As a middle school teacher I have found a small number of students who, after 6-8 years of school, are still nonreaders. These students have normal or above intellegence, and yet cannot decode words. They almost seem to not be able to see the words on the page, and instead, guess what the word might be. I have been working intensely with one such student using this book. The book is a series of lessons that begin with the short vowel sounds, and introduce one new sound for each lesson. By the end of the lessons (lesson 76) the student is reading compound words. The lessons are carefully sequenced and easy to use. After 2 months using this book, my student is now reading. He went from guessing the words from context to actually reading the words on the page. This 8th grade student is now a reader for the first time. This book is meant for a one-on-one tutoring situation for students who have not acquired sound symbol relationship. In my experience with my one student the program works. I would recommend it to teachers working with special education dyslexic students. They CAN learn to read, and this program does work for them.

The Association of Jewish Libraries awarded this book a Sydney Taylor Book Award silver medal, and it truly deserves recognition. It's a quiet gem. At face value, it's about the value of truth, the importance of forgiveness, and the joy of family bonding. The language is simple yet elegant, formal in a European way that adds flavor to the Vilna setting. Young readers will be drawn in by the mystery that baffles Sara and the honesty of the emotions portrayed will resonate with them. On another level, the story is a remarkable tribute to the author's pre-war childhood. As anyone who has read Hautzig's The Endless Steppe knows, most of her family perished in the Holocaust; she survived with her parents and grandmother only because they were exiled to Siberia as capitalists. In this book she brings her belvoed Vilna back to life, peoples it with her extended family, and breathes significance back into matters that the Nazis were soon to treat as inconsequential. Rathe rthan describe the disruption of family connections by war, she examines the history of the family and the mending of broken connections. Although it takes place in 1939 the story has nothing to do with war, highlighting the normalcy that was soon to be destroyed and intensifying the poignancy for those who know Hautzig's history. The story is fiction, but it is based on real events in Hautzig's childhood, and many of the characters bear he names of her actual relatives. The facts may be fictional but the feelings are real.
-Heidi Estrin, Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee, Association of Jewish Libraries

No church is perfect, but the church that strives to follow the Biblical strategies set forth in this book will go a long way to being the kind of church that is needed in this age.

The title (a literal translation of "Denkverbote", which is the original German title) means "Taboos at the Turn of the Millennium".

This book can be described as a summary of Esther Vilar's most important essays. She wrote it in 1998, looking back upon her own publications in the past three decades. It's so convincing it can almost be called the "world formula" in the fields of psychology and sociology. It's an eye-opener, enlightening, also witty, entertaining, and some passages will shock you! It deals with many different subjects, like religion, crime, the battle of the sexes, the modern phenomenon of "beautism", and a phenomenon the author calls "pleasure in non-freedom."

Here are some of her theses:
- Societies want crime.
- Religion is dangerous.
- Most people don't really want freedom, but are naive enough to believe that the non-freedom they want is actually "freedom."
- Feminism, the way we know it these days, doesn't work because it's inconsequent (as long as women do not support men).
- In the field of love, stupid people have it easier than intelligent ones (and they fool the intelligent ones).
- Both women and men, and also their children, could be better off if everyone only worked five hours a day (which is possible; and Vilar explains *why*!), because both genders would not only have equal rights, but also equal duties and responsibility.

What fascinates me most is the author's ability to explain the logical links between her theories in all the different chapters; that's why you can only understand each chapter when you see it in the context of all the others - when you see the book as an integrated whole.

Too bad it's not available in English - beside this Spanish translation, it's only sold in the original German as far as I know (which is the language in which I read it)...

...but in the U.S.A. there are millions of Spanish-speaking people, so "Prohibido Pensar" might make Vilar's theories popular in the States.

Esther Vilar made women all over the world furious when she dared to criticize her own gender in her classic "The Manipulated Man" in 1971 - is it any wonder "Prohibido Pensar", as well as most of Vilar's other work, is not available in English, the world language number one...?

Enjoy this tremendous book (and benefit from it in your daily life!) - if you have the guts...

This is the best telling of the Puirim story that I have come across for children. The narrative is very close to the original, but what makes the book wonderful are the illustrations which are fantastic. They are so vivid that my children (aged 4 and 6) love the book and ask for it again and again, even when Purim is nowhere in sight. The pictures also conjure up images of a time long ago which helps to give the children a sense of a far away time. I have used the book in a service for children for 4 -8 year olds at an Orthodox synagogue and even those who generally protest at being there are spellbound. Highly recommended.

Mordecai Gerstein's Queen Esther The Morning Star will reach ages 5-10 with its involving story of Esther, who must hide the fact that she's Jewish in order to marry the king. When the king decides all the Jews in the kingdom will have to be destroyed, it's up to Queen Esther to reveal her secret and save them.

In Raising Up Queens, author Esther Davis-Thompson lays a foundation for mothering African-American daughters which is personal, spiritual, inspirational, and responsible. Through chapters that move the reader from Pain to Healing, from Fear to Courage, from Despair to belief, Raising Up Queens will enable the reader to get at the core of what it is to bring up their daughters to truly realize their personal and spiritual potential; to survive the crisis of violence and social neglect that so hallmark today's society; to enhance judgement and life-goal planning; and to become superlative adults and loving mothers in their own time. Raising Up Queens is an excellent and timely addition to parenting and Black Studies reading lists and reference collections.

As a young child, Esther Hautzig and her family were forced into Siberian exile by the Communists for being capitalists (and thereby inadvertently escaping the Nazi holocaust in Europe), which enables her to bring a personal passion to Remember Who You Are: Stories About Being Jewish. In this anthology of true stories of men and women who lived and died during the Holocaust, the reader is treated to a candid, informative, and occasionally inspiring exploration of the challenge and solace of the Judaic faith on the part of Jews living in Vilna, America, and Israel. There is Esther's vibrant young aunt who sacrificed her life so that her own mother would not die alone in the Shoah; the story of 6,000 Jews rescued in 1940 through visas given by Chiune Sugihara, a remarkable Japanese consul in Lithuania, the story of Barry, a drug-addicted musician who was transformed by Orthodox Jews, as well as Ada and Eddy, whose lives were saved by righteous Christians during the years of the Holocaust. Very highly recommended reading for students of Judaic studies and Jewish life, Remember Who You Are offers true life examples of finding life through faith, sacrifice, redemption, achievement, and community.

It's hard to imagine now that this book was considered pop fiction when it was published in 1948. You'd now have to look deep into modern literary fiction to find a work as complex, nuanced, historically exciting and completely enjoyable as "Running of the Tide." Author Esther Forbes had a fine career as a historian and novelist, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for "Paul Revere and the World He Lived In." Her young adult novel "Johnny Tremain" still tops many school reading lists.

In "Running of the Tide, " Forbes turns her considerable historical skills to Salem, Massachusetts, at the turn of the 19th century. The Inmans are one of the town's oldest seafaring families, and they're facing a rough patch due to the loss of one of their ships by the eldest son, Dash. There are four Inman boys, and all but the youngest, Peter, go to sea. Dash is the most canny captain of the family, but because he lost a ship the grandmother who runs the family company punishes him by giving the captaincy of the family's beautiful new state-of-the-art ship to someone else. But there's a last minute change of plans, and it's Dash who gives the orders to hoist sail on the Victrix's maiden voyage. He asks seventeen-year-old Peter to tie up a few loose ends for him. How Peter, who adores Dash and has a serious crush on the woman Dash loves, ties up those ends entangles the family for decades.

The wealth of understanding Forbes brings to the New England of 1800 is a treat. The Yankee character, traditions, customs, dress, the role of women as both business leaders and "pretties", captains who can sail around the world and triple their profits but can't get across town because they can't drive a horse, new trade routes opening up, the lives on shore and on ship of people who may not see each other for years are all explored with an historian's intelligence and a novelist's panache. I first read this novel in college and have come back to it every time I need a really good, involving read. The first time I read the book it was great, but each time after that my respect for Esther Forbes has grown as I realize just how elegantly "Running of the Tide" is put together. As the book sails toward the final pages, the outcome is as inexorable and as haunting as the final scene in a Greek tragedy.

This is the best novel that I have read from XXth century Spanish literature. Through a deep emotional and profound language, Esther Tusquets introduces us into the world of this female narrator whose name is not spelled out in the entire novel. At the same time, El mismo mar de todos los veranos explores female subjectivity in an unprecedented way, and it is the first Spanish novel ever to portray lesbianism in its literature. Through this creative language full of metaphors, imagery, symbolism, and stories, the narrator introduces us into her world and into her mind, in fact, throughout the whole novel, it is the mind and experience of this anonymous narrator that the reader explores. El mismo mar de todos los veranos at the same time presents a critical portrayal of marriage, family, and heterosexuality, showing that women's experience is very limited; the narrator has always felt unsatisfied and a deep sense of failure when it comes to the traditional roles that are assigned to women (wife, lover, daughter, mother), leaving her with nothing else but language, words, metaphors, imagery and a deep desire to tell past stories. It is this intimate language that shows how female experience and homosexuality (in this particular case lesbianism) can only exist in isolation, and it is precisely in this state of isolation that past and present will coexist. What personally passionates me about this novel is that it portrays our precarious and insignificant existence as human beings; when we have lost the love of our lives, when all our dreams and expectations have never come true, or when they at least are not what we would have expected them to be or what we believed they should have been, when all the tenderness and love have gone away, we are only left with a deep sensation of sadness and emptiness, and the only things that we have left are language, words, metaphors, symbolism, and the desire to relive and retell a painful past.
An excellent masterpiece to be read by every contemporary reader.