks, condensate return tanks,pumps, and piping. If you can see the problem, you will probably see a picture of the problem in this book along with what caused it...and in color 95 percent of the time. It has been a real life saver, literlly. You gotta have this book even if you only use it once..it could save your life, or your building/s. Try it ..you will like it. My instructor in 2 grade class was so impressed it got one.

Open City consistently publishes great stories, poems, essays, and artwork. I look forward to each issue, because each one is so different, and because this magazine continues to be vital and relevant, esp. because many literary magazines are so staid and dull....