This book is the direct sequel to Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion, which really must be read first. On the quest to find Jim -- on the lam from his evil stepfather Jonsey -- Trixie, Honey, and Miss Trask arrive in the Autoville trailer park, and the girls eventually find the dual mysteries of Jim's whereabouts and a stolen red trailer converging in one area of countryside.

The Red Trailer Mystery does get confusing and could have used a map, but the author summarizes the action periodically, and it sounds natural and helps develop the reader's comprehension and critical thinking.

I think this series gave me an appreciation in my adult life for the benefits of family, community, and enduring friendships.

l too loved these books and still have the whole set funny how these can be so much fun to read even after all these years....nope l dont wanta sell them....LOL

As a young girl (like seven years ago!), my mom pulled out a box from the attic when I showed an interest in reading. In the box were the first fifteen Trixie books. I have treasured them dearly. Number 2 is still my favorite! I have enjoyed reading and collecting the rest of the set. I have only 3 left to find! - Julie Major

This is definitely the most interesting encyclopedia of facts out there. The cover makes this stand out alone with a hologram of a guy moving up and down stairs on his head. There's over 6000 facts in here, some you will have already seen if you've been to a Ripley's museum, but a lot you won't have.

There's stuff such as the sailing ship (Eclipse) that was hit by a meteorite out in the Pacific Ocean. The funniest entires in here are real life grave stones such as Here Lies the Body of Jonathan Blake, Stepped on the Gas Instead of the Brake. You'll also see photographs of stuff like the world's biggest broom and smallest violin as well as hotels shaped like elephants. Read about the guy who returned a library book his grandfather borrowed that was 145 years overdue and was fined $22, 646. There's so much to see and read in this huge encyclopedia. You have to own it.

My fourth grader received this book as a gift...you can imagine the initial disappointment in receiving a book and not a gadget. He has not put the book down! He keeps it on his bed. When friends come to visit they actually read! It has provided him with many interesting details and amazing facts to share with his classmates and friends. These reports are truly conversation starters. Presented with colorful photos and drawings and easy to browse paragraphs, this book is easy to pick up and enjoy for a few minutes before school or for an hour of reading. The reading level is appropriate for grades 4-6. Third graders could easily enjoy the book as well. This would be a perfect coffee table book if your child had a coffee table!

This book features standard Ripley's fare with more of an emphasis on facts (it is, after all, an encyclopedia) than on cartoons although quite a few of those as well as some photographs appear within this collection. Some of these facts are not things you are likely to find out about elsewhere such as the momordica, which is a fruit purported to taste like roast veal! This collection has over 6000 such facts and is fun to read at anytime of the day or evening.

This is a very complete book on the subject for the layman. It gives descriptions of a number of systems including pressure distributed dome which is my type and not described in any other book I have read. Easy reading but a good deal of information. Seem to be very current. This is the best book I have read on the subject thus far.

The basics of septic systems, from underground systems and failures to what the owner can do to promote and maintain a healthy system, is revealed in an excellent guide essential for any who reside on a septic system. Rural residents receive a primer on not only the basics; but how to conduct period inspections and what to do when things go wrong. History also figures into the fine coverage.

This book is an essential tool for owners of homes with septic systems, or for people who are considering buying or building a home with a septic system.

It is written in non-technical language and includes a plethora of illustrations, some of them humorous. It provides enough information so that reader can deal effectively with professionals, should that become necessary. While it mainly focuses on the traditional septic tank, it also describes many alternatives which can be used in situations where the standard tank may not be applicable.

There is also an intriguing history of sanitation. I was fascinated to learn that the re were flush toilets in the Indus Valley (now Pakistan) in 2500 BC!

Also included is an extensive bibiolography, including web sites, and a list of suppliers of various secptic-related products.

I am extremely pleased with this book and am now the proud owner of both volumes of this book. It is one of those books that I use all the time, which says a lot. It helps me personally and is a terrific resource when I teach stress management sessions.

This is one of my favorite books because it is such a helpful resource to help me relax and benefit from guided visualization in incredible and powerful ways. Not only that, I use it all the time with my stress management, yoga and meditation clients. This book doesn't get old.

Wonderful source of scripts for use of imagery. An essential part of any relaxation kit! The beginning also has a section explaining how to use imagery and relaxation which is very well written.

I bought this book in 1993 because i needed to familiarize myself with the silk fabric. i also bought many other books on the subject. today i was browsing through my bookself and came across my copy of all about silk and i am still amazed by its content. i will now order the other two books which have since been available.

This is an absolutely indispensible book for costume designers and seamstresses alike. It has an incredibly easy format to read loaded with pertinent information about the fabrics as well as the actual fabric samples. I am studying to become a costume designer and realized that my fabric vocabulary was very limited. I was overjoyed to find this book and am loving it.

I couldn't believe it. I've been sewing all my life and I picked up Julie Parker's book about wool and discovered a whole new world -- or at least a whole new way of looking at my favorite hobby. How did I ever do without this? I'm ordering the other two -- on cotton and silk -- and can't wait for the fourth. Write faster, Julie Parker!

Yes, yes, I have been a fan of this show since I was 13, so it's a really guilty pleasure revisiting all the storylines that so enthralled me. This book has great pictures, and covers the entire history of the show from 1956-1996. That's a lot of twins, kidnappings, murders, and family drama. What comes through best about this book is its sense of history. I truly will always have a place in my heart for this show, and the Hughes family.

PS... even more fun is seeing the old pictures of Julianne Moore and Meg Ryan, both major characters in the 80's...

Whether you are a long-time fan of As The World Turns, or a new fan of this CBS daytime drama, you will want to add this book to your library. Lifelong fans of the show will enjoy re-living the rich history of As The World Turns, and new fans will enjoy learning the history of the plot twists and turns of this popular daytime drama.

The book is chock-full of pictures of cast members, and includes special sections on As The World Turns weddings, personal anecdotes from the actors, and features pieces on former ATWT actors who have achieved superstardom. A wonderful feature of the book is a complete cast list.

If you watch As The World Turns, you must add this book to your personal library.

As The World Turns is one of the longest running soap operas. This book is a wonderful gift to the numerous fans of the show. It has beautiful pictures and poignant stories about the characters, some who have been on the show from the beginning.

If what you are looking for is a delicious, show-stopping dessert, with no thought at all to calories, cholesterol, or fat content, you'll find loads of them here, starting with the scrumptious-looking cover photo of a Coconut Cream Cheese Poundcake. Those on diets of any kind may have a harder time finding appropriate recipes.

Southern Living has collected their best recipes from the past thirty years, including, apparently, quite a few from those blissful years in the 70's when the future seemed to stretch on forever and we felt no guilt about indulging our taste for lots of butter, eggs, and heavy cream. The recipes are all fantastic and relatively easy to prepare, and some, such as the Baked Spicy Beef Chimichangas have been updated to suggest spraying them with cooking spray and baking them, rather than deep frying, to lower the fat content, though the frying instructions are still included. None of the recipes, however, include any nutritional analysis.

What I find most surprising is the extent to which the baking recipes, especially, have not changed with the times. I had hoped the book would help me update some of my S.L. favorites by suggesting some options for reducing the fat and cholesterol while still remaining delicious. Alas, of the 25 recipes for cakes (excluding jelly rolls), nine still call for at least one full cup (one-half pound) of butter. Some also call for six eggs. No options are suggested, though there must be some which would not compromise the recipes too much! When one adds to this the fact that the microwave is seldom, if ever, mentioned and that none of the recipes seem to indicate whether something can be frozen or for how long, the cookbook feels a bit dated, not completely in tune with today's greater health-consciousness and S.L.'s older readership trying to be more conscientious about food preparation.

l like Southern Living because their recipes are accessible to people like me who have only moderate skill in the kitchen but who like to cook from scratch. Plus, the ingredients are easy to find in my local grocery, unlike a lot of the recipes from Bon Appetit or Gourmet. This "Best Of" cookbook is GREAT. It is the first cookbook I reach for on an ordinary weekday and for holidays and dinner parties too.

Some of the recipes are incredibly easy to make (Bibb Salad w/ Raspberry Maple Vinaigrette; Jalapeno Coleslaw) and taste fabulous. Others, like the Almond Braid, seem more complicated but turn out great and taste wonderful. This is because Southern Living creates their recipes from the point of view of the average cook in the average kitchen, so the instructions always make sense, use techniques and equipment I am already familiar with, and are easy to follow.

I have made many of the recipes in this cookbook and every one of them has tasted great and gotten rave reviews. My only complaint is that there are too few recipes. I highly recommend this book!

I have been cooking for 30 years, but this cookbook inspires me to cook the recipes without hesitation. As the previous reviewer wrote, I also have never made a Southern Living recipe that didn't turn out great! My husband can hardly wait for me to make the French Onion Soup again (it was the best he had ever had). Last night the Chicken and Mushroom Marsala was absolutely delicious. I'll just work my way through the entire book. No other cookbook has inspired me so.

Be careful about lending out the book. I made the mistake of showing the cookbook to coworkers - now I am "allowed" to take the book home at night, but someone else always wants to borrow it to get the recipe for Black Walnut Cake or Mississippi Mud Pie, etc. Everyone comments that the ingredients are commonly available. Some recipes are simple, some require more time. But if you have a hankering for a certain dish, you know you can trust the Southern Living recipe!

This would be a great gift for a new cook (I can imagine no better way to build an instant reputation as a "great cook") or for the cookbook addict who adores great food.

p.s. I am not tied to the magazine or the publisher.

This book is basically a manual for Unicode 3.0. It is not a light read but well worth the price and then some just for the glyphs from all of the various scripts that Unicode supports.

At 1040 large (8.5 x 11) pages it is the ultimate guide to unicode. With information on scripts and glyphs I had no idea even existed.

However if you are just getting started with Unicode I would recomend you get Unicode a Primer written by Tony Graham from M&T books. If you understand or feel you are starting to understand Unicode then The Unicode Standard Version 3.0 is the best comprehensive reference on the subject out today.

Consider it an overview of the developing UNICODE standard. As such, it will serve the engineer working on software in English and many other European countries rather well. It will be a good _starting_ _point_ for engineers developing software for other languages.

This book is essential for software engineers, at least for the next ten years or so. All programmers should understand characters, and UNICODE is the best we have for now. Even if you don't need it in your personal library, you need it in your company or school library.

The standard is flawed, as all real standards are, but it is a functioning standard, and it should be sufficient for many purposes for the near future.

The book itself is fairly well laid out, contains an introduction to character handling problems and methods for most of the major languages in use in our present world as well as tables of basic images for all code points. Be aware that these are _only_ basic images. For most internationalization purposes, be prepared for more research. (And please share your results.)

**** Finally, UNICODE is _not_ a 16 bit code. ****

(This is well explained in the book.) It just turned out that there really are over 50,000 Han characters. (Mojikyo records more than 90,000.) UNICODE can be encoded in an eight-bit or 16-bit expanding method or a 32-bit non-expanding method. The expanding methods can be _cleanly_ parsed, frontwards, backwards, and from the middle, which is a significant improvement over previous methods.

Some of the material in the book is available at the UNICODE consortium's site, but the book is easier to read anyway. One complaint I have about the included CD is that the music track gets in the way of reading the transform files on my iBook.

This is not just a reference for computer people, but for anyone interested in alphabets, symbols and character sets.

Central to the book, taking up the larger part of it, are the tables of the characters themselves, printed large with annotations and cross-references. If you enjoy the lure of strange symbols and curious writing systems then browsing these will occupy delightful hours.

For the Latin alphabet alone there are pages of accented letters and extended Latin alphabet characters used in particular languages or places or traditions: Pan-Turkic "oi", African clicks and other African sounds, obsolete letters from Old English and Old Norse, an "ou" digraph used only in Huron/Algonquin languages in Quebec, and many others, particularly those used for phonetic/phonemic transcriptions.

The Greek character set includes archaic letters and additional letters used in Coptic.

Character sets carried over from previous editions with additions and corrections are Cyrillic (with many national characters), Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Arabic (again many national and dialect characters), the most common Hindu scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam), Tibetan, Thai, Lao, Hangul, Bopomofo, Japanese Katakana and Hiragana, capped by the enormous Han character set containing over 27,000 of the most commonly used ideographs in Chinese/Japanese/Korean writing. Then there are the symbols: mathematical/logical (including lots of arrows), technical, geometrical, and pictographic. You'll find astrological/zodiacal signs, chess pieces, I-Ching trigrams, Roman numerals not commonly known, and much more.

Scripts appearing for the first time this release are Syriac, Ethiopic, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherookee, Runes, Ogham, Yi, Mongolian, Sinhala, Thaana, Khmer, Myanmar, complete Braille patterns, and keyboard character sets. And yes, there are public domain/shareware fonts available on the web that support these with their new Unicode values.

There are very good (and not always brief) descriptions of the various scripts and of the special symbol sets. Rounding out the book are some involved, turgid (necessarily so) technical articles on composition, character properties, implementation guidelines, and combining characters, providing rules to use the character properties tables on the CD that accompanies the book. After all, this is the complete official, definitive Unicode standard.

Of course this version, 3.0, is already out-of-date. But updates and corrections are easily available from the official Unicode website where data for 3.1 Beta appears as I write this. My book bulges with interleaved additions and changes. And that's very good. Many standards have died or been superceded because the organizations behind them did not keep up with users' needs or the information was not easily accessible.

Caveats?

The notes on actual uses of the characters could be more extensive, particularly on Latin extended characters. More variants of some glyphs should be shown, as in previous editions, if only in the notations.

Some character names are clumsy or inaccurate (occasionly noted in the book), because of necessity to be compatible with ISO/IEC 10646 and with earlier versions of the Unicode standard. For example, many character names begin with "LEFT" rather than "OPENING" or "RIGHT" rather than "CLOSING" though the same character code is to be used for a mirrored version of the character in right-to-left scripts where "LEFT" and "RIGHT" then become incorrect. And sample this humorous quotation from page 298: "Despite its name, U+0043 SCRIPT CAPITAL LETTER P is neither script nor capital--it is uniquely the Weierstrass elliptic function derived from a calligraphic lowercase p."

Wow, I wish I knew about this book when the author had her book signing! The opening prologue was written with such a vivid description of details I felt that it could have been ME as the character of Eric. I could barely believe I was reading fiction! The author must have really changed alot from her journal for readers. Though it was a very interesting and arousing read, I find it sad that she depicts the charater of Eric as such a heartless player but I guess she needed to fictionalize some things afterall.

A must read for anyone who has ever been 23. I'm now 36 years old, keep house for my husband and a 3 year old boy, hold a full time job (albeit a 32 hr. work week), spend 3 hours a day commuting to and from work, YET, I managed to consume Wednesday Girl in a day-and-a-half. I simply could not put the book down. In the midst of pretending to be a Power Ranger or a dinosaur; while preparing my husband's dinner of Puttanesca Pasta; even turning away from the only Television Show that I care to watch - JAG on Tuesday night...unearthing Paige's adventures (for that's what life is to me - an adventure) became priority.

I cannot say that the challenges I faced at 23 resembled Paige's in any form or shape - but the emotional roller coaster, the confusion, the soul searching - those were all so familiar, so real.

The Book is now on loan to my sister-in-law who is actually 23 years old. Her perspective will be interesting.

Two thumbs up.

The Wednesday Girl is an excellent novel. It is very down to earth and filled with emotion. The author does a tremendous job of telling this story in a very descriptive and metaphorical, yet extremely readable way. I think almost everyone can relate in one way or another to the struggles and successes of the main character (Paige). It deals with emotions and situations everyone is very familiar with. Paige deals with career choice and what the author says is the "driving force behind nature" - sex. I strongly recommend this book to virtually anyone. I hope that this self-published novel reaches as many eyes as it deserves!