Fantastic collection of pictures with comments!! A great addition to anybody's library. Brings back great memories of the many Happy Trails brought to us by Roy and the members of his family. Buy it if you can find it!!

This book was a gift from a 'southern' friend in an effort to explain the 'southern psyche?!' Good, lord, I thought I'd die of hackneyed plot development and platitude! The truly interesting aspects were never persued nor explained -- the mother--southern woman personified and yet left to hang -- the ill-fated father -- zip! Ultimately a mawkish effort at 'southern literature' that leaves the reader unfulfilled and the genre stagnant. I am shocked to learn this thing has been compared to Harper Lee and Truman Capote! Are people just not reading anymore, are they just stupid, or what? After a brief while; you just don't give a damn and want to finish the thing. If this is the present/future of 'southern letters,' I'm even more glad the North won the Civil War!

Even after a month has passed, I still find myself thinking of this book, and when I was reading it, I couldn't put it down. Devoto tells a story of childhood in the South (northern Alabama) in the early 1950s, where fear of polio and segregation were pervasive realities. 8-year-old Tab (Tabatha) is friends with a boy whose mother, fearful of polio, makes him stay in the basement while she's at work. Tab's other friend is Maudie May, a 13-year-old "colored" girl whose younger twin brothers (known only as the Brothers) tag along around, kept in check by their strong-as-iron older sister. It is a time when children really were free to spend their summers with little adult supervision during the day. As a result Tab and her friends have some amazing and funny adventures, including an unforgettable episode on the Tennessee River in a rickety rowboat they've borrowed. I laughed out loud at a number of points in this book, both from the funny situations and the funny commentary by Tab.

This book is a keeper.

This book reminded me a lot of my childhood. Long summer days, Roy Rogers, the polio scare, hideouts, and long-lost childhood friends.

It is the story of Tab Rutland who lives in a small Alabama town in 1954. The 1954 polio scare is on, and all of the swimming pools are closed in the town. So with her new friend, Maudie (who is the daughter of the neighbor's African-American maid) they set about to build a fort in a kudzu vine thicket which they nickname Fort Polio. They then begin a summer spying on the local moonshine maker, taking a fishing trip to get money for school supplies for Maudie, Tab's friendship with her neighbor's son, John (who is brilliant in his own right), in addition to other adventures. Meanwhile, Tab's mother is blackballed by the venerable Ladies Help League and especially by the head of the League, Mrs. Grace Poovey.

But the summer ends--and what happens to Mrs. Poovey? And--what happens to Maudie and why does she have to leave town?

This is a wonderful coming-of-age novel set in the 1950s and those have grown up in this time period will enjoy this book immensely.

If you like beans, you will like this book. It is nicely written and interesting.

This year 2000, 225 page book contains nearly 700 very large, sharp, full color photos of every item. Each is clearly pictured, described, and priced. You'll marvel at the photography. Items include: story books, lunch boxes and thermoses, school supplies, albums, records, and related items, movie posters, time pieces, cereal premiums, guns and holsters, and much more. Merchandise ads and store displays are shown. Every Roy and Dale fan will love this book. It's great to look at and use.

This tradepaperback reprints the first apperarances of all the original Thunderbolts. For those of you unfamiliar with the Thunderbolts, they are Marvel's newest and greatest superhero group. What makes them so interesting is that they are all former villians! A half dozen of Marvel's villians known as THE MASTERS OF EVIL changed thier identities to a new group of "good" guys in order to gain the public's trust and then strike! A true Troyjan horse. The only flaw was that most of them

found the public's audulation and addmiration too much and could not follow through with their "master plan". Now they struggle to stay on the right side of the law and are trying to atone for previous indiscresions. That's where this book comes in. It is a compilation of all the characters first comic book appearances in their former villianous identities. This book reprints the entire stories the characters were originally in. Featuring such heros as the Hulk, Captain America, the Avengers and more. You get classic Marvel stories from the 60's and 70's. Highly recommended

I've bought numerous books on Flash and the Dynamic Scripting that can be intermingled with Flash.... Flash 5 ActionScript F/X and Design, Flash 4 Creative Web Animation, and different Wrox books on ASP, ASP databases, and ADO. This book ties ALL of them together. It explains motion scripting for beginners, and then it shows how to import variables from ASP, PHP, Perl, and Cold Fusion. These 1000+ pages contain EVERYTHING you want to know about Flash, it it with out a doubt, THE BEST FLASH BOOK EVER CREATED!!!! It even branches out Flash to other programs like Dreamweaver UltraDev and Generator, it explains how to display information from databases using Flash Turbine. If you read this book, you will be a master at Flash.

An excellent book! Well worth the investment! It transitions well from more basic concepts to more complex topics -- With lots of substance for people at all levels of experience. Even those with more expertise can learn a thing or two from the different conceptual approaches presented. The book is not just about "here's how to do the same old boring X, Y & Z, just in the updated version of Flash", it also says "here's some different ways of thinking about solutions that takes greater advantage of new features of Flash". I also really enjoyed the mini math and geometry lessons... it's good to know that years of high school algebra and geometry could be put to some use!

The interface design chapters were particularly outstanding; judging by how awful so many Flash sites are at integrating interactivity, PLEASE!! I BEG YOU!!! everybody read the chapters on designing interfaces! They are a "must read" for anyone who wants to improve their site's interactivity.

The game design chapters are also incredibly helpful as well, and I think are some of the first useful explanations of game design I've ever seen for Flash. Even if you're not designing games in Flash, using a familiar game like Asteroids as a vehicle for explaining some pretty clever design elements works very well. Not to mention, it's very cool to be able to make your own video games! Flash isn't just for dull corporate websites anymore!

I'll be incorporating the lessons learned from those chapters into all the stuff I do... even though I only get to do very boring stuff for a corporate site. And if I use what this book teaches, maybe someday I can get hired to make games and do cool interfaces!!! :)

If you are a newbie,......their are other alternatives that will get your feet wet, but if you are a practicing Flash developer and have a firm understanding of ActionScript...this book will inspire you to build real dynamic Flash apps. It touches on Flash Javascript methods, Flash and textfiles and goes into server side middleware solutions like, CGI,Perl and PHP. It also introduces you to database integration. This book gives you real world solutions, which maybe a bit elementary, but overall it lays the foundation for you. I found this book to be inspiring and to be the book which pushed me to learn CGI,PERL,PHP and MySQL. If your looking to build real dynamic/interactive Flash applications or websites this is the book.

An excellent book that provides a concise review of diplomacy among the Great Powers during the period. This particular printing is not hard cover however and several pages were double printed or blurred in this edition.

This small book is a fairly readable and insightful overview of the European states system in the nineteenth century. This system consisted of the great powers, Britain, Russia, Prussia Austria and France.

During the nineteenth century, the great powers struggled to maintain the stability of the states system, in order to maintain the status quo at home. The states used diplomacy to keep conflicts to a minimum to avoid any threat to the survival of the powers. The great powers wanted to prevent the rise of an overly strong or revolutionary power like Napoleonic France, which had almost destroyed them at the beginning of the century. These efforts usually succeeded.

The only serious conflicts in Europe during the nineteenth century occurred during the 50s and 60s. We see how the revolutions in Italy changed the status quo. We also see how Bismarck unites the German states under Prussia, radically changing the status quo by defeating Austria. It is obvious that the authors of this book are not fans of Bismarck.

Another important goal of the great powers was to keep the declining Ottoman empire from disintegrating with disastrous results. The regular crises between Russia and Austria concerning the weakening Ottoman empire and the rise of the Balkan states were a regular threat to the states system. These problems grew worse when the great powers solidified into two blocks of alliances at the end of the 19th century. In this book we see the contortions the great powers went through to solve these problems. Eventually these combined problems lead to World War 1

This book has good maps, a good chronology, and an excellent annotated bibliography to help clarify the complex problems of the great states. To sum up, this book is an excellent, but involved overview of European diplomacy from the Napoleonic wars to the first World War.

It is amazing that a supposed authority on accents, Dr. Stern, would be associated with this book (and especially the cassette that goes with it.). He is - allegedly - a dialect coach to the Stars. It may explain some of the atempts at foreign accents that have recently come out of Hollywood. The accents on the cassette are nothing short of embarrassing - A cringe a minute. I asked a fellow actor to listen to the French accent and guess what it was: He guessed Spanish! If you want a first rate book on accents, buy Robert Blumenfeld's "Accents - A Manual for Actors". Now where do I go to get my money back?...

I recently bought the CD version of this, and I am compelled to warn people who are thinking of buying this. If you are at a;; serious about learning dialects, do NOT buy this CD. ... A high school drama student would have done a superior job. You would be better off learning dialects from the Simpsons or Saturday Night Live. This is not an exaggeration, this is a flat out warning. Don't waste your money. ... Pygmalion is old school cockney. Not modern. You want authentic Cockney? Try "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" and "Love, Honor and Obey." They're the best. "Scum" and "The Krays" are also pretty good. And that's on the authority of a real cockney girl (my girlfriend).

I own nearly all of Dr. Stern's Accent/Dialog books and tapes, including "Dialolect Monologues" I and II and over 20 of his individual accent/dialect tapes (example: Acting With an Accent/Norwegian & Swedish). While I do feel that it is worthwhile to own Dr. Stern's tapes in order to complete one's libary of accent/dialogue books and tapes, I do not feel that Dr. Stern's tapes are the best of the bunch. If I could only choose one author's accent/dialogue tapes I would not choose Dr. Stern's. Dr. Stern's system has several flaws. The first flaw is that Dr. Stern is a "one man band", meaning the only voice you will ever hear is Dr. Stern's. By contrast, two of the three other accent/dialect systems I own include lots of recordings of actual natives speaking the dialects. The second flaw is that Dr. Stern chooses dialects that bias towards educated middle class. For example, his tape on New York City accent does not teach the normal Brooklyn/Bronx dialect of the "Dese and doze, toity toid street" variety, but instead uses as his standard a sort of mildly Jewish middle class Manhattan accent as the single dialect he teaches on the tape. Similarly, his tape on the Polish dialect sounds so sanitized and educated that its really hard to tell what accent it is other than being mildly European and educated. Similarly, his Italian tape is of a European, educated person instead of the lower class Italian that one would expect to hear included on a tape devoted to Italian. A third and severe flaw in Dr. Stern's single-dialect tapes is that he repeats every exercize first in standard American and pauses for the student to repeat it, and then says the word or sentence in the dialect and pauses for the student to repeat it in the dialect. This effectively wastes about a quarter of the tape, as it doesn't teach anything to hear and repeat the words/sentences in standard american. A forth flaw is that Dr. Stern is obsessed with his pet theory that each dialect must resonate from a unique portion of the mouth cavity. Dr. Stern wastes from ten to twenty minutes of each of his hour long single-dialect tapes going on and on about the point of resonance of the dlalect. This is mind-numbingly boring to hear more than once, so one ends up fast forwading through it when listening on subsequent ocasions. The two accent/dialect systems that I recommend are not currently offered by Amazon so I will not give their names. Hopefully at some point Amazon will expand their selection of accent/dialect tapes. It would also be extremely useful if Amazon had a cross reference system in place so that one could show all video tapes or recordings that, say, give examples of a Cockney accent, an Irish accent, etc. For example, the 1938 video of Shaw's Pygmalian is an excellent example of Cockney, but one must figure this out on one's own as Amazon does not list videos by the accent/dialects they use.