If you want to decorate a lot with white on white, there are some great pictures to give you great ideas in this book. Although she mentions color and pretends to emphasize its importance in your home decor, nearly all her pictures are so devoid of color you might mistake it for an old-time hospital.

I was disappointed in the text content because it merely tells us things any homeowner already knows. I learned nothing new from this book. If you're looking for suggestions on style, I'd recommend the Shabby Chic series by Rachel Ashwell. If you're looking for suggestions on color, I'd recommend Donald Kaufman's books on interior color. This one is a waste of money.

This book is like a breath of fresh air for anyone interested in decorating in an inexpensive, personal, and eclectic fashion. The photos are beautiful and the text very informative and inspirational. Following the guidelines provided will result in a beautiful, satisfying, and unique living environment. Recommended!

If I were only allowed one decorating book, this would be it. Practical ideas for every decorating style. From bathrooms to colour schemes, vignettes to window treatments there are useful and affordable ideas everyone can use. A must have!

During his lifetime, Henry Mercer was a lawyer, archaeologist, museum curator, promoter of lost crafts, and collector of a museum's worth (literally) of assorted stuff. One of his many interests was early American woodworking tools.

Ancient Carpenter's Tools is a comprehensive look at 18th and 19th Century American woodworking tools. The book is divided into chapters by function (Measurement, Shaping, etc.) and then by type of tool. As American tools were heavily influenced by their European ancestors, Mercer also includes a history of each tool with references to Medieval and Classical tools. Each tool is illustrated with photographs and drawings.

While this book was originally published in the 1920's (and occasionally shows its age) it remains useful for any student of tool history.

This is a good book about the reality of Civil War soldiers. Written by their beloved captain, who later became a Methodist minister, this book seeks to capture the hearts of all. The book was written mainly for the men and their descendents, and though one sometimes gets the feeling that there's some "inside joke," it is a good read about real people. I recommend this book to anyone seriously interested in the Civil War. It is a better, more interesting read than may company histories, although it does at times seem like a yearbook.

This book was about George "Babe" Ruth and Henry Aaron. I think it was a great baseball story about these to players. It really tells a lot about Babe's history where he came from and how he got to the top. the book also tells some about Henry and how he got to the top. I really enjoyed this book!

Magnolia LeGuin was a woman struggling to deal with daily life as it was post-bellum. This includes frequent childbirths, servant problems, and few if any modern conveniences. Yet it is also a testiment to the power of love between a husband and wife and a mother and her children. I found it far superior to many of the women's diaries put out for publication these days and would recommend it highly. -Marianna

Finally ! A solution for those of us who have grown children who keep showing up, with their significant others. Our children kept coming back, and leaving their baggage, both emotional and material. It helped to find we are not alone. I really enjoyed the U-Haul tales, because during one five year period, I moved cross-continent ten times. But I never used them for hauling hogs. That, I would like to see!

Mary Hallock Foote came west with her engineer husband Arthur D. Foote, a dreamer-engineer, to build dams, lay out canals, and tame the vast desert areas. While they waited through one frustration after another with various backers, she kept the family solvent with her delightful sketches and stories, all the while raising her children on the boundary of civilization. Oh, that's with the help of a proper English tutor, of course.

Her prose is grandiloquent in the early chapters, something of an annoying Victorian mannerism in my mind. She lavishes compliments with abandon on her family and associates, as well as the landscape. Thank goodness the editors carefully footnoted Mrs. Foote! Otherwise the reader wouldn't have a clue as to whom she was writing about so ecstatically. (Actually, the volume is soundly annotated and edited throughout.)

However, in the later chapters, when the family settles down in Idaho, near what was to be the highest dam in the world at the time, the Arrowrock, her prose deepens and her style strengthens. She begins to incorporate her western life, the engineers and workers lives, into her stories. The geological phrase, "Angle of Repose," emerges in this section. The prose, like the work, becomes purposeful in its passion.

Is is, after all, of Mary Hallock Foote and her husband, Arthur, that Wallace Stegner wrote in his Pulitzer prize-winning fictional account, "The Angle of Repose." Here we really get the story in the words of those who lived it.

The frustrations of engineering the dam and engineering the financial and political backing are superbly related. The latter half of the book is more than worth the slower early portion. The account it bears of life in the early western United States is a treasure of its times. I heartily recommend it.

I truly enjoyed this read. It may help to listen to the audio cassette beforehand. I find Thoreau inspirational. Many times you step back and realize how beautiful all of life's intricacies are, how wonderful life truly is & how lucky we are. Thoreau has embraced every minute detail of natural life, as it was meant to be & has successfully captured it in print. I love the fact that each line is a "novel" in itself. I loved the book and listen to the audio cassette often. Buy it, buy it, buy it.

They can't appreciate this book due to the fact that they live in a world of pop trash. Im only 19 and I like it, it's one of the best books I've ever read (besides Waterland). No author describes images and scenery as well as Thoreau, at least that I've read, and his dislike for society is well argued. So, if you're one of those MTV-watching, mall loving, stylish-car- driving, conforming, TV junkies, or an educated uppity know-it-all than this book isn't for you.

I read this book about every five years or so in
order to take inventory of my personal life. Soon
I find myself forgetting about DVD players and software
applications and begin to focus upon bringing
my life much more in tune with the harmonics of
nature. Thoreau has the ability to cut through the
messages of nonstop consummerism and force the reader to
evaluate the cutural norms of greed and individualism.
Why is it so hard to accept that man is of this planet
and we must learn how to balance our species goals and
desires with those of the other species of life which
inhabit this biosphere?

If you want to experience the bond between adult and child in all of its emotional breadth, put this book down and go talk to a kid.

Although Mr. Dunow describes some memorable times with his son through the joy of coaching his son's Little League team, his choice of language does not fit what I would expect from a father or a coach. His use of four letter expletives certainly do not fit this type of book. I would think someone of his literary background could certainly express himself far better than street talk.

Like Dunow I decided to coach Little League to relate better to one of my son's and to make sure he got a fair shake at developing as a baseball player. Unlike Dunow I didn't get the job the first time I applied.

I found the Little League situations fascinating and related to the various players coaches, their attitudes and the situations. But it surprised me that Dunow's team improved so much without special coaching or instilling much competitiveness. I would be kind to the kids and almost never yell at them unless they weren't paying attention to the game while they were in the field. Dunow took a very gentle, kind and noncompetitive approach which worked surprisingly well. Even the problem kid Dylan came around in the end.

I was very interested in the Little League story and the fact that his son Max was a baseball trivia nut, knowing everything about the Yankees and his idol Derek Jeter. I was a lot that way as a child too. But Dunow alternates chapters, with one covering how he and his seven year old son progress during the Little League season followed by a chapter covering his own childhood and his relationship to his father.

I found the chapters about Little League more interesting. The switching back and forth breaks up the continuity and the two stories do not connect together very well. In the end he does do a good job of tieing his relationship with his son to his relationship to his father but the connection does not justify the style which I found disconcerting.

Both stories by themselves could make for interesting books but together it doesn't work. I found myself wanting to get through the chapters about his father to get back to the chapters about his son and the Little League. Hence I only gave it 3 stars.

"Traces of Thoreau" is a pretentious, self-congratulatory narrative, and rather a bore as a result. For this reviewer, it failed both as a personal story and as a descriptive work about Cape Cod.

The author just isn't as compelling to us as he clearly finds himself. (I strongly disagree with the editorial reviewer who said that Mr. Mulloney largely "absents himself from the narrative." It just isn't so.) Although he fancies himself a modern "H.T.," there's nothing particularly insightful about Mr. Mulloney's walk on the beach, which unfortunately leaves Cape Cod shortchanged as a subject. The book does contain some informative passages about natural history, but there are some great guidebooks that are much better in that regard.

This book would best have been kept as a personal journal. You know, the kind that gets tossed out when it is reread it in a few years and found embarrassing even to the author.

For really fun and insightful travel/nature writing, try Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods"!

As I sat on the ferry steaming across to Martha'a Vineyard, I could not help but constantly gaze to the Northeast and attempt to see past the horizon to the Cape Cod beaches on which Mulloney was strolling. Admittedly, I have never read a page of Thoreau and I embarked on reading this book with some serious trepidation. However, I was more than pleased when I found myself along side him, watching the waves crash along the seashore, listening to the locals tell tales of how it used to be, and generally feeling right at home, even though I had never visited a single place he was describing. And to top it all off, his references to Thoreau ( or H.T. as Mulloney calls him) were not only clear and pertinent, they were solid enough that I now feel as if I am some sort of junior varsity expert on the Concord native. This is perfect summer New England beach reading. It's also perfect winter New England reading for when you're wishing you were at the beach. And it's perfec! t Autumn reading, for that was the season when Mulloney embarked upon his retracing of Thoreau's steps down America's outer rim. And I suppose I must say it's perfect Spring reading, for when you are preparing for the summer's events. "Traces of Thoreau" is summer escapist non-fiction reading at its best. It is a timeless work, to be appreciated for summers and summers to come. Enjoy.

Boston area readers should check out a review by a local columnist for a Dedham paper that in itself is a masterpiece in that it places Thoreau's book among the greats of late 1800s.