Steve Stern is that rare writer who combines great storytelling with a gift for elaborate, RubeGoldberg sentences. His stories, while comic in nature, reveal hidden depths the more you venture into them. These are tales, rife with magic, that take the reader to places he or she has never been before, places of fantasy and truth, places in the heart and the head. For all his comic exuberance Stern leaves you with much meat to chew on. Highly recommended!

I greatly enjoyed this collection of stories. They were quirky and delicious. This was the stuff that my lower east side grandmother believed in. Saints, sinners and we, the observers cheering them on. The "Old Time Religion" with a twist, beautifully expressed in a multicolor canvass. It did evoke Chagall's work.

What a gem of a collection! The neighborhood mystical rabbi, the newlywed coupling orthodox couple, et al! I loved picturing the Memphis Jewish neighborhood. Can't wait to read his next work!

This one is fun due to the rhymes and the interactivity--lifting flaps to reveal the bugs underneath. Our toddler loves to identify the bugs.

Steve Stern is one of a group of younger writers who are investigating what it means to be a third-, fourth- or fifth-generation American Jew in a time when more than 50 percent of us intermarry, most of us are secular or nonobservant, and, despite our passion for education, know little about the religious culture that is the basis of our (largely Eastern European Ashkenazic) ethnic culture.

Stern stands out from a very talented pack (Pearl Abraham and Allegra Goodman are two of its better known members) because he is a Southerner and because, in "Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven," he has created a shtetl below the Mason-Dixon line--a shtetl that never existed. The book's related stories read less like discrete stories and more like chapters from a novel, though each might be read independently--as, for example, in a magazine or an anthology.

In his rueful, wistful humor, Stern reminds me very much of the Polish writer in Yiddish, Chaim Grade ("Rabbis and Wives") and somewhat, though less, of Cynthia Ozick in "The Pagan Rabbi."

Buy this book, treasure it, and share it with your friends.

This book collects the thoughts of Peruvians and Peruvianists on the terrible decade of the 1980s - the most thorough and nuanced account of Sendero Luminoso I have read, with attention to many events in a variety of regions of the country. The reader really walks away with a sense of what this period was like for the people who lived through it.

I've been hooked! This book is definitely one good read- page after page this is one of the most entertaining books i've read.

192 pages is just not enough- this volume is an informative and entertaining compendium of mankind's best (or worst- depending on the reader) pastimes.

This volume contains everything you want to know about sex, drugs, booze, and everything in between.

This book is definitely worth your $13.50

One more excellent entry from Paradox Press! Here, you learn about all the good/bad things of life. Learn the pros and cons of all vices. If you're hooked on Big Books, it's an obvious must-have!

As a lover of bizzare facts, I felt that I hit the mother-load. The Big Book of Vice is an incredible well of information, with great a bibliography that serves as a roadmap for the dedicated kookologist. For anyone else, it is an extremely entertaining, fun and easy to read book, as are all the "Big Books" Paradox press puts out. The art is wonderful, and the short, comic style is the perfect addition to your bathroom reading list. Highly recommended!

My son loved this book. It has easy to open flaps and he is able to follow the "eyes" from picture to picture.

This is my son's favorite book, since he was about 4 months old. The eyes first attracted him, and captivated his attention. He is eleven months old now, and enjoys reading it over and over. He especially likes opening and closing the flaps, turning the pages, and sticking his fingers through the holes! A definite winner! We are going to try the rest in the series for his birthday and Christmas.

My son (and I) enjoy reading this book along with the other three Eye Spy books in the series. My son turns all the flaps at the appropriate time. The pages and flaps are very durable which is great since this book gets read over and over. I would definitely recommend this book for your little ones.

I was captivated by Mario Vargas Llosa's disturbing novel, Death in the Andes. It is structurally a mystery story, but it can be best characterized as a compelling portrait of political violence in contemporary Peru. Mario Vargas Llosa is a captivating story teller and I found myself wanting to know more about the people that inhabit the harsh mountains of Peru.

My personal book collection is somewhat eclectic and I was not surprised to find on my bookshelves a copy of "Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest - Huamanga to 1640" by Steve J. Stern. This scholarly text tells the story of how conquest transformed a resilient and vigorous people into an inferior caste of Andean Indians. The geographical focus is a mountainous region in southwest Peru dominated by the city Huamanga (today known as Ayacucho, a city not too distant from the fictional town of Naccos, the setting for Death in the Andes).

The lengthy title, "Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest - Huamanga to 1640", may be a little intimidating, but the book is well-written and is largely accessible without undue effort. The first chapter paints an intriguing view of a pre-Columbian society based on complex reciprocity relationships between members of extended families or kinships called ayllus. These arrangements allowed dispersed groups to exploit isolated, island-like, ecological niches like cold high mountain pastures or low dry valleys while depending upon others for products grown or created elsewhere.

The ethnic groups native to Huamanga welcomed the overthrow of the Incas and allied themselves quickly with the victorious Spaniards. "Local communities sacked warehouses once dedicated to the discredited Incas." Chapter 2 examines the rise and subsequent demise of these post-Incaic alliances with the Spanish.

Chapter 3, "A Historical Watershed", describes the revival of Andean religious fervor (the Taki Onqoy) and an unsuccessful effort to expel the Spanish colonizers. Remarkably, the Spanish, under the formidable leadership of Don Francisco de Toledo, within a decade had dramatically revised their colonial structure, and largely eliminated any possibility of future revolt by the Andean Indians.

Chapter 4 details the political economy of colonialism in the Huamanga region while chapter 5 investigates the contentious legal battles between the Indians and the colonizing elite under the Spanish judicial system. Both chapters are intriguing, but are more difficult for the non-specialist. I was surprised by how carefully the Spanish structured the taxation system; it siphoned away the maximum wealth without completely devastating the Andean economy. The Indians resisted this economic oppression through evasion as well as by tenaciously exploiting the Spanish legal system to protect their rights.

The final three chapters explore the ways in which the Andean Indians gradually adapted to Spanish colonization and how this adaptation fostered a political economy of dependence. Stern devotes chapter 7 to the "tragedy of success", the story of the successful few that escaped the burdens of the peasantry by becoming integrated into the ruling Spanish colonial structure. The final chapter, Huamanga's colonial heritage, admits that much has changed in modern times, but argues that "the present seems to superimpose itself upon the past, not destroy it."