This book makes a great gift for the any nature lover. It is well illistrated and full of facts.

The great thing about this book is that there is an engaging, funny illustration on one page to set the stage and pique the child's interest, with simple rhyming text, and then on the other page there is a detailed paragraph on the featured critter full of interesting facts, vocabulary, and science concepts. So this book can be used by beginning and more advanced readers. The combination of humor and information is a winning combination for kids. I can see preschoolers and parents reading this book together, and then middle elementary school kids coming back to it later when they are looking for information to write reports.

This book is good for someone that is wanting to learn alot about Indiana Railroads, and their historical value. If your into railroads, this is a must have coffee table book. Some small errors in it, but for a book of this scale, it is great, and very profesionally done.

Very complete for a one volume history. If Indiana railroads are an interest, this is the starting book.

Parker ends up working with amateurs and a shaky ex-con as he plans the robbery of a coin convention. Parker does pick up a new love interest in Claire. The heist goes sour with a double-cross and it is up to Parker to improvise the escape. Same Parker series format and a quick read. If new to the Parker series start with the Hunter/Payback/Point Blank book.

... It even has an excellent Robert E. McGinnis cover painting. The story inside the book, of course, is just as excellent. Just what I've come to expect from Donald E. Westlake, regardless of whatever pen name he chooses to write under. Parker is a lean, mean, hardboiled machine as always, taking no prisoners and no 'crud'. Readers of the newer "Stark" novels might also be interested to know that this is the book where Parker meets his lady friend Clair, who in this 1967 version, is more of a femm fatale than she is in the present day. Bottom line: If you can find THE RARE COIN SCORE, grab it and read it!

I found this to be limited use, because it's very basic. It goes through the survey methods step by step, and detail by detail. It's not a theoretical book but more of a practical handbook.

This is an excellent reference book for writing survey questions, for ensuring population representation in your samples and for interpting the responses. It even includes reference statistical tables for use in analysis of survey responses. All this in a small volume that is easily understood because it is so well written! It hits the nail right on the head. If you are conducting surveys or must present results after a survey is completed, this is a "must read" book.

This is an excellent reference book for writing survey questions, for ensuring population representation in your samples and for intrepting the responses. It even includes reference statistical tables for use in analysis of survey responses. All this in a small volume that is easily understood because it is so well written! It hits the nail right on the head. If you are conducting surveys or must present results after a survey is completed, this is a "must read" book.

I enjoyed the story, have been reading Westlake since I was a kid and read The Spy in the Ointment. The Parker books by Stark were (are) more edgy and well written, good solid stories. Other reviewers here have done a much better job than I can discussing the merits of the story and the characters, etc.

I found Comeback to be a bit disappointing, however - it was too easy a read. Amazon so helpfully shows the books dimensions (slightly larger than your typical paperback) and it's page count (304), but when it arrived and I opened it, I was dismayed to see that the book had huge margins and very generous line spacing - I had to doubletake and be sure I had not ordered the "large print" version!

Overall, a good story, there just wasn't quite as much of it as I had expected.

Parker is a heister, a man who plans and carries out major thefts with the help of other heisters, chosen for the job at hand. He is unabashedly a crook. The stakes are real -- if you are hurt on a job, you will likely be killed by your partners who want to ensure their safety.

In this book, Parker is ripping off a televangelist, at a stadium prayer revival. Things start going wrong after his team gets the money. The story is gripping, and a fast read. The author stays true to the characters and situation.

There is an entire genre of fiction -- Block's hitman series, Max Allan Collins' Quarry novels, and these fine novels about Parker -- that involve criminal men acting within their criminal impulses in adventurous situations. For some reason I am drawn to these stories -- they offer no moral redemption, but have a hard boiled honesty about the human condition. And they are fun to read. probably because your average white bread suburbanite loves to imagine a transgressive life of adventurous crime.

Although I adore the crime/detective genre I must confess that I'd never even heard of Richard Stark (and hadn't read Westlake either). But now I'm hooked. To my mind the writing - sharp, clear, direct prose that I would die for - in "Comeback" is superb and I coundn't put the book down. The characters were equally as fascinating as some of the best in Elmore Leonard, who is one of my all time favorites favorites. I'll wait until "Backflash" comes out in paperback, but in the meantime I'm ordering some of the older books. Can't wait till they arrive!

It seems strange to be entering a rating for a novel so firmly entrenched as a classic. I really just came here looking for other readers' responses, because I have found this book, in the Everyman translation, so deadly dull that I have been using it as a soporific for over six months, and I'm still 100 pages from the end. The characters have never come to life for me; indeed the whole world of the novel seems very distant and thin. Therefore it's fascinating to read the reviews below. Am I missing some gene that makes it possible to enjoy this strange narrative?

Most people who have even heard of Stendal know of him as the author of the Red and the Black. Thanks to the praise Harold Bloom bestows on this lesser known work in How to Read and Why, I think many are rediscovering this book as well. Imagine my surprise when I found it not hidden deep in the literature section, but right on the "new release" section thanks to the New modern library edition.

Stendal, really Marie Beyle, wrote prodigiously during his lifetime and used over 200 nom de plumes, Stendal being only one of the more well known ones. He dictated this book in 54 days, impressive when you realize its girth. Stendal has been critized by many for his lack of style and proper French grammar, but thanks to fellow writer Balzac who wrote an influential review of the book, it gained much fame. Balzac wrote, "Beyle has written a book in which sublimity glows from chapter after chapter...If the mediocre knew that they had a chance of raising themselves to the level of the sublime by understanding them, La Chartreuse de Parme would have as many readers as Clarissa Harlowe had on its first appearance."

This novel has a bit of everything, but mostly court intrigue and love plots as we follow the unlikely hero, Fabrizio through his adventures, the most exciting of which for him seems to be his imprisonment in the tower. His charm lies in his complete inability to realize the importance of anything until after it happens. In fact, he sleeps through most of the important events: he gets drunk and barely remembers his small role in the Battle of Waterloo and later during his "rapture" in the tower, he finally discovers in his boredom that he is happy. As far as actually enjoying this book, I suspect that many modern readers will find parts either boring or hard to follow since many of the Italian court traditions are far from our experience. Unlike other long novels like War and Peace or Madame Bovary, this one might not hold interest levels the same way since it has a much denser plot and much less convincing characters. Still, I think we should appreciate this novel for its incredible scope and faithful recounting of a period long gone. It's not hard to see why it's a great novel, it just may not be as enjoyable to read as other great novels no matter how much praise Balzac heaps upon it.

I'm a longtime fan of this wonderful novel which until recently almost no one seemed to read. There is nothing like it in the whole of literature, and the good reader is exhilirated and refreshed by the blast of Stendhal's sustained burst of inspiration: done in six and a half weeks and he lopped off the last 150 pages at the publisher's request (and realized his mistake but couldn't find the sheets: keep looking, folks). New readers are advised to plow through the first 50 pages, which are just as good as the rest of the book but from which it is very difficult to catch the book's unique tone; the great set-piece of the Battle of Waterloo will set you straight. I'm not sure that the vaunted new Richard Howard translation is better than the reliable old waddle of the Penguin, but that might just be my hankering for a familiar flavor. But what a book! Bliss to read it, and the Duchessa Sanseverina might well be the most magnificent woman in the whole of literature; she's certainly the only woman of such stature in 19th century fiction who doesn't have to pay the price for it by a suicide in the last chapter. Much of the book's inimitable energy derives from the enjambment of a whole range of incompatibles: a story out of renaissance Italy set in post-Napoleonic times; characters simultaneously seen from the perspective of great worldly experience and that of an enthusiastic adolescence conceiving them as larger than life (Mosca and the Duchessa primarily, but also demi-villains like the Prince and the hilarious Rassi); and so on. Fabrizio is a dashing cipher, is occasionally idiotic, the very archetype of impassioned inexperience. All right, Clelia Conti is irredeemably dull in a book suffused by the Duchessa's nearly superhuman radiance, but her stint as the bird-woman of the Farnese Tower raises to the pitch of inspired looniness Stendhal's sense of the world as a place in which all essential thought and emotion are sentenced to a fugitive life and an interminable series of codes and disguises. Fabrizio's terror of engaging with his auntie the Duchessa generates the subsequent phantasmagoria of prisons, intrigues, revolutions; and yet the tone is that of some crazed, inspired operetta, the characters speak in recitative, and the multiple ironies of character and tale serve not to distance us from life, as our modern irony usually does, but to embrace an astounding range of living contradictions. A last one such: notice that despite the utter scarcity of physical description, the sensory world comes to you crystal clear, vivid as can be. Major magic working here. The book is a source of joy for anyone who enters it whole, and nothing this side of Shakespeare is as bracing. I'm so glad it's being taken up and read again.

This one isn't up to par with it's predecessor's. It's an okay read, but not as engaging as the first two. It's hard to believe the "Outfit" guys are that easy to steal from and kill. It all happens so easily that it's not very enjoyable.

The name is Parker and he's not one for making idle threats. When he talks, he follows through with brutal efficiency. And so, when he warned the organised crime boss not to cross him or he would hurt the organisation, it would have been a good idea to listen. What would not have been a good idea was to attempt to put a hit on Parker.

When the hit fails, as of course it must, Parker sets in place a devious plan to hurt the Outfit just as he promised. What follows is a highly entertaining string of crimes around the country, striking blow after blow on behalf of our anti-hero, Parker.

If you're simply after a flat out entertaining book of action sequences that aren't cluttered up with pesky character development, then this is the book for you. As a matter of fact, the entire Parker series is for you. Parker remains the true dispassionate enigma. Sure he's heartless, cruel and vindictive but you've just gotta love the rascal.

I absolutely love Richard Stark's (Donal Westlake) Parker novels! Here we have THE OUTFIT back from 1963 and it still works today! Parker and his underworld cohorts decide to toss the rule bookl out the window and start knocking over syndicate scores. This is tight, fast, and hard. Read Stark or miss out entirely!

A good book, to be sure, but not one of Stark's best. Parker is hired to plan a robbery focusing on an entire town. The heist goes off without a hitch, but unforseen circumstances come into play, and Parker has to fix the problem his own way. About equal with Backflash and Firebreak.

Richard Stark ( Donald E Westake) gives us the ultimate in heists with this terrific early Parker novel. When Parker hears of a plan to rob an entire town, he's leery of the inside man and the number of thieves needed to pull off the caper. Nevertheless he is brought into the scheme and together with 11 other fellow thieves, they pull off the dream caper until the double cross inevitable in a Parker novel. In the meantime, the inside man acts on the plan that he formed for vengeance. Grofield (Stark's actor/thief) falls for a hostage and a teen leaving a night of passion at his girlfriend's after curfew also throw monkey wrenches into the story. When the team makes it to their hideout after several deaths and an inferno, it further unravels as the group waits out the police search. This is Stark at his finest. Granted it's a little dated and the plan wouldn't work today. The townfolk have to place out-of-town calls through operators at a central switchboard and the switchboard operators are covered by the team. Imagine the problems in today's cellular world. Nevertheless, this pulls together several of Parker's cronies from previous capers and introduces new ones. We get the usual scenes of plan, payoff,doublecross and Parker's efforts to escape the consequences of the doublecross. These are set pieces in any Parker novel and Stark works them like a pro. If you're just discovering Parker through his new capers, this is a must have from the original series.

I write this only because I like Parker so much and, if you're reading this, you do too. I read this book in about three nights-- twice the time I suspect it took Parker to write it. I'm surprised by all the glowing reviews, since Parker obviously only wrote this one for the money. Yes, there's a new character and a new setting, but beyond that not much. Jesse Stone is a one-dimensional hero with problems that he doesn't really confront or overcome--they just sort of go away (his alcoholism, for example: midway through the book he just kinda forgets to keep drinking or something). His plot offers up inept bad guys (a pathetic wannabe militia who--in the days of Waco, OK City, and the Freemans-- aren't much more menacing than the local Elk's Lodge), and Jesse actually doesn't do much detecting. Mostly he just sort of hangs around places and people confess to him. The dialogue between Jesse and vitually everyone else seems to consist solely of one-sentence phrases that read like they've been written by Ernest Hemingway--if he'd suffered from Attention Defecit Disorder. If you want a quick, easy, shallow read this is it. If you're looking for a smart, compelling page-turner with real characters battling real demons (internal and external) skip this one and read anything by James Lee Burke.

As you read Robert B. Parker's "Night Passage" you are always thinking in the back of your mind how this book and its hero Jesse Stone are different from his Spenser novels. "Night Passage" is written in third person rather than first person, although there were a few Spenser novels (most notably "Crimson Joy") that had third person sections reflecting the ramblings and doings of the villain. Consequently we get ahead of the hero in terms of knowing what is going on with the bad guys. In terms of the hero, Jesse Stone is the new Chief of Police rather than a detective, talks very little rather than always having a clever quip, is carrying a torch for the wife he recently divorced instead of having a fulfilling relationship with the love of his life, tends to buy store wrapped food rather than cook his own, drinks too much scotch instead of having a taste for imported beer, and does not know who in town or even on his own police force he can trust instead of having a small circle of trustworthy friends. However, the basic elements that make Spenser such an enduring character are present in Parker's new hero as well. Stone takes his job seriously, knows how to pick up on what's happening in town, and is just as concerned with helping people as he is in following the letter of the law. Also, "Night Passage" is set in the Massachusetts of the Spenser novels, as evidenced by the fact that four familiar supporting characters pop up in the course of the book. So, certainly, Parker is still on familiar ground. But do not think that this novel is going to be as quick a read as his Spenser novels.

The plot finds Stone leaving L.A., having lost his job as a homicide detective after he turned to the bottle in the wake of his divorce. Stone has been hired to be the Chief of Police in the town of Paradise and it quickly becomes clear to us that he was hired not in spite of being drunk but because of it. The powers that be want a lush in that key position. But Stone wants to get his life in order and the police officers and citizens of Paradise eventually learn there is more to their new Chief than meets the eye. "Night Passage," despite its time and place, is a good old-fashioned western. There is a new "sheriff" in town to bring law and order to the good folks of Paradise. In that regard the ultimate showdown is a bit over the top, but very must in the vein of the classic western. It will be interesting to see how Parker plays out this hand in future novels in this series.

OK, I admit it. I wouldn't buy this book for a while after it came out. How could Robert B. Parker do this to me, when I've loved Spenser all these years? Don't fix it if it ain't broke, Bob, I thought. Inevitably, though, I got to the point where I had nothing to read. So I bought "Night Passage". Then I let it sit around for a few days. I didn't want to read it. I was prepared to be bored, disappointed, and lonesome for Spenser and Susan Shapiro. Finally, I picked it up...and stayed up until 4:00 in the morning to finish it. This book is every bit as good as the Spenser books, and quite different from them in scene and general tone. Jesse Stone, newly divorced and dealing with it badly, is forced to resign from the LAPD for drinking on the job. He takes a new job as chief of police in a small Massachusetts town called Paradise, only to discover that the town has hired him because they want a police chief who won't police certain things. The intricate plot is very believable, as are Jesse and the other major characters. Anyone who knows small towns will also recognize the accuracy of Parker's picture of small-town politics. The best part? The characters. I found myself wanting to call up Jesse Stone and talk to him for a while -- and almost believing that I could. It's terrific Parker. Write more, Bob, and I'm sorry I doubted you.