"Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" was my favorite movie during early childhood. I was pleasantly surprised that the book tells a different story than the movie, although it conveys the same sense of adventure. Ian Fleming wrote "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" in a different style than more current children's literature, something that may bring a change of pace to a young audience. I don't think the crude illustrations by Burningham would be received in the same manner.

This is my favorite children's book ever! I have read it at least 10 times--gets better every time!! Read this book to your children.

This is an exceptional book about a car that can run on its own. It used to be a famous race car, but then was thrown in the dumps. This eccentric yet ingenious man buys this car, and names it Chitty Chitty Bang Bang after the noise it makes (hence the title of the book). They soon find out that the car they bought is like none other. It had powers that no technology can exceed. The car saves their life by waking the family in time to get away from the water, for the tide was rising and rising. Then they go through a scary and creepy cave with skeletons hanging from the top, and they meet gangsters. They manage to get out of the cave alive, but not without fallimg (or almost falling) into a few traps which only the car can sense. The father discovers that the car has a mind of its own and can sense danger better than any of them. The big blow for the family comes in the end when their children are kidnapped by robbers. The clever children out-smart the gangsters. But their only hope is their very own car, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Read the book to find out the rest of the story. For those who are interested, their is a movie based on this but has a different yet intriguing plot. That is a wonderful and I would recommend it. Cheers!!!!! : )

This is one of those books that bring coal to Newcastle. The main thesis of Part I is that not everything about Ottoman Empire was bad and the authors proceed to prove it by refuting statements of books written mostly in the 60's in communist countries (as if previously revisionist views on this topic haven't been almost the predominant opinion since the last few decades). The refutations are carried out mainly by quoting statements from a few books from the 50's and 60's, thus sparing the reader of supporting arguments and documentation on beliefs fostered by the most up-to-date stereotypes (such as the obscurantism of Orthodox church and the absolute rejection of 'ethnic nationalism'). We learn (together with new international students in their college orientation program)to be less Eurocentric with sentences like: "Europeans were caught almost completely off-guard by the remarkably rapid rise of the Ottoman 'menace' (as contemporaries perceived it)" : Quotation marks apparently aren't enough to warn us that the menace was subjective. They need to make the warning explicit. Throughout the book, the authors (although they 'are conversant with several European languages')have focused mainly on English-language secondary sources for the interesting reason that looking at primary sources and more specialized research monographs wouldn't be efficient enough for them to reach their geopolitical moral. Ironically, the political correct warnings and

quotation marks don't prevent the authors from their neo-colonial tendencies expressed most amusingly in their skepticism about the national liberation movements of the 19th century because of the new state's failure to become immediately indistinguishable in form from the most advanced Western European states. (By the way, they do prove convincinly that Western Europe has consistently been more prosperous than the new Balkan states.) Despite its being very readable the interested reader would be better off with other books on the subject (M. Glenny's book on the Balkans, Mazower's 'Dark Continent' come to mind) and, yes, 'more narrowly focused research monographs'.