What a great book for Halloween. The story can be sung to "Farmer in the Dell" which gets all the kids involved. But the best part of the book are the wonderul pictures. Each page is full of marvelous detail about Halloween. Creating a warm and friendly image for young children. Each time we read the book we discover a treat that we missed the time before. These wonderful pictures truly bring this book alive.

What a terrific Halloween Book! The beautiful illustrations dance off the pages. This a Halloween must for children of all ages! My 6th grade girl scout troop likes the book so much that they are reading it to a 2nd grade brownie troop for Halloween. And then they will teach the brownies the song "The Witch Casts Spell". I think this book will become a Halloween classic.

When is somebody going to reprint this gripping book. It is elegaic and full of glistening cracks in the bedrock. And yet the lines range wildly back and forth, effervescent with flight, leaving the reader dazzled with a sense of life.

William Olsen has written yet another wonderful book of poems. He has a madman's eye for beauty, and he has discovered in this seemingly troubled world all kinds of treasures to refute the
prophets of despair and defeat that write most of the modern poetry of today. Olsen's high humor lurks just below the surface and between the lines. You can't see it in the poems, but you can see it on the face of anyone you hand the book to and say, "here, read this one." He is a mind on a treasure hunt, a brain that serves as a butterfly net as he lives his life saving absolutely EVERYTHING GOOD for you and for me. I have bought two extra copies already for friends. They say what I say. You can read these for a fifth and sixth time and they will all appear to be new. None of these poems stays the same. They get better every time you read them. This is a book you will enjoy very very much.

i thought it was a good book....and would recommend this to any body who is into adventure

Being a student of Lee Fishman at Beloit College, I feel somewhat inclined to like this book of poetry, and in truth I really do. I do find several of the poems to be very insightful and moving. Certainly worth checking out...

Lee's poems shatter the growing pain of unanticipated and unforeseen heartbreak with the same ease and grace of a shot of rumplemintz rinsing away a case of the mondays.

I have earned much respect and friendship with her through the delightful game of poetry.

Olsen may be an unknown author now, but after reading this book I can see it's only a matter of time before his name is well known. I really love the way he puts me right into the middle of what's happening. This is excelant!

I read Olsen's first book and I loved it. This book didn't let me down either. I couldn't set it down because it was so gripping. I won't say anything more because I don't want to spoil it for other readers. I recomend this book to anyone who enjoys action novels.

This book was published in Dec 01 which means it was written using .NET Beta 2. It is now completely out of date and many of the examples just don't work. To be fair, there is an "Update" document available for download from Wrox but wht not just buy an up to date book in the first place. My recommendation is "Applied XML Programming for Microsoft .NET" by Dino Esposito, # 0735618011.

VB or C which is it? I don't mind books the have syntax for both VB.net and C#. I also don't mind books that have JUST C#(since I don't know C# why would I mind this?). I Like books that have JUST VB.NET since thats what I like. But this book doesn't do any of these! It provides C# only on many occasions! And as a VB.NET only programmer its awfully hard to build on C# examples. It's almost as if the authors didn't know how to code everything in VB.NET and just skipped it sometimes.

Very interesting title and content. This book is very helpful to learn XML .NET features.

what are we supposed to take away with us after reading this book? this glorification of suicide (it's romantic) in a field of animal blood. So much tar gums up the pages and reflects the light back only as too-intense heat. well-written, yes. Profound, no. it's the equivalent of the spit in the face we got from the sex pistols, only it pretends to be polite by somehow cloaking itself in obsessive erudition, as if it's okay to be cynical if you've read enough books. And where's the movement. There is none. The poems just sit there, angrily squatting inside their dark closets.

If you like brainy books and rock-and-roll, if you like The New Republic and Salon.com, if you like both Wallace Stevens and Allen Ginsberg, then William Olsen's poetry may be for you. As I've said in print (see SOLO 3, "Velocity and the Visceral in the Poems of William Olsen"), his work is remarkable for its intuition, speed, and breadth of learning.

VISIONS OF A STORM CLOUD is a groundbreaking book of poetry for a variety of reasons. Virtually all of the poems move fast while smartly referring to a panoply of American landmarks, archetypes, and threats. Olsens' subject is the inquiring, educated self in a cultural chaos that keeps portending death. His voice is that of man caught in a jet stream of potential violence he can't control. Wired by a world amped on mortal fear, he chooses to join the quick current and to take succor from it. The electricity is nearly medicinal. The speed of Olsen's voice briefly inoculates him against the twin fears of meaninglessness and mortality.

In a way, Olsen's fascinating poems are a modernist answer to the post-modern developments of John Ashbery or the more radically post-modern Language Poets. Neither of these modes will do for Olsen because they lack the visceral kick that comes with an engaged life. He recognizes all the recent existential concerns about meaning and the inadequacy of language, but he can't stomach the disassociated sensibility. So he practices a poetry of celerity.

I think Olsen is at the forefront of a new kind of poetry that privileges speed, intellect, and emotion. This isn't a book for those looking for either sweetness or elegy. By referencing near the speed of thought, his poems can carry the reader on an astonishing, phantasmagorical ride. While a few other poets have started down a similar trail recently, they aren't likewise driven by the sound of their own informed doubt. Olsen has transformed his interior debate between skepticism and hope into a series of adrenalinic adventures in which the immediate prevails.

A superb book. I return to it often, and I learn from it.

-Kevin Clark