The photographs are so gorgious and real that they make you feel like you are right there. From the cliffs to the sandy beaches and from the light houses to the huge watery rocks make this book extremely unforgettable.

I especially like the way this book has been organized. The layout is also quite colorful with borders around the text and illustrations.

The stories included in this book:

God Makes the World
Adam and Eve
Noah's Ark
Joseph's Dream
Joseph in Egypt
Moses in the Bulrushes
The Ten Plagues
The Crossing of the Red Sea
Samson and Delilah
David and Goliath
Solomon's Judgment
Daniel in the Lion's Den
Jonah and the Great Fish
The Birth of Jesus
The Wise Men's Visit
Jesus in the Temple
The Temptations in the Wilderness
The Wedding in Cana
Three Miracles
Jesus the Storyteller
Jesus Feeds the Five Thousand
Martha, Mary, and Lazarus
The Last Supper
The Crucifixion
The Resurrection

There is also a section of "Who's Who in the Bible.

These are rich stories that teach children great lessons, like how to choose between good and evil. Every child deserves to hear these wonderful stories. During my childhood, the Bible stories were some of my favorite stories of all time.

Each story has plenty of pictures. If you are reading to a younger child, they can look at the pictures on the left, while you read the story on the right.

Beautiful Illustrations!

Angela Thirkell's books fall into a typically English genre: the gentle goings on of a set of eccentric (usually upper class) villagers. The books amusing and make an enjoyable quick read. Although I understand where the comparisons to Jane Austen are coming from, I think they are off the mark, though. I think P.G. Wodehouse is a fairer comparison, without so much silliness (which I love). These little trifles don't have the depth or subtlety of Austen's works. However, for a light read where you like most of the characters and wish them well, you can't beat Thirkell. My favorite is Cheerfulness Breaks In.

Unexpectedly wonderful. I had read somewhere that Thirkell was a bit of a poor-man's Nancy Mitford. Well that might have been for some of her novels - my knowledge of her full body of works is not great - but the Thirkells is a wonderful descent into glorious pre-World War II English Countryside.

The book is chokka with great and memorable characters and has an appealing plot which has a few twists in it to keep things very interesting indeed. In fact it starts as a simple premise of a family waiting for an inheritance, as such, as ends as a very sweet romance indeed.

It all starts with the sickness of a maiden aunt, Sissie - who lives in a mouldering pile and keeps threatening to will it all away from various relatives if only to keep them on their toes. Trouble is the various relatives - or at least two of them Mr Grant, and Francis and Brandon - don't actually want the mouldering estate anyway. No matter how poor they are they can see that it will be a bit of a white elephant - or at the very least a very damp hippotamus.

The Brandon's come with a wonderfully vague mother who keeps getting read bits of boring pieces of writing by adoring males in the area, and Hilary Grant comes with a hideously annoying mother whom nobody - except possibly the reader - can like. This book is very much in the vein of E E Benson's Lucia Series - although those were individual masterpieces of machivellian cunning- this book is a fun and rather distinguished country romp.

Apparently Thirkell wrote a number of stories in which the same characters turn up - all of which is set in the Barchester land of Anthony Trollope so there is enough connection among these books to make for quite an extensive bit of connected reading (if anyone is interested of course). It has all the satisfaction of a nice twisting plot with the pleasant relief of a happy and romantic ending to look forward to.

This is the first book I have read by Angela Thirkell and I am determined to read all of the other novels she has written.

Of all the authors I have read with claims attached to them of being "modern day Austens", Angela Thirkell is the only one that lives up to that claim, in my opinion.

In "The Brandons", as in Austen's literature, one senses a "match" in the offing and Mrs. Brandon spends much of her thinking on how to match up Miss Morris with one of her eligible male friends. The book is delightful, charming, funny, and full of astute observations on human nature...just like Jane Austen's writings. Read it!

The story is totally written in the first person, of a man condemned to the scafold, never the reader being told about who was the man and which crime did he commit. As the days passes, the end approaches and we begin to feel ourselves in that man's skin, suffering with him, groping for some way out of his whole misery. I suppose this is a book which must have caused a lot of controversy and anguish at the time of its first publication, but I am afraid that the impact is not the same today, with a lot of books and films showing the same theme, only changing the dreaded guillotine for the terrible electric chair. The book is a libel against the death penalty, something Victor Hugo did not manage to achieve in his lifetime.

After reading Les Miserables I bought The Last Day of a Condemned Man, I was not expecting an masterpiece like Les Miserables and, because of that, I had such a great surprise, it's a short book but with an energetic message, it shows the horrors of the condemned, the psycological efects in his person when hes own daughter do not recognize him, everiday expecting only death, and with feeling, truth and talent, Victor Hugo show us why the penalty of death is horrendous to anyone.

I originally read the French version of this book, with a preface (which is probably in the English translation, no doubt) that is an essay of the reasons to abolish the death penalty. Abolishing "la peine de mort" was the point of this book, published in 1830, a year before Hugo published Notre-Dame de Paris (a.k.a. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame); Hugo was 27. The essay logically spells out why the death penalty should be abolished; the actual narrative of the story - a journal that the main character keeps of his every thought and feeling in the six weeks from his sentencing to the moment before he is taken to the Place de Greve to be guillotined - moves the reader emotionally. What was relevant in France in the 18th cent. is relevant in the U.S. today.

I was required to read this book for my American Lit class in college, and though I had heard that James was a bit verbose and that the plot of the novel was purportedly about the life of a telegraph-girl, I nevertheless enjoyed it thoroughly. The novel centers on a young girl who works at the sounding board of an English store. Because she is the main operator, she is privy to all of the customer's private affairs, for she transcribes all of their personal notes. Some of her insights regarding relationships and the often-intimate details of her state of mind seemed to articulate some of my own thoughts. The "hook" of the plot(as concern other female-heroines of her time) revolves around her intense fatuation with a male customer, with whom she eventually falls in love. "In the Cage" is taut, well-written, and eerily similar to the trials and tribulations of everyday life in the present era.