This delightful book of at least three hundred photos of advertising characters shows the public face of commercial America. Companies realised that a three-dimensional figure built brand awareness. Look through the photos and you have to admit they do look cute and so very collectable too.

This book is the author's second attempt at the same subject, he wrote an earlier book called 'Advertising Character Collectibles', more or less the same items in each book but the earlier copy had perhaps a bit more historical detail about the companies. I prefer 'What a Character', the photography and design are so much better and I think these count for a lot in a strongly visual book.

Both books have a photo of the character I would love to have, the Kraft Cameraman from Kraft Television Theatre. Yours for fifty cents and the end flap from a Velveeta carton in 1954, yours now for at least $100 without the end flap!

I ran across this book in a offbeat-stuff boutique and couldn't put it down. An amazingly comprehensive view of all kinds of advertising characters over a century. This can't help bring back childhood memories, whether you're 20 or 85. And the writing is quite interesting as well. This one quickly made my gift list for some hard-to-choose person's birthday or christmas.

I love this book and love giving it as a gift as well. The thick colored photographs glorify these quirky, spooky, adorable, impish, goofy figures. This is not just another boomer collector on my kitchy 50's coffee table book. Oh no! The writing is musical, provocative and sociologically insightful. I'll never look at an advertising character again in the same way. Chronicle does tasteful stuff but this book with it's tribe of characters is a yummier feast for those who long for magic from our breakfast cereal and motor oil and in moments once spent between the twilight zone and Mr. Clean . Bye bye kittie!

The Franconia, New Hampshire, farm of the American poet Robert Frost was turned into a museum and center for poetry and the arts in 1976. From that time, "The Frost Place" has been annual event wherein an emerging poet has been invited to spend the summer living in the house where Frost once lived and wrote some of his greatest poetry. The Breath Of Parted Lips: Voices From The Robert Frost Place, Volume One is a remarkable anthology of twenty-four poets, each of whom won that honor of a summer's residency and document the success of the original concept as a means of generating outstanding poetry while nurturing the poet's muse in the rooms and views that were once the inspiration of the great Robert Frost. Poem At 40: Windwashed--as if standing next to the highway,/a truck long as the century sweeping by,/all things at last bent in the same direction./An opening, as if all/the clothes my ancestors ever wore/dry on lines in my body:/wind-whipped, parallel with the ground,/some sleeves sharing a single clothespin/so that they seem to clasp hands,/seem to hold on.//And now that I can see/up the old women's dresses,/there's nothing but a filtered light./And now that their men's smoky breath/has traversed the earth,/it has nothing to do with them./And now that awkward, fat tears of rain/slap the window screen,/now that I'm naked too,/cupping my genitals, tracing with a pencil/the blue vein between my collar bone and breast,/I'll go to sleep when I'm told.

If you are researching the Civil War, especially the practice of medicine and surgery during the Civil War, this is an invaluable source. This is a personal journal of a Civil War surgeon. As such it is told in his own words. The reader is regaled with day to day details of the surgeon's life.

I have many organic type gardening books, but this is the most informative and common sense book that I have ever purchased. It takes you through the whole process of setting up a garden and super charging your soil so that your vegetables will be packed with good nutrition!

I was shocked to see that this book has received such marvelous reviews!

I am a big fan of anybody that has deserved success on the same level as Bill Bradley. However, this simple fact does not mean that the product of his interesting life will be a good book.

Simply, this book was very plain and details Bradley's life at Princeton, inside and outside the classroom and on the basketball court. The stories are not interesting and there is too much worship given to Senator Bill. I found many of the "facts" divulged by the author to be incredibly hard to believe.

If you like the modern-day NBA at all you will absolutely hate this book.

If you like the modern-day NBA, politics and the Golden Age of sports you will give this book two stars on a five-star scale!

This book is about how he was great at Princeton and was on the olympic basketball team.He also had so many reports.John McPhee tells about Bill's running hook shot,layup,set shot Etc.The book really inspired me to want to be a basketball player.

I'm writing this review because the fact that it didn't have a 5-star rating irritated me. I first saw the McPhee/Bill Bradley piece in the New Yorker Magazine about 30 years ago. After reading it I xeroxed the entire article and sent copies of it to every member of the University of South Carolina basketball team (which for those of you who are as old as I am was coached by the legendary Frank McGuire (the assistant coach was Donnie Walsh, now President and General Manager of the Indiana Pacers) and featured a cast of great college players like John Roche, Tommy Owens, Billy Walsh, Bobby Cremins, etc. All of the players (an unusually intelligent group) loved the article. We had many conversations about Bradley's approach to the game in the months to come. This is definitely a 5-star book for any lover of the true game of basketball. It's great and can't possibly be outdated. Highest recommendation.

This text provides a quick, concise review of the pimary topics covered on emergency medicine exams. I found it to be a good way to prepare for inservice exams and the written boards.

It's almost unprecedented for me to return a baseball book. It's almost impossible to find a baseball book I won't enjoy. If the book's about the Yankees, the odds of either would be non existent. Well, at least I thought they would be non existent until I began to read this one.

The book contains no new good information & is filled with mistakes. Also, the author's system of rating the players creates a premise that's flawed from the beginning.

If you know enough about baseball to know Snuffy Stirnweiss wasn't an all time Yankee great, then you find this book insulting to your intelligence.

I truly enjoyed this book. Each piece (and there are 50!) takes you back to the particular year! It has all the stats on the individual player in his best season. It has lots of fantastic photos and a terrific section on the 1998 Yankees! At the end of the book, there is a section that allows me to record my own memorable seasons with my favorite team! A must have for every Yankee fan, and those fans of baseball history!