I have been an avid reader of vampire fiction for many years I can see why it won the best vampire novel of 2001. It didn't use any of the usual clichés of the genre.
I found all of the characters intriguing and didn't want to put the book down. I especially liked the way Jean handled the whole relationship between Dan and Brandy.
Her theories about vampires are unique and intriguing. I found the last few chapters to be wonderfully nail biting and went to bed rather late because I had to read them before I slept. It will definitely be on my list of rereads that I do once in a while.
Run, do not walk to your favorite bookstore and buy a copy or order it from here!

The situation where Brandy is called to investigate a body in the faculty offices of the local university starts getting screwy almost from the start. Why is a young man's chair occupied by the body of someone dead of extreme old age?

Then, too, why is Dan Martin taking such an interest in the investigation?

And what part do Doc and his ex-con son have in the situation?

Then Brandy's best friend is found murdered, with fang-marks in her neck. Now it's personal!

Brandy Mather is a detective in a small, Kentucky town. In such a place, there should not be a rash of murders, especially not ones as baffling as the ones she is now trying to solve. The first victim was supposed to be only in early middle age, but appeared to be an old man who died with a very odd expression on his face. It is not long before other bodies begin appearing, one of them her own best friend. Brandy seeks help from computer genius, Dan Martin. What she gets is a lot more.

She begins to fall in love with Dan, but a mysterious secret keeps them apart at first. Dan has an inside track on the killer that is completely unexpected, and shocking. Brandy finds that she is facing an other worldly villain that will attempt to corrupt her very soul. Small town politics and murders may be what she is fighting on the surface, but the truth is one she can hardly believe. Vampires are real.

***** In a complex and fast paced plot, readers are given a new twist on the old legends. Dan is an appealing hero, but not as other worldly and brooding as many heroes in this genre are. Brandy is a modern, strong willed woman whom many readers will find similiar to themselves. If it is possible, this would make a fantastic continuing series.

For those of us who bungle at the keyboard and can always use more guidance, this book offers a great start in understanding Chopin's music. Probably the most difficult piece to play in public is Chopin Ballade No. 4, and Chopin offers some incredible insight into how he wanted it played. As you know, the music notation on the sheet cannot cover every intention of the composer, much like writing cannot capture everything, but most of what we want to say. This book supplements your understanding of the music. I would not be surprised if your great piano teacher pulls material out of this book in order to advise you on how to play Chopin.

This book is wonderful for understanding Chopin's philosophies on technique and musicianship. One important thing you learn in reading this book, however, is that the piano has changed dramatically since Chopin's time. My main reason for reading this book was to gain valuable information about how to improve my technique for playing Chopin. Although I definitely learned a lot by reading this book, the issues relating to Chopin's advice about technique are unfortunately not as relevant on pianos today as I was hoping. In short, it's a great read, but will not solve all your Chopin technique problems.

This is an excellent and well documented work. Anyone who tries to play Chopin or has an amibition to do so, should read this. It goes straight to the heart of Chopins entire musical philisophy, and gives not only insight into the artist himself, but solid and sound advice on practicing, technique, and interpretation. Strongly recommended.

Cleo is born in 1912 in Oklahoma. At age fifteen she craves to go not just beyond the garden gate, but all the way to Lhasa. She leaves home with the egg money, her trumpet and a heart full of lust. "The way to contain the itch in the privates," Cleo says, "is to cultivate the itch in the brain."

It's a circuitous trip to Lhasa, that looks as though it may last a lifetime. Cleo's sense of humor keeps her moving on. She falls once in love, once in lust, bears two children, and survives tragedy. Back in Oklahoma she begins to recover, then moves on to Los Angeles to find even more trouble, which for Cleo has become synonomous with passion.

In the end, she finds that life never loses its power to astonish. Once you make the journey with Cleo, things look different when you get back home.

In "Cleo," Jean Brody creates wonderfully specific characters and writes with both depth and a wise, hard-headed humor. In a way, it's a book about loving books, as the title character's life is forever changed by a rural Oklahoma librarian who feeds her love of literature and opens her up to the wider world. But Brody doesn't stint on story, and I found myself eagerly returning to the book for three nights running to discover just where the next turn in Cleo's life would take her.

If John Wayne had True Grit, then Jean Brody's Cleo has True Spunk! This little gal takes us on an adventure through her growth as a runaway adolescent to a mature woman, scarred, but not beaten, by life's journey. When we meet Cleo she is on her way to Lhasa. Thank goodness for the reader she never gets there or we would have been deprived of some wonderful literary moments. If you are tired of reading cookie cutter novels, give Cleo a chance - she'll steal your heart and leave you asking for more! Me? I'd love to read more about the grandmother. How about it Ms. Brody?

"In the span of nearly 50 years of priesthood, what is still the most important and most sacred moment for me is the celebration of the Eucharist. My awareness of celebrating in persona Christi at the altar prevails. Never in the course of these years have I failed to celebrate the Most Holy Sacrifice. If this has occurred, it has been due entirely to reasons independent of my will. Holy Mass is the absolute center of my life and of every day of my life. It is at the heart of the theology of the priesthood, a theology I learned not so much from text books as from living examples of holy priests. First and foremost, from the holy Cure of Ars, Jean Marie Vianney. Still today I remember his biography written by Fr. Trochu, which literally overwhelmed me."  (English text of the address given at the International Symposium on the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Promulgation of the Conciliar Decree Presbyterorum Ordinis on Friday, October 27, 1995. Text acquired from L'Osservatore Romano, Weekly English Edition.) Text can also be viewed at the Vatican web site.

The definitive life, based on the official "Process of Beatification and Canonization," and thus totally factual and documented. Of humble education and assigned to a forgotten farmers' village, he attracted the whole world to Ars and was proclaimed "Patron Saint of Parish Priests" in 1929. Ate one meal a day, slept only a few hours a night, heard confessions up to 17 hours a day, converted thousands. His body remains incorrupt. A grace-filled story of total love of God!

I first read this many years ago and it was a favorite book of mine. The Cure d'ars was such a saintly man-and this book was wonderfully inspiring to read. A treasure.

The book "Eternal Gold" is a "how to" book for those willing to claim their inheritance. God gives us the necessary knowledge, when we are ready for it. This book teaches the fundamental laws of manifestation. "Eternal Gold" invites each participant to practice the lessons along with the writer.

My life changed after using the guidelines in this book. I became unlimited by what earth says is possible. With each new goal completed the manifesting became faster and easier. As I learned to use the process in one area of life, the technique was easily transfered to new areas of life - again with success. Today I enjoy a "good" life. I have a good job, a home, etc. and most of all a rewarding life.

Our spiritual growth can be prospered when we apply spiritual laws and principles to your every day living. We come to trust God, as the God of Good operating with us in our lives. Your life can change. You'll learn how to deal with blocks in life such as fear or lack.

I highly recommend "Eternal Gold" to those who seek answers and want a concrete proof of God working with them in their lives.

I have read both trilogies many times and have recommended both trilogies many many times. My only caution is that the two trilogies be read in order. All of her books are a MUST reading for true awakening

This book is one I keep on my nightstand. For those interested in learning how to find their own personal truth, and to enact it, this book is tops. The author's down-to-earth writing, detailing spiritual principles in easy-to-understand language, makes it plain to the reader exactly how we each can manifest our best and highest dreams. "Eternal Gold" is truly that--a gem of a book!

My girlfirend loved it. It has lots of great photos... showing how there are happy faces everywhere. Beware, however, that you will get the point before you look at all the photos.

As soon as I looked at the first few pages of this book I was hooked, from cover to cover this book is packed with an imaginitive look on the world and shows over 130 faces in places you would'nt have dreamed of looking for any meaning what-so-ever.

My advice to anyone who has'nt got this book is to obtain one as soon as possible, this book simply has a fun outlook on the moderm world.

If you thought the "Play With Your Food" books were fun, you should check this out. Everyone I've shown it to loves and says things like, "I see faces in that, too! I thought I was the only one!" Brilliant. Simple. Simply brilliant.

Jean Genet wrote masterpieces,this autobiography is a masterpiece in itself !

Jean Genet wrote masterpieces...this autobiography is a masterpiece too !!!

Jean Genet's major works are considered masterpieces. His plays, The Screen and The Blacks are performed worldwide. During his lifetime, he received the Grand Prix des Arts et Lettres and he is remembered for championing the causes of the oppressed. Yet, surprisingly, for many years, no biography of Genet had been attempted. Writers could have been intimidated by Sartre's huge psychological study, St. Genet, published in 1952, or perhaps by the elusive nature of Genet, himself, and his complex morality.

In 1987 Edmund White began what became a six-year study of Genet's life and works. The result of that work is this book, Genet, a shining and enduring biography that shares much in common with Starkie's excellent biography of Rimbaud and Ellman's Oscar Wilde.

White read Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers for the first time in 1964. He responded to Genet's "deeper, more extravagant prose," and, in doing so, he experienced a self-liberation as the gay world was presented without apology or explanation and gay men were afforded the experience of seeing their world, not as tacky but as glamorous and poetic. In addition, Genet's affectionate rendering of drag queens helped to elevate their view in the eyes of all.

White, who had tested HIV-positive in 1985, was grateful for the chance to work on the biography as it also afforded him the opportunity to reflect on his own homosexuality, art and literature in a world not yet affected by the AIDS virus, for Genet had inhabited a world and culture prior to the outbreak of AIDS.

In this sensitive biography, White takes us on a journey through the French welfare and prison systems; high society led by Cocteau; café society led by Sartre; and revolutionary movements as well.

In Genet: A Biography, White shows us that Genet's work, like Genet, himself, is a terrain of contradictions, and he spells out both the kindnesses and the cruelty with sincere and translucent clarity.

Genet began life in 1911 as a ward of the state. Raised as an outcast, by a young age he was attempting to come to terms with his sensitive and convulsive nature. At the age of thirteen he began lying and stealing; by fourteen, he was branded a thief, something he accepted with arrogance rather than shame. At fifteen, he was arrested and led, in handcuffs, into the Penitentiary Colony of Mettray.

At Mettray, he worked in the fields and performed naval drills on landlocked ships. By night, however, the prisoners lived by their own code. The handsome, sadistic heterosexual was king, and someone, like Genet, passive and adoring, not only served, but blossomed as a princess and a scribe.

As brutal as life was for Genet in Mettray, he cherished his time there, for he experienced many awakenings within its walls. The time in Mettray also afforded Genet a chance to look inward. What he saw caused him tremendous anguish, for he had to face the realization that he did, indeed, possess all the evil that others had attributed to him. His suffering, however, only made him strong.

Destitute, but free at nineteen, Genet began a decade of wandering through Europe and Africa, passing from one prison to another for one petty crime or another. In 1939, in a prison cell in Fresnes, Genet began his masterpiece, Our Lady of the Flowers. Figuratively, he wrote in martyr's blood, for the book represented a reopening of all his adolescent wounds.

As Genet wrote of his early loves in his cell at Mattray, modern literature found society's most marginal men portrayed, for the first time, without shame or remorse. White clearly points out that Genet never used his writing as a political or psychological forum, yet his books sparked furious debates over censorship in the courts of Europe. What Genet did do was open the door for future writers and, most importantly, confer dignity and understanding on society's least understood and most estranged.

Genet had not set out to do so, but he had created a kind of miracle. Social change began to take place, and the president of France, at Sartre's urging, pardoned Genet of all his crimes. However, as White theorizes, this pardon also stripped Genet of his sacred individuality, his uniqueness, and he fell into a deep depression and ceased all writing.

A relationship with the sculptor, Alberto Giacometti, however, conferred on Genet new meaning and purpose and he said, "every man is every other man, as am I."

Resuming his life as a vagabond, Genet discovered untapped inner resources and a wealth of creative ideas. His importance as a poet emerged.

Genet's last years were filled with suffering, when, addicted to drugs and suffering from cancer, he dedicated himself to the plight of the Palestinians; rootless warriors lacking a champion, much like himself. His final work, Prisoner of Love, is dedicated to these people and to life, itself, and the power of the creative imagination. This was Genet's final miracle: the realization that we are all holy, that we all contain, both the whole and the part, of the divine.

Genet died at the age of seventy-five, on 15 April 1986 in a hotel room in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris. He is buried in Larache, Morocco and his grave bears only two sun-washed, sparkling white stones. Although Genet's body may lie beneath the Moroccan sand, his spirit still soars, crowned with the blood of his youth and the thorn-studded roses of old age.

This book gives a concise and very systematic overview of the tools for biochemical determination of bacteria. All commonly used tests are discussed, common combinations of individual tests are also described. For each test there is a chapter on the purpose, the biochemical background, the necessary reagents, the interpretation of test results and precautions.

The enormous amount of data, however, comes at the expense of readability. Sometimes the chapters are repertitious and appear to be a succession of quotes and facts from different sources. Moreover, the book contains a few sloppy mistakes ("the periplasmic space of staphylococci", for instance) in the background information.

Altogether, a concise reference book on the background and use of biochemical tests but not flawless in the sense of readability and circumstantial information.

The absolute best reference in my opinion for anyone in microbiology.

This is an outstanding resource for the educator and for laboratory personnel. My lab would be incomplete without it. I plan to order several copies to use in my laboratory class. The book is well organized, highly detailed and comprehensive. With the focus on molecular microbiology today, many scientists have forgotten or never learned most of the information covered in this book. Such information is increasingly difficult to find since it is buried in the older scientific literature.

The first giveaway of Eternity, My Beloved is the epigraph which informs the reader that the title is borrowed from Nietzche: "I have never found the woman by whom I would want to have a child except this woman that I love--for I love you, eternity, my beloved." Official Catholic teaching rarely quotes that particular German philosopher for a defense of celibacy! But the phrase very aptly captures the spirit of the novel's protagonist, Father Jerome Strozzi, aka Tonzi (based on an actual worker-priest named Auguste Rossi) who immerses himself in the demi- monde of Paris' prostitutes, pimps and petty criminals. Once again the narrator plays a major part, this time complaining that Strozzi has hijacked his plan to write a novel about a prostitute named Elizabeth. But Strozzi's combination of anti- bourgeois sentiment, gospel conviction and humility proves irresistible. Freedom, that elusive gift Juan Ramon spent most of his life seeking without realizing it and only finally grasped in an act of self-incarceration, is Tonzi's hallmark. It allows him to plunge into incriminating circumstances daily, to see God's providence in an act of betrayal, a missed train or an eviction, to touch the hearts of street-wise prostitutes simply because his agenda is entirely unhidden.

"A long time ago he had recognized as a secret vice the habit of embracing formulas [e.g., 'Arise, take up...'], building arguments, using the Son of Man as another object, situating Jesus in history instead of, even today, living one's life sufficiently within His so as to grasp the meaning of those phrases and trying over and over to understand them. He apologized for being tactless, because it seemed to him that no one had the right to use these words if his own life had not first transformed them into bread and wine, into flesh and blood, and if he couldn't say them in his own personal voice." [61]

As the novel develops the narrator (named Sulivan) becomes more and more obsessed with Strozzi and his powerful influence over people, especially prostitutes. Like a true modern, he professes skepticism about Strozzi's celibacy but can find no evidence to impugn it; rather, the women speak of his friendship and his demand that they exercise their spiritual freedom. "All that he was good for was to rekindle light in eyes that had become dead. Meanwhile he was paying the price." He is regularly roughed up by the pimps whose business he threatens and reported to the chancery by virtuous Christians whose wayward pleasures he subverts.

The first giveaway of Eternity, My Beloved is the epigraph which informs the reader that the title is borrowed from Nietzche: "I have never found the woman by whom I would want to have a child except this woman that I love--for I love you, eternity, my beloved." Official Catholic teaching rarely quotes that particular German philosopher for a defense of celibacy! But the phrase very aptly captures the spirit of the novel's protagonist, Father Jerome Strozzi, aka Tonzi (based on an actual worker-priest named Auguste Rossi) who immerses himself in the demi- monde of Paris' prostitutes, pimps and petty criminals. Once again the narrator plays a major part, this time complaining that Strozzi has hijacked his plan to write a novel about a prostitute named Elizabeth. But Strozzi's combination of anti- bourgeois sentiment, gospel conviction and humility proves irresistible. Freedom, that elusive gift Juan Ramon spent most of his life seeking without realizing it and only finally grasped in an act of self-incarceration, is Tonzi's hallmark. It allows him to plunge into incriminating circumstances daily, to see God's providence in an act of betrayal, a missed train or an eviction, to touch the hearts of street-wise prostitutes simply because his agenda is entirely unhidden.

"A long time ago he had recognized as a secret vice the habit of embracing formulas [e.g., 'Arise, take up...'], building arguments, using the Son of Man as another object, situating Jesus in history instead of, even today, living one's life sufficiently within His so as to grasp the meaning of those phrases and trying over and over to understand them. He apologized for being tactless, because it seemed to him that no one had the right to use these words if his own life had not first transformed them into bread and wine, into flesh and blood, and if he couldn't say them in his own personal voice." [61]

As the novel develops the narrator (named Sulivan) becomes more and more obsessed with Strozzi and his powerful influence over people, especially prostitutes. Like a true modern, he professes skepticism about Strozzi's celibacy but can find no evidence to impugn it; rather, the women speak of his friendship and his demand that they exercise their spiritual freedom. "All that he was good for was to rekindle light in eyes that had become dead. Meanwhile he was paying the price." He is regularly roughed up by the pimps whose business he threatens and reported to the chancery by virtuous Christians whose wayward pleasures he subverts.

By the end Sulivan has abandoned all pretense of plot and is simply describing Strozzi or quoting him. The pages read like the spiritual journal which is so far only his third book to appear in English. As an introduction to it, here is a final Sulivanism from Eternity based on Strozzi's life that makes explcit the Paschal character of that priest's mission: "Love wants eternity; it is closer to death than to life: nothing can prevent it from sooner or later being crucified."

Sulivan does a wondrous thing: he tells his tale in two keys. It is both a post-modern tale of urban tragedy and chaos, and a kind of hagiography replete with references to St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, and especially St. Francis de Sales. He manages to strip the pietistic mask from Christian sanctity and reveal just how gritty, scandalous, and healing the Spirit of Christ is in every age.

"Jerome Strozzi is a renegade priest who roams the seamiest side of Paris resurrecting the dead. No wonder he barges in and takes over Jean Sulivan's novel, "Eternity, My Beloved." which was supposed to be about a retired whore called Elizabeth ... The book stabs at the deepest stuff of life and it might, if only in those flashes when eternity cracks and you slip the border into that buried beyond, let you see again that it is all possible, all right here waiting to be lived. Because Strozzi is. Because Strozzi bears witness that eternity is now and resurrections can happen on any corner." -- Tim McCarthy, NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER