This book might be helpful to parents of newborns who have no idea how to play with their children. For everyone else, it has a pretty obvious and unimaginative take on how to use toys to stimulate language development. A typical suggested dialog for playing with legos is: "Yes, Bobby, that is a blue block! Here is another blue block! Now there are two blue blocks and they are exactly the same!" and so on. There are lots of lists of things your child should be doing at various ages; but if you are interested in this book, your child has special needs and you probably already know he/she isn't going to develop in a typical way. To me, this book wasn't worth the money.

I bought this when my son was 15 months and we had concerns with his speech (he was a preemie and fairly ill his first year, so we have always monitored him pretty closely). This book may seem like "obvious" information or ridiculous to a parent of a typically-developing child, but it is a wealth of information to a speech-delayed child.

My son began special education preschool (for daily ST) a year after I bought this, and finally we were able to do more with it (his receptive language prior to that never came above a 6-9 month level). His ST and I would coordinate which activities I was doing with him using what sentence structure. (Right now, we are working on "wh" questions for example, ie "WHere is the ball?" "WHo is in this picture?" Early on, it was more like "Ball up. Ball down. Block up. Block down.").

By being "on the same page" (no pun intended), we believe he has made more progress than he might have made if I was treating him languagewise like a typically-developing child and he was only getting the intensive language therapy at school. I also have been able to transfer the ideas to household chores (shopping: "One apple. Two apples. Two apples in the basket. One, Two.").

I love the charts given of language development - I check off each consonant and consonant blend sound right in the book as he masters pronouncing then correctly. I don't have to use this book as much as I had to before, as now we are basically working with oral hypotonia, some other oral motor issues, and building his vocabulary (which he LOVES to do), but this book was great when he was unable to speak, frustrated because he couldn't make himself understood, and I still reference it at least weekly, either for my own child or to answer another concerned parent's questions. (We also used ASL for my son until he could physically produce the sounds to make words, so I signed a lot of the phrases suggested in this book as well, repeating them over and over until he could at least make himself understood through ASL.)

Just a bit of clarification on the previous review, many of our kids DO develop speech "typically" - they just don't begin until much later, but then many do it in the same order as other kids. The charts and checklists in this book make it easy to track that, which can be hard when other kids the same age are saying complete sentences and you aren't sure if your child's next step will be frontal consonants. It keeps you on track of YOUR child, so you can ignore what the typically-developing kids are doing that your child isn't.

(For a list of toys for kids with fine motor delays, see my list in listmania!)

As a Speech Language Pathologist who works with very young children and a mother of 2 children, I can tell you that this book is great. I loan my book to the families that I work and all the mothers have enjoyed it. There is a lot information on child development, particularly speech and language skills. The authors give suggestions on what are good toys and activites and how to use them to increase your child's language skills. In other words, "how to play with you child". The book is very easy to read and understand. Anyone with a young child, whether they have special needs or not, will learn a tremendous amount.

This is the first work of Sue Miller's that I have read. I found the book to be an excellent narrative of what we mother's go through in our daily thought processes about the mistakes we make. I thought that Anna was an EXCELLENT mother. As Ursula points out in the book, it is only rare here in America that families do not share "the family bed". The "intercourse incident" hardly constitutes child endangerment. Leo probably did make a bad judgement call with the incident between himself and Molly, but that hardly makes Anna a bad mother or neglectful in any sense. To me the worst moral mistake she made was sharing her bed without being married! As for her sexual awaking and the behavior she and Leo exhibited around Anna....I found nothing abberant in it. It is a shame that the prudish judge made the decision that he did, but it is also a sad reality in today's society. Sue Miller did a great job of capturing the mind of a VERY caring and empathetic mother. I highly recommend this book.

This was a very realistic story of a divorced mother and her choice to love a man. It is very hard to begin a life again after a painful divorce, especially when it is not by your choice. Anna Dunlap had to face this challenge alone with a 4 year old daughter, Molly. She decided to move on with her life and try to love again. This was a decision that she probably regretted most in her ordeal, but she would have never known it could come to her losing her child. We all make decisions that we regret later, without any forshadow, but then we have to learn to live with our choices. Anna was naive about a few things in choosing her mate, Leo. One, he had no children of his own and two, she slept with him so soon after the first date. That to me was the foreshadow that things were not going to be pretty. The trial, the aftermath and the romance was very real. Sue Miller did a good job intoducing us to Anna Dunlap. All characters were fully developed and the story line was captivating. Job well done.

I first read "While I was Gone" and became hooked on Sue Miller's writing. Just had to read "The Good Mother" and found it even better. Miller has the uncanny ability of taking flawed characters and allowing us to find some redeeming qualities, some reason to like them. Her words trigger something in all of us, that no matter how sad the story, you can't lay the book down. It haunts you days after you read it. The story focuses on Anna's poor parenting, yet Miller subtly uses the court testimony of the psychiatrist to define Anna's better qualities, and explains why, despite her irrational sexual behavior, she was a "good mother." Prior to Leo, Anna developed an emotional bond with Molly, giving her a sense of security and inner strength. And despite the tormented years that would inevitably follow the divorce and custody battle, we're told that Molly will survive emotionally because Anna is her "inner parent." She, in effect, became a piece of Molly forever. To many, that would make Anna a "good mother." Thought provoking book and author.

Sue Miller is a wonderful writer and expresses things quite well in her books. This one is no exception.

She introduces us to Cath and her grandmother Georgia. Cath is a twice divorced mother who has inherited her grandmother's home and decides to go there to sort things out in her life. She discovers her grandmother's diaries and we get a glimpse into her life and times. The story on TB and the stay at the san was really well done. I did feel like I knew Georgia's character better than Cath's though. I enjoyed the flashbacks and the development of the characters.

An enjoyable book. Worth the read.

I was lucky enough to get this book at the library before it hits the bestseller lists. I predict it will. I can also see it as a movie. Sue Miller explores the past and present, drawing parallels with the modern day Cath and her grandmother, Georgia. When Cath discovers her grandmother's diary, she is compelled to read it and fill in the blanks of her life. Learning from Georgia's past mistakes and also seeing how much alike their lives were, Cath comes to a deeper understanding of her own life. The allegorical submerged town under the lake illustrates poignantly the themes of the story. This well researched tale explores a part of history little known till now-the TB epidemic and life in the "sans". A compelling story, with many layers.

This was the first book I read by Sue Miller. I thought the story started out slow and I wasn't sure where the story was going. The story surprisingly jumped back and forth from Georgia, the grandmother, to Cath, her granddaughter. I kept reading and was drawn into the personal lives of these two women. The book is an excellent read if you are savvy with emotions and introspective to life's complicated and mysterious circumstances. The details of Georgia's life are delicately sewn together throughout the entire book. The entwinement between the sanitarium and the bank account opened my heart and eyes to realize the weaving of my own present life. The book sends a message that love does prevail. The World Below read like a true story when learning about Cath's and Georgia's personal challenges and the decisions they were faced with. I look forward to reading more of Sue Miller's novels.

There are twenty stories in the 2002 BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES. The best out of how many? I did the math.
In the back of the book is a list of 227 American and Canadian magazines. These aren't the only magazines that publish short stories, but they are the ones (it is claimed - though I doubt that Alligator Juniper or Porcupine are truly in the running) from which the gems were selected. I did some research and averaging and came up with a number for their yearly submissions: 817,200.
Of course, only a minuscule fraction of these stories get accepted for publication. The great mass of them were written, they were submitted, they were rejected. So we are unable to judge their quality. We can only evaluate the ones that do see the light of day. And now, on the pages of BEST, we have before us the creme de la creme.
Interesting, that out of the 227 magazines, eight of the twenty stories are from The New Yorker and nine others are from prestigious publications. As for the authors, I recognized ten of the names in the table of contents. When I checked out the brief biographies at the back of the book, I found that those unknown to me have impressive credentials.
Of course, you could say that the best authors write the best stories and submit to the best magazines, and thus they congregate on the pages of BEST.
What contradicts this assumption is the stories themselves.
Not that they aren't well-written. Someone who's been through a writing program at Columbia or Iowa - or who teaches creative writing - knows not to use the word "resonant" twice in the same sentence. The stories aren't outright bad (except for two BOMBS); most have their virtues. But are they the best? The recurring problem has to do with content.
A story fails in its own way, but I finished many with the ultimate question WHY looming before me. Why was it written? Why was it published? Why did I just read it? I'm not asking for a message or a social purpose - nothing so shallow as that - but I do want to feel that some meaningful and truthful and completed interaction took place between me and the world created on the page. Many of these stories are insular and artificial - roses with no fragrance, waxy to the touch.
Many.... Since quality should always be recognized, I want to acknowledge the stories in the collection that I thought were worthy - to varying degrees - of being there:
Ann Cummins' "The Red Ant House"
Jhumpa Lahiri's "Nobody's Business"
Jill McCorkle's "Billy Goats"
Tom McNeal's "Watermelon Days"
Akhil Sharma's "Surrounded by Sleep"
Five out of twenty (with the McCorkle story being the only one that is wholly successful). Where does that leave us, as regards the state of literature? To my thinking, nowhere good. What could be the cause?

There are good stories in this book, no doubt. But, "Best" of 2002? Of the (I think I recall correctly) 20 short stories, eight are from The New Yorker. Perhaps The NYer prints many of the best short stories; in fact, they probably do - given their readership, pay scale, and authors they attract.

However, if you want to read The new Yorker just buy The New Yorker. If you want a variety of short stories from a variety of magazines, you won't find them in this book.

What you will find is a nice bibliography of all the magazines read by the editor and considered for publication in this touted series. As a new author, this is good. To me, it's a nice list of suggestions about where to submit stories. Even though those stories probably won't make it to this series, the bibliography suggests a degree of clout. I think this is important given how many magazines out there; the honed-down list can be useful. (This isn't the only place to find such a thing, but it is a way to see which magazines the editors of this series consulted.)

Another book, the annual Pushcart Prize selection, works similarly. The list of publications *they* used gives us a good lesson in small presses that aren't so small as to be ignored, yet too small to be viewed by _this_ series or a wide readership.

Basically, I feel this is a book for writers more than for readers. We learn what the editors are reading, where they are reading it, and what they are looking for. If you are a reader looking for a short story collection, I'd say skip it - despite, I'm sure, the many hours of reading and thought put in by the editor.

The Best American Short Stories 2002 is a wonderful collection, and a great introduction to some of america's finest new authors. I especially liked the first story, entitled Along the Fontage Road -a compelling story from a father's point of veiw about raising his son in today's world. I would recomend this book to just about anyone who enjoys reading.

I enjoy Michael Crichton's novels, but I know just what I'll get; a great, original plot with 2 dimensional characters designed to push the story along. Fine, it will still be an original story and that is enough.

Ludlum, in the Sigma Protocol, has characters of single dimension push along a one-dimensional plot. Worse, you've read it before in every single Ludlum novel you've ever read. I was about 150 pages into this book when I remembered why I stopped reading Ludlum years ago; every book is the same, every book has the same flaws. This is the best-selling worst writer out there. I am always surprised by the depths of the bad writing. It is definitely not to a professional level, and if he were just starting out now, no one would publish him. I would like to see how much the final draft was fixed up in the editing process.

Here are a few examples that come to mind:

If the characters overhear a newscast or see a newspaper, it will be pertinent to the plot, and in the next few pages. Nothing happens simply to give you a feel for the characters or to flesh out the atmosphere. This is irritating in a thriller novel because if it's there you know it will be used. There are no false clues or even slight attempts to throw you off the trail.
The dialog is interchangeable; there is no difference in style, tone or however it is that real writers do it so you know that a particular comment is from the female good-guy, or the male bad-guy. Any of them can say anyone's lines and that story won't change. I think Ludlum would change who was speaking simply because a certain numbers of lines had passed, to make it appear as a conversation were taking place. Instead, he writes what could be monologues and attributes them to random characters.
Ben and Anna, (the good guys) never take a false step, never get into a corner, never are without a highly skilled expert to call, never call and find that expert not able to pick up the phone. They are on the run and never have a problem paying for hotels, international airline tickets, food, and clothes. This plot only would work if Ben were super rich, expertly trained and a superb physical specimen. What??!?! He is?? Then let's write this ...!!!

I was a quarter of the way invested into the book when I realized that Ludlum was still as bad as he ever was, but I figured I'd see it through to the end. It is bad to the point it becomes funny. If you read it, count how many people Ben and Anna meet to get crucial plot advancing info, only to have them die violent assassinations mere moments after they leave. You'd think that after 2, 3 or at least 5 times they'd say, hey, someone may be following us, let's at least check to be sure the next guy we visit has his life insurance paid up before we lead the assassins to them.

I finished the story wondering why Ludlum wrote this. Did he need the money that badly? A contractual obligation? Maybe this was a test to see how gullible the reading public can be. I sure was.

This is the first book I've read by Robert Ludlum. And from the likes of it, I'd be encouraged to read more (there's always The Bourne Identity which comes out in theaters next summer to start with). The author's technique of covering multiple story threads occuring at the same time was well used. You could picture the scenes to a mental movie quite vividly. He doesn't give the protagonist in the story unbelievable traits. In fact, he makes the male protagonist (Ben Hartmann) downright sensitive with her interactions with the female protagonist (Anna Navarro). There were lots of twists and turns in this story, until the last few chapters. What seemed really suspenseful at the beginning, quickly degenerated into preachiness in the last few pages as the author explains the logical reasoning behind the sinister plot to preserve the world's leading industrial/political icons. The story is mainly set in Europe around Switzerland. I like the fact that the author describes his surroundings and interactions with people in these countries in their native vocabulary (usually in italics), then explains them again in English for the benefit of the reader. I'd like to think I learned a thing or two about those countries he mentioned.

All in all, it was a fascinating read. Pick up a copy today!

This is the vintage Ludlum. Ben Hartman,an American investment banker has replaced his late brother in the firm. While in Zurich
an old college friend tries to kill Hartman killing several
innocent bystanders. This sets off a wild chain of events.Enter
Anna Navarro a field agent for the Department of Justice who is
investigating the deaths of several old men.They come into possession of an old secret file that links everything into an
organization called Sigma.Ben and Anna are being stalked by a hired assassin who is very good at what he does. The books spirals into a colossul conspiracy. This book will keep you on the edge of your seat.A very good book to read. You will enjoy it.

This is the first Sue Miller book I read. I am intrigied by the idea that someone can totally lie about her past, completely change her identity, leave her first husband, marry a great guy, have three pretty good kids, almost have an affair with a murderer and get off totally scott free, with no retribution to pay. Her husband gives her a hard time for a while and even throws a tomato at her (though he misses her on purpose), but in the end he forgives her. Even her mother forgives her for leaving her first husband and disappering for 2 years. Doesn't she have any guilt or regret for all her deceit? She had hardly done one honest thing in her life. Why doesn't she have to pay a price for that? The only thing she was ever honest about is that she prefers animals to most people. She is obviously more comfortable with animals because she doesn't need to lie to them.

One thing I really did like about this book is the interview with the author and the discussion questions in the back of the book. I enjoy learning what the author had in mind when they write a book. This helped to clarify a few details for me. Otherwise, I thought the ending was just a little too neat and tidy for me. She should have to suffered a little bit more for her dishonesty.

I found myself totally absorbed in this book from the first page forward. This is the first book I read by Sue Miller, and I cannot wait to read another. I loved the depth of her thinking as she wrote, the intimate thoughts of simple moments of everyday life. The details of this book are like vivid genre paintings of the Dutch masters, or the 20th Century American realists.(just to compare it to a few things) I admire her ability, perhaps, to remember and write her own intimate thoughts of these everyday moments, private nuances, that some of us forget right after they have taken place.
Yet, in some aspects, I differ. I did not understand why Jo had to lie and create a new name and background when she moved to Cambridge. She really did not have anything to hide. Also, I wondered why she was not smart enough to figure out the aftermath of the killer's confession, before she acted on it. She should have arranged another meeting with him and questioned him further, maybe, in a public place, so they would have been casually seen together. In this case, she could have denied the entire Ritz incident. She could have played detective, she could have hidden a tape recorder and gotten his confession on tape. But, that was not Jo, I am talking about somebody else now. Not meaning to rewrite this wonderful book, but as a veterinarian who is in touch with everyday realities, she acted awfully unrealistically. But overall, I would absolutely recommend this book to all of those who lived or whose lives touched the lifestyles of the 60's. Great book!

I' am not a lover of modern fiction. Most of the books on Oprahs' book club I find to be commercial, pedestrian and trite. However, Sue Miller's new book is an absolute wonderful read. I could not put it down. Her prose is as intelligent as poetic. She has an incredible ability to develop character. Miller's characters have strong emotional, intellectual and psychological inner lives. She takes her character on a journey through the labyrinth of modern life. She allows the reader to enter her character's world fully without hesitation or distance. From the first sentence she has taken a hold of the readers mind and does not let go until the end. Even after the end of the book, she still possess you as you try to sort out all of the implications of her character's lives. I especially found her ending to be excellent. Without apology Miller gave us an ending that is true to life. She did not feel the need to tie everythng up in a neet package. Why do we always need to read overly-romantic happy endings that really have very little to do with reality. Thank you, Ms. Miller for a wonderful book, much like the Good Mother, in which woman are multi-dimensional people whose lives are complicated, compelling, messy, fecundated and real.

Having very much enjoyed the film version of "Inventing the Abbots", starring Joaquin Phoenix, Liv Tyler, and Billy Crudup, I was intrigued by this collection of short stories by Sue Miller, an author who was foreign to me up until this point. I purchased the book in the hopes that these stories would be absorbing and entertaining as the movie I'd seen. Inventing the Abbots, I've found, makes just as good of a story as it does a film. I cannot tell you which version I prefer, because they both tackle the same premise in completely different ways. Both involve two brothers from a poor family and their love/hate relationships with the Abbot sisters-- the daughters of one of the wealthier men in town. While the movie beefs up the role of the narrator/younger brother and makes love (mainly the tortured type) a central theme, the literary work is more focused on the resentment and anger that can come with the youth, and the releasing of that hostility that can come with growing up. Both interpretations are interesting takes on a basic, uncomplicated storyline. The stories that followed failed to be even half as good as "Inventing the Abbots". While Miller's ability to characterize and set a scene is incredible, the actual content, the PLOT, of her works were... uninteresting. Had her pieces been, say, five pages, it would have been fine. But, her stories were usually ten, fifteen, even twenty pages... sometimes more. My feeling was that if she insisted on writing such long stories, she should establish a more solid conflict. All of the characters in her stories were hurting, they were vulnerable, they were REAL, but they were also boring. My other complaint was that with every story, it looked as though she was going to define a message, a POINT, but she copped out at the end of each work. "Inventing the Abbots" was about mistakes made during one's youth, it was about anger that can only be soothed by time. I honestly can't tell you what the other stories were about-- I found myself drilling my brain, trying to figure out what she was trying to teach me. Maybe I'm wrong. I am, after all, too young to identify with many of the situations she sets up. A lot of her works in this collection deal with middle-aged women and men who are coping with broken hearts and children they can't connect with. "Inventing the Abbots" is the only story that is about young people-- and when I say young, I mean college age, I don't mean junior high. So, I'm not condemning the writer, I'm saying these works didn't do anything for me. I'll be incredibly interested to see if anyone else has an opinion about this book, but to anyone who sees this review and this one alone, I will leave you with this:

She is, no question, an amazingly talented author, but her short stories, except for "Inventing the Abbots" (which is REALLY good), left something to be desired in my own mind because, frankly, nothing happened and I didn't understand any of the symbolism, if there was any... I'm not sure.

Maybe a bit predicatable, but an interesting look at middle America.

I bought this book soon after watching the movie that shares its name...And I just have to say that the movie, "Inventing the Abbots", is not near as compelling nor as convincing as Miller's version. Not to mention, that the remaining collection of stories in her book are all astounding! The details she brings to her characters make every story in this book so heartfelt and poignant...It is a must-read for every serious lover of literature! For Miller is a novelist that brings these characters to life with such candor, and explores the frailty of human nature and the darkness that lies somewhere in us all.

This book will not help you prepare for TOEFL at all!

IT is waste of money.

IT doesnt cover anything!

Study with Barron's TOEFL and you will do well on the test.

Good Luck!

This book shows you what the TOEFL is llike, but it will NOT give you any deep preparation. It does not even come close to preparing you for all the material you will see on the TOEFL. The grammar is too easy, the listening section is mostly just a list of idioms, and some of the reading passages are about topics that TOEFL does NOT put on their tests.

You might think this is a good book because it is long, but don't think that! Most of the book consists of practice tests--Princeton Review puts one question on each page (trying to simulate what the computer will look like). For example, the last 150 pages of the book are ONE test.

Finally, the CD-ROM is NOT a Computer Test. You will get only some listening practice.

Good luck on your TOEFL!

This is a good book if you want to take TOEFL practice tests but not interested in the preparation material as such. The TOEFL practice tests are really good, you will get a decent practice. I would recommend this book.

I made myself finish this because I had bought it. I bought it because I had previously bought and enjoyed "While I was Gone" but this book just didn't gel. It could have done with a lot of editing out of excess words and adding in of character development. Neither the characters nor action ever seemed to be wholly developed. I also felt that the jumps back in forth in time and the use of the present tense were done awkwardly - they came acoss as a creative writing experiment which really didn't help the story to move.

While I have liked some of Sue Miller's books ("The Good Mother" and "Inventing the Abbotts"), this one was very unsatisfying to me (as was "While I Was Gone"). I never felt that I knew the characters and because of this, could not understand their motivation. It was as though I was viewing them through a cloudy lens...the characterizatons just never were clear.

I tried to feel sympathy or even empathy for Lottie and Cameron, but could never muster any. They just never really engaged me as a reader.

Also, parts of their history and background seemed to be missing, as if lost in all of the changes of time that Miller used.

I will try "Family Pictures" next.....hope I can get more involved.

"For Love" takes place over the course of a summer in Boston. Lottie is struggling with her second marriage and she's using the summer to figure out what she wants. She and her grown son Ryan spend the summer preparing her childhood home for sale, while her husband Jack stays home in Chicago. Meanwhile, her brother Cameron rekindles his high school romance (obsession) with Elizabeth, who has since married but has returned to her parents house down the block from Lottie, also deciding whether to leave her husband. Elizabeth, who was never nice to Lottie as a teenager, tries to befriend Lottie, putting her in the middle of a difficult relationship between her and Cameron.

Sue Miller's books tend to start the reader out in the middle of a story, and as the action progresses, we learn about the main character's past through flashbacks. She uses this technique here as well, and I think it generally works. In the first chapter, Cameron accidently runs over Elizabeth's au pair in a wild attempt to keep her from returning to her husband. That sets the stage to show us how this affects Lottie and what led to this event. Over the course of the book, we learn that Lottie met her second husband Jack while his wife was deeply ill and that their relationship is in many ways defined by the slow death of his wife. We learn that Lottie's father was arrested for embezzlement when she was a child, and she grew up with her alcoholic mother, both angry at her and guilty for being favored over Cameron. Yet Cameron has become the devoted one, looking after their mother as she deteriorates in the nursing home. We learn that Lottie takes pride in growing up without wealth, for having tacky taste, for not going the conventional route, and yet she chooses Jack, who is a doctor, with money and refined tastes. All of this (and more) figures in how Lottie eventually makes her decision and, perhaps, comes to accept herself.

This is my third book by Sue Miller, and like her others, it has interesting and complex characters and it has many insights about human behavior. But while I found Lottie's journey is interesting, this book didn't affect me as much as "While I Was Gone" or "The Good Mother." The story felt a little disjoint at times -- it seemed like if you put the story back in chronological order, there would be some important periods missing. I sometimes felt that I didn't understood Lottie's emotional development and the reasons she made the choices she did. At the end, although I expected Lottie to make the decision she did, I didn't really understand why from her point of view. Still, I liked Lottie's unconventional ways and I appreciated the emotional complexity of her character. It's not my favorite of Miller's book, but I wasn't sorry I read it.