This book has some interesting tidbits and some cute details about women's life 100 years ago. Lots of info about how they dressed and personal hygiene and some housework information. It is an easy read. The book is over 200 pages, but the margins are huge. I'm an old house fanatic and a history buff and this book didn't quite hit the spot for me, but it's in my personal library as a good reference work.

However, if you can only buy one or two books about life 100 years ago, I'd recommend "Never done" by Susan Strasser and "Victorian America" by Thomas Schlereth.

These books get to the nitty gritty and have more substance. Again, "Light of the Home" is not a bad book - I bought it, after all and I kept it! It's in my top five favorite books of women's life in history. I'd just put a couple books above it, in my personal preferences.

I really like this book, and highly recommend it.
It's great for anyone interested in the Victorian era.
It talks about women's fashion's in that era and their
way of life. It has some good illustrations a well.

After remodeling my home with victorian woodwork and accessories, I was curious about the lifestyle of the average victorian. The book contains numerous pictures and historical information which gave me a broad understanding of their lives.

Enjoyed this fourth Jane Whitefield novel. I love the character--her strength, brilliance, logical thinking, ability to strategize and come up with great plans. Glad her husband's character, Carey MacKinnon, was part of the plot more than he was in the past. However, thought the ending was a little strange, the villains as it were. It could have been just one (Quinn)without the second--(Christie) that seems tacked on and too melodramatic and unnecessary. It was very clever until then. However, the book was a good suspenseful read. Even though it seems as if Jane Whitefield is going into retirement for real this time to have a family, it would be a real letdown for her fans. This is one of the better-written mystery series and one of the most interesting characters. To Thomas Perry--please do not let Jane Whitefield retire. It would leave too big a gap in the field of good mysteries and good and unique women major characters. Keep writing about Jane Whitefield--h! er fans plead.

Please Mr. Perry don't let Jane retire, not yet. I can't get enough. I became a fan when I just happened upon "Vanishing Act" the first Jane Whitefield novel. I quickly read and then went in search of anything else I could get my hands on. I was lucky enough to read Dance of the Dead and Shadow Woman in quick succession. Then I had to wait several months for "The Face Changers". Most books leave you feeling "tired of them" after you've read about the same character, but Thomas Perry is a master at giving you just enough to make you want more and more. I am now in search of all of his early works - again, please Mr. Perry don't stop now.

Thank you, thank you.

I ABSOLUTELY LOVE Thomas Perry's novels. They are all incredible. I stumbled upon Shadow Woman, then went back and read the first two of the Jane Whitefield series. I am an AVID mystery/thriller reader, and read an average of 2-3 books a week. I've been reading for years now, and Thomas Perry is my favorite author in this genre, and he clearly stands above all the rest, when it comes to suspense, spy tricks of the trade, and intricate plot.

As with some of the other reviewers, I was THRILLED to see that Jane Whitefield hadn't retired and grabbed this book off the shelf right away. While this novel was well written and well-constructed as usual, I thought it wasn't nearly as creative or suspenseful as his other novels.

I was totally disappointed, for example, at the discovery of the identity of the "Face-Changer." It was a real let-down after all that build-up. It was no one that would make the situation more of a 'stake' for Jane.

Also, I felt that more could have been done with the "identity-tampering" theme. The final show-downs Jane had with the enemies weren't nearly as huge or intricate or exciting as her other ones.

Still, I hold Perry up to very high standards -- his own (that he has set in other Jane novels)! So this book is still excellent!!! A HIGH RECOMMENDATION to all. Beautifully written and detailed without slowing down at all.

And I agree with the latest reviewer -- THOMAS PERRY, IF YOU'RE READING THIS, PLEASE DON'T RETIRE JANE!!! I CAN'T GET ENOUGH OF YOUR JANE NOVELS!!!

For anyone who has read any of the other historical mystery anthologies, this latest will seem weak in comparison. I'm trying to recall at least one story that stood out from the rest...can't do it!

Much Ado About Murder is a collection of seventeen mystery stories stiched together by the common thread of Shakespeare's plays. All were written especially for this anthology edited by Anne Perry. Some put new twists on characters or plots lifted from the plays while others are about the actors performing the plays or about the Bard himself.

In the former category, Marcia Talley tells a humorous tale starring the three witches from Macbeth. In the title story, Kathy Lynn Emerson transports Beatrice and Benedict from Padua to Bloody Mary's England for an adventure. Lillian Stewart Carl has Twlth Night's Duke Orsini send Viola/Cesario to Olivia's castle as a spy rather than an intermediary. Posing as a kitchen maid, she solves the poisoning of Olivia's brother. The Tempest, Henry V and VI, Hamlet, and Anthony and Cleopatra serve as launch pads for other writers' imaginings.

In the latter category, my favorite is P C Doherty's The Sperpent's Tooth which offers an interesting answer to the puzzle of Shakespeare's death and his epitaph. Also enjoyable is Peter Tremayne's Elizabethan sleuth, Master Hardy Drew, solving the murder of an actor in the first production of Henry V. Perry herself contributes a mystery set in a Victorian production of Othello.

The only story that seems out of place is Richard's Children by Brendan DuBois. It's connection to Richard III is tenuous and the plot belongs with the likes of Robert Ludlum.

Kudos, applause, and a standing ovation for Anne Perry and this fantastic book of short stories. There are so many truly unique and amazing stories that it's hard to choose which is best. Some involve actual Shakespearean plots, including two of the funniest: Too Many Cooks, which is a hilarious take on Macbeth from the point of view of the three Weird Sisters, and The Fall of the House of Oldenbourg, which will assure that you never think of Hamlet the same way again. Those Are Pearls That Were His Eyes combines characters from The Tempest with Portia & her husband Bassanio of The Merchant of Venice as the most brilliant and beautiful Doctor of Laws solves a murder with Caliban as the accused. The beautiful Viola (disguised as Caesario disguised as Viola--shades of Victor/Victoria and Shakespeare in Love!) solves the murder of Olivia's brother in A Dish of Poison. Even two of the lesser known plays, Cymbeline and Measure for Measure feature in the stories. Some, like Anne Perry's excellent Ere I Killed Thee, deal with the players who perform these works. The bard himself appears in several of the stories, including Exit, Followed. . .and All the World's a Stage, and his death is investigated in The Serpent's Tooth. And Richard's Children can only be described as chilling. I wish that there had been stories based on Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and Midsummer's Night's Dream, but perhaps there will be a volume 2. One can only hope. This is a fantastic book for mystery lovers and for Shakespeare lovers, but heaven for those who, like myself, love them both. Buy it, read it, and recommend it to your friends!

This short little book is really more of a prayer than a book. It is based on Psalm 8 in The Bible. The main message of the book is that God has created all things, including people, but people are especially unique and one should be thankful that God has created them the way they are. This tiny book includes some colorful and warm illustrations to accompany the text. Overall, very short, but contains an important message that children need to hear over and over.

This was a book I really liked. I found it facinating to read about another two members of the Tudor family. Maybe the most interesting thing about the Tudor family is how they managed to rule, or simply survive, in a time when cruelty, power struggles and dominance over women were common.

In this book Maria Perry tells us about the sisters' childhood and family background, as well as about their adult lives. In both cases the sisters had to marry a king as part of their father's attempt to keep or make allies, and not for love.

The eldest sister Margaret soon ended up as my favourite. She came across as a strong and couragious woman. In a time when women had no power, she fought to take control over her own life. When she was widowed and still pregnant, her brother tried to arrange a wedding for her. But Margaret wanted to marry based on her own choice, something her brother Henry VIII disliked. Later on she had to fight in order to keep her children, since they as heirs to the throne could be used as tools to rule the country by scroupulous men.

--Because this book, for the most part, except when the author decides to basically abandon a person or issue in it, is loaded with details. If you are interested in the life and times of Henry VIII, his relatives, friends and enemies, then you will likely forgive the author's apologist attitudes toward him (and her seemingly hyper-critical eye, in my view, of his sisters). If you are relatively thick-skinned about writers who do that, weaving their own opinions through the story they are telling, while supposedly presenting historical fact, you will find this book very interesting and fairly absorbing. There are a lot of minute details about banquets, clothes and social behavior, which are a lot of fun to read and know about, again, if you're interested in the first place. Which I am, so I liked this book.

Perry writes about the lesser known subject of Henry VIII's two sisters, Margaret and Mary who became Queen of Scotland and Queen of France respectively. It's really a review of his whole family, which shows that his sisters, even as political pawns were much more involved in events than wife focused biographies and legends would generally show. There is some early discussion of their parents, Henry VII and his Queen, Elizabeth of York, which shows how they inherited the royal propensity for pagentry and how, Perry's descriptions are sumptuous, the emphasis on sartorial wealth and jewels was really the political rhetoric of the day. More than that, it seems also have been a business, and many conflicts and wars can be explained by the need for the Tudors to pay for all their nice clothes and jewels--even, or especially, they owed money--so that they can keep being royals. Perry is as assiduous about the financial details as she is avid about the fashion details, and even if you aren't quite sure what the numbers mean the story is always readable, imaginative and intriguing, leaving its share of Historical what-ifs. (What if Mary's long-term youthful betrothal to Charles V of Spain had been honored, for example?) As one might expect Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn get their fair share of mention, but the context of their tribulations seems at once more mundane and more majestic.

If you want to read Margaret Sanger's book, read Margaret Sanger's Pivot of Civilization, as published by Humanity Press or as available on-line, not this chopped up attack on her book by someone with a major agenda.

I was personally offended when Planned Parenthood recently announced plans to give its Margaret Sanger Award to the BBC documentary "The Dying Rooms."

Don't get me wrong: The documentary is a wonderful and courageous piece of work. An undercover camera crew managed to gain entry to China's state-run orphanages and videotape the mistreatment and murder of the girls there. I appeared in the documentary, testifying that this tragedy is a direct consequence of the country's one-child policy.

It was the award, named after Planned Parenthood's founder, to which I objected. For Sanger had little but contempt for the "Asiatic races," as she and her eugenicist friends called them. During her lifetime, she proposed that their numbers be drastically reduced. But Sanger's preferences went beyond race. In her 1922 book "Pivot of Civilization" she unabashedly called for the extirpation of "weeds .... overrunning the human garden"; for the segregation of "morons, misfits, and the maladjusted"; and for the sterilization of "genetically inferior races." It was later that she singled out the Chinese, writing in her autobiography about "the incessant fertility of [the Chinese] millions spread like a plague."

There can be no doubt that Sanger would have been wildly enthusiastic over China's one-child policy, for her "Code to Stop Overproduction of Children," published in 1934, decreed that "no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit ... no permit shall be valid for more than one child." As for China's selective elimination of handicapped and abandoned babies, she would have been delighted that Beijing had heeded her decades-long call for exactly such eugenicist policies.

Indeed, Sanger likely would have turned the award on its head, choosing to praise publicly rather than implicitly criticize China's government for its dying rooms. Even the inhuman operators of Chinese orphanages might have gotten an honorable mention, in order to underline the importance of their front-line work in eliminating what she called the "unfit" and "dysgenic." Sanger was not one for subtlety in such matters. She bluntly defined "birth control," a term she coined, as "the process of weeding out the unfit" aimed at "the creation of a superman." She often opined that "the most merciful thing that the large family does to one its infant members is to kill it,", and that "all our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class."

Sanger frequently featured racists and eugencists in her magazine, the Birth Control Review. Contributor Lothrop Stoddard, who also served on Sanger's board of directors, wrote in "The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy" that "We must resolutely oppose both Asiatic permeation of white race-areas and Asiatic inundation of those non-white, but equally non-Asiatic regions inhabited by the really inferior races." Each issue of the Birth Control Review was packed with such ideas. But Sanger was not content merely to publish racist propaganda; the magazine also made concrete policy proposals, such as the creation of "moron communities," the forced production of children by the "fit," and the compulsory sterilization and even elimination of the "unfit."

Sanger's own racist views were scarcely less opprobrious. In 1939 she and Clarence Gamble made an infamous proposal call "Birth Control and the Negro," which asserted that "the poorer areas, particularly in the South ... are producing alarmingly more than their share of future generations." Her "religion of birth control" would, she wrote, "ease the financial load of caring for with public funds ... children destined to become a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation."

War with Germnay, combined with lurid tales of how the Nazis were putting her theories about "human weeds" and "genetically inferior races" into practice, panicked Sanger into changing her organization's name and rhetoric. "Birth control," with its undertone of coercion, became "family planning." The "unift" and the "dysgenic" became merely "the poor." The American Birth Control League became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Following Sanger's death in 1966, Planned Parenthood felt so confident that it had safely buried her past that it began boasting about "the legacy of Margaret Sanger." And it began handing out cutely named Maggie Awards to innocents who often had no inkling of her real views. The first recipient was Martin Luther King-who clearly had no idea that Sanger had inaugurated a project to set his people free from their progeny. "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the Minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members," Sanger wrote Gamble. Had Dr. King known why he may have been chosen to receive the award, he would have recoiled in horror.

The good news is that Sanger's-and Planned Parenthood's-patina of respectability has worn thin in recent years. Last year Congress came within a few votes of cutting a huge chunk of the organization's federal funding. The 1995-96 Planned Parenthood annual report notes that it has closed up shop in Mississippi, and that the number of its staff and volunteers has fallen by 4,000 over the previous year.

Perhaps the next time the Maggie Award is offered to someone of character and integrity-and more than a passing knowledge of Sanger's bigotry-he will raise an indignant cry of refusal. He will have ample grounds.

Mr. Mosher, author of "A Mother's Ordeal: One Woman's Fight Against China's One-Child Policy," is vice president for international affairs of Human Life International in Front Royal, Va. Michael W. Bird, a writer living in Minneapolis, helped with the research for this article.

Very interesting material. It's reveals some of the strange ideas that were fervently held by intelligent people, such as the obsession with "feeblemindness."

This book is rather boring through the first half or so. Otherwise, it's a really good book and has some interesting stuff in it about important modern day people.