I read this book and, was doomed to a wonderful life of reading Daniel Pinkwater Books. This book was and is my favorite book and I am sure it always will be. Alan mendehlson is a book that could only be written by the mind of a genius, tried and true. Daniel has changed my life and will continue to change our outlook on life for generations to come. I like to call myself a Pinkwater addict and I am proud of it. All you intellegent kids out there, get it while it's hot!!!!!

this might be one of pink waters older ones but it is on of the best

basically what happens is two boys go to a used and weird book store spend some cash and get a mind nd state enchancing book. then they finally get to sate 26 then they go back to the book shop. the book shop owner mr kulklash tells them that they can go into state 26. then they get a book that mentions in waka waka lore that they will save them. they have a few more things happen and then they save the waka wakaians and allen mealstorm gos back to mars and invites the narrater to stay with him for the summer

I checked this book out of my public library at the age of 10, and renewed it every week thereafter for another reading. All told, I probably read it over 200 times; it has had more of an influence on my life than my parents, television, Bill Gates, and God combined. It's what kept me out of all the really good schools.

A Different Kind Of Boy: A Father's Memoir About Raising A Gifted Child with Autism is the personal memoir of Daniel Mont, the father of an autistic boy. Daniel's fourth grade son Alex has difficulty interacting with the world and other people, is prone to anxiety, and has no real friends. But Alex is an amazing child prodigy in math, and one of seven fourth graders in the United States to ace the National Math Olympiad. A Different Kind Of Boy is a heartfelt, candid, and ultimately inspiring tale of the struggle of a father to teach his gifted child the awareness the boy needs to survive and connect with others, while making the most of his prodigious talents. A Different Kind Of Boy is highly recommended reading for any parent of an autistic or specially gifted child.

I, too, have a high-functioning very smart son with autism about the same age as the boy in this book, so I ordered "A Different Kind of Boy" as soon as I heard about it. I loved it. The way the author showed the events in his family's life and the evolution of his and his wife's perspective was wonderful. I identified with most of the author's experiences, especially those involving interactions with schools and teachers. Besides my autistic son, I have two other sons with different disorders. The frustrations the author in had dealing with trying to get the world to "get it" applies to all three of my sons' situations. I highly recommend this terrific book for teachers, medical professionals, and especially for parents of children with any special needs.

I stayed up until 1:30 am last night finishing this book. The Monts' story is moving and engrossing, filled with unexpected and often hilarious delightful surprises. I never laugh out loud when reading, but I did so while reading this one, many times. Alex's back and forth with his dad about the economics of grocery stores and amusement parks, his utter inability to comprehend why Jackie Robinson wasn't welcomed by every major league team ("But why, he was a great player, right?"), and his endless fascination and facility for games (tic-tac-toe with gravity, so that you can't put a symbol in any square that isn't on top of another symbol or at the bottom of the grid - try it!) are particularly memorable.

This first-time author displays a strong, clear writing voice, particularly in the last two-thirds of the book, when it seemed like he really locked into a narrative comfort zone that made the book flow extremely well, not to mention impossible to put down. His use of snippets of quoted dialog throughout the book is particularly striking and effective.

Perhaps more important, the book opens up and explains the world of autism in a way that really allows the reader to understand and feel the nature of the condition. In the course of recounting observations and scenes from his own life and experiences with Alex, he manages to illustrate the various facets of autism and view them from a number of different directions. I found it both fascinating and even mind-blowing in many ways.

I highly recommend this book. For people like me, who are relatively uneducated about the world of autism, it will make you think about people in a new way.

this book is awesome. It gives you a picture into history by using photographs, timelines and newspaper articles.

History made easy and fun, thats what this book is all about. I hated history when I was in school because the textbooks were boring. Now this book is something completely different. For every month of each year since the beginning of the century it has the highlights of the important events that happened that time. It is like reading an article in the newspaper, giving you the feeling of the era and also providing great pictures. This chronicle is all about pictures. Its structure has a feeling of a magazine or a newspaper.

The whole idea is that you get all the important events of the 20th century in an enjoyable fashion. It covers all aspects of the history like scientific breakthroughs, artistic movements, wars, politics, from all around the world but with a particular emphasis in the US history ( I have also read the Greek version which gives more emphasis in Greek history).

The book is huge and it is more like an encyclopedia rather than a history book. I like to read it before I go to bed and I doubt that any reader will be able to go from cover to cover singlehandedly. It will really strenghten your skills in world history and because of the informal way of covering the events (more like a reporters point of view rather than a professor of history) you will be able to remember a lot after you have read the book. I enjoyed particularly the coverage of the WWII, it is breathtaking, its like reliving the whole thing. I can only imagine the poor people reading in the newspapers of the era the advancement of Hitlers troop across Europe and then the break of war and the losses and the great battles and..... I can go forever.

This book is also a great option for a gift. Believe me the people that you are going to give this book will really appreciate it and will rember you for a long time.

The use of actual newspaper articles in their original format showed the style of the day as well a presenting the news of the day. Photographs and even some contemporary ads are interesting. Reviewed by two teachers, one eleementary and one high school.

Parapsychologist Cree Black is a ghost buster - an empath who gets to know her ghosts and thereby frees them from earthly bondage. It's a dangerous empathy though. She so closely sympathizes with people - and their deaths - that she can take on their characteristics.

This series opener takes Cree to New Orleans and the 150-year-old Beauforte House. Lila Beauforte's attempt to live in her ancestral home ended so badly that her family fears for her sanity. They - a venerable old family gone to seed - humor her terrors to the extent of hiring Cree to exorcise the ghost they don't believe in.

But all too soon Cree begins unearthing violent secrets (through a combination of ghost work and detecting) and real ghosts and the family circles its wagons against her. All but Lila, who has kept the true horror of the house to herself. Hecht keeps the pace brisk, juxtaposing suspense with investigatory digging and parapsychology, which culminates in a violent climax and cathartic resolution.

The series set-up is intriguing - a balance between the scientific (Cree's technological partner is on another case in this book) and the supernatural - and Cree is likeable despite an irritating tendency to angst and depression due to her husband's death nine years before. This pall becomes wearing and unfortunately pads a story which doesn't need padding. With romance, detective work, ghosts, murder, mayhem, sordid secrets and history to juggle, Hecht has more than enough substance. Good ghost detectives are hard to come by so let's hope Cree gets over it in her next adventure.

As a History major with a concentration in New Orleans history, I approached this book with some skepticism as many authors stereotype the city. However, I found a refreshing change in City of Masks in which Daniel Hecht paints a very accurate picture of New Orleans from the rich suburbs of the Lakefront to the seemy underbelly of Bourbon Street.

In the novel, Hecht introduces us to Cree Black, a parapsychologist with a penchant for dealing with ghosts on an emotional level. Her method of ghost busting relies on dealing with the emotional cause of the haunting and helping the spirit to move on past its unresolved issues. It was a good change from the standard apparition or ghost that has come to inhabit most horror tales. While Hecht does explore the science and psychology of hauntings, I found that the book did occasionally get bogged down in description.

Cree's first assignment takes her to New Orleans where she is hired to rid Beauforte House of an evil presence. An interesting cast of characters awaits ranging from Lila Beauforte, the plagued victim of the hauntings, to Dr. Paul Fitzpatrick, the psychologist of Lila and the "love-interest" of Cree, to Ronald Beauforte, the eccentric and spoiled brother of the Lila.

Throw into the mix voodoo and hoodoo, two ghostly entities possessing Beauforte house, a closet full of skeletons, the mystery of Mardi Gras and the mystique of New Orleans and its rich culture and you have a wonderful tale. All of these things make a rich gumbo to savor.

Hecht has done an excellent job in creating Cree Black. She is a well-rounded character that plays well off of the other characters in the book. She is self sufficient, smart and resourceful while showing her feminine side. Everything that one could want in a heroine.

In all, Hecht does an excellent job of keeping the story fast paced and interesting and through his development shows just why New Orleans can be called a City of Masks.

© 2003 by Diana Guerrero (allianceofwriters.com)
"Ghost Buster" and detective Cree Black is facing mysterious and sometimes terrifying forces in the beautiful and haunting setting of New Orleans. Daniel Hecht has woven a wonderful novel blended with suspense, psycho-babble, and the paranormal. I was glued to the book and unwilling to put it down. Full of sensory detail--this is spine tingling. This is my first read of Hecht but I am eager for the next Cree Black adventure. Buy it for yourself and anyone else you know that loves a great detective or ghost story!

if, like me, you're a bit plugged up from reading irvine welsh, noam chomsky, dave eggers, etc. van reid's "daniel plainway" might just do the trick.

i picked this up on a whim and afterward was scared i had gotten myself into something that was going to be a bit "precious and old-people-y", though i held on to a glimmer of hope due to the fact that "the onion" had read and liked the book.

in the end i couldn't put the thing down -- partly due to the author's way of jumping from storyline to storyline on a chapter by chapter basis, but mainly due to the fact that it was a delightful read. it reminded me more than a little bit of a rural american sherlock holmes adventure (the story is set in 1890s maine), but with tongue planted firmly in cheek (never irritatingly so though).

i won't divulge any details of the storyline, but i will say that i thought the book peaked about 2/3 in (when all the various threads finally came together) and after that it slowed down a bit. not bad, but perhaps mildly disappointing after such a fantastic build-up. one other point of note: if like me, you find yourself wanting to read the first two books in the series after finishing this one, you'll realise you've been given too many spoilers about book 2. will this affect your enjoyment of book 2? dunno. i haven't started that one yet... but i know how it ends.

i don't think you can go wrong with this one. regardless of your age or interests, a bit of good clean old-time book reading fun is coming your way.

Van Reid is just a great story teller. This is the best (so far) in his Moosepath trilogy.

Hurray for the Moosepath League!! Maine novelist Van Reid now has published a series of his comic, sweet novels, each more pleasurable than the last, featuring Tobias Walton and his companions Ephram, Eagleton and Thump. His most recent offering, Daniel Plainway: Or the Holiday Haunting of the Moosepath League, is the perfect Christmastime or winter fireside book. Woven with so many pleasurable amiable asides and subplots, the main story about a kidnaped boy and ancient Norse writings seems almost an afterthought. To take one example, Walton, whom Reid describes as "himself a pearl, and good things did seem to surround him", starts the novel losing his hat in a sudden wind; the peregrinations of that topper itself, and the goodwill it seems to bear from its owner, flow delightfully through the story. In another delightful scene, Reid waxes rhapsodically on the perfect qualities of snow for snowballs, leading to a delightful snowfall fight involving the novel's heros, villains, and local youngsters. A particularly pleasurable turn for me, a former classicist, is that the interpretation of the writings depends on hearing the Greek spoken in a seemingly nonsensical English phrase, "she'll bust her feeding." Although always lighthearted, Reid's novel is not without serious purpose, as expressed in the dialogue as to whether "there are so many people in the world willing to drive tragedy" or whether "there are as many, more, really, who are willing to put things right." In Reid's world, those who good-heartedly "put things right" - most especially the comical Moosepath League - predominate. I finished his book with a fair certainty that the same prevailed in my own place and time.

I'm a sucker for this contemporary short fiction. Much in the style of Larry Brown, Carver, and not so much Bukowski, Crocker draws you into his characters. When you try to leave, he won't let you. In this tale you are the guest that sits in discomfort and wants to leave the setting...but you are Trapped. The stories ends in resolve, something that is not done easily. Bravo! The full twenty-three stories will read like a fun weekend in Jersey City. I enjoyed this very much.

I picked up this book a few weeks ago and couldn't put it down until I had read it all and some of the stories twice. It's an amazing mix of the experimental and ordinary life. At times, it's even creepy, in a good way.

Crocker, nobody's fool of the written page, has composed a work of great and difficult striving. 'Do Not Look Directly into Me' is a rendering of the desperate, ugly, and mundane in a language packed with our shared human frailties.

I recently took up sculling and very much enjoyed this book. Honestly, I don't know if the book would be that beneficial to someone with years of experience, but from my point of view it was a great primer for training, and working on technique, etc.

I think for readers looking for some sort of Holy Grail...my guess there really isn't one. Just get out on the water and do it.

It's Dan - what more can I say?

As a recent convert to the sport of sculling I have read most everything published to the point of obsession. This book does however stand head and shoulders above most. It is for the more cerebral sculler, dealing not just with technique, boats, races etc but the mental rigour and benefits that is undoubtably the attraction to most of us "Norman no mates" who prefer the intensity of a single scull. It has been read and read and read again and still has something fresh to offer. I want Daniel J Boynes job!! r. gourlay email:robert.ellis.survey@lineone.net

This is just my own two cents but I believe that reserving this space stricly for book reviews may help in enhancing the integrity of this review section.

In my view, it may not be as helpful as intended to place Mr. Tulku Thondup's workshop schedule here, as sadly, it may have the unwanted result of reducing the author's credibility in the view of the readers such as myself : ). I have no doubt that the intentions of these reviewers were good in this case... Perhaps a more succesful approach would be to post these workshop schedules on non-associated website. Thank you for listening. Peace.

Good for both the newcomer and the experienced reader of buddhism. I have read this book three times, and every time is a new experience that creates an amazing aura of mindful positivity.
It is not a book of religion but it is the book about positivity.
I would reccomend it for everyone.
It has changed my life.

Tulku Thondup has once again extracted the essence of traditional Buddhist techniques and made them accessible to Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike. For those who would like to attend one of Tulku Thondup's Workshops on Healing, here is his schedule:
1) Shambhala Center of Washington, DC: March 8 - 10th, 2002 (301) 949 0517
2)Ottawa Shambhala Center, CANADA: May 24 - 26, 2002
(613) 562 5800, poste 1783
3)Karme Choling, Vermont:May 3 - 5th, 2002
(802) 633-2384

This book explores the world of gypsies, scamps and thieves and the offbeat group of Private Investigators who pursue them.

Always planning the next con, theft or bunko, a band of gypsies in San Francisco pull off a perfect crime. Using four branches of the same bank, slick tactics and phone banks, a group of gypsies manages to steal 32 cadillacs, all in the same day.
Facing a million dollar loss, the bank hires DKA, a local PI firm, to recover the stolen cars. Tipped off that a gang of gypsies was responsible, the DKA operatives, or repomen, start a chase that follows the cars across the US. Using very unconventional methods this quirky band of PIs, who are rejects and misfits, must use their wiles to "outcon the cons."

What makes this story really outstanding is the background tale of the gypsy life, description of how the cons are done and the plotting of the PIs to get the cars back. There is lots of action too including breakneck chases and escapes, including one where a DKA agent must leap into a car while his rear is filled with buckshot.

My favorite character is Ken Warren, a repoman with such a severe speech impediment that he barely communicates. But with extraordinary skills in hunting down and absconding with cars that no one else can get, he earns the respect of his fellow DKA agents.

A fun ride which I highly recommend.

Why Joe Gores isn't a better known author is a complete mystery to me. Ok, Ok, he's won 3 Edgar Awards and all, but still you don't hear his name mentioned too often when asking for recommendations. His DKA Files series are full of action, humour, cons and scams and in short are pure entertainment. Well, no matter, I've discovered him now and I'm here to tell you that the series, and 32 Cadillacs in particular, is one that's not to be missed.

For the first time, the DKA Agency is pitted in a head-to-head battle with San Francisco's Gypsy community following a Gypsy scam that had netted a grand total of 31 Cadillacs. This is a once-in-a-lifetime job, recover the 31 Caddys for a nicely negotiated fat fee. But the Gypsies are crafty specialists of the long con and are exceedingly difficult to track down, so the recovery process will require the DKA team to use every resource available as well as every underhanded trick in the book.

To give you a head start, I'll introduce you to the central DKA characters. They are, Dan Kearny, Giselle Marc, Patrick O'Bannon, Larry Ballard and Bart Heslip. And two new characters are added to the staff, Trin Morales, a sleazy Latino who failed on his own as a PI, and Ken Warren, the genius carhawk with a killer speech impediment. Both bring tremendous dimension and entertainment to the DKA team.

But the real stars of the book are the Gypsies, colourful in character as well as in their various ingenious scams. Although they're such big thieves that they'd make a kleptomaniac look like a saint, you can't help but like them and hope that every now and then they'll catch a break.

Joe Gores is an author who has walked the walk, having been an agent in the real life DKA Agency. His first-hand knowledge and experience is apparent as his agents work through their cases. Rumour has it that the Larry Ballard could very well be modelled on Gores himself.

As a final word, if there are any Donald Westlake fans out there who have read and enjoyed his Dortmunder book Drowned Hopes, I would urge you to read this one too with a brilliant crossover of storylines. This book was an absolute pleasure to read and, I know it's a much-overused catch phrase but I would term it a "must read book".

This book is full of heroes on all sides as DKA agents and gypsies strive to outwit each other throughout a very funny story. 32 CADILLACS is the best entry in the entertaining DKA series.

Doc Evans not only tells it like it was, he makes his fellow grunts, like L. J. Henderson, and their heroism come alive in your mind. After reading Dr. Evans' book you won't want of miss two other books about the 4/39th during this same period; ...

I am a military physician and was serving in Afghanistan when I read Platoon Medic. I read the whole thing, cover-to-cover in a day and a half. It's simply a great book. It is a well-written, action-packed, gut-wrenching rocket ride through the hellish world of the combat medic in Vietnam. I felt like I was there in the rice paddies, watching Doc Evans patch up his bloddy, dying comrades while the bullets were flying over his head. Dan Evans tells an astonishingly honest, important and poignant personal story. This book should be required reading for all Army medics and physicians. A great and important read.

As a Squad Leader of 2nd Squad, 1st Platoon, reading Dan's book years after experiencing it brough back a floor of memories. We lost some good men in our battles, but we'ed lost a hell of a lot more if it hadn't been for him and the other medic's. I was honored to proof read his story before it was published and when I did, it was hard to hold back the tear's from the memories it brough. I'am honored to know him and to be part of his story.