I was recently fortunate enough to hear Joan speak at the ICAN conference in Omaha. She is truly amazing! Hearing her story puts all of the little bumps in my life into perspective. I would recomend this book to anyone!

I knew Joan when she was going through her loss of vision. She is a very positive and uplifting person. Her book is true to the experiences we all had with her and her family. You have to read the book and feel that your outlook on life can be just as positive and happy!

I had the pleasure of hearing and seeing Joan Brock while at a convention in Oakland, CA in May of 1999. This woman has been through so much, yet still manages to see the good in life and in people. She will inspire you and lift you. The book make my mother cry with joy as she read it. I hope to have the pleasure of reading more books of Joan's should she choose to write them. Thank you Joan for the joy you have added to my life.

In the airport recently, I picked up the Los Angeles Times and came across a review of this delightful book, which will appeal to movie buffs, history buffs or anyone whose family experienced the Great Depression. I quote from Jonathan Kirsch who wrote the review: "The next time a 1930s gangster flick called 'Kid Galahad' shows up on cable, take a close look at the guy in the spectacles and the fedora standing next to Humphrey Bogart. 'If you are familiar with many B movies of the late '30s or '40s,' writes Joan M. Cunningham, 'you would probably recognize my father's face, if not his name.' Joe Cunningham was one of the character actors who are the unsung heroes of old Hollywood, and his brief but memorable career is detailed in an unabashedly sentimental memoir by his daughter. Joan Cunningham recalls a childhood on the margins of Hollywood." The review goes on to highly recommend this fascinating book about the other side of Hollywood during it's Golden Age. I picked up the book and couldn't put it down.

Just returned from a tip to California where I learned about the Hollywood moguls who founded the movie industry. What a joy, when I returned, to discover this little book--the other side of the coin--that told what it was like for families to live and work amoung the famous in Hollywood of the 30s and 40's. The author takes you back with her to walk the streets where Jackie Cooper was her neighbor and little girls adventured out to get a peek at the big studio lots. You feel the highs of dining at Chassens when dad has a bit part and the lows of moving to a smaller house when bits are sparse. A love story from a daughter for her father, forever a featured player in her life.

A delightful read. I was transported back in time to an era of "B" movies as seen in the lives of the players, a family that shared love, and tough times with humor and strength.

As a child I LOVED this book and read it several times

Yet another incredible book in this series by Joan Aiken! This one places the focus on Dido Twite, and one of the things that I thought was most enjoyable about this book was seeing Dido grow into the strong, tough-girl from the wretched "brat" in Black Hearts in Battersea. I also thought that there was a lot more humour in this book than the previous three. I guess this book is like the "growth" book. Dido grows into the confident person we see in the later books, and Dutiful Penitence, under Dido's care, also becomes much stronger during the course of this adventure. I guess what I'm saying is that this is the book that makes Dido the mainstay for the rest of the series by showing how she grew stronger and how she helped others grow stronger.

I think it's a funny spoof of the whaling society of Nantucket in the 19th century, and of the Puritanical sort of Quaker types who brought up "Pen". This book introduces several sympathetic, believable, "bang-up" characters, such as Nate, Doc Mayhew, Cap'n Casket and Professor Breadno, and of course, Mr. Jenkins. The plot is wildly fantastical, (and physically impossible, in some parts) but the wonderful storytelling more than makes up for that, and rather sets the scene for the even more eerie and improbable sequels, The Stolen Lake and The Cuckoo Tree. Loads of fun, a must read for kids, and I personally think that adults should read it just to get in touch with the inner child within, etc. etc. READ THIS BOOK!

Joan Aiken writes a brilliant story on two levels which continues the saga of Dido Twite, lost at sea in the preceding novel (Black Hearts in Battersea.) She is rescued by a whaling ship whose skipper, the lugubrious Quaker Captain Coffin, is obsessed by his hunt for the great PINK whale while having some difficulty relating to his timid daughter, who has locked herself in his cupboard for the duration of the voyage. Dido wins her trust and is 'rewarded' by her father who imposes on her to be a sort of au pair. The girls are dropped off in Nantucket where they are to be under the 'care' of Coffin's sister, auntie Tribulation. Tribulation does indeed appear as Nantucket turns out to harbour anti - British-monarchy terrorists and the wicked Miss Slighcarp, villainess of 'The Wolves of Willoughby Chase'. The fast-paced, intricately- plotted story comes to a very clever ending.

As usual Joan Aiken is brilliantly spoofing 19th century literature. Adults will find the parody hilarious while children thrill to the melodrama.

After reading Eric's brilliant books, I was curious to see what "the man" was like in person. WOW! "No Acting Please" is an incredible primer for actually studying with Eric. Eric brings the principles of "No Acting Please," "Being And Doing" and "Irreverant Acting" to life in his 2-day seminars. I don't care how long you've been acting or how accomplished you think you are - what this man teaches, in writing and in person, cannot even have a value put on it. I'm a regular on a Top 15 drama series, and when I first started studying with Eric about 6 months ago I realized how little I really know. He's taken my acting to new heights, heights I never thought I could reach. He made me excited to be an actor again. You can't put a price on passion. I highly recommend reading Eric's books (get ALL of them) and sitting in on his seminar. Check out his website too.

This one of the best books on acting ever published. It is also one of the only books where you can significantly improve just by reading the thing, "getting" it, and playing around with some of the exercises. Eric stumbled upon something great with his "Being State" stuff. However, I have studied with Eric, and run from Eric, and so have many established actors/celebrities. He is a total narcissist neurotic whose "craft" sucks all pleasure from acting. Personal recommendation: JUST READ HIS BOOK AND DON'T GO NEAR HIM.
And one more thing: Eric's books on imaging and craft and Carl Jung-based theories on acting are all bogus. If you read them you see how more and more self-indulgent and full of it he gets and how these lengthy pop-psychology theories are truly ignorant. Save your money but keep "No Acting Please" as a bible.

I discovered this book by accident years ago and it helped my acting tremendously. This, Being and Doing and Irreverent Acting --all by Eric Morris are some of the best books on acting ever written.

These books helped me stretch as an actor by suggesting exercises for my emotional instrument. I did them alone and found I could reach areas of emotions that were at one time foreign to me.

Incredibly helpful. Helped me grow as an actor, a teacher and a director!!

A journalist observes the seasons in a garden in Canale, Etruria, and recounts the tribulations and satisfactions of creating it. Readers who fantasize about getting a sweet little cottage set in romantic countryside, planting a garden there, and becoming part of a traditional community-that is, practically everyone who isn't actually doing so at the moment-have created an insatiable demand for stories like A Year in Provence and In Tuscany to color their daydreams. Marble's cheerful garden chronicle sticks to the established formulas of the genre, and revolves around the adventures of a sophisticated but sympathetic couple with some unspecified source of income who go off in search of their spiritual home in some not-yet-fashionable patch of countryside. They build a touchingly modest house with thick stone walls and a tile roof for a reassuringly low price, and adjust awkwardly to the lack of American comforts. The grudgingly productive farmland is gradually coaxed into luxuriant, decorative bloom, and there is the assortment of entertaining eccentrics and local yokels (who use dynamite to dig an orchard and wreak havoc with the water pipes) close by in the background. This particular specimen of the myth offers plenty of incidental pleasures: Marble's prose is witty and reasonably charming, and she presents some sharp, precise observations on semitropical gardening (including a wonderfully detailed chapter on seed germination). Yet the little town of Canale never quite comes into focus either as a landscape or a society. Portraits of the indigenous population, including Massimo (a bulldozer driver with a mysterious past) and DeDe (a plant wizard with a sleazy husband) have a creepily condescending tone, as though it never occurred to the author that they might tell their stories for themselves, or that the perceptions of the people who have worked the land for generations might be as valid and interesting as a newcomer's. Now that would be a refreshing variation on the theme. Pleasant fodder for armchair travelers and gardeners, if not appreciably different from the many other works of its kind.

A truly delightful book about Italians, human behavior, history, travel, and gardening. The author paints a picture with her words, captures your imagination, and makes you chuckle at the unique Italian way of living. From buying land and building a house to sinister business deals, to marriage contracting, gardening fetes and disasters, this book will charm and delight you on many different levels. I enjoyed this book so much more than "Under the Tuscan Sun." This is truly a gem of a book.

I love to travel but I have never added to the sales of those memoirs of hapless outsiders who renovate a barn or farmhouse in Provence, Tuscany or Umbria. No matter how well-written, most are self-conscious narratives recycling the same ingredients: coping, making friends--and enemies--and eating well. Joan Marble's book is refreshingly different. She and her husband built rather than renovated, and in Etruria, off the touristic track; they nurtured unforgiving soil producing delights for the table. But it is the delight of armchair gardening that makes this book such a good read. There is humor and pathos in how this couple celebrate life. Highly recommended.

After a recent submersion into what is passing for lesbian erotica these days -- and feeling as if I just wasn't perverse enough to be a "real" lesbian -- I revisited this classic.

After finishing it, and being once again intrigued, informed, aroused and delighted, I realized what it has that so many more recent anthologies lack: it has human contact based on emotion. The women in it are real and their feelings have true context. Instead of cold and sterile sex acts between people portrayed as obsessed with looks and their own image, this anthology overflows with the fluid nature of human sexuality and genuine human warmth.

Some may read for the historical perspective and others may miss the explicit-anything-for-shock-value gender games and power plays that are required it seems in all of the "best of" lesbian erotica out there now. I read it for the emotional impact because when it comes to erotica I need the emotional tie. Given how many lesbians (whether they admit it or not) read lesbian romance novels, I don't think I'm alone.

Though I do not consider myself a lesbian, I have been attracted to a butch woman before and wanted to understand the feeling better. This book helped me understand the dynamic of attraction between butch and fem. It was precisely because she was masculine that I was attracted to her, but because she was a woman there was a sameness I could relate to and identify with. It was safer in a way than a man, because it wasn't quite so opposite. You still have the masculine/feminine polarity, but at the same time a comfortable sameness. It cleared up a lot of my questions and validated a lot of conclusions I had come to regarding the butch/fem dynamic.

This is the one of the first serious books published on butch/femme within a historical context in the lesbian community. It's a huge collection of historical materials of varying quality, with poems, photographs, essays, etc. This book is absolutely necessary for anyone seeking an understanding of butch/femme as a multi-layered, many-faceted experience.

Sara Hoskinson Frommer has taken all the best elements of a murder mystery. She gets you caring about the characters and wanting to find the killer, and when you find out whodunit, you say to yourself, "Of course, I should have seen that." I loved the Gilbert & Sullivan references at the beginning of each chapter, and what an ingenious, Gilbertian plot twist to murder a "ghost." The only problem is that I am a Gilbert & Sullivan performer, and I'm going to be afraid if I ever get cast in the role of Sir Roderic Murgatroyd.

Perhaps the best of the Joan Spenser mysteries, Murder and Sullivan is soooo much fun! The main character is this ordinary music-loving lady, Joan, and she's always up to her neck in danger! I love all of Sara Hoskinson Frommer's books. They're fabulous reads if you like mysteries. A writer friend of mine says she thinks Frommer is the best mystery writer out there today..and she might be right, too.

Murder & Sullivan is another gem from Sara H. Frommer, a writer who understands music and real people. I'm not a professional book reviewer by any means, but I know what's good when I read it. I've read other books by this author and all of them are I think, wonderful.

Joan Retallack, a long-time friend and colleague of John Cage, has done us the favor of publishing this series of conversations between the two of them. These conversations (for they lack any conventional formality that might render them 'interviews'), which took place not long before Cage's death in 1992, run the gamut of topics. Through their amiable banter, one gets a great sense of what was going on in the oft-misunderstood artist's mind--especially as regards his fixation on chance operations and the I Ching. The talks also give ample insight into Cage's writing and visual art, practices for which he is lesser known. When not provoking thought about Cage himself, the two (and I mean both of them equally; Retallack has a meticulously rich and compelling mind, and expresses many enlightening points-of-view herself) have revealing conversations about everything from Duchamp to Joyce, Buckminster Fuller to the Koran.

Perhaps the most interesting and rare aspect of the book is the pervasive inclusion of the environmental and more mundane details of the conversations. She is careful to note the frequent occasions when Cage laughed, what he might have been cooking that day, interactions with an artist who stopped by to fix a bookshelf as a favor to Cage and to Merce Cunningham. Especially valuable is the penultimate conversation, when we are made privy to the beginning of Cage's composition process, as he begins to write a new piece on the spot with cellist Michael Bach. These insights into Cage's daily domestic life are perhaps the most revealing aspects of the book into his personality and philosophies.

For those familiar with Cage, this is a must-read. If you are skeptical or confused about his work, these talks will clarify a lot for you. If you have yet to be exposed to Cage, I recommend this book highly as an accurate and exhaustive portrait.

i consider my entire college education as a necessary a tool for understanding every detail of this book, and that use alone would make it worth the time and money i've spent on it :). it embraces every detail of postmodern theory, ancient philosophy, and avant-garde art. it makes the world a more vivid and better place to live in. the best case for anarchism i have read.

Joan Retallack is immensely gifted. If you're familiar with John Cage, you'll like this book. If you're not too familiar with John Cage, well, I have someone I'd like you to meet.

This is entertaining, compelling, thought-provoking stuff. I can think of few other people who are so mindful of WORD USAGE, or in this case, I guess, WORD "USCAGE." Many insights in this book. I recommend it highly.

"Not Alone" is more than just an opportunity to learn about the "other side" of the war from the unique perspective of an outsider who was on the inside (a British-born woman who was classed as German by the Nazis). This book is a journey with Franke as she grapples to deal with a world that has turned upside down. For either students of the time period or those exploring the human spirit, this book is excellent. Being fascinated by both, I find this book priceless.

Written with emotion and honesty, "Not Alone" takes readers into the distant, now-incredible world that existed behind the Nazi lines during the Second World War, guided by someone from the other side who experienced it first hand. Then, as that desperate world collapses, she brings readers on a remarkable journey to freedom, on the walk of the century from Germany home to England, two small children and all her belongings clutched in her hands, and carried on her back. The courage of the author and her love for her children will touch the hearts of everyone who reads this book. Highly recommended.

After reading so many books about how generals and politicians won the war it's about time we saw how the innocents suffered because of the wars. This is the story of a British woman trapped behind German lines and her courageous struggle to get out of Germany and back to England with her two children.
Well worth the read. Inspiring.

Old Henry is a great childrens book that also has a moral. The moral of the story is that you should not judge a person for how they look, dress, or live but how they are as a person. The neighbor's of Henry in the story do just this and drive Henry to move away. The neighbors end up missing him and feel guilty about how they treated him. A child can learn a lot from the book.

It may not last forever, but this book has momentarily knocked Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" into second place. "Old Henry" is now my favorite all time book, even after having owned it for about seven years. Oh, I used to read it all the time to the kids, but the moment I realized this book is now, for the time being, my all-time favorite book, is when I sat in the emergency room late one recent Saturday night.

My wife was in another room, discovering she had a broken foot from a slip earlier that day on a basement floor made wet by water leaking in through the walls.

I spend far too much time doing home maintenance these days, mopping up wet basement floors, calculating how the house will be sided or painted, deciding whether topaint or replace a garage door, trimming hedges and yanking weeds.

All of these ridiculous, no-win chores simply chip away at the time I want for reading, writing and drawing. It is not enough that parenthood justly requires so much time and energy -- we signed on for that -- but the treadmill that is home maintenance is a horror for anyone who likes to sit by the bird feeder and read magazines.

I envy, then, Old Henry, who wants only to move in, leave things be, and read and draw while his neighbors are concerned about the length of his grass.

My uncle once explained to me why he barely ever trims his bushes. "I want them to express themselves," he said, comparing his free-flowing shrubs to the neighbors' which were stiff and buzzcut as military sentries.

So I used to read "Old Henry" for my kids. Now it is at my bedside, along with the magazines and feng shui books, all reminders that if I want to nurture my mind, I'll have to give up the landscaping and such, and while the water in the basement must be mopped up lest anyone else break a bone, that we actually do have the freedom to surrendur to nature, let it grow and grow around us, and in that sweet surrendur, curl up defeatedly with a book.

I thought that this book was really good. I think that it will help kids understand how you should never judge people because that is what they did in the book. The neighbors judge Henry because he moved into a house and he did not fix it up so his neighbors cleaned his yard for him and was running him out. The neighbors did what they wanted but when he left the neighbors started to miss him. It shows that with him gone there was something special the people liked about him.