This translation of Platero and I is the only "complete" translation into English of the Spanish Classic. It is also the most Spanish! This refers to the paperback edition.

This is a beautiful little book by a Nobel Prize Winner of Literature that is too often neglected, Juan Ramon Jimenez.

Only Jimenez could make the blood of a leach in a stream of water into beautiful imagery. Children read this book as part of their curriculum in Argentina, however, this book can be equally enjoyed and appreciated by adults.

The story is a simple one: it is a first person (semi-autobiographical) account of a poet and his donkey in the mountains of Spain, appreciating, almost Zen-like, the simple beauties of life. The elements, children playing, leaches bleeding in a pool, everything seems beautiful in this book, and the descriptions are exquisite.

This is probably the best introduction to Jimenez, a book not to be missed!

Platero y yo es un libro tierno y sencillo que cuenta la relacion de un borrico y su amo. Yo lo recomiendo a todo aquel que quiera aprender espanol con esta pequena historia llena de poesia.

I'M A RECENT DIABETIC. I HAVE LOOKED OVER COOKBOOK AFTER COOKBOOK. NONE ADAPTED TO MY TASTE OR LIFE STYLE. THIS ONE IS TOTALLY GREAT. I MADE THE WALDORF SALAD FOR THANKGIVING. MY FAMILY'S WAS CRAZY ABOUT IT. THE HUNGARIAN GOULASH WAS GREAT ALSO. I HAVE BOUGHT, BUT I HAVEN'T TRIED THE 1,001 DESSERTS BOOK YET. IF IT IS AS GOOD AS THE RECIPE BOOK, I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO TRYING THE DESSERTS ALSO. IF YOU ARE DIEBETIC, YOU HAVE TO TRY THESE BOOKS. I CAN'T RECOMMEND THEM ENOUGH.

I found this book to be incredibly helpful! Not only are there a variety of recipes, but this book also contains comprehensive nutritional information and general cooking tips for beginners.

I've been cooking for more than thirty years, and this book stands on my shelf with very few other cookbooks as one I will actually use.

I know we're not supposed to talk about the price of the book, but here goes: for my money, you won't find a better value. There really are a thousand and one recipes, but the other information truly puts this book over the top. Buy, try it. You won't regret it.

This is the most comprehensive cookbook for diabetics I've ever seen. Once you start using it, you won't be thinking of what you think you shouldn't eat, but will concentrate instead on all the wonderful and delicious recipes that will enable you to stay in control. The ones I made were really delicious, and very easy and to make, and since all the recipes have exchanges and nutritionals, including carbos, cooking diabetic meals is a no-brainer. With over a thousand recipes, you'll find hundreds you'll like; a fine addition to your kitchen bookshelf.

Peter Simple is the tale of a young British midshipman seeking his fame and fortune on the high seas. Set during the Napoleonic wars, it offers comedy and adventure in an old-school style.

Originally released in serialized form, Peter Simple is a fun, straight-forward adventure novel. It was a best-seller in it's time (1833) and holds up beautifully. I think this will appeal to anyone who ever thrilled to the works of Rafael Sabatini, Bernard Cornwell, or Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel. It's an easy read and great fun !

Frederick Marryat was a sea captain who served under the famous Lord Cochrane. This book was an inspiration to such later writers as Patrick O'Brian and C.S. Forster. It is a little like Tom Jones in that it episodic, even picaresque. It is very funny in parts, in a way that O'Brian is not--you get the sense that Marryatt is weaving in incidents and characters from his own naval career. It certainly helps to have read O'Brian for a deep understanding of the culture, but with Marryat you feel at times that you are in touch with the real thing.

Another good book in the Heart of Oak series. This novel was quite the opposite of the last one in the series I read, "The Black Ship". I think both novels give good pictures of how life was on the British sailing ships but in "Peter Simple" the crew seems to have a lot of fun and good times as well as taking their work very seriously. They are able to joke around a good bit and enjoy life. This seems much more realistic to me based on my own experiences at sea. "Peter Simple" is written by an actual man of war captain from the Napoleanic era and so probably portrays a much more accurate picture of life on a British man of war than any of the other similar novels. I really liked the novel. Although some of the coincidences and the ending especially are a little too much like a "ladies romance novel" I still think O'Brian fans would enjoy this novel too. The sea battles and ship maneuvers are every bit as good as O'Brian.

Interesting story with different western characters from your normal western novel, L'amour's Reilly's Luck is a fun read. The internal struggles of Val Darrant's trials strengthen the twisting plots. Loved the reading Tennyson to those who don't appreciate poetry portion. Some closure was definitely needed for his mother though. That part of the story was just left up in the air. A fast read.

A young boy of 4 is taken away and left to die, but he is found by Will Reilly who takes him under his wing. Reilly loves to gamble and is not afraid to use his rifle, and he is an expert in those two skills. Now he is pushing his luck. A great story.

This is one of my all-time favorite Louis L'Amour books. The characters are well-written, the tension is taut, and I really like Reilly and Val's characters.

Very well-written.

The fifth in a great series of mysteries. Rachel is a brilliant, beautiful, crime-solving attorney with an appealing cast of confidants. These books should be far more popular.

This fifth and best of the Rachel Gold mysteries starts with a deception, ends with a surprise and in between involves our heroine in myriad plot twists surrounding a most unusual profit scheme and a most unusual murder. Rachel, spunky and vulnerable, a Jewish attorney with a nose for detection, works her way through all the puzzles most satisfyingly and even ends up close friends with one who started out as an enemy. Rachel is a delight as she peels the layers of the puzzle like a rose and at the end this reader is left with only one question: When will we see the sixth Rachel Gold book?

Rachel gold gets better in every novel. This one is a thoroughly entertaining piece of fiction with an unusual and quite exciting plot.

The characters are very well drawn and I'm really looking forward to the next novel by mr. Kahn.

This is a very well written book. I have always been a Louis L'Amour fan but this is one of his best. It starts with a man named Matt Brennan who is a wanderer who goes from town to town. But one day while riding through a town he meets this girl. And that changes everything. To win her heart Brennan has to stay alive. He gets a ranch and watches a friend die in his arms this make Brennan mad a Brennan promises to never give up the ranch. Matt is pushed by the other ranchers to give up the ranch. The reason they want it is the is a Cotton Wood Wash and the other farmers want it for there cow to graze on. The others ranches send fighters in to kill Brennan. One of those ranches is the Box M. He gets in a fight with them and he gets in very bad shape. Will Brennan live? Well you have to read it to find out. I think the author could have made the book a little longer. There is a strong plot and good characters I suggest you read it.

I have read many Louis L'Amour books. But this one is my favorite! If you like really good gunfights, classic western scenery in canyon country, along with plenty of enemies and the odds against the hero, you will love this book. This is the story of Western drifter, Matt Brennan. One sunny day he drifts into the small Western town of Hattan's Point and catches sight of the girl of his dreams. Of course she thinks of him as an overconfident and cocky cow-puncher with no future involving her. But Matt plans to change that after he inherits the Two-Bar, a massive cattle ranch with plenty of valued water and the best graze around for miles. Of course every outlaw and cut-throat in the area also wants the ranch, and Matt has to defend it from the nasty outfits' hired hands with nobody but himself and his trusty firearms by his side. This was a great book with plenty of outdoor action in the desert canyon country of Utah along with enjoyable characters and a quality story.

I have read many Louis L'Amour books. But this one is my favorite! If you like really good gunfights, classic western scenery in canyon country, along with plenty of enemies and the odds against the hero, you will love this book. This is the story of Western drifter, Matt Brennan. One sunny day he drifts into the small Western town of Hattan's Point and catches sight of the girl of his dreams. Of course she thinks of him as an overconfident and cocky cow-puncher with no future involving her. But Matt plans to change that after he inherits the Two-Bar, a massive cattle ranch with plenty of valued water and the best graze around for miles. Of course every outlaw and cut-throat in the area also wants the ranch, and Matt has to defend it from the nasty outfits' hired hands with nobody but himself and his trusty firearms by his side. This was a great book with plenty of outdoor action in the desert canyon country of Utah along with enjoyable characters and a quality story.

This book had one of the best plots of any Louis L'Amour books you'll ever read. Louis L'Amour does a graet job of getting the readers attention and keeping it throughout the book. The author discribes the setting so well, it feels like you are there. My only dislike of this book would be that the author skips around from subject to subject, but it did make the story make sence. I think anyone with a sense of adventure or anyone that likes western books would like this book.

When I was just a little boy... My cousin gave me a box set of five Louis L'Amour books and To Tame a Land was the first one I read. It was also the first book I remember reading that was not written for children and it hooked me. Completely.

An epic story with a moral but deadly hero, To Tame a Land tells the story of a boy orphaned on a wagon train headed west. With natural skill and the luck of Raggedy Andy he grows into a gunfighter as fast as John Wesley Hardin, a bronc buster, a gold miner, a card sharp and a cattle driver. The story starts with a sad little boy and ends with man fighting for the woman he loves. Corny Cliches - sure - but this book captures the language and feel of the old west. Scratch that - it DEFINES the old west as we all know it. I re-read the book recently and twenty years later it still works (although it seemed awfully short the second time around...).

Ryan Tyler was a boy when his father got killed by marauding indians and was then left alone, without a father or family. In steps Logan Pollard, a loner and a drifter without ties to anyone or anybody. The moment they meet their lives change forever. To Tame a Land has got to be one of the best books L'Amour wrote. The plot is tight and fast moving and the chapters are woven seemlessly together. The characters are diverse and complicated, while Ryan Tyler's character is tough, hard, and sad all at once. If you are a person who loves action and adventure, then pick this one up. As soon as you open the book, you will be transported to a time where a romance was pure and danger was real. A time when good prevailed against evil and your friends are what stood between you and death. If you have nothing to do on a weekend, or are longing to be transported from the day to day grind of life in the new millenium, then pick this one up amigo, you will not regret the time spent reading this book. So, cinch up your saddle and reload your pistol because you are on your way to a fast paced ride through the west.

I had no idea H. L. Mencken wrote a book until I stumbled upon this treatise (shows you how much I know). Needless to say, I snatched it up in a heartbeat. The book is, unsurprisingly, a literary delight. I was, however, struck at how calm the tone was compared to the acid sarcasm in his dispatches from the Scopes trial. I have to confess, I enjoyed the peacable Mencken more, not that the old trouble-maker doesn't peek through once in a while to give us a good laugh. There is, for instance, a little passage about a "rough Christian country." But I won't give it away - read it for yourself!

In 'Sleeping With Extra-Terrestrials,' Wendy Kaminer wrote that nobody writes like Mencken anymore. She's right, and her advice reminds us that it is always a joy to read such dense, intelligent prose, almost without regard to the subject matter.

In "Treatise on the Gods," Mr. Mencken offers a simple account for the rise of religion that is not founded on much more than his own imagination. But it is as defensible as anything written by anthropologists, and is certainly several orders of magnitude more sensible than taking the stories at face value. For the sort of "true believers" that Mencken would casually dismiss as the "vast herd of humanity," this book will be an affront and an insult. But to cowboys riding that herd, it's a delight.

Who says comparative religion has to be dull? Mencken is on his best behavior here, but his characteristic flash and dazzle light up the book. As "The American Language", reflects Mencken's enduring interest in words, so this book reflects his fascination for religion in all it's varieties from high-toned to gaudy. While innumerable histories of religion have appeared before and since, probably none are so gracefully written and engaging. Even the pious will enjoy it. As for the "admittedly damned" (HLM's phrase), they will enjoy it all the more.

This is not a politically correct book.

It challenges ideas of Native "authenticity" and gives short shrift to out-of-town environmentalists (rather shorter shrift than I entirely agreed with, in fact). When Tom decides to act against a copper mine, he does so not out of simplistic ideological purity but because of a complex of reasons, largely having to do with his own identity. (And he was uncritically working as a logger before that.)

Nevertheless, this is a profoundly environmentalist novel, with intensely beautiful descriptions of wilderness. It's an environmentalist novel because of the unbreakable connection it creates between humans and their environment and because of its challenge to the ideals of short-term profit. (At the same time, the problems of poverty are never glossed over.)

Owens wrote beautifully and incorporated stunning passages of magic realism. Tom is a believable character--confused, irresponsible (college drop-out), lonely, fierce, and ultimately heroic in the same way animals are in those old Western novels where wolves and mustangs leap off cliffs rather than be captured.

This book combats the usual conservative white male destruction of the enviornment, and offers instead a compelling look at the incredibly brave and noble traditions of Native Americans and their conservation efforts. Copper mines are not usually something I could care about, but this book challenges the assumption of the domineering white patriarchal culture, and I for one am grateful.

It is the "forks" in the river and the road for the citizens of Forks, a small town which perviously had logging money running through its veins, but now it is considering an infusion of mining dollars as the mills close down. Native American Tom Joseph returns home to attend his uncle's funeral and to unconsciously assume the mantle of trickster and to learn what drove his uncle to acts of ecoterrorism and monkeywrenching. Readers will get a true feel for the temperate rain forests of Western Washington while reading this novel, and may be tempted to don a slicker or their climbing boots by the time it is finished. Owens lets the reader decide many of the outcomes in this novel, though the meaning is always clear, the humor is rampant and the small town was probably a role model for Northern Exposure, right down to troubled sexy waitress and a fly bouncing around in the pie case.

For wilderness supporters, this book is a horror story. The book is based on the very real possibility that a copper mine could be opened with the attendant roads and carnage, on Miner's Ridge, north of Glacier Peak in the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area. Congress left a loophole big enough to drive a front-end loader through when the Wilderness Act was passed. The road isn't there yet, but Owens' vision is remarkably clear. Take heed, and enjoy

In 1831 YEAR OF ECLIPSE, Lewis Masur suggests that 1831 was perhaps the pivotal year between the post-revolutionary era when America was busy enacting the promises of its great contracts, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and enjoying its new freedoms inscribed therein, and the pre-Civil War era, when all the underlying social and economic tensions submerged in those documents boiled to the surface.

Skillfully he shows how these tensions were manifested in Nat Turner's rebellion, the founding of THE LIBERATOR by William Lloyd Garrison, the radical religious fervor of Charles Finney, the evangelist, and the industrial utopianism of Robert Dale Own. He shows the rise of the anti-elite democrats as exemplified through Andrew Jackson's fight with the Federalists over the Bank of the United States, and the power of social censure as practiced by Washington's social elite when they forced Jackson's "firing" of certain cabinet members who condoned another member's too hasty remarriage after his first wife's death. The Anti Masonic convention in Baltimore in 1831-1832 is emblematic of the seizure of power from the Federalists. He shows us how the genocide of the Cherokee's Trail of Tears was prompted by designs of speculators for their land, and how Marshall and the Supreme Court acceded to those expansionist desires through a peculiar reading of the status of the Cherokee status as a "nation" was revised to "citizens" so they could be removed at will. The Nullification "movement" over tariffs also came to head, and though the South did not withdraw from the Union, the States Rights doctrine which became the ideology of the slavocracy was put definitively into play.

The chapter covering abolition and slavery, especially the pithy telling of the Nat Turner story and the furor and fear this small "revolution" set off is particularly well-told. Particularly striking is that Turner (who had taught himself to read) saw in the 1831 solar eclipse a portent from heaven that it was time to kill his oppressors. Using the lessons of the Bible, he cast himself as a redeemer who would free his people through a conflagration and bloodshed. Although the revolution was short-lived, Turner's rebellion had an enormous impact on Southern fears, serving to reinforce and justify the prevailing military and concentration camp culture. At the same time, Garrison's "Liberator" began to become a thorn in the side of slavers who considered such tracts as direct interference in their business. The Liberator and other abolitionist newspapers, books and tracts are banned from circulation by the slavocracy.

Masur amply shows that America in 1831, the promises of the revolution were being enacted in ways the Founding Fathers could not have foreseen and would not have endorsed. Contrary to their program, where a benevolent oligarchy of elite planter and merchant families would administer America to the obedient masses, a new more democratic America was taking shape. Max Weber, according to Lipset in "American Exceptionalism" believed changinng liberal societies be likened to a game of dice where the dice were "loaded" by tradition. And as time went on the dice became more and more "loaded" as the accretions of time and custom were sedimented into the society, eventually creating framing stories and commonsense views that closed the foundations of society to debate. 1831 was a watershed year, a year in which some sluices were opened and others closed, a time when the roiling waters of liberty and democracy were undermining the foundations of elites, when the promises of revolutionary America were being extended to, revoked from, or taken up focibly by its people. It is a fascinating time, and "1831 Year of Eclipse" lays out the key events of this era with admirable clarity.

Tis book was fascinating and very quick reading.

A nice quick read that I assume is aimed at a non-scholar general reader such as myself. One interesting feature is in the first few pages : there are some obvious parallels between 'year of eclipse' tales of pending doom and the Y2K hype a couple of years back.

I learned a lot from this fast paced, but thoroughly researched book and would suggest it to anyone with even a passing interest in what was going on during the subject era.