As a counsellor, I have found many individuals discover "anticipating retirement" and "living in retirement" are two very different things. In the next ten years, I, too, will be "growing up" and facing this new chapter of my life. However, there are so many plans for my future, I only hope my health, financial resources and stamina will allow me to fulfill these ambitions. To me, retirement is like planting and tending a garden. First, one must plan carefully (you do not want to waste your precious years on activities that do not bring you joy and fulfillment.) Then, one should decide what plants (projects, hobbies, activities) to sow, not only to keep you physically active, but metally alert. Finally, one must lovingly tend that garden (nourish the soul, maintain physical health, and weed the emotional clutter from the past.) If you have lost a spouse, partner or soul-mate during this planting season, it is important to grieve, but it is equally important to know when to let go and when it is time to plant a new garden. Remember, time waits for no one. Only then, will one be prepared to start the next chapter of their life. We all need to have hopes, goals and dreams, no matter what our age.

In this book, the author points out the positive ways of dealing with change and how to plan and approach this new period in the lifecycle. Anyone approaching mid-life can certainly benefit from this book; it is never to soon to plan for the future. If you are already into your retirement years, this book may be just the inspiration you need if the years are not as challenging and fulfilling as you anticipated. The author has a lot to say on the subject and it is a great book based on sound advice.

As a mid-sixties professional who retired about five years ago from my own business,and then found myself in a true depression until I sought help, I found this book remarkably acute regarding the questions that I should have thought to ask myself, the planning I should have done, and the problems that would arise for me when I no longer had the structure of my working life to support me. Doctor Cantor's amazing understanding of the dynamics of retirement has helped me immeasurably to understand myself in what is an exciting but very complicated period, and her practical advice is advice I wish I had had before I retired!! I cannot imagine anyone approaching the later stages of life who would not benefit enormously from Dr. Cantor's insights and help. GET THIS BOOK!

Dr. Cantor has written a brilliant analysis of the fears of facing retirement, and how to plan for a meaningful life after work ends. I keep giving this book to friends who are looking for more for their anticipated leisure than bridge and golf. Dr Cantor outlines practical ways to figure out our strengths and interests to craft together a blueprint for the last third of our lives.

From the moment we opened NO MORE GOOSEBERRY PIE, my four-year-old grandson was enchanted by the story! He liked it so well that we read it five times and he still wanted to do it again! For anything to hold a child's interest that long, it has to be good!

The story is simple. A young boy eats the gooseberry pies his mother has put out to cool. He lies to her about what happened to them, making up preposterous excuses. Then when he goes too bed, stuffed too full of gooseberry pie, he has a terrible dream about everything he did that day.

The story was sweet but not to the point of causing tooth decay. The illustrations were gorgeous! Kym Jones is fantastic! While I know the mother had to see through the explanations of what happened to the pies, my grandson thought they were believable. It was like reading a brand new fairy tale!

Author Dorothy Thompson tells this story like she's sitting in the room with you. NO MORE GOOSEBERRY PIE is warm and honest. My grandson Eric and I heartily recommend it to anyone who wants to spend some quality time with the child in their lives!

Joyce Lavene

Lagniappe Book Reviews...

I would like to say I have read Dorothy Thompson's, No More Gooseberry Pie, and wish that I had had it around when my sons were young. It's very enchanting! The imagery was outstanding. I could picture the 'Land of Tall Tales' with the mean, angry dinosaur demanding the poor boy to eat those pies. My grandchildren love it!

I picked this book up by mistake several years ago. I thought it was a bio of Dorothy Parker. It was possibly the best mistake I ever made. Thompson is now a forgotten figure, somehow escaping the accolades heaped upon her peers.

Yet she was a fantastic and inovative woman, breaking new career paths and new ideas. Sure, she wasn't the most likeable of people. But with Thompson that's not the point.

This book has sent me on a five year quest to gather all of the information I can about her, from her book "I Saw Hitler" to collections of her essays. I've been on a tangential search for every thing relating to her I can get my hands on.

And it's all because Kurth wrote a spectacular and engaging biography.

The authors shared the real life emotions that young children feel when they have to deal with the divorce of their parents. This book is a workbook for a young child, to be read and talked about with a caring adult. The story of Kristen, the cat, was skillfully written to help children feel understood, how to handle new members of the family that might come, and how to not be the "messenger" for each parent. It inspired me. It gave me hope that I can help them feel "whole" again. It is the book that I will choose as a gift for adults who want to help young children understand and talk about what they are experiencing.

A Cherry pickin' good time!

This is a beautiful book for anyone interested in Hellenistic Greek or Roman painting or portraits from any time. These are the first portraits in which the subjects look directly at us as we regard them. They are a haunting glimpse into the lives of people dead for 2000 years. This book is full of big color illustrations. Doxiadis does a fine job of tracing the history of the discovery, theories about, and conservation of these images.

An extraordinarily moving story with the biblical Job at its heart - a man driven 'to curse God' and ready to die, including his friends who come as comforters - but written in such a way as to capture the heart of the story and the imagination of the reader and, by concluding at the very point where you want it to go on, leaving you to complete the experience for yourself.

Mendel Singer parallels the biblical Job. Roth's characters are warm and human. The best of all the fictional treatments of the Job story. I particularly appreciated his treatment of the most difficult part of the Book of Job, his final restoration.

It is so good to see that people haven't changed in almost 100 years. What moved people then, still moves us today. Life has come full circle. It is among the wisest books about human nature and life's bare essentials.

It is an amazing book, and kids can play with it. All senses are used by the little ones.