This book is wonderful because it sparks ideas. When I read "Plant herbs from seeds in window boxes", I thought it sounded like fun. Maybe it's not as exciting as "Win the Nobel Peace Prize", but The Wish List succeeds at conveying the idea that all experiences are worthy and one can learn from them. I recommend this book for anyone stuck in a rut and who needs a jumping off point to get out of it.

Like the first idea is the book says, "Try everything once."

Personally I don't own this book. But when I saw a friend reading up on how she could spend her next spare moment improving her life I was amazed. She showed me things she had accomplished, including learning sign language all thanks to this tiny book.

From the moment you open it, The Wish List makes you smile. By crossing off the things that you have already done and grinning at the ones you'd always secretly hope to accomplish, you'll find yourself dreaming and sceming how to pull some of them off. A great book to encourage those who are feeling down.

In theory, this is a terrific idea for a library ready-reference book: pages and pages of lists of every kind and classification of thing you can imagine. The design and execution is a good deal more problematic, however. Some of the selected topics are obvious -- Roman and Japanese emperors, weights and measures, the Ten Commandments, Newton's Laws of Motion -- but many others (I'm tempted to say "most others") are not in any way hierarchical and are seldom naturally structured. In fact, they often seem artificial and arbitrary, meant only to fill up space to produce a book large enough to market. At the least, they strain the rubric. For example: "Circus attractions" is just a incomplete collection of types of acts; "Employee benefits" is merely one sample list; "Motion picture genres" includes an apparently arbitrary forty-one types of films (who says?); likewise the "areas" of the performing arts; likewise the topics in a household budget. And why is the list of topics used in the _Macmillan Visual Dictionary_ a valid universal list? Finally, even some of topics I personally would have considered obvious are omitted, like a list of the traditional logical fallacies. If you remember the Wallaces' highly idiosyncratic and very browsable _Book of Lists_ series from the 1970s, . . . well this is nothing like that. Finally, it pains me to observe that the book's designer saw fit to commit the amateurish font-sin of setting the titles of publications in the blurbs on the back cover in ALL SWASH.

Pick it up, turn to a random page, read for a while. This is by far my favorite book to thumb through. Useful as a reference book in a few rare situations, but best used as a book left in your book bag to make time fly when commuting, waiting or generally killing time.

It gives you a basic understanding of a variety of subjects in quick, facinating format.

I picked this book up after seeing it mentioned in David Sedaris' "Me Talk Pretty One Day" - he had referred to it as an excellent source for verifying just about any fact or figure you can think of, and he was right. The Internet can answer just about any nagging reference question you may have, but here you will have it in a handy volume you can also pour over just for fun. Excellent for settling debates with know-it-alls and Cliff Clavens everywhere.

As a fiction writer, I use this book often for two extremely helpful aspects:
1) The lists of different names for colors, kinds of fabrics, etc.
2) The thesauras-type entries contain some words that only particially mean the same thing. This in-exactness means that you find words that are closely related to the word you originally looked up; you receive a more comprehensive list of suggestions. (This feature is great for people who already know the exact definitions of words. Otherwise, I suggest a companion dictionary.)

The "flip dictionary" aspects of the book are useless. First, if you don't think the same way the author does, you might not be able to find the reverse entry at all. There are many different ways to word a definition. Second, what good are words that most likely your readers won't know? Take these entries for instance: "pivoting, capable of: trochoid;" and "larval form of certain bivalve mollusks: spat." Trochoid? Spat? In a short story about underwater exploration, if I must mention those things in that way, I'll stick to "able to pivot" and "clam larva." My readers will undoubtedly thank me for it.

I'd have to own a Roget's Super Thesaurus to be sure, but I highly suspect that it's a much better resource for writers.

This is a reverse dictionary with a lot of lists, charts, etc. Although it can be confusing to use, it is one of the best reference books I've seen for just flipping through. Lots of surprises and interesting facts tucked away in sidebars.

While there is plenty of words and good relationships, I found its organization a bit difficult to use when needing to rapidly find a word. Saying that, it's also the one most often on my desk and not in the bookshelf with the others.

I chanced upon this eye-catching book at a large bookstore. The conspicuous tagline states: "For when you know what you want to say but can't think of the word." That sounded like familiar territory.

I bought it and have been using it countless of times. It really boosts one's writing.

This is just another, silly average book/calendar for kids. In my opinion you could find much better books for kids these days. So drop this book, unless you're lazy, and find a better one.

This calendar single-handedly makes me look forward to getting out of bed in the morning. The first thing I do when I wake up is tear off another page and see five more things that make me smile! I hvae bought this for the last three years, and will continue to buy it until Barbara runs out of things to write.

The 2002 Page-a-Day calendar contains entirely new entries. Enjoy!

Few of the many things kids can do includes:
Learn CPR
Make a Collage
Learn encyclopedia skills
Make your own personal flag
Read about Canada, the 2nd largest country in the world
Create a pet scrapbook or photo album
Make a salad with 5 ingredients
Find Out about a career you might like to have
Find a great pizza recipe
Make lunch for your brother or sister
Card Games

Also included in this book is a partial list of materials/supplies you will need to accomplish an activity

This book will give your kids a list of 5,001 activites to choose from which will keep them occupied for hours in fun, mind-expanding ways. Some activites may require adult supervision while others don't. I recommend this book for children between the ages of 6-18 years. While some activites may be appropriate for a young child, there are activites that are more appropriate for a teenager. While this book has lots of ideas and activities, I felt this book would have been better if the activities were seperated by ages and categories instead of one long list. A sampling of activities includes: learn CPR, illustrate your wall calander, write down your hopes and dreams, make a suggestion to the mayor, make a tower of disposable drinking cups, make up a new card game, cultivate an ant farm, make a salad with 5 ingredients, start a diary you'll really enjoy keeping, make a map of the town, make a "guess the number of" jar and many, many more activities to choose from. While I thought this book was great, I found some activites would be difficult or almost impoosible for a child or teenager to accomplish or some activites that were listed were similar. I also felt some of the activites may be geared to what your child(ren) may be interested in. At the end of the book, it gave a supply list a child may need to accomplish an actvitiy. I would recommend this book to anyone who is looking for ideas/activities for their child(ren).

For people fond of words and language, this is a fun book for browsing, no doubt. But for writers looking to write more descriptively, this book is not the best choice and for some writers, may even be a poor choice.

For one thing, nearly half the words in this book are *very* obscure, polysyllabic words that writers are probably better off avoiding. The words may impress but most readers won't know them.

For another, this book is all adjectives. That in itself is not a bad thing, but many writers also need specific verbs as well. Using this book, one could be inclined to modify a verb with an adjective. No matter how well-chosen the adjective, this leads to wordiness. Why use "walked slowly" if "ambled" is the more specific (and better) choice?

You'll get far more use from books like Rodale's "The Synonym Finder" and Random House's "Word Menu." McCutcheon's "Roget's Super Thesaurus" is less comprehensive but still a decent book to have on your shelf.

This is a good book for those who enjoy unusual words and who enjoy language for its own sake. Writers looking for books that help them improve their writing should look elsewhere.

Reviewed by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, award-winning author of This is the Place and Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered

This is a writer's aid that works When Microsoft Word's Thesaurus doesn't cut it.

This Roget's will work to an author's advantage often enough to encourage her to keep going back to it.

Kipfer reminds us that her book works much like the human brain, by categorizing. She's right, of course.Because we memorize the alphabet when we are young, we think we are naturally alphabetical animals. We are wrong. We had to learn specific skills for using a dictionary or putting a Rolodex into order, but we group and classify the entire world rather naturally.

I found that one of the most useful ways use Kipfer's combination dictionary and thesaurus is look up a word in my old thesaurus and then cross-reference what I found there to this new one. If you look up "receding" in a thesaurus and find "retrogression," you could go to Kipfer's book and find other entries that were, indeed, in your thesaurus, but you'll also find "crablike." That certainly suggests a simile better than another Latinate word like "reflex" or "retrograde."

I also was in awe of Kipfer's approach to categorizing in her addendum. She calls it a "Quick Word Finder". It uses very broad categories like Appealing-Unappealing. There one finds everything from the mundane (affluent, alluring, yummy) to the really off-beat (fiddle-footed and Circean.)

(Carolyn Howard-Johnson's first novel, This is the Place, has won eight awards. Her newly released Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered has won three.)

This book is supposed to help avoid cliches and repetition. A wonderful idea--how many times have you wished to find a different way to say the same old phrase? Unfortunately, Roget's Thesaurus of Phrases isn't very helpful.

The phrases listed are, for the most part, not phrases I have difficulty replacing. Honestly--"microwave oven"? "space being"? "business school"? More phrases like "bury the hatchet" or "writing on the wall" would have been better choices. Moreover, many phrases one might wish to find synonyms for, such as "take to heart" or "throw something in another's face", were not included. In fact, the percentage of genuinely overused phrases is really quite small.

The word "phrase" is somewhat misleading as far as this book is concerned. Most of the phrases included are limited to two-word combinations, and a number of entries are merely hyphenated words. Even "e-mail" is included! In addition (another phrase that is not included), the "synonyms" vary greatly in quality and are often not really synonyms at all. For example, under "Romance language", the following words are included: French, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish. Yes, these are Romance languages, but they are not synonyms for the phrase "Romance language". "First draft" and "diamond in the rough" are rarely used in synonymous ways. And isn't "diamond in the rough" itself an overused phrase?

Another problem with the book is its layout. Unless you're thinking of the same phrase that the author used as an entry, you'll never find what you're looking for. Many of the words used in the listing are not also used as entry words. You have to think of the right entry word to even look for other possibilities!

The only valuable segment of the book is the addendum, Phrase Maker, and even it is limited. This section lists a number of nouns that can be used with two or more adjectives that follow. It would be a handy reference if the rest of the book merited purchase. As it is, you're better off with a good, solid standard thesaurus, one that includes synonymous phrases.