Torn Thread by Anne Isaacs, is a really sad book. This book takes place from June 1943 to May 1945. This book is about two sisters one named Rachel Buchbinder who is the oldest and Eva Buchbinder the youngest. There mother had died of influenza. Rachel had frequent colds and coughs wich were accompanied by high fevers and shortness of breath. One day the two gilrs were walking home and there was German army trucks that drove up slowly up Promyka street and the soldiers jumped out and started to force people by gunpoint into the trucks. Eva was swept up and carried into a building. Her sister Rachel had been taken by the Germans. She had lived in an attic which her father had built a false partition this became known as their hiding place. Her father had owned a candy factory until the Germans took it away. Papa knew the Nazi manager and was able to find out where her sister was taken. Rachel was at a Nazi labor camp in a town called parschnitz in Czecholoslovakia. Papa arranged for Eva to go and work there so she can be with her sister. She was only able to bring as much as she can carry on the train for three in a half days they weren't able to eat on sundays and were only able to wash their hair on sundays. Also on sundays the shomaker came to make their shoes. Food was served every morning at 5:15am. The two girls washed their hair in the factory where they worked during the lunchbreak. At the end of the day her sister Rachel's eyes were swolen shut and had a rash. Rachel was allergic to nettle fabric it was caused by the fiber floating in the water where they washed their hair Rachel's fever lasted a long time. Her fever finally broke they had returned to Bedzin all their relatives were killed on August 1943. They moved to the Belsin refugee camp in Germany each of them had married and gave birth to a son. In 1949 the two sisters and their new family recieved Canadian Visa's and Emigrated to Alberta, Canada where they raised their children and they built a new life. Eva and her husband, Morris kolplowicz are still living there and her son Samuel is married to the author of this book Torn Thread.

In Torn Thread the World War II experience of Jews in the Polish town of Bedzin is told through the eyes of a courageous 12-year-old girl. First, she, her family and other Jewish families are forced to move from their homes into a crowded ghetto and live in cramped spaces with limited resources. But, things get much worse quickly when Eva is separated from her beloved sister, Rachel and then her father. It turns out that Eva's sister has been taken to a Nazi-run work camp. It is here that Eva's father sends her to take care of Rachel. So, now Eva finds herself also a prisoner in a Nazi work camp and responsible for her sickly sister's well being as well as her own. In addition to this, both Eva and Rachel are separated from their father. This is a great deal of responsibility for a 12-year-old girl in horrifying times. That is the power of this story. Eva is willing and able to keep it all together. I found myself wondering if as an adult I could have withstood all that Eva did and taken care of others so well. She was a remarkable child.

The story is divided into two parts beginning with the ghetto and the work camp and ending with the last months of the war when the Russians and Americans are in the process of liberating Poland. The second part (nine chapters) lasts a time period of 6 months, which adds to the reader's experience of the prisoners waiting for their freedom. All the while, the prisoners could hear the guns of the Russians and the Americans in the distance. Throughout, the sense of fear and deprivation is quite explicit but not so much that children of 10 and above would be frightened by it. There is an epilogue and an afterward with some history to let reader's know what happened to the characters. All readers will marvel at Eva's resolve and at the courage of all of the prisoners in impossible circumstances.

I have always been interested in the holocaust. This is the first book that I have read about this subject. It is about a girl my age named Eva who lived through the holocaust. Her father sends her to a camp where she works in a factory. There at the camp she has to learn how to stay strong and not loose hope. She has to deal with starvation, illnesess and people dying all around her. After I read this book I couldn't believe how cruel people in the world can be. I won't tell you too much more because I don't want to ruin the book. I read this book and it opened my eyes and it will open yours too.

Forgive me first of all for even attempting this review of "The Principia"...but would any of you attempt to even review the Bible, the Quran or the Bhagvad Gita...??? The Principia is something that should be worshipped not as the work of a mere mortal, but that of the greatest genius of all time... this was the pinnacle of thought, and none since Newton's time has come even close to matching his scientific prowess...forget Einstein, even he did not consider himself worthy of comparison with Newton, for Newton was a theoretician par experimentor par excellence...(Einstein was often apalled by his own poor ability to experiment)..

Here was where Newton introduced his theory of gravity and theory of light and his version of the Calculus...but a word of caution...be afraid, DO NOT attempt to learn these subjects from this book...the real purpose of this book is this...to hold it in your hand's and dissolve into tears as you read the mind of the man who came closest to reading God's thoughts...when, years later, Newton was asked how he hit upon his ideas, he replied "By thinking upon them " !! How very helpful, eh..??

Buy this book, treasure it, read it if you can, and all the while, remember Alexander Pope's words:
"Nature and Nature's laws
lay hid in the night;
God said 'Let Newton be !',
And all was light !"

I am responding to the person who wrote the second review, the student who decided to use this book to study for an exam in basic calculus. What are you, crazy? Why would ANYONE think they could learn "baby calc" from the great book in which Newton elucidated his theory of the universe!? Did you think about asking anyone, first? I'm a college math prof and my guess is that ANY math teacher would have suggested you study from a modern, elementary calc book, instead. (Then you make matters worse by giving the book a bad review!) At any rate, if you would like a good, modern translation of Newton's Principia, this is the place to go. You really should know some calc and basic mechanics, however - remember, this book, was written by one of the greatest minds in the human history, and it was NOT meant to be a textbook for the novice. Please do not let review # 2 steer you away..........

I've seen bad reviews for master works of science in the past. Mostly they claim these books are either not clear or impossible to understand. Don't buy this book for the purpose of learning Classical Mechanics or Calculus from it, but for the scientific curiosity of learning how the great Isaac Newton presented his revolutionary scientific ideas to the world. Of course, it is difficult to read. This is a translation of a book written in Latin more than 300 years ago!

This book is a jewel. Just like the original works of Einstein, Maxwell, Heisenberg, Schroedinger and all those giants. Many of the ideas presented in the book were written for the first time in history and probably they are not organized in a didactic form. The person buying this book should not expect to find a clear textbook when originally it was not written for the layman, but for the expert scientific community of its time. Buy this book, sit back, scan through it, and enjoy a true piece of history.

I only give this two stars for the illustrations and suspect that the main reason this book is bought is because of the Caldecott Honor. While I look for books that have strong female characters, I cannot recommend this story. There are many violent images -- a man caught in a bear trap, a multi-day wrestling match with a bear -- which, IMHO, are too much for young children. We shouldn't be teaching our girls or our boys that to be a giant and wrestle bears is how girls get to be the equal of boys.

Excellent book for a young reader. Very much in the tradition of Paul-Bunyan-style tall tales. The hero this time is a heroine, nicknamed Swamp Angel, with the strength to rid early-days Tennessee of a giant bear called Thundering Tarnation. Like the best tall tales, this one is full of wonderfully humorous exaggerations, all wonderfully illustrated on every page. Delightful and entertaining book for both boys and girls.

What fun to have a tall tale that features a woman--and such a capable woman at that! Anne Isaacs has written a yarn that seems somehow to have been in the pantheon all along--much like Howard Pyles' "Pepper and Salt" stories, "Swamp Angel" is new as far as children's stories go, but has all the elements of the classic stories and so seems older and as wonderfully distinctive as the tales that have been around for generations.

Isaacs tells us all about one red-headed, freckled young woman named Angelica Longrider. From the first, we know we are in for a wild ride when we see the picture of her rather startled-looking parents holding an enormous but contented baby--the text tells us calmly that Angelica was "scarcely taller than her mother and couldn't climb a tree without help." Things start moving at a pell-mell pace when we find out that a destructive black bear has so annoyed folks all around the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee that a reward has been offered for his hide. Angelica sets up to whup that bear and means to do the job right.

The fight between Angelica and the bear is a wondrous portion of the story, told with great good humor, a number of winks at the reader, and the astonishing illustrations of Paul O. Zelinsky. "Swamp Angel" may well be Zelinsky's masterpiece. The pictures have the flavor of early American folk art, combined to great effect with Zelinsky's usual eye for telling detail and gorgeous use of color. They fit the style of the story so well and complement the action so sufficiently that it's as though Isaacs and Zelinsky are two halves of the same person. Rarely do the visions of both author and illustrator dovetail as cleanly as they do here, and it's our great good luck as readers that Isaacs and Zelinsky found each other. Three cheers for "Swamp Angel!"

I collect childrens' books and illustrations, and Stephen Mackey is one of my all-time favorite illustrators. The same sense of mystery and magic that is so at home in his illustrations of fairies adds a particularly special element to his paintings of children and cats. You feel like you're seeing into someone's secret world, even if the events portrayed are mundane, yet you never feel as though you've discovered all of the secrets. As an afficianado of Mackey, I have to say I've been disaapointed in the two major works he's chosen to illustrate -- this book, and the Yolen collection of fairy tales. I think in both cases that the text is not particularly engaging -- too stilted, artificial, and even esoteric for children, but not nuanced or sophisticated enough to be entirely satisfying to adults. Don't buy this book if you want to read a story about cats to a young person; but if you love cats, and if you believe that they know a lot more than we can prove that they know and that they make excellent companions for us, the meager fleshed ones, then I think you might really enjoy sharing the pictures in this book with your child or your over a cup of tea with your feline friend.