The advise in this book can extend your life and improve your health. No one knows what the "optimal" diet is, but Dr. Barnard shows that there is overwhelming evidence that the common dietary practices in America are responsible for a great deal of avoidable illness and early death. He backs up his statements with health statistics and numerous references to studies published in well-known journals. He shows that high rates of heart disease, cancer, and many other life threatening diseases are *not* natural -- they are primarily the result of poor diet and/or smoking. For some diseases, our risk can be reduced more than 50% by following the sort of diet recommended in this book.

The book, like Dr. Barnard's previous books "The Power of Your Plate" and "Food for Life", is clearly written and invites the reader to examine the evidence and decide for himself. The author also gives suggestions for making a change in diet easier and encou! ragement that it will be an enjoyable, sustainable transition.

There are two things I don't like about this book: the second half of the book is nothing but recipes, and this book follows a trend toward dumbing-down the presentation (in comparison with "The Power of Your Plate" and "Food for Life"). The author tries to make his presentation friendlier and more understandable to sixth graders through the use of analogies and explanations of biological phenomenon in overly simplistic terms. The book would be better if it contained more depth and more precise language. For these reasons I rated it only 3-stars.

Still, this book is well worth reading. If you're following the FDA's dietary guidelines, you are almost certainly shortening your own lifespan. The advise in this book could add years and improve the health of most Americans.

Dr. Barnard gives us a concise and extremely well-documented summary of all the various diseases that are linked to meat and dairy consumption. He refers to the studies behind the recommendations and explains everything in a way that's easy to grasp. I also recommend The Vegetarian Way or Becoming Vegetarian and, of course, the American Dietetic Association's Position Paper on Vegetarian Diets. This particular book's menu suggestions may be a little too lowfat for some people, which may be good if you're trying to lose weight. All plants have some fat, but some people may find it useful to include higher fat plant foods like nuts and olive oil to maintain their weight. Highly recommended also is Dr. Barnard's book Foods That Fight Pain...

This book educates you on your body and how it works. Then, Dr. Bernard tells you how you can use that knowledge to lose weight permanently and feel great. It is not about a "diet" but rather about how to eat to get your body to perform at its best which naturally results in weight loss. Dr. Bernard covers different problem areas of health such as high blood pressure and diabetes and how changing our eating habits can improve them. At the back of the book are many recipes which help you to get started.

I highly recommend this book as it will help you learn about your body and what it needs and what happens when it gets the wrong "fuel". I've read it twice and its on my Christmas list!

This book shows England's Father Christmas in his annual work on Christmas eve. Father Christmas comes to life in this book as a very human gift giver. This wonderfully illustrated book shows how he lives and the problems he faces each year when making his rounds. A magically Christmas story which has been a family tradition in our house since it was first published.

This comic-strip-like book is very British, slightly irreverent, and quite funny. Actually, I think it makes a good Christmas book for adults, but children too can enjoy the warmth and comfort of the many pleasant holiday scenes depicted.

I remember reading this book as a child...one of those ones that is permanently being brought home from the local library. I was thrilled when, as the mother of a 2 year old son, I rediscovered it in the bookshop. I rushed home with it and read it to him, laughing all the while. He loved it, and has consistently asked for "Santa Book" to be read to him every night since (we have had the book in the house for a year now!) He loves looking at the pictures, and finds it amusing that Father Christmas is a human being with a very important job to do. My husband was horrified at the fact that this Santa grumbles and complains, but I think that it makes him more real to our son. He can't wait to go and sit on his knee and talk to him this Christmas!

This is a sociological work which may seem a bit tedious to the general reader; however, it is carefully researched, and useful to those interested in more in-depth studies of cross-cultural communication. Gorden focused on a particular circumstance--young North American students living with middle-class urban Colombian families--and explored the points of view of both sides. As a North American who has some experience in Latin America, I found that some of the information can be applied to other countries as well.

To paraphrase A. S. Byatt, Leavis shows us the terrible, magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprives us of any confidence in our own capacity to contribute to, or change it. This book is a classic example of his style. While Leavis's lack of equivocation is still thrilling, so totalising are his views that we are often left wondering if we even deserve to be thinking about the same issues. The problem with Leavis is not simply that he took a false position with regard to the relationship between culture and literature. The problem is that he, like Matthew Arnold before him, failed to acknowledge the ideological basis for his vision. Despite having aesthetic values which were clearly ideologically-informed, they both treated these values as if they were non-ideological. They saw their aesthetic choices as facts, necessarily ideology-free and non-negotiable. Arnold can be forgiven for such a view, living in the nineteenth century. For Leavis it was a luxury. For us, it is indefensible.

Throughout his life, Leavis steadfastly refused to defend his critical standards because he did not see them as choices which needed defending. Yet a defence of the Leavisite criteria - something which will make this book more meaningful to contemporary readers - can actually be mounted, and John Casey provides one in 'The Language of Criticism' (1966). This defence does not suggest Leavis's views are as unarguably true as he imagined them to be. Rather, it articulates the implied theory of art which underlies them, and thereby opens them up for serious debate: something which Leavis himself was never courageous enough to do.