How I wish I'd had such a readable text when I was raising my children! I've not seen anything on this vital topic that is nearly as practical or of such breadth as trhis very readable book. A great bonus for parents!

Robert E. Lee is still considered one of the greatest military leaders in American history, which is rather ironic since he achieved his successes on battlefields against Federal troops. In this juvenile biography, Patricia A. Grabowski explains how this fine young man became a gentleman soldier, appointed to West Point by President Andrew Jackson. She does a nice job of setting up Lee's difficult decision to resign from the Army when his state of Virginia seceded from the Union and showing how Lee came to be put in the position of leading the armies of the Confederacy. The attempts to explain the strategic and tactical brilliance of Lee, as well as his fatal error at Gettysburg, are less successful, but Grabowski does make an effort. However, what we have here is definitely a solid introductory biography for young readers interested in Lee and the Civil War.

This book is illustrated mostly with historical paintings (many of which you will see in other volumes in the Famous Figures of the Civil War Era series), as well as some contemporary photographs of a few Lee related sites. Sidebars provided some additional details on Lee's life and the events covered. As always, the fact that these books insist on calling their subjects by their first name continues to nag at me. Marse Robert I could accept, but calling Lee "Robert" the entire book just sounds strange. Sorry.

This guidebook introduces the potential tourist to various utopian communities throughout the United States. Each community is given a chapter, which has an introduction that includes the community's general location, address, telephone number, hours when open, admission, restaurants, shops and facilities. (Everything a tourist could need!) Next follows an overview of the community, its history, and finally a written tour explaining what a visitor will see.

The communities included are: Ephrata Cloister (Ephrata, Pennsylvania), Old Salem (Winston-Salem, North Carolina), Mount Lebanon Shaker Village (New Lebanon, New York), Hancock Shaker Village (Pittsfield, Massachusetts), Canterbury Shaker Village (Canterbury, New Hampshire), The Shaker Museum (Poland Spring, Maine), Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill (Harrodsburg, Kentucky), Shakertown at South Union (South Union, Kentucky), Shaker Museum and Library (Old Chatham, New York), Old Economy Village (Ambridge, Pennsylvania), Zoar Village State Memorial (Zoar, Ohio), Historic New Harmony (New Harmony, Indiana), Oneida Community (Oneida, New York), Fruitlands (Harvard, Massachusetts), Historic Bethel German Colony (Aurora, Oregon), Bishop Hill (Bishop Hill, Illinois), Amana Colonies (Amana, Iowa), Historic Rugby (Rugby, Tennessee), and Koreshan State Historic Site (Estero, Florida).

This book is a wonderful resource! Not only does this book tell you how you can visit various historic utopian communities, but it also gives you the information you need to understand what the community was about. Complete with pictures, I highly recommend this book.

~This is a great book about a girl named Nellie Lee Love who lived during a time when blacks were treated very unfairly compared to whites. She lived in the seregated town of Bradford Corners. Even though life wasn't very good in the seregated town it was bearable until Nellie Lee's Uncle Pace was killed. The police said he was drunk and accidentaly stepped in front of a moving train but in the Love's hearts they know that isn't true. When finally they learn the truth Nellie Lee's dad decides he~~ can't stand it anymore so he tells the family he has decided to move to Chicago. Nellie Lee and the rest of her family must face many different new challenges in Chicago. This book is a must read!~

This is the diary of Nellie Lee Love a girl born in Bradford Corners, Tennessee. The town is segregated. The Blacks call it Corners and the Whites call it Bradford. Nellie has called this place home for all of her life. Her family is much into equality for Blacks and other races, and are terrified when more then fifty lynchings done by racists are reported to have been committed in their area. The family is even more terrified when they learn that their Uncle Pace has been claimed to have been drunk that February 4th, 1919 and had laid himself down on the train tracks and gotten hit, and then had died. Nellie's father can't stand another minute of it. He decides to move up North to Chicago, Illinois. The move takes a while to adjust to, especially since the family were witnesses the day the Chicago Riot occured in the year of the Red Summer. This year was the worst for Blacks because Whites were fighting all over, but in Chicago, Blacks were fighting back. Now the Love family is in danger. Will the city ever calm down? What losses will occur during the situation? What lies will be revealed? Read this wonderful book to find out.

The Dear America diary Color Me Dark by Nellie Lee Love is interesting story of a girls life with many sad, happy and serious times. The plot of the story is a black family trying to get their rights so that they can be equal with whites. Nellie's family owns a funeral home in Bradford Corners, Tennesse. In the book she moves to Chicago because her family thinks that Chicago will bring new hopes to blacks. When her father tries to get a license so that he can strat a funeral home in Chicago. Her father thinks that they want him to pay a bribe because he did all of the paperwork. Then Nellie finds out that she has to go to a new school where she finds different friends that are like her in a way. I would recommend this book for people of all ages who are willing to learn. People also read this book because it shows what some black families have to go through.

My 3 and 6 year old daughters enjoy the story for the talkabout dancing and for the "little sister looks up to big sister" and "little sister feeling left out" themes. The adults in the family get misty-eyed over a little girl's discovery of the beauty of dance (if you've ever shed a tear of joy when Linnea is finally atop the bridge in Monet's Garden, you'll know what I mean). This will be one to save for the next generation :-)

Beautiful water-color-ish illustrations appealed to all ages in our family.

This was a childhood favorite of mine, and the pages are tattered from reading it over and over. A young girl wants to be a dancer and is saddened because her older sister can take lessons, but she is too young. She looks up to her graceful old sister and dances with her, but wishes she herself could be in the spotlight...The book is a wonderful story for all ages, young and old.

Amazon says this is out of print. NOT SO! It can be gotten thru the National Parks Service National Women's Museum in Seneca Falls, NY. The woman who wrote this lived an extraordinary life, as a slave child, and as a freed woman. Yet by many standards she is just an ordinary person living her life, doing what she CAN do. It's a nice read. She's not trying to be anybody's heroine, more simply I think she was writing to tell herself who she was, that she could survive, that she could be of service. Neither boring or exciting (so far), simply real.

It's a short book (especially when you consider the added historical footnotes and pictures), but very valuable. It's so rare to hear the perspective of someone who was a slave, and who then lived free in the post-war period. Her heartfelt tales of the bigotry of the _post_-war period to me were even more memorable than her focus on the war itself.

"A Black Woman's Civil War Memoirs," by Susie King Taylor, was first published in 1902. A new edition, edited by Patricia Romero and featuring an introduction by Willie Lee Rose, appeared in 1988. In that new intro Rose declared, "There is nothing even vaguely resembling Susie King Taylor's small volume of random recollections in the entire literature of the Civil War, or in that of any other American conflict insofar as I am aware." Indeed, this book is a rare and valuable historical document.

Taylor was born a slave in 1848 on an island off the coast of Georgia. She gained her freedom and worked as a laundress for an African-American Union regiment during the war.

Taylor recalls how she learned to read and write and then herself became a teacher. She offers fascinating details about her life with the troops. She had many different duties beyond laundry service. I loved the episode where she recalls concocting "a very delicious custard" from turtle eggs and canned condensed milk, and serving it to the troops.

Taylor condemns the lack of appreciation shown for both black and white Civil War veterans. She also condemns early 20th century racism. Reading her book I was reminded of W.E.B. Du Bois' classic "The Souls of Black Folk," which was first published around the same time; I think the two books complement each other well.

Taylor ends on a note of hope and pride, noting "my people are striving" for better lives. This book is, in my opinion, an important milestone in African-American literature.

Warm-hearted, colorful illustrations carry us along with Tanya and her new friend, the wardrobe lady at the performance of the ballet Coppelia. When Tanya gets lost backstage she is lucky enough to experience a "show and tell" about some of the costumes from other famous ballets. She dances with the wardrobe lady and the French ballet terms are sprinkled liberally throughout the story. This book would be well appreciated by a certain niche of readers but would probably not be of interest to non-dancers.

Tanya and the Magic Wardrobe is magic itself. Wardrobe's and Magic have been inextricably linked since C.S. Lewis (c.f. the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) and in this book the tradition continues.

The illustrations are as usual delightful and the prose is beautifully expressive of the magic that always seems to exist between the very old and the very young (the Old Dancer and Tanya), between those who share a love of something greater than themselves (dance), and the magic of dress-up (whether in the theater or the play room).

Our own ballerina asked for this story to be read three times the day we brought it home, and has asked for it again every day since. And I can't wait to read it to her again and again.

"Couch Potato Kids" is a good start for parents who want to take a more active role in their children's lives. It, however, does not go into enough depth on resources for parents such as Turn Off the TV dot-com, home school/parenting assocations and other resources for parents trying to find alternatives to the influence of television.

This is a story about a young girl and her involvement with a group that is moving in the wrong direction. Despite warnings from her parents, teachers, and friends, she does not see her mistake until she is in serious trouble. This text focuses heavily on peer pressure and is ideal for a middle-school student.

I've bought numerous books on Flash and the Dynamic Scripting that can be intermingled with Flash.... Flash 5 ActionScript F/X and Design, Flash 4 Creative Web Animation, and different Wrox books on ASP, ASP databases, and ADO. This book ties ALL of them together. It explains motion scripting for beginners, and then it shows how to import variables from ASP, PHP, Perl, and Cold Fusion. These 1000+ pages contain EVERYTHING you want to know about Flash, it it with out a doubt, THE BEST FLASH BOOK EVER CREATED!!!! It even branches out Flash to other programs like Dreamweaver UltraDev and Generator, it explains how to display information from databases using Flash Turbine. If you read this book, you will be a master at Flash.

An excellent book! Well worth the investment! It transitions well from more basic concepts to more complex topics -- With lots of substance for people at all levels of experience. Even those with more expertise can learn a thing or two from the different conceptual approaches presented. The book is not just about "here's how to do the same old boring X, Y & Z, just in the updated version of Flash", it also says "here's some different ways of thinking about solutions that takes greater advantage of new features of Flash". I also really enjoyed the mini math and geometry lessons... it's good to know that years of high school algebra and geometry could be put to some use!

The interface design chapters were particularly outstanding; judging by how awful so many Flash sites are at integrating interactivity, PLEASE!! I BEG YOU!!! everybody read the chapters on designing interfaces! They are a "must read" for anyone who wants to improve their site's interactivity.

The game design chapters are also incredibly helpful as well, and I think are some of the first useful explanations of game design I've ever seen for Flash. Even if you're not designing games in Flash, using a familiar game like Asteroids as a vehicle for explaining some pretty clever design elements works very well. Not to mention, it's very cool to be able to make your own video games! Flash isn't just for dull corporate websites anymore!

I'll be incorporating the lessons learned from those chapters into all the stuff I do... even though I only get to do very boring stuff for a corporate site. And if I use what this book teaches, maybe someday I can get hired to make games and do cool interfaces!!! :)

If you are a newbie,......their are other alternatives that will get your feet wet, but if you are a practicing Flash developer and have a firm understanding of ActionScript...this book will inspire you to build real dynamic Flash apps. It touches on Flash Javascript methods, Flash and textfiles and goes into server side middleware solutions like, CGI,Perl and PHP. It also introduces you to database integration. This book gives you real world solutions, which maybe a bit elementary, but overall it lays the foundation for you. I found this book to be inspiring and to be the book which pushed me to learn CGI,PERL,PHP and MySQL. If your looking to build real dynamic/interactive Flash applications or websites this is the book.