Imaginative fun, with an exasperated protagonist reminsicent of The Cat In The Hat. My two-year-old loves it, and we have fun doing the voices of Babysitter and the Lady from the Babysitter Help Line.

Timothy Bush ``gets'' kids sensibilities.

Benjamin Mc Fadden and the robot baby sitter are by Timothy Bush. Timothy Bush is a great writer and a good illustrator too. This book is great, it's funny and it's good for a bedtime story for kids the age of 3 to 13. Benjamin is a stubborn boy when it comes to bedtime. The book is about a robot baby sitter that's mean. Benjamin reprograms the robot to be fun. The baby sitter reprograms the other robots to be fun too. Then it gets out of control. Then Benjamin says the password, it's pa... sorry you will have to read the book.

I like the end when Benjamin said " What a weird night. " and Fantastic (the robot cat) said something really funny. Then Benjamin looks like the book is going to happen all over again. I recommend this book to Kindergartners though 6th graders because every one can enjoy it. I think 7th graders won't read it because it's too easy to them.

By the way this book takes place in outer space, you can tell from the illustrations.

Technology goes haywire when the Robot Babysitter is programed for FUN! This is one of my favorite books to read aloud to children and to give as gifts to youngsters to share with their "Ultimate Passwords."

I just move to the usa and because I wanted to have something that reminds me of home with the decoration of my apartment I had to buy it I saw the book in a furniture store in Antigua Guatemala days before I left but I couldt buy it!!
I decided to search and I found it, I am so happy

We bought 2 of these books in Guatemala and paid almost twice Amazon's price! Bummer but we loved the book. Pictures are awsome and when we got home everyone wanted our books to keep so I was so pleased to find it on Amazon and at a bargain price.

Not only is it a wonderful collage of home styles and decorating ideas with professional quality photos but the history of the architecture is a very interesting read as well. I'd call this one of the best books we ever purchased. If you are interested in Guatemala and/or Central American architecture, I think you'll love this book.

For a Guatemalan like myself, it is a thrill to have a book like this in order to show people some of the best our country has to offer in the way of art, architecture, use of space and color and textiles. I am sorry Amazon does not make this book available. However, it is found in both English and Spanish in Guatemala. Anybody going down there should pick it up. I picked one up during my last trip as a gift for my mother-in-law, a tenured ASID Interior Designer in San Jose, California (she was very thrilled!). My only 'complaint' is that they did not show more houses outside of the Antigua/Guatemala City circuit, e.g. Quetzaltenango, the great estates in Escuintla, etc. In fact, it is a bit too Antigua focused, which in that case it should have been called "Casa Antigua". However, do not let this detract from acquring this wonderful book.

This is a truly impressive book. All of her books have been easily accessible, informative, and entertaining. Benjamin is thoughtful and compassionate about her subject matter.

This book offers wonderful, realistic advice about choosing and raising a puppy from an animal shelter. I found it very informative, and recommend it to anyone wanting to adopt a puppy from the shelter where I work.

I adopted a 8-week-old puppy from Humane Society and being a first time dog owner, this book is very helpful with my raising my puppy. In a month, she will be 4 years old and as a puppy, she was a GREAT puppy and today, as a dog, she is a GREAT dog! The other people have commented to me how well-behaved my dog was when she was puppy. Today, people still tell me how smart and well behaved my dog is.

Well, it's all due to that book.

During the high tide of the Victorian era, the political life of the nation was dominated by two men, Disraeli and Gladstone. Gladstone is an obvious choice for one of the top statesmen of the era, he was elected four times to the premiership. Disraeli was not quite so fortunate. However, given the short period of time that he was in office he accomplished a great deal. He brought the tories back from the dead, passed a reform bill and managed to acquire the Suez Canal. At the Congress of Berlin, Disraeli's command of the situation even impressed Bismark (not exactly a slouch in these sorts of things). Not bad from a rather foppish young man who specialized in "Silver Fork" novels (a fictional version of lifestyles of the rich and famous in the 19th century).

Blake's book is the best one on the subject of Benjamin Disraeli. The complex story of the novelist turned politican is brought out in all of its facets. Disraeli was probably one of the most interesting people to be prime minister (after perhaps Churchill and Walpole) and Blake's book shows the reader how he did it.

Blake's Disraeli is not only flawless in its interpretation of Disraeli but also in its style. It is a work by which all other biographies must be judged. Simply put, it is the perfect biography.

This is a work of considerable scholarship which chronicles the life of one of Great Britain's outstanding statesmen. The book covers the political life of Disraeli admirably, but also gives a view of the private Disraeli: confidant of Victoria, prolific novelist, inventor of the crouton.

This book is an excellent explanation for any who are searching for answers to the origin of mankind and how we came to be on earth. It answers the question of the missing link through ET's altering of primate genes to produce a being with a soul. They then waited many thousands of years in order to mate with the 'human' species to bring a more evolved being onto the planet.

A truly great book for anyone beginning to search for meanings...

I have problems with many books which are channelled and also many books purporting to describe the ET agenda. So many seem airy-fairy or unconvincing in some way or other, as if either the author or source is confused.

This book stands out as an exception. While it goes into great detail on which ET civilisations seeded our planet (not of great interest to me, whether accurate or not ) it also provides insight into who is around now, and what they're up to.

It turns out that, not only are there positives and negatives around the planet, (positives the Pleiadeans, negatives the Zeta Reticulian Greys, for example ), but there is another categorisation - whether they come from "third density" worlds like Earth, or higher "fourth" & "fifth density" worlds.

What is most interesting is the description of beings incarnating on Earth who are highly advanced intellectually, but not spiritually. Saddam Hussein is named as one such, and the "good" allows such negatives to persist in order to test us, and further our own growth.

In a similar way there are evidently "fifth density negatives" - highly spiritually evolved, but negative ( a contradiction? ) who are also a great test for the peoples of Earth. Rev Moon & Jim Jones (Jonestown massacre ) are cited here, and I can see Osama bin Laden as the prominent example of a highly spiritual being who nevertheless serves evil, and is a great challenge for the good in the world.

The book actually warns us to use our God-given discrimination when listening to channels, as the bad guys are also channeling. One hallmark of a negative source is their attempt to instil defeatism on Earth - with the notion that we are doomed, either by climatic disasters, or ET colonisation. We are warned against such sources.

Although channelled info is prone to eror ( The inspiring "Starseed Transmissions" predicted the expansion of the Universe as halting & reversing around now - in fact, it's recently been shown to be speeding up! ) this, like Starseed, is definitely a must have for anyone interested in making sense of the ET phenomenon. Full of spiritual wisdom. Buy it while it's still in print.

(...)

If you read only one book on physical extra-terrestrials, this is the book to read. Both the positive and negative visitors are covered. In addition to providing comprehensive information not available from other sources, an overview perspective is included which will be most valuable as events unfold.

This book is the pinacle of riddle fun! I popped like a spring chicken when I bought this book because it's so small, but HUGE with entertainment and mind-titilating fun. Most riddle books are really joke books, but this one is the REAL THING! There are hours of enjoyment and tons of mind-stumping exercises- Great for the whole family!

I bought this book because I'm a riddle fanatic. I was really pleasantly surprised by the sheer number of riddles. This book kept me busy for hours! The illustrations and the design are great too. This book makes a great gift for people of any age and is great at parties! It would be great if the authors did a follow-up book.

This is a fabulous book to entertain both child and parent. As a psychologist, I recommend this book to families as an activity that parents can do with their children. It is one of those rare activities that engages all ages and that often children are quicker at than their parents. My children and I have had great times trying to solve the riddles and we are still trying to solve some of them This is a great gift to give any child or family--they can be assured to share many enjoyable hours using it.

I've read a lot of books about Franklin, but this one is in a class of its own. It's a psycho-biography (kinda) that traces Franklin's religious development from his early childhood through the rest of his life. Nope, he's not the deist we learned about in school. Instead, he's what Walters calls a "perspectivist." If that sounds boring or dry, think again. The book reads like a novel. I definitely recommend this one. It puts a new spin on old Benjamin. My only objection is that sometimes you have to wonder how much of this is Walters, and how much Franklin. So it loses one star.

Kerry S. Walters has written one of the best studies of 18th century religion yet produced. Benjamin Franklin is a difficult subject, in part because as Walters puts it, Franklin "wrote both too much and too little about his religious thought." (p. 4) Different historians read the same documents and come up with radically different interpretations of their meaning. Walters, however, has produced a nuanced study, sensitive to the wider religous context in which Franklin lived his life, and profoundly learned too in the cultural and intellectual developments of the Atlantic enlightenment. By meticuously locating Franklin within this larger context, he has written a work which sheds insight both into Franklin himself, as well as the larger society in which he lived. To do this in 151 pages of lucid and economical prose is quite a worthy achievement.

Walters argues that Franklin's religious views developed in tension between two ultimately irreconciliable religious traditions. On the one hand was the Calvinism of his native Boston, the faith of his father, with its sophisticated Augustinian piety. On the other hand was the "New Learning" which captivated so many polite and cultivated men and women on both sides of the Atlantic, the faith of men like Isaac Newton or John Locke, with its concomitant liberal Christian emphasis on the capacity of human reason to arrive at religous truth. As a young man, Franklin wavered, adhering first to the one and then the other.

As a mature adult, however, Franklin came to accept the ambiguity of his earlier commitments. "Recognizing that a Newtonian-inspired deism was spiritually impoverished, but unable either rationally or emotionally to return to the orthodoxy of his boyhood, he was at loose ends for a few years," Walters argues. But in 1728 Franklin found a way to reconcile the contradiction. "The solution he arrived at--his doctrine of theistic perspectivism--enabled him to escape from the mechanistically sterile cosmos into which he had drifted without falling back into a Calvinist worldview whose central tenets he found unacceptable." (p. 12)

As Walters explains, Franklin's perspectivism stemmed from a belief in an inaccessible God, which humans symbolically represent to themselves in order to establish an emotional and intellectual relationshop with the divine. This means that while God *is*, there are various human representations of God as well. "These anthropomorphized conceptions of the divine," Walters writes, "serve as the foci for personal adoration as well as sectarian theologizing." (p. 10) The result, then, is a commitment to religious toleration because human representions of the divine are culturally and historically bounded. Human religous traditions, to the extent that they share the same purposes, contain some worth.

In arguing for this understanding of religion--an understanding which arises from the tension between the two religious traditions within which Franklin was working--Walters can explain Franklin's religous statements with a cogency missing from earlier accounts. While Walter's statement of Franklin's perspectivism may sound superficially anachronistic, that is a misreading of this work. This is a terrific exercise in intellectual and relgious history, and Walter's demonstrates convincingly the historical origins in Franklin's thought of the theology he discusses.

I really like this book, even though I'm not sure I agree with its spin on Franklin's religion. Walters argues that Ben is a "perspectivist"--basically, a proponent of religious fictions that he knows have no objective basis, but which he thinks are necessary for psychological health and social stability. The case is well presented and nicely written. (Would that all historians wrote as well!) But I can't help thinking that Franklin comes out more of a twentieth-century existentialist than he is--complete with religious angst and identity crisis. What the heck, though. This is one good book. My guess is that it's going to make a lot of people mad--especially those good American Christians who want to think that all the "Founding Fathers" of the USA were also Christians. As Walters demonstrates, it just ain't so.

When Walter Benjamin, a German Jew, died in Spain during World War II, Europe was deprived of "the most subtle mind of [his] generation." Benjamin, a philosopher, historian, and literary critic, was a colleague of some of Europe's most influential thinkers during the period between the two world wars. Deeply involved in the intellectual aspects of history, Benjamin, however, became a prisoner of the world of ideas, a man who neither understood nor recognized the immediate political realities of the Nazi threat, preferring to sit "in glory above the fray, on an alabaster cloud." Refusing to leave Paris until almost all avenues of escape were closed, Benjamin's indecisiveness about escape and his insistence on toting his 1000-page manuscript on the history of Parisian arcades may have cost him his life.

Parini's imagery here is often stunning, and his prose so smooth it is almost melodic in its flow. Using several points of view, he allows Benjamin's friends and acquaintances to recall episodes in Benjamin life, creating emotional power from their reminiscences after Benjamin's death in Spain. First-person accounts by Lisa Fittko, a real person who helped Benjamin and others escape through the Pyrenees into Spain, are particularly powerful, giving immediacy and drama to Benjamin's attempted escape on foot. Quotations from Benjamin's own philosophical writing give a sense of reality to a man who otherwise refused to become engaged in the realities of his time.

Unfortunately, Benjamin himself is phlegmatic, and Parini is often forced to "tell about" his life, rather than recreating it for the reader. Because he is distanced, both by his own personality and Parini's narrative style, Benjamin never really comes to life as do his friends, such as Fittko, Jewish mystic Gershom Scholem, and Russian Marxist Asja Lacis, who, in addressing us directly, create scenes which are full of vitality. Still, this novel about Benjamin as "the European Mind writ large" is endlessly fascinating, a thoughtful eulogy for all that has been lost to posterity.

This book is among the top three I read last year. It tells the story of Walter Benjamin, the German/Jewish thinker, who happened to be in the middle of Europe during the dark times of the Third Reich's apogee.

Mr. Benjamin makes a very interesting character, with his obssession for true and pure knowledge and his inability to deal with people or the terrible times he was facing.

The author, Mr. Parini, has a very pleasant style, constantly changing the point-of-view in the narrative, in a way that we can understand every character in a much more deep sense.

Walter Benjamin was nobody to me before I had read this book, and I must say I have bought two books with his writings since then. The same goes to Mr. Parini, since I bought his other book "The Last Station", which deals with the last days of Russian writer Leo Tolstoi.

This book is definitely worth reading. It is very touching since and it is hard not to feel any simpathy for a character with such a complicated personality. Also, it is based in true facts, this people really existed and the book is very well written.

The most exciting parts of his escape read like a thriller. By the time you end this book, I doubt if you won't feel any shame for a regime that sacrificed so many bright minds for nothing. I sure did.

This is a book that I turned to with some scepticism. I admire Jay Parini enormously as a poet, novelist and essayist but this new project: to "novelize" Benjamin's last years seemed excessively ambitiousess. How do you add flesh and bones to this melancholic man of letters, this Marxist rabbi or magic lanternist as some have described? What can be added to Benjamin's own work, his letters and the reflections written by friends and comrades? Well Benjamin's Crossing is both a marvellous, magical and intensely moving novel. Parini gives Benjamin a sexual and emotional life which sensously combines with Benjamin's mental life. By the end of the novel I was so immersed in the figure of Benjamin, so moved by him, that I wanted Parini to re-write history, which of course he could not. If there are any ambitious filmmakers out there this would make a compelling and yet daunting movie.

Judge Posner examines the reasons for Cardozo's reputation and, more important, analyzes the rhetorical methods the judge used in creating some of the most renowned and cited decisions in American law. How and why he crafted the statement of the facts a certain way for one decision, a different way for another; how Cardozo used a lawyer's persuasive skills in reaching results he believed were warranted. Posner also examines the inconsistencies in Cardozo's thinking and opinion-writing. The book presents a portrait of a brilliant, prudent jurist and illuminates his professional shortcomings as well. May have little appeal for the non-lawyer, but for anyone interested in legal writing, the judicial process, and opinion-making, this is a terrific book.

This may be the classic book by Posner. Shorter than most his books--and less encyclopaedic--but also less maiandering. Cardozo: A Study in Reputation stays on track, while revealing a complex sensibility of jurisprudence by Posner and an astounding intuition by Cardozo. In this book we see two great legal minds at work: Cardozo's providing the interpretations that further social welfare and Posner's explaining why these interpretations are so desirable.

I 'd rate this book the one MUST READ book if you are thinking about law school. This is what law school is about: Struggling with how to promote social welfare by interpretation and rulemaking.

Judge Posner builds and presents a strong case in defense of Justice Cardozo's reputation as a leading American jurist. Apparently, sometime during the 1950s a revisionary movement emerged in American legal thought that eventually injured Benjamin N. Cardozo. His Hemmingwayesque opinions were criticized as pedestrian, and the logic behind his reasoning was attacked as paternalistic. Judge Posner's thesis (a top-notch dissertation) deflects the subjective defamation and focuses upon objective standards of judicial measurement. Employing the resources of an electronic legal database, he proves that the Cardozo opinions, particularly those written as a judge in NY's Ct. of Appeals, have been consistently cited with regularity. This original test demonstrates that Cardozo's influence on the common law is unrivaled by any jurist other than O W Holmes.

Attempting to create a new genre of social science, Judge Posner smoothly integrates the drives that formed Cardozo as a man with the strictures of the law that define a judge. Analysis of the opinions, along with the briefs of the arguments, show that he was a good judge because he was able to reach correct results even when the specific facts of cases seemed to predict a legal anamoly. That quality produced case law that remains hard to reconcile, and the result has been attacks on the decisions as inconsistent. Judge Posner recognizes those weaknesses, but rather than contorting his logic in reconciling them explains that a man's reputation is typically based on either his high points or his low ones. In Cardozo's case, his death after only six years on the US Supreme Court limited the high points to controversial cases, such as MacPherson and Hynes. Judge Posner speculates that had Cardozo, like Holmes, had a full career as a Supreme Court justice the subjective standard for measurement of his reputation would have shifted away from the decisions as a state judge.

Although those state court opinions continue to dominate Torts textbooks, Cardozo's critics have injured his reputation by suggesting that he was merely a flamboyant local judge. Judge Posner shows that their slurs have not reached the ears of leading jurists. However, the ordinary person is apt to adopt those reputationary revisions without actually reading Cardozo's opinions and relating them to the specific cases and the development of American common law. Thus, Judge Posner creates a bridge, somewhat like Justice Cardozo, between arcane legal studies and the conduct of the people that law governs.

I went to Honduras on a short term mission trip last year and I've seen poverty first hand. This book has opened my eyes even further of the rural poor of Honduras. This is the story of a courageous woman who is helping her people overcome their unimaginable poverty by discovering the roots of it.
In a subtle sense she denounces short term mission projects....that we come in to countries like hers and try to put a band-aid on a skull fracture. Americans, like myself, come into these third-world countries thinking we are fixing a country's problems in a couple weeks by donating old Gap t-shirts and building a few houses and then leaving. She urges the fact that if we are to really help the poor, we need to make a long-term commitment to get at the root of the problems. Shes not asking for sympathy, but for us to join us in her struggle. Get this book if you are ready to make a difference.

this is the ultimate story of courage. this woman has so much to share with you. you will be changed by it. Fast read.

A truly great read. Luckily, this book was assigned in my sociology class or else I probably would have never read it. It gives you an accurate portrait of peasant life in Honduras. If you want to be inspired read this book. After reading this book I feel like going down there to help them in some way. Her book is put in very simple terms and it is easy to see the injustices going on in her land. If you don't read it tell someone about the book. THANK YOU ELVIA!