"Walk These Stones" is a wonderful look at the people and culture of Costa Rica as seen through the eyes of service workers. The illustrations are beautifully painted and very expressive. The writing is almost lyrical, sometimes humorous, sometimes moving. A lovely book to learn about these villagers and their daily lives, and get you thinking about their values and your own.

I am a mother of two small children ( 2 & 3) and they really enjoyed listening to this story being told aloud at a recent book signing. The colorful art on every page keeps my children very interested in this wonderful book.

This book is enchanting - good story, and wonderful use of the language. Spanish was quite basic and easy to understand even for a beginner. Beautiful illustrations.

You do not have to be a Cubs fan to thoroughly enjoy this book about Harry Caray. His antics and love of baseball make this a terrific read! Some of the tales are hilarious and some will make you shake your head in disbelief. But it's all Harry. Steve Stone and Barry Rozner captured his true character with affection and humor. You're gonna want this in your home library!

Don't think that you need to be a Cubs' fan to enjoy this book.

I actually chose to read this book for a class paper on great American journalists. I had a hard time convincing my professor that Harry was indeed a journalist and not simply an entertainer. After thoroughly enjoying this book, I think I convinced the prof - I got a 99% on the paper.

If you have a love for the game of baseball, you will surely find this book entertaining. As someone now in sports communications with a professional baseball team, I recommend this book to all my co-workers. It's a great way to learn about aspects of the game that most fans would never know about - and it's about a guy everyone feels they already know.

Perhaps one of the most disappointing things about biographies is that they somehow tarnish the memory or reputation of the book's subject. This book will simply make you love Harry even more.

I absolutely loved this book! I couldn't put it down. Not only did it bring back some wonderful memories, but I found myself laughing out loud almost constantly. Steve Stone did a wonderful job. Thank you Steve for sharing your stories with us!

That "Drug Ministry" is really something. Once the underground city is entered this dreamlike bubble transports us inside an enormity reminiscent of the first "King Kong."

The characterizations are exquisite. The beauteous earth mother Ximena Del Rio makes a radiant heroine. It's a shame she comes on only after we get through the first hundred twenty some pages. A major weakness in the story. She gives it its greatest warmth. She is the strongest character.

Virgil's crime scenario is intriguing. Hard to believe we could come up with a new way to kill somebody but this might be it.

The men seem to cry a lot when they're not out on sorties destroying life and property. It's comforting to contemplate even terrorists have a tender side.

The story of Virgil Shoop is a story about all of us. The panic and villiany that affect us all, and on occasion, heroism, inspired by love, or our perception of it. Real or imagined. And Rick's story is ours, too, the taking of risks, and their consequences.

The scene where the priest puts the dagger against Virgil's face, the spores infecting his nostrils, and Ximena bringing her face down upon his hands about the kitten, his awareness of her having shed the single tear - and then her throwing back her head to reveal only laughter- is masterful.

The zen-ambiance blends effectively with the raunchiness of the situations. It touches all bases. It's a big story. Given a lesser range of language skills, it would come out like oil and water,

"A stirring romantic tale of peril and rescue, chivalry and pageantry. And of two beauties living lives shaped by the farthest flung opposite poles of destiny. A thunderous climax catapulting this work to the uppermost pinnacles of all fiction."

Commentary re "A CAT'S FULL NINE?"

No, re "IVANHOE" written by Sir Walter Scott in the early 1800s. Read in middle school in England, and enjoyed to the max as I did and do enjoy reading about superbeautiful women. I wonder if you've guessed, I'm one myself.

I'm a big girl now with adult tastes and the world of Rowena and Rebecca comes out far too pristine. But not that of the two contemporary beauties of CAT'S, Pola and Ximena. Abstractly polarizing wickedness and virtue, they bring over to this side of the diaphany that cordons them away from our reality the concept of beauty as weapons toward those ends.

Besides the women I recall very little about IVANHOE except despite some hype about "a thunderous climax" it did end in a way that was logical. Likewise CAT'S, for all its wild mindtrips that push the envelope, given the mesh of circumstances and personalities, it comes to rest fully inside the limits of probability.

Allen Barra, a terrific columnist for the Wall Street Journal and Salon, unfortunately disappoints in this book. Most of the book consists of recycled,unoriginal conclusions. Yes, most knowledgable baseball fans know Babe Ruth didn't save baseball single-handedly and was a womanizer, Mantle was a better offensive player than Mays, Ted Williams was a better hitter than Joe Dimaggio, etc... As another reviewer pointed out, most of these ideas were originally proposed by Bill James years ago. I cannot recommend this book.

Furthermore and far worse, Barra makes several factual errors in Clearing the Bases. In his misguided attempt to tear Babe Babe Ruth down, he incorrectly states that Ruth benefited from good homerun parks in Boston and New York. This is absolutely false. One thing Barra didn't learn from Bill James: Fenway Park in 1919 was a very tough homerun park. Ruth hit 20 of his 29 homers on the road. For his career Ruth had more homers on the road. I sent the author an e-mail informing him of this fact, which he has not acknowledged. Another misstatement occurs in the Lefty Grove section. Barra says that Grove missed time in 1934 because Connie Mack was overusing him. That would have been unlikely, since Grove was traded to Boston before the season and wasn't being coached by Mack that year. Barra can do better and I hope he will try again. Don't waste your time and money on this book.

The book's jacket makes it sound like some revolutionary tome that uses completely original thinking to slaughter baseball's sacred cows. But a quick flip through the text reveals a collection of ideas that Bill James was bandying about back in the 1980s. Tim Raines was a great player? Mike Schmidt was one of the greatest of all time? Statistical analysis favors a peak Mantle over a peak Mays? Babe Ruth wasn't as much of a God and savior as many believe? Valid points all, but these ideas, each the subject of a Barra chapter, can all be found in James's Abstract work. So this book seems oddly stale to me, and will feel the same, I think, for many well-read baseball fans.

Whether or not you've decided for yourself who was the best player at his position, the best team, what is the best stat that determines anything, you must now re-think your position. Allen Barra has challenged us all to do so with this well reasoned and obviously long thought out clever look into the real facts.

It is a joy to look back at the circumstances that led us to believe what we understand to be the total picture of fact. While I don't neccesarily agree with all that Barra points to in his own reconciliation, I found myself wound up like a pretzel trying to accomodate my own beliefs on numorous occasions within the pages of "Clearing The Bases".

Following the pattern of his "That's Not the Way it Was" volume, he has outdone himself with this new set of chapters debunking the myths of sports legends. This book is a must read for anyone interested not only in Baseball, but sports of any kind. It is one of the most thought provoking, intriguing books I have read in many years.

Thank you Allen, for a re-energizing look into the greats of the game!

Although there is good general information in Mr. Howard's book, when I moved to Costa Rica from California three months ago I was taken aback at how much of the information is no longer true. The major flaw really is that sufficient change has occurred in Costa Rica between the writing and publishing of this book so as to make it absolutely inaccurate in certain areas (cell phones take up to a year to get while home phones take 3 - 6 months) and misleading in others ("Live for less than you ever dreamed possible and enjoy all the amenities of home" is considerably more difficult to accomplish now than the book suggests. Perhaps this change occurred after this edition was published as I notice real estate prices are listed as of 1998.)This is too bad as the reality of being here contradicts the general tone of the book - a rather serious flaw in a book entitled "the New Golden Door to Retirement and Living in Costa Rica"). I think this book is just too dated to present an accurate portrayl of Cost Rican opportunities in 2002: whatever great deals once existed are raidly being relaced by North American prices with the lower Tico-standard level of service. (The offshoot of this overall ratchetting up of prices is also not adequately addressed: the thriving community of those deliberately targeting North Americans, and in particular, anyone who is not fluent enough in Spanish to pass for a Tico. This ranges from blatant everyday discrimination such as the common practice of openly and automatically charging higher prices to foreigners in terms of house rentals etc to more criminal acts of intent to deceive that seem remarkably impervious to prosecution.)

My advice? Get your general knowledge from a guide like Fodor's, skip the inevitably dated and "fluffy" guidebooks to retirement, come to Costa Rica and attend a "warts and all" newcomers seminar sponsored by the Costa Rican Resident's Association (the best bit of information in Mr. Howard's book), and wait for the next and more accurate edition of The Golden Door to emerge.

I just want to tell you how much I APPRECIATED reading the best-selling "New Golden Door to Retirement and Living in Costa Rica" which I purchased from Amazon.com. It was just what I had been looking for. I have been very familiar with Costa Rica for many years since I was a young man living there as a missionary. I married a Costa Rican woman 29 years ago and am very happy. We are planning to retire to Costa Rica in the next few years. Anyway I just wanted to let others know that this guide is WORTH every cent I paid for it and was very HELPFUL.

A few years ago I moved from to Costa Rica from Venezuela. If I hadn't read "The New Golden Door to Retirement and Living in Costa Rica" I would have been lost. The information in the book made my move a lot easier. It helped learn how things really work here and provided some excellent business advice. This useful book is really a "Golden Door" since it's worth its weight in GOLD.

I give this book 4 stars on the "Saramago Scale". By the standards of contemporary fiction, this book is phenomenal. By Saramago's standards, it's not quite up to par.

The book involves the adventure of Senhor Jose, a low-level functionary in a state bureaucrat of The Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths. Senhor Jose, who lives in a meager house attached to the Registry, becomes obsessed with collecting the birth records of "famous" individuals, and thus begins a series of midnight excursions into the Registry. One night, along with the celebrity birth records, he stantches a copy of an ordinary woman's birth certificate, and quickly begins a compulsive quest to learn the details of the woman's life.

This book is ripping good to read, yet does not meet the standards of Saramago's earlier works (especially ripe for comparison is The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis). In Ricardo Reis, Saramago focused on issues of personal identity by ingeniously having a pseudonym communicate with a dead poet, all the while exploring the poetic notion that "I am innumerable people". All the Names explores the same theme far more heavy handedly: instead of a brilliant poetic vehicle, or a clever plot construct, Saramago here explores identity through the rather hackneyed device of anonymity and obscurity (a sort of long-winded Kafka, if you will). And this is generally the case--All the Names is far less original a work than Saramago's early novels, and far more dependent on modernist European literature.

Again, this is not to say this is a bad read. Anybody who enjoyed Saramago's other novels should be sure to check out this Kafkaesque, Borgesesque dark wonder. However, if you expect a second Ricardo Reis (or Blindness for that matter), you will probably be disappointed.

If he had never won the Nobel Prize, I would never have heard of Jose Saramago. I have read all of his novels and am captivated by his elegant and beautiful writing. It was with a mixture of hopeful anticipation and dread that I read this book: could it possibly measure up to my favorites Blindness and Baltisar and Blimunda. Well I need not have worried, Saramago drew me into his labyrinth from the first sentence. I was reminded of Kafka and Dante's Inferno when reading this story of a lonely public official Senhor Jose who is isolated by istitutions and his work. He represents all of modern humanity in it's struggle to survive emotionally. The book tells of Senhor Jose's attempt to find connections to other human beings, of having to fight all of the barriers erected by modern life. He is the "everyman" of the Twentieth Century. The glimpses of love that he finds during his obsessive quest is enough to transform him into another person. Read the book very slowly to savor the taste of Saramago's prose. He will be remembered as a great writer in distant times.

Saramago's in depth, tender and frequently humorous exploration of the life of a simple, timid clerk (Senhor Jose) unfolds into a story of a man's quest to overcome the fears that have all but smothered him. "Senhor Jose both wants and doesn't want, he both desires and fears what he desires, that is what his whole life has been like," Saramago tells us. Other than his "hobby," collecting information about famous people, Senhor Jose's life is mostly about being as uninvolved as possible.

In contrast to the main character in Saramago's earlier "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis," who is dead but doesn't know it, Senhor Jose is alive but doesn't know it. And unlike his earlier works in which fate seems to hold all the cards, in "All the Names" Saramago lets chance (serendipity) guide the story. It begins, almost as a reward for a tiny bit of daring, when Senhor Jose sneaks into his work place to get some more information about famous people for his collection and discovers, stuck to one of the records he was looking for, a misfiled record for a woman (another un-famous, unknown). Unbeknownst to him at the time, it will be the question posed by this simple piece of paper (Who is she?) that brings Senhor Jose "back from the dead." Skillfully, Saramago uses the same question to draw in his readers, and it is some time before he begins to let on that maybe this "unknown woman" is more important as a metaphor for what has become of Senhor Jose's spirit - his willingness to engage in life - than as some real woman he will eventually find. In the end, it is the search itself that eventually leads Senhor Jose to discover that what makes life worth living is never so dead that it can't be resurrected.

There is a shift in "quality" (character) between this book and Saramago's earlier ones. "All the Names" is not about politics, history or culture; it is focused on the psychology and spirit of the human experience. Saramago is such a brilliant observer of the inner life. His ability to write from within his characters (as opposed to about them), while clear in his earlier works, is taken to a new level in "All the Names." The many occasions in which Saramago lets us know what Senhor Jose is thinking (be it silly or sublime, ridiculous or profound) are written so well that it is hard not to feel that you know this character as well as you know yourself.

It is significant that Saramago never says where the story takes place and he gives no one but the main character a name -- and it could be Mr. Smith or John Doe for all it matters. Although Saramago has written this book as if it were about "someone in some place," what he has created is in fact a story for anyone in any place, even you in your place. There is a more than a little Senhor Jose in all of us.

(A note for those who are new to Saramago's writing): Saramago's writing style is, I think, an acquired taste. He has little regard for punctuation and slips easily into "stream of conscious" wanderings (more accurately, what appear to be wanderings but eventually add to the whole experience -- like unexpected dashes of some spice that no on one in their right mind would think of using but everyone would miss come dinner time had they been omitted). If I could claim to know a universally fool proof method for reading Saramago it would be this: sometimes you have to listen to the reading voice in your head as if it were someone reading the story to you aloud. As Saramago was blessed with a grandfather who would stay up at night telling him about life (and all the stories that entails), I think that his writing voice can be attributed to (and is a tribute to) his grandfather's speaking voice.

The authors make a convincing case for a pre-deluge, navigational civilization that had its base in tropical Central America. They do a great job of citing to well-published archeologists and demonstrating, like Graham Hancock does, the ethno-centrism and ego underlying their hypotheses and their myopic view of world history. I like this book for the boldness with which it challenges the academic establishment, and how it shows that an interdisciplinary study of ancient history debunks many of the commonly held assumptions about the origins of human civilization and culture.

On the other hand, the authors tend to overstate their case by being very repetitive, and they don't need to. The material is so provocative, it doesn't need rehashing ad nauseum. Additionally, the countless typos are a huge distraction. Taken together, the repetitiveness and the typos undermined what could be a very open and shut case.

Nonetheless, it's a well-conceived work, and solidly grounded in common sense. You won't find any fantastic, Von Daniken-esque intergalactic flights of fancy here. If ever there was a case for Occam's Razor in the case for, rather than against Atlantis, this would be it.

This work stands at the threshold of a new age of discovery. Erikson and Zapp deftly take apart the conventional view of history as Eurocentric and recent... with the Americas as a barbaric afterthought to civilization. The authors reveal a multitude of sites in Mesoamerica that hearken back to Plato's description of Atlantis. They reveal an ancient world that included seafarers from Africa, China, Polynesia, and the Mediterranean that met in a virtual melting pot in the Americas. The fun part is that they describe the locations of these ancient sites and their legacy in stone and myth. Some are as enticing as the awaited undersea site off Cuba. For the independent investigator this book is a must.

This is the best summer reading I've had in years. Forget the old stories about Atlantis, this book is an excellent resource for proof of transatlantic travel in ancient times. It is scholarly and meticulously researched. There is nothing sensational here, the authors do a fine job in connecting various ancient cultures. Great for research purposes.

If you like a detailed, psychological analysis of love and family relationships, then this is a book for you. You need a while to get into Maria's writing style. His style is not the most readable - a sentence can be a page long. After you get used to the sentence legths, it is a great book to read. The plot is well presented with surprising flash-backs and time intervals. I started to really enjoy the book in the middle chapters. From then on the pace of narration is much faster and interesting coincidences makes you curious about what might come next. The final scene is gripping and very emotionally engaging. Overall a very intelligent book.

For those who are equally obsessed with time and chance and the effect one has on the environment, this is the perfect book for you. The protagonist lovingly describes the effect his actions has on those around him and even goes so far as to underline the point that even, or rather especially, his non-actions truly affect those around him. This is not a book to read while sitting on an airplane so that you don't get distracted by the screaming kid behind you; this is a book to read and savor bit by bit. Marias' long sentence structure sometimes causes a bit of a headache - I find myself wondering if the sentence will take up the whole page, but generally there is an anti-logical string holding it all together. I say anti-logical because there are no certainties in this book. It explores the realm of uncertainty and how much we all dwell in this realm. For that reason, I found it occasionally necessary to put the book down and work in the garden for a while. It's truly a moving piece of fiction and something definitely worthwhile for those who wish to read it in the original Spanish. The Spanish itself is most certainly accessible to most readers and the cultural references made are few and relatively unimportant.

If you want something that will truly make you think, read Marias' "A Heart so White". Not only does it beautifully intertwine Shakespeare's "Macbeth" into the story, but it sheds light on many of the complex emotions and thoughts of human beings. At times crude and ironic, others funny, and still others surprisingly touching, this is a story that will remain in you...