Jack Ramsay has just lost his entire family's fortune on the turn of a card--and before he's even outside his club, this gossip has been added to his reputation that has named him Rakehell Ramsay. Nevertheless he can't resist another wager, and on such, goes to the debut ball of a merchant's daughter and plays the cello--which brings guests in from the streets and turns a failed come-out into a great success.

Selina Preston knows her father just wants the best for her, but she would prefer to marry for love than to marry one of the high-born fortune hunters who comes to her ball only interested in her dowry and her father's money.

When Mr. Preston hires Jack as Selina's music master, both Jack and Selina are determined to not be thrown together by Mr. Preston's machinations. But Selina is drawn to Jack's gorgeous, emotional music, and Jack is awed and impressed by Selina's talented sketches of the real side of him.

Elisabeth Fairchild has penned another winner, full of heart-throbbing emotion. Her descriptions of Jack's music are glorious--another example of a heart-felt look at the creative, artistic side of life. THE RAKEHELL'S REFORM is a story worthy of the Ramsey family line.

Kimberly Borrowdale, Under the Covers Book Reviews

This is the conclusion of the trilogy about the Ramsay family. Jack Ramsay is the rakehell that began it all by losing the entire family fortune. This story begins in the exact same instant the first did. Creditors now hound Jack. In his flight, Jack helps rid the Navy of a traitor. Then winds up as the master of music for Selina Preston. As he taught Selina how to play instruments, he also began his inner battle to reform his gambling ways.

Selena fell in love with Jack the night of her ball. The night would have been a complete failure if Jack had not shown up, uninvited, to play the cello in an attempt to pour out his misery. He was everything she loved and everything she despised in one.

Since Selena's family was so wealthy, and Selena was such a failure as a music student, her father decided to see if Jack would attempt to teach her. Throwing them together ended up bringing out the best in both of them.

***This one was good, but not as good as the first two. Jack's story tied up all the lose ends in a marvelous way. Once again Fate shows she has sweet mercy.***

If a Regency Romance is a 'seduction with words', as I once heard an editor so describe the genre, then Elisabeth Fairchild is a seductress, par excellence! One can easily become inebriated by the sheer exuberance of her word-play, let alone the clever plots and endearing characters of her creation.

Following the success of THE LOVE KNOT about Aurora Ramsay and her battle-wounded brother Rupert (Rue), and LORD RAMSAY'S RETURN about older brother Charles,(Rash) the talented author now gives us one of the two remaining Ramsays--Jack, or Rakehell, whose story slightly pre-dates that of Aurora. Only Roger, (who is called Ruin because of his poxy illness) is left out of this series, although all the siblings feature (at least obliquely) in all the books.

Jack's weakness is gaming, and in one momentous evening, after having lost the family fortune entrusted to him by Charles, Jack next wins a wager by playing the cello at a come-out ball given by a Mushroom, and then, in company with Ruin, while scouting out a nest of thieves on the seedy, dark docks along the Thames, shoots and kills his best friend, not entirely by mistake.

To Selina Preston, the Mushroom's only and much-beloved child, Jack's appearance at her ball awakens feelings she never knew resided within her. She succumbs to the charms of the music as well as the charming, red-haired rogue, who turns her ball from a lonely nothing to the most talked-about event of the week.

Hired as her music master, Jack eagerly escapes London, only to fall head-long into a greater gamble--love. Selina also wagers, much against her better judgment, and not until the last page do we discover who finally wins.

A nice little book. Great photos, however, when compared to contemporary commentaries by person's whom actually knew the Empress this book seems a bit biased toward the "official" and "political" interpretation of Sissi's life, personality and problems. I have kept it for the lovely photos. I prefer to garner a less biased history from a myriad of other sources.

Hamann's little book on Elisabeth has some great pictures and a fairly good accounting of Sissi's life. This is a good starter book, if you're just curious about her. But if you're looking for the who shebang, I'd go with Joan Haslip's "The Lonely Empress" which is much more detailed and gives a more all-inclusive look into Elisabeth's life and the people who were a part of it.

A wonderfully illustrated book with a short but complete biography. The text is written by acclaimed historian Brigitte Hamann and is accurate though sometimes overly simplified by comparison to her 500+ pages biography about Empress Elisabeth. A very good book which shows another side of Elisabeth of Austria and a must for every admirer of Sissi.

I spent years going to OA meetings, diligently working the program and wondering why I was still a hopeless victim of food cravings.

If a child is running around screaming, having a tantrum, isn't that an indication that something is wrong? If your body is doing that, isn't something wrong with your body?

For a great book on eliminating food craving by eliminating the cause, read "Dr. Abravanel's Body Type Diet." It will set you free.

If you aren't well, read Dr. Hulda Clark's "The Cure for All Diseases". You will learn how to heal yourself. I overcame the chronic fatigue virus which I'd had for 8 years. Not only that, I have more energy and vitality than most people I know.

If you think, also, that you have deep psychological problems, read "Dianetics" by L. Ron Hubbard. I used to wonder what was wrong with me that my life never got better in spite of years in therapy and my earnest efforts. I used to wonder why so many of the people in OA meetings were the same insane people, unable to live fully, year after year. I read Dianetics and laughed! It was the missing link to why psychology doesn't work. My husband and I did Dianetics and I truly became saner, happier and freer.

If you think you're a compulsive overeater, this book is a great buy.

This book has helped me tremendously. I love the sample questions in Step Four, and it's in-depth explanation of the program and it's effectiveness.

Definitely a good companion to the "Big Book".

They call it freelancing because you have the freedom to go wherever you want. This is what both Luards (Elisabeth and Nicholas) did, and managed to live in Spain, France and the English countryside with their children for much of their youth. I have to admit it took me a while to get into the book. Maybe it is the style, slightly purplish. Once the family moved to Spain, though, I read with more interest. When foreigners write about my country or my region, one of two things may happen: they got it or they didn't. I am happy to report that Elisabeth belongs to the former camp. For one thing, her portrayal of life in a small village in Andalucia in the 70's was excellent and veracious. The episode with the donkey had me laughing. One thing that annoys me, however, is how many Spanish words were misspelled. It's not mesa camella, it's mesa camilla, it's not spontaneo (italian?), it's espontáneo! I have encountered this with other English-speaking authors writing about a Spanish-speaking country. Is a Spanish editor so hard to find?

Elisabeth discovered her love for food along the way, and the book is peppered with recipes in every chapter. There are times when the recipe fits in very well, like for example when she is describing a specific dish or mentioning how each of her children demanded a different birthday cake. Then, there are times when the recipe's appearance is somewhat contrived (for example, lentil soup: "It was time for strengthening lentil soup all around"). The recipes are, for the most part, very easy to follow, and although I haven't tried any yet, they do look good.

Nowhere is Elisabeth's writing style more esoteric than when it gets to the chapter about her daughter's death. It was hard at times to follow what she was meaning, and it took a bit of reading and re-reading to figure it out.

This is an interesting book for those of us who come from the South of Spain or the South of France, or the Hebrides, or who enjoy reading about food.

It took me a while to warm up to this book...Luard's writing style takes a bit of getting used to-- a sort of posh/bohemian thing that, to me at least, seems unique to British writers.

But Luard's writing about her daughter's illness is amazing. It's loving, moving, bueatiful, and terrible. It's also shocking, because the tone of this memoir very abruptly changes from this jovial story about an eccentric family's travels to a different, much more serious, story altogether. I don't think I have ever been so moved by a book.

I have read this book about 10 times, and I gave it to 12 of my friends for their birthdays and at Christmas. Elizabeth Luard's writing is so relaxed and lovely, she describes the years she spent bringing up her children in London and in Spain. She tells funny little anecdotes and describes the smells and sights of Spain and France. This is a MUST for any woman of any age, anyone having children or who has ever had a mummy. I cant tell you how much I adore this book, and how much my family and friends have enjoyed it.

As a historian, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn should revisit the events of 1968. Elected President that year, partly in reaction to the rioting that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Nixon gladly embraced the advice of Daniel Patrick Moynihan to practice a policy of "benign neglect" toward the African American community. The administration decided against rebuilding the nation's cities, and white Americans exited en masse to the suburbs.

Linking to the work of her father (Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism) Lasch-Quinn instead blames angry black men and wimpy white liberals for disrupting what had been, as she sees it, an ever-expanding, polite circle of inclusion. She claims that various individuals deployed the tools of humanist psychology to make piles of money making whites feel guilty and helping corporations deal with a more diverse workforce without expanding democracy's benefits. I was intrigued by her argument that diversity training, by dealing primarily with employes' emotions, distracts them from larger issues of equity in the workplace, but she doesn't develop it.

Instead, she's bent on belittling anyone who continues to argue that racism is virulent in America. She doesn't address the fact that African Americans as a group still receive poorer housing, education, and health care and greater prison time than their white counterparts. Putting all the "race experts" she despises out of business wouldn't change that, but perhaps she'd consider it impolite to say so.

The trouble with liberals and intellectuals is that they become so enamored of their concepts of the world as it should be that they are reluctant to check out the way it is. Why haven't all the prescriptions for fixing race relations worked? Is it that a racist conspiracy, of course well hidden, is pervasive throughout the land? Or are there other explanations for the different outcomes and behaviors of the races?

Ms. Lasch-Quinn makes those painful connections and comparisons for them. Between the "low self esteem" theory and the fact that those presumed to have low self esteem are in fact loaded with that quality. They just aren't intellectually very capable and they don't control their impulses. Between the "hurt feelings" school of dealing with diversity and the fact that people express rage more because it works and they can get away with it than for any other reason. Between the notion that whites "ought to to more" and the minority communities' often virulent rejection of their proferred assistance, unless it comes in the form of money or concessions.

As you will note from other reviewers' comments, minds are made up on this matter. Lasch-Quinn should not expect thanks from newly enlightened lefties.

Recommend that readers interested in the scientific aspects of the issue read "The Blank Slate" by Steven Pinker and "Genes, Peoples and Languages" by Cavalli-Sforza. Both are troubling to diversity advocates in academia although both go out of their way to avoid saying anything about differences in ability or achievement between the races. Their theses do, however, undermine the notion that it is illogical to think there would be differences. The next question to ask is whether people have researched such differences and what have they found? Oh. Turns out they have. And why are their findings so successfully supressed and vilified, but never refuted?

... No made up hypothetical abstract theorization in this book. Not a vast this- or that-wing conspiracy, but instead only truthful reality. In tune with, "the criminals' behavior is so obvious they are now profiling themselves," her book makes great timing to display the excess of how white America is obviously being run over by what I see as revengeful behavior. Explaining how minority leaders and mainstream idols are profiling themselves as irrational, illogical, motivated by vile emotionalism and possibly allaround incompetent of any better leadership, the author's writing is backed with only the most blatant real-life, popular culture and everyday workplace examples of white societal submissiveness. She does not fabricate nor materialize, and the examples are so visable throughout society today (movies, television, billboard signs, music, workplace sensitivity, academic 'balancing,' etc.) that even after only one chapter no reader can escape feeling dumbfounded and thinking, "it's about time." The reader's eyes are opened not to a proposed concept but to the truth.

As a person myself who pays keen attention to the lopsided reverse-racism in America and it's idiocy, I indeed found continued use for the book and see it as almost by itself among hardprint. The author displays ingenuity and proposes new perspectives and new penetrating examples, and I particularly liked her investigative nature on how the mess is originating at the highest levels of academia and leadership, and simultaneously provides recent scenarios from such popular media as a Tom Cruise & Cuba Gooding movie.

I do want to emphasize that Lasch-Quinn, of who I do not know, is noticeably gifted in writing. There is a combination of simplicity, enjoyment, and wonderful truthfulness in her book that sincerely puts it in high regard.

Having being taught only the "Mr. Rogers" version of American history by my previous teachers (the Revolutionary War started with the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776), I found this book very disagree able. Then, of course, I realized that we had to hand a nice, happy, packaged to Americas young ones.

The book digs into the top soil of American history. It gives general happenings, events leading up to and following wars, and reactions to wars off the battlefield. It labels some of the key events in history as being "Turning Points" and devotes a section in chapter to these happenings.

This is a great resource for teaching freshman and sophomore American history and you are hearing this straight from a student himself.

most history books are pretty dry, but this one teaches me. i actually do learn the history of america from a concise text.

This is a continuation of Joanna Bennett Sorensen's family which began when she was a girl of about 19. The reader gets to know the Main lobster-fishing life and comes to love and appreciate every member of the large close and extended family.

It's Vietnam era, but the time period is only incidental in this slow and lazy trip to the Island. Joanna and Nils are almost on their own, until long-lost cousin Hal joins them. He's all Bennett, and the reader loves him from the start, but is he all that he seems?

Ogilvie devotees get a chance to catch up on all the Bennetts in this latest episode. It's an excellent read.

I would like to correct the lady reviewer of Waltham, Massachusetts who does equal disservice to Mme Vigee Le Brun and to the writer of 'The Exceptional Woman : Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun and the Cultural Politics of Art' in labelling the artist an "extremely uppity chick". The writer would also be the first to correct the reviewer's odd notion that she has rescued Mme Vigee Le Brun from oblivion. Elisabeth-Louise was not only the finest portraitist of her day, and generally acknowledged as such, despite early salon criticism - compare the charm of her double portrait of Therese-Elisabeth-Charlotte, Madame Royale with her brother the first Dauphin, with the pedestrian work by Drouais for example - but also a woman of letters. Her diary, which is also available, not only catalogues the people for whom she worked but describes them in a way that would summon them to life even did we not possess the canvasses she painted of them.

Her description of Marie-Antoinette and account of the Queen's sense of humour is touching; her account of being summoned to paint Mesdames Tantes - Louis XVI's rather spiteful spinster aunts Madame Victoire and Madame Adelaide - on their arrival in Rome - is also amusing. However, Elisabeth Louise was no feminist, nor would she have joined the camp had the movement existed at the time. She was fully aware of her talents and her charm, and felt not in the least disadvantaged by being a woman or of the judgements that this sometimes occasioned.

Ghastly phrases - 'extremely uppity chick' is one of the worst I have yet found in describing a late-eighteenth century woman - which betray a naievty and an atrocious lack of inscape can only harm the credibility of the feminist cause. I'll leave you with the words of my great grandmother, the first Englishwoman to be a Justice of the Peace, who on finding two suffragettes in her court, said, "My dears, you should realise, as I did long ago, that it is pointless campaigning for equality with a being who is manifestly our inferior in every way." Madame Vigee Le Brun realised this I am sure. I am sure too that she, like every woman confident of her femininity and unique value, would not stoop to generally denigrating men simply because they are men. Had she done so, we would have been deprived of so many of her magnificent portraits.

There is a very large collection of Mme Vigee Le Brun's works in the United States; the reviewer from Waltham can access it simply by typing 'Vigee Le Brun' into the search field on her computer.

Wandering goggle-eyed through Washington's National Gallery of art, I was arrested by the most lively, lush, *real*, and striking depiction of women in the whole gallery. Imagine my delight upon inspecting the plaque and discovering the artist was one of us! No wonder her subjects -- two rich French court ladies enjoying an afternoon in the garden with their children -- were not *objects*, as were the drab, blurred, unhappy-looking women in most male painter's work. Researching the artist, Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, whom I had never heard of (but of course -- she was a *woman* artist!) I discovered Mary Sheriff had just published a book about her. I waited for the paperback and have ordered it, and can't wait to find out more. From what I can tell she was an extremely uppity chick, the best kind, and a survivor (usually a contradiction in terms in Elisabeth's day: she managed to scram out of France with her head and her money intact as the Revolution descended, although her buddy and patron Marie Antoinette fared less well, as we know.) Sounds like a great costume drama for Jane Campion, starring a strong, knowing, and savvy personality. Holly Hunter, Judy Davis have the strength. Elizabeth Shue has the look. Add Vigee-Lebrun to your collection of women who prevailed against the odds. Retrieve her from obscurity. Most of all: look at her work!

Meet seven year old Barbara. She has a secret no one knows, not even Mama or Papa. She has a twin sister, Lalla-Lee, who lives in an enchanted world beneath the rosebush in a corner of the garden. Lalla-Lee is queen and lives in the Golden Hall. "Papa likes Mama best, and Mama likes my little brother, who was born in the spring, best. But Lalla-Lee just likes me." Lalla-Lee never calls Barbara by her given name. She always calls her "Most Beloved Sister." The sisters have a special language all their own, and enjoy marvelous adventures. They ride their horses, Goldfoot and Silverfoot, through the Great Horrible Forest where the Frights live. They visit The Kind Ones who bring them cookies and caramels, and ride to The Most Beautiful Valley in the World where the flowers sing and the stream hums. But on this visit Lalla-Lee tells Barbara it's almost time for her to die, a secret Barbara doesn't want to hear. "Right then, I felt a pain in my heart....." Astrid Lindgren, author of the Pippi Longstocking series, wrote this stand alone story about imaginary friendship over fifty years ago, but it wasn't published in the States until now. Her wordy text doesn't sparkle or engage the reader and feels somewhat dated, and little ones may find the storyline as a whole, confusing, and the subject of a beloved sister's death, upsetting. Hans Arnold's captivating illustrations are magical and rich in detail, and though youngsters will enjoy the artwork, the book really doesn't work for its chosen audience of 4-8 year olds.

Charmingly written by Astrid Lindgren and beautifully illustrated by Hans Arnold, Most Beloved Sister is a delightful picturebook children's story, with stylized, gentle color illustrations about a young girl and her secret twin sister, who embark on a wondrous magical adventure. Warmly translated into English by Elisabeth Kallick Dyssegaard, Most Beloved Sister makes for excellent family bedtime reading and is an enthusiastically recommended addition to school and community library collections as well.

Most of it covers Winhelp, rather than HTMLHelp and WebHelp which is more at the leading edge and where the excitement is.

Also this book has been much delayed. It is bizarre to publish it just a week before the next new version of RoboHelp (version 9) is launched, although, as it happens WinHelp is unchanged.

It is not really a bible, more just a competent user guide.

It would have been interesting to give warts and all information, for example how it compares against Forehelp which has less market share, probably because of less agressive marketing, but may be an easier and more feature rich product to use.

I thought that this books was great and very informative.