I learned spanish in school by the usual school method, focused on grammar. I quit this program after not too long when I realized the best I would do is learn some phrases and put together some basic sentences. The book is tiny and lacking explanation. I am saving my money for pimsleur or something else better than this.

I got this book and cassette from the library. I am only on the second lesson. I have been struggling to learn German, since my husband is from Germany, and I feel like an idiot when I'm there and can't understand anyone. This book and cassette appears to be teaching German from a different angle than most of the other cassettes I got from the library, and I'm actually learning!

I bought this book with the accompanying cassette and I would recommend this book to anyone. I live in Germany and right from week one I was able to communicate and be understood by Germans. I could even understand most of what they were saying back to me. Since completing the course my confidence to talk with Germans has improved in leaps and bounds, as has my vocabulary. I, however, strongly recommend you purchase the cassette with the book to aid pronoucation.

While I did hope to see her love for her dogs shine through at the end- I was severely dissapointed. The author imposes on us her completely self-absorbed nature. I honestly felt bad for the poor little animals.

FOR THE LOVE OF A DOG is a book to cherish.
Since the moment when Reverand Van Dyke told 12 year old Rose dogs didn't have souls,at the very beginning of the book, you started cheering Elisabeth on as she proved him wrong.You fell in love with the animals, no matter how spooky or neurotic.It made me truly understand animals.

This is a stunning memoir of all the animals Elisabeth ever loved and/or interacted with. Especially dogs(via the title).
But,as I was quite suprise,it is not just dogs. There are horses involved in this book too.
A must for animal lovers, FOR THE LOVE OF A DOG, tells of the immense complexity that is the amazing relationship with and attachment to animals.
It proves that animals really do have souls. Amazing book.

This book wasn't too bad, although I think Ms. Fairchild has several much better works. I also lamented the misuse of Philip's titles. I found these constant mistakes both irritating and distracting. I would like to say that it was also very irritating to hear him called the Earl of Rockford, MARQUIS of Chalmondelay on one page, then the MARQUESS of Chalmondelay, Earl of Rockford on the next page. They aren't at all the same thing!!! Then he was Philip Chalmondelay (as his family name), when it should have been his title! Argh.

All in all, it wasn't a bad book, just occasionally a bit sickening sweet. The characters were likable, and it ended decently.

Elisabeth Fairchild does not shy away from making her readers think carefully about difficult issues. In this book about honour, loyalty, honesty and loneliness the central issue is the destructive and demoralising results of malicious gossip. As others have said here, the H/H are both victims of a breach of promise but their recovery from the situation is hindered by local gossip. In this book, the action takes place in a village and it made a refreshing change from gossip at Almacks or Carlton House, etc.

It was, for me, nice to read a story set in Chipping Campden as I live nearby and know it very well. The descriptions were quite evocative and obviously the author has visited and walked around the village!

Only one problem with this book which crops up in so many Regency novels. Why oh why don't authors (or, particularly, their editors) purchase a paperback guide to titles and forms of address? In this case, the Marquess of Chalmondeley and Earl of Rockforth is constantly referred to as the Earl. In the case of two titles such as this, he is a Marquess and the Earldom is what is known as a "courtesy title" and is held by the eldest son. If there are three titles in a family (often the case with a Dukedom) then the third (and lowest) title would devolve on to the eldest son's eldest son. Confusing perhaps but the mistakes made in this book really are annoying on my side of the "pond" or, indeed, to anyone who does know the correct form. Also, the second son (and all other sons) of a Marquess, eg the villain of this piece, does have a title and they are known as "Lord First Name/Family Name, or in this case Lord Brett Chalmondeley. Sorry to be pedantic - wmr-uk who also reviews Regencies finds this annoying too!

All in all, a lyrical and emotional story - well done!

A standard Regency romance comprises 70-75,000 words. Of those words, probably 60-65,000 of them are the ordinary, mortar-like glue that holds the story together. A, an, and, the, it, he, she, they, them, his, her, town, country, and so on. Everyone uses them. It's the *other* words and how the author uses them that either makes magic or boredom. Poetry or hogwash. If only there could be a magic formula to imbue all authors with the ability to make magic or poetry, instead of the much-more-often found boredom or hogwash. (It is this latter ingredient that is most responsible for those books referred to as 'wall-bangers'. I've certainly encountered my share of these, just as you have.)

An author who always spins a tale of magic and poetry, of such life and tenderness and longing is Elisabeth Fairchild. She wields her wand of magic once more in this book, breath-taking in the beauty of its words, as the tale is told of two victims of a separate Breach of Promise; one the day after the marriage, one the day of the marriage.

Susan Fairford of Chipping Camden, orphaned young, and husbandless now, must remain in a small rented house in her hometown, although not in her childhood home, which she still owns, as it is beyond her capabilities--financial and otherwise. She now raises bees, and the reader is privileged to learn about this activity, never too much or too little, but just enough to provide a glimpse into the life and times of the buzzy little sweet-making creatures.

Philip Stone (or is he really someone else?) enters the village and being told that the manor house is to let, engages it for a fortnight or two. But soon, because of the ever-present fascination with gossip (such fascination apparently unchanged through the centuries) it appears that he is not what or who he says he is.

These two wounded souls must reach out to each other and the world around them. How fortunate they are to do this in a world made beautiful for them by the magical and poetical words of their creator. How very fortunate WE are to be able to read about them. Life is good, indeed. As long as there are books by Elisabeth Fairchild in it.

I expected this novel to be engaging not only because it was by Andre Brink, one of the most celebrated South African writers, but because it was also shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize. However, I was deeply disappointed with this chronicle of the relationship between a white woman and a runaway slave because it becomes, almost right from the beginning, cliched, repetitive, and affected.

'An instant in the wind' is a novel of exploration at two levels. On the one hand, it explores the beautifully cruel South African landscape between the Great Fish River and Table Mountain, passing through the Tsitsikama region and the Karoo Desert; on the other, it intends to explore the psychology between blacks and whites and men and women in the South Africa of the mid-1700s--and, by extension, of 'apartheid' South Africa. Brink's thesis appears (and I emphasize that word, appears) to be that only extreme situtations bring people together, making us forget our racial and sexual differences. However, nothing really illuminating is said, and the very ending is extremely ambiguous, causing one to wonder if Brink did't play a trick on the reader with respect to the intentions of the female character. If he did (and I'm inclined to believe that he did), then the ultimate message of the novel is extremely nihilistic.

Is there anything redeeming in this novel? I found the descriptions of nature superb. The Tsitsikama and Karoo truly come to life the way Brink describes them, and Table Mountain becomes truly magnificent. This background, perhaps, makes the novel worth reading.

What is it that makes South African authors incapable of happy endings?

Having read and enjoyed JM Coetzee's bleak "Disgrace" I found Brink's novel in a second hand shop and went to work. In subject matter it is a blending of two Patrick White novels - "Voss" about a doomed journey to the (Australian) interior, and "A Fringe of Leaves" about a white woman's life among Aborigines after a 19th Century shipwreck.

In Brink's hands, in 1750, a naive but spirited white woman from the Cape accompanies her Swedish explorer husband into the upmapped interior, only to find herself alone when the husband dies and the Hottentot retainers head for the hills.

She is found by a runaway slave, Adam, who for reasons of his own agrees to set off with her to the Cape.

Brink vividly describes the country through which they must travel. Against its physical presence, the couple become lovers. All of this is good fun. Brink was writing at a time when black/white relationships were forbidden under apartheid law. Indeed, the book for a while was banned. He delivers us a vintage love story, full of sex and spirit. (Funny how Coetzee, 25 years later when inter-racial sex is no longer verboten, sees the politics of such relationships in an entirely different way).

As Brink signals in the opening pages, however, there is no happy-ever-after. If there had been (the story purports to be based on truth), South Africa's history might have been different.

At times, the writing has less to do with black and white than purple, especially as Brink creates a seaside idyll for his pair, but for my money it's a grand read. It recalls a time when white South African liberals believed if only people could see their true nature everything would be all right.

Coetzee's darker - and more recent - version is that WHEN people are most true to their nature, South Africans have much to fear.

A wonderful read. A powerfully written love story between a slave and a white woman in 18th century South Africa. The South African landscape is revealed in all it's harshness and beauty. The story of the two characters are based on fact which makes the story even more phenomenal. A masterpiece.

As a voracious reader of everything, but especially social history and even more of olde new york, I was so excited to discover this book. But, it is hard to plow through the verbiage, repetition, and confusion of this book. Each of these woman could have been the subject of her own book and Lewis has done little in the first three quarters to give us anything so we may understand connections that merit their lives being twined together in this fashion. Also, Lewis has tried hard to develop mystery and suspense where there doesn't need to be any - these ladies are great just the way they are, the endless foreshadowing, broad hinting and leaving a story just when it gets interesting is rather silly. The author has obviously done detailed research, but I found it confusing enough to have to jump back and forth between the narratives about the four subjects, but threw up my hands as chapter after chapter began with three pages on someone new who turned out to be the sister or next door neighbor of one of the subjects. Whew, I finally deconstructed the thing by reading each woman's story through by picking it out of the morass. What a shame, because these are interesting women.

Each of these women could easily have had their own biography, but the author does a pretty good job of covering all four, their relationships with their world and each other. This book is a bit disorganized, but once you sort out the characters, this is a wonderful view of four outstanding women and their world.

Thank you Alfred Allan Lewis for creating a book of these spirited women who were the backbone of New York City, American society and worldwide. They are invisible in our history books, but thanks to you and your accuracy for facts their spirit remains alive!

These women influenced their power, money, political and social status to unite and heal mankind. I should know, I was there........to carry on, and say every "Queen" to there own home..

"Miss Marjoribanks" is set up in a mock epic style following the social conquering of Carlingford by Lucilla Marjoribanks when returns to her hometown after years in school and on the Grand Tour. The omniscent narrator sets the epic tone, and this more than the plot or character development carries the story along. Lucilla's work to bring order to the chaos of Carlingford social life causes her mostly success with a few small failures thrown in, but she doesn't seem to ever grow in awareness as do the heroines of Jane Austen's or Anthony Trollope's novels. This lack of character development and absence of a strong plot made this novel less satisfying than those of Trollope, Austen, Fielding and the like. But the narration is amusing and makes the book readable and moderately enjoyable.

I enjoyed this book much more than I expected. I came to love the character of Miss Lucilla Marjoribanks. She's a little over the top, and Oliphant has fun with Lucilla's extensive charm and "strength of mind". I found myself laughing as Lucilla shaped society in her town. The book is a fun and easy read...definitely recommended.

This must be one of the funniest books I've ever read--I hadn't laughed out loud like this since Catch-22. The character of Miss Marjoribanks (that's pronounced "Marchbanks") is used by Oliphant both as a vehicle for social satire in the Victorian community and as an instrument to examine female modes of power in the Victorian home. The scene in which Miss Marjoribanks figuratively usurps her father's role as patriarch of the house by appropriating his place at the breakfast table is hilarious. Oliphant's book is wonderfully enjoyable and furtively serious--it may be light in tone, but it reveals a great deal about how a resourceful Victorian woman might seek modes and expressions of power within parameters that are very limiting.

The main character of Miss Marjoribanks is not intended to "grow" or "develop"--part of the pleasure of her characterization and her story is in witnessing how her single-minded mania as social director of her community compells her to overcome the obstacles thrown in her way by the novel's narrative. Why should we arbitrarily expose this book to aesthetic standards created by a handful of canonical novels? Miss Marjoribanks's characterization is as valid as any found in Austen or Trollope (though not necessarily as great as the best of them)--we must keep in mind that there was much more to Victorian fiction than what is revealed in the small quantity of canonized examples still read today. Oliphant was immensely popular in her day, she was Queen Victoria's favorite writer, and there were many contemporary critics who considered her to be one of the best novelists of that period.

In short, Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks is a comic masterpiece, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to any reader of 19th-century British fiction.

Good book, easy reading. Reader will learn a big part of Elisabeth of Austria's life. Historical content is pretty accurate although I find that the author is interpreting to much the state of mind of the subject like the French Book by Nicole Avril "Sissi, Imperatrice Anarchiste". No one will ever know exactly was "Sissi" was thinking. The assomptions prevent the readers from making their own mind about this lovable princess. In my opinion the straightforward story of her life and the historical facts will give them a better idea of who she was. Golden Fleece and Sissi by Edgar C. Conti are perfect to learn more on Elisabeth of Austria...

Prior to visiting Vienna last summer, I hadn't known much about Elizabeth of Austria or Sissi as she was often called. Seeing Schonbrunn and the Hofburg made me curious to learn more about her, and this book certainly makes for interesting reading. The author provides details not only about Elizabeth and her family, but also about the politics of the day. Elizabeth comes across as a study in contrasts: on the one hand, she could be very charming and gracious, on the other hand she appears to have been fundamentally self-centered and unsuited for the duties of an Empress. Wrapped up in her own pursuits, obsessed by the thought of gaining weight, growing old and losing her beauty, she was restless, possessive and prone to depression. At the end of the book, I felt much more sympathy for the Emperor Franz Joseph who loved Sissi to her dying day, despite the many separations he endured that were caused by her constant wandering around Europe and despite her unwillingness or inability to perform the duties traditionally expected of an Empress. Overall, this is a well-written biography, and my only caveat would be that Haslip sometimes makes allusions, for example regarding Elizabeth's illness, that are not fully explained which can be frustrating for the reader.

I first learned about Sissi during my senior year of high school when my German teacher had a connection with someone in the international airline biz and could get her students back issues of German magazines like "Der Spiegel" and "Gala." I grabbed an issue of Gala and there was the most enchanting woman on the cover. It turned out to be Romy Schneider and the magazine was celebrating the 100th anniversary of Sissi's death.

I was utterly FASCINATED, reading about her life, her beauty cult, her self-abusive trials with anorexia and bulimia, her marriage to the emperor, and so forth.

A few years later, I got the chance to study abroad in Austria and hat the opportunity to visit actual historical Sissi-related sites.

When I got back to the US for my senior semester of college, I took a women's studies course and did a paper of the Austro-Germanic Beauty Cult surrounding Empress Elisabeth of Austria. This, along with my personal experiences in Austria and Hamann's book, provided me with a plethora of information about Elisabeth.

But what made me truly appreciate this book was the way that the author presented the material. This book read like a novel. I feel that Haslip provided a very well rounded amount of historical material that doesn't feel one-sided (very pro-Elisabeth or focusing solely on how beautiful she was).

If you're interested in a different "princess story," this empress will captivate you!

Benny and the Binky. By Barbro Lindgren. Illustrated by Olof Landstrom. R & S Books, 2002. 24 pages. [money](Preschool)

A binky may be the only thing that calms a screaming baby pig, but the excruciation of growing out of that binky is the ingenious subject of the irresistibly hilarious Benny and the Binky by Olof Landstrom (Benny's had enough, 9/99). Benny finally has the new baby brother he has been waiting for. But all Benny's new sibling does is scream - until he receives a binky from his mother. Now Benny wants one too, but he's told he's too old. This causes Benny to "steal" his brother's binky and hit the road, but he soon realizes why he's too old when several groups ridicule him during his adventures for being some "kind of oddball". The comedy of Benny's journey (with binky in mouth) comes through the cast of characters he meets along the way, including "three tough pigs with soccer shoes (on)." They are shown preparing to chase Benny, each in a three-point stance, in the masterfully done illustration that tells the story even better than the text itself. Each character's personality is colorfully brought to life as each page is turned. Unlike the classic picture books, Benny and the Binky uses modern-day concepts and ideas, such as a dog working on a laptop computer and listening to headphones, in a progressively entertaining way. As all of us have a favorite picture book from our childhood, I feel that many of today's preschool aged children will someday look back at this book with the same fond memories. At the same time I, as a 28-year-old man, had several entertaining laughs at the "corky" humor throughout this book and will enjoy reading it to my children.

This book just grows and grows on you. The text is simple enough for the youngest toddler, and the illustrations make it so funny that you will not mind the repeated requests for "read it again!" Every kid and adult can identify with the myriad kidlike emotions in this book. Get it.

Benny and the Binky is a very funny book written in a wonderfully simplistic way that I'm sure children would love. The illustrator is brilliant, and Benny's expressions are just priceless. You will laugh out loud at the "three tough pigs." For those of you who find it appalling that the three tough pigs want to punch Benny in the snout -- perhaps you should stick with gentler classics such as "Little Red Riding Hood." Benny and the Binky is just plain fun for kids and adults.

This book is interesting up to a point, and it contains some good anecdotes. But the author's almost touching need to prove that the Third Reich's admiration for Nietzsche was based solely on a combination of willful misreading and Elisabeth Nietzsche's influence leads him into all manner of logical quagmires.

At one point, he claims that Nietzsche's idea of the "superman" is "a concept intended to inspire but one which would develop sinister overtones in the wrong hands." This begs several questions: Whose are the right hands? How many people read--and believe-- Nietzsche without considering themselves to be at least larval supermen? Why should anyone be surprised when a philosopher who "rejected Christian morality and all other ideologies with moral imperatives," who claimed that "man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior," and who trumpeted the obligation of the self-styled strong to stamp out the "weak" is well received among brutal eugenicists with a lust for military power? I would think that a necessary competence for a career in philosophy would be to possess some slight awareness of the practical implications of one's ideas.

MacIntyre makes a convincing argument that Elisabeth Nietzsche was responsible for trying to pass her brother off as a rabid anti-Semite, but leaves one wondering precisely what benign effects Nietzsche's own drab and cruel political thought was supposed to have had on the world. Nietzsche would surely have rejected the notion that he was dealing in abstractions, so it seems disingenuous to treat his political notions as some form of Platonic ideal. MacIntyre's confusion is especially evident when, after praising Nietzsche for freeing mankind from the tyranny of false morality, he calls the Nazis "moral cripples"...beyond good and evil indeed!

A biography of Nietzsche's sister Elizabeth that would make good airplane reading. Partly that's because the bio is hung on a story, that of the author's trip to backwoods Paraguay to look for the colony she helped start.

I enjoyed this book because I found the story of Nueva Germania very interesting, although it turned out to be more of a biography of Elizabeth Nietzsche. I was expecting more on the actual inhabitants of Nueva Germania. I think it is still worth reading though because of its unique subject matter.

I would reccomend this book but only to someone extremely interested in the subject. If you are looking to be amused-this is not a good choice. This is definately an educational resource to be used to understand this woman's life, not to be interpreted as a cozy novel to curl up by the fire with... but as I said, if you are a real woman's history buff- I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

I found this book totally mesmerizing. I thought the author did a good job in covering Stanton's later years. She was thorough and honest. I learned a lot and would recommend it to anyone interested in the origins of women's history.

Wow! How many synonyms are there for GOOD? Let's see: magnificent, wonderful, amazing, fabulous (and for the teens, totally fab) great, weel, I could go on and on, but hey- just read the book for yourself. Pig out of FAB books, man.