There is no way to give proper tribute to these amazing books in 1,000 words or less. They are must read books for any teenager who wanted to know how to fight evil with good and know how great our God is. With a quoted word from scripture, demons flee in terror. The difference in power between he who lives in this world and He who lives in me is astronomical. Of Christian non fiction out there, this series is one of three I took the time to read, buy, and recommend. Bill Myers is a fanomonal writer. He's right up there with C.S. Lewis. My only question is: who is Z?

hi, this is an awesome book for anyone of all ages and religous backgrounds. i own the entire series and love them all. they're very inspirational and remind me of how powerful the Lord is when i have a problem. has anyone heard anything about another book(#11)?? if so let me know. thanks

This is an awesome series for any Christian teen, and anyone else who wants to read it! It really shows the power of God and how He gives Christians authority over demons, etc. This series can really build your faith! Except the last book made you think another one was coming... what about #11? I hope there is more to come! =)

My awareness of the intricacy of Rick Riordan's plotting began when I realized the main character was known only by his last name. This interesting linguistic twist indicates a distancing from intimacy and immediate knowledge about Chadwick's personality and history. I should know. I semi-dated a man who constantly referred to himself by his last name. The story is riveting and often doubles back to re-involve the original characters and reveal previously unmentioned details. I pre-ordered this book and will always pre-order this writer's novels.

The typical death toll in a contemporary thriller would populate a small city. Today's crime-fiction writers gleefully dispatch more souls than Forest Lawn, and rarely is anyone haunted by the carnage or the shadows.

The ghosts are thick in Rick Riordan's new thriller, "Cold Springs," but not because a lot of people die in a first few blood-splashed pages. Quite the contrary. These ghosts -- like Riordan's cast of characters -- once had three-dimensional form and feelings, and they haunt the heart more than the noir-ish corners of rain-slicked cliché.

"Cold Springs" is Riordan's first stand-alone thriller, a departure from his Edgar- and Shamus-winning series featuring wise-cracking San Antonio private-eye Tres Navarre. While the Texas middle-school teacher has now returned to the character who first put him on the radar, "Cold Springs" shows he has the chops for more stylish prose in the headlong rush of a multi-level, rapidly twisting plot.

Riordan's voice is smooth, accented with a South Texas drawl and punctuated by evocative imagery -- hills that look like "scar tissue, swollen and raw and pink" or a voice that "stung like sleet." Such metaphor from the mouth of the irreverent Tres Navarre would elicit a Chandler-esque groan -- and often does -- but transplanted to a deeper story with more complex relationships and landscapes, it's not out of place.

It's a matter of degree. "Cold Springs" doesn't portend a new trend toward literary thrillers, but it flirts with slightly more "character arc" -- the way a protagonist changes over the course of a story -- than most of today's purely plot-driven stuff. It ain't even so high up the tree that it will put off page-turning mystery fans who measure good "literature" by high body counts and bizarre ways to die. For them, Riordan supplies a steady stream of corpses and unusual wounds.

But Riordan is a rising star in crime fiction and, with luck, will help the genre usher back strong plots with complex characters.

I really like Rick Riordan's Tres Navarre books. Tres is a great guy and a great character. Even in the deepest mysteries or most desperate straits, he always strikes me as someone who's basically in control, and a fun guy to hang out with.

The characters in "Cold Springs" aren't like that.

If the Navarre stories are fast-paced and entertaining, "Cold Springs" is edgy and uncomfortable. All of the characters are tense and troubled. All their lives are dark and desperate. And with one or two exceptions, none of them were ultimately particularly easy to be around. Even Chadwick, our hero, is battling too many demons ever to feel comfortable with. In fact, I never felt comfortable in this story at all, never able to relax, and never certain about what might be around the next corner.

I loved it.

"Cold Springs" has all the intricate plotting we've come to expect from Rick Riordan. Suspicion points at one character, and then another. Nobody seems trustworthy, not even our hero. But when you finally reach the resolution, most everything falls into place. As you read this, keep in mind the subtitle on the front cover: "A Novel of Secrets." Secrets are always being revealed -- right up to the very end.

Riordan's plot is complex and winding, but his characterizations deserve praise too. As I read this, I was reminded of Tolstoy's famous opening line, "All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Here, every miserable, troubled person is miserable and troubled in his or her own way, and each of them, including the several teenagers, is true to life (or at least convincing to someone like me who has mercifully avoided that kind of misery in my own life). And unlike the Navarre books, this story is told in third-person, and from multiple viewpoints. Riordan thus not only had to create characters whose actions are believable, but whose thoughts and emotions are believable too. That's much harder to do, and my hat's off to him because I think he pulled it off.

Rick Riordan has done a great job. He's one of the few authors, and certainly the only novelist, for whose next work I'm always impatient. Though "Cold Springs" paid off the wait, it also whet my appetite for whatever's coming next. But first, I need to sit back and let the tension ease out a little bit. This was a nerve-wracking ride, and I think I need a rest.

I read the book in the Mid 80's while living in California and saw all of the myths that I thought were just that myths come to light out of the dark. This book is slimmer that the most of them but contains everything you need. "A musicians instruction manual."

Absolutely fantastic. Gives the honest truth about the business today. Any person in the music business should read this.

This book is a God-send to all aspiring musicians. Gives you insight on everything from getting small-time gigs to recording to making it big.

This is the coolest book!... I love it. It really honors God and it teached you about things that happen every day. Things that you might not think could ever happen to you, but they could. This is a great book if you are a teen or a pre-teen. I'm 13, and I think that this series rules!...

I am 10 years old and Bill Myers is really good. I recemend Forbidden Doors to any advanced reader or any teenager who likes books.

These are very well written and I strongly recommend them. I am 11 years old, but an advanced reader, and I like them. They are astonshing and you really get deep into them. If you are an adult, teen, or an advanced preteen, I suggest you read this book. Suspense, horror, mysterys, thrills!

I really liked this book and I plan on voting for Riordan for governor. You should read this book because it tells a lot about Mr. Riordan and California.

This is a great introduction to Mr. Riordan, a former 2-term mayor of Los Angeles who is now a candidate for California governor. The author does a good job of introducing bits and pieces about Riordan's life and what he's done for Calif. and what he hopes to do in the future.

I think I was eight the first time I read these stories. Over the years I read again and again, before lending the book to a friend and never seeing it again. It took me eight more years to track down a used copy, a search that encompassed two continants, countless used bookstores, and finally, a very good out of print book service. Every minute spent on that search was well worth the effort. The copy I have now sits in the place of pride on my bookshelf. I still haunt used book stores looking for copies to give to friends with daughters.

This book opened so many doors to new ideas for me. It dispelled the notion that women could only be beautiful, helpless prizes for men (like Cinderella) or evil, ugly, vicious adversaries (like her stepmother). That is, after all, the stated objective of the book. But it also taught me that the stories our culture tells are not the stories every culture tells. It opened my eyes to a world full of rich and varied literary traditions.

Beautifully writen, marvelously illustrated, this book belongs in the collection of every young girl -- and boy. Buy it for any child you care about -- you never know what sort of ideas it might give her, or him.

My grandmother gave me this book when I was 10 years old, and I loved the exotic stories that went way beyond the typical Cinderella fairytales I was used to. I've passed on my well-read copy to my 10-year-old little sister and, just like me, she couldn't put it down. I still occasionally reread these stories, not only because they're well-written, but because they take me to another place and time where women warriors rule, young girls can fly and married women are anything but "the wife." I recommend giving this to any young person you know and love.

Kate O'Riordan's spell-binding novel twists and turns through the complexities of human relationships, exploring a broad swathe of emotions from complacent marital love to pure hate. She weaves a tale of fear through a story of grief, and leaves her reader reeling over the dizzy edge of realisation that all is not as simple as it seems.

Exchange rate policy is one of Latin America's most importante, and most complex, issues. From currency crises to dollarization, the topic has been economically crucial and politically controversial. This book provides an excellent analysis of the exchange rate problems and experiences of Latin American governments. With both general overviews and country case studies, the volumen bring a wealth of theoretical and empirical knowledge to bear on an increasingly important policy area.

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

I originally read this book in undergraduate school as Political Science major, and had to go back and find a copy because of the profound affect it had on my psyche. George Washington Plunkitt was a "stereotypical" politician. You know, the one who says what he needs to say to get elected; but once there does what's necessary for his party.

Comparing his comments to the actions of present day politicians, I don't think there are many differences. Everyone does a little grafting and civil servants are still "civil servants." Understood?

As with any politician, Plunkitt "seen (his) opportunities and (he) took 'em." This is a must for anyone interested in any realm of politics.

Plunkitt was a king in a world that needed benevolent despots. In a place like turn of the century of New York before Keynesian economics and the Welfare State, Tammany was the only relief the poor knew. Plunkitt reveals with refreshing honesty the seemingly rough and coarse manner with which one needed to play the game of politics in his town. However, one must look at it in context. This was a different time from our own, and the reader must imagine whether a person of Plunkitt's demeanor can last in the information age political world. Then again, the book also illustrates how many of the problems Tammany had still exist today.

I first read this highly informative, often hilarious book for Intro to Political Science back in college. In this short tome are pearls of wisdom about politics and human nature still relevant 100 years later. Plunkitt, high atop his regular boot-black stand in NYC, declaims to his biographer, Riordan, a life spent in the political machine known as Tammany Hall, with such disarming honesty that is nearly non-existent today. Plunkitt's diatribes on "honest graft vs. dishonest graft," "Brooklynites Natural-Born Hayseeds," and the evils of civil service exams are outright hilarious. I highly recommend this book to anyone with even a passing interest in politics.