I bought this book for my 2 year old because it shows the new baby nursing, and I really want her to get used to the idea that her sibling will nurse like she did. Unfortunately, it contains way too much information for a little one and is geared too much towards what is happening to mama while she is pregnant. I mean, yeah, my stomach was upset but it's not my two year old's job to worry about it. I would have appreciated less information about pregnancy and birth and more about the actual arrival of the new baby.

I also thought it was odd that the gurus of attachment parenting put so much in this book about how mommy and daddy will be expanding the house, buying new stuff, making a place for the baby to sleep, etc. Part of the beauty of attachment parenting is (in my opinion) that all of that isn't so necessary. I am trying to get my daughter to adjust to the idea of a new baby in the family bed and this book does not address that at all.

I do read it to her occasionally, but I have to change most of the wording in order for her to understand it and I skip whole pages that just aren't relative to our lives.

You might like this book if you have a much older sibling and a big house with a nursery and a crib and all that jazz, but I don't find it terribly helpful in preparing my daughter for her new sister.

We got this book for our 4 year old daughter when we were expecting her brother. It really helped her to understand what was going on with mommy. I loved it because it was a great tool to help explain what was going on in terms she could understand.

At storytime, she always wanted this book read to her. I highly recommend this book

"Baby on the Way" is a superb book for preparing older siblings for the arrival of a baby in the house. Written by pediatrician William Sears, registered nurse and certified childbirth educator Martha Sears, and author Christie Watts Kelly, cofounder of the Memphis chapter of Attachment Parenting International, this book does an amazing job of adapting to young readers. The idea is that while the new baby is growing inside mommy's belly, her other children are also growing up and becoming an older brother or sister. Realizing that kids might be afraid to ask questions, this book compares what mommy is feeling to similar feelings children will certainly recognize. Of course there is a young boy and a young girl, so young readers will have someone to identify with throughout the book.

The major strengths of this book is that it provides both basic information on what is happening and how things are going to change with the arrival of the new baby, including "Answers for the Very Curious," as well as practical tips for having the older siblings involved. Every few pages there is a "What You Can Do" box that suggests things like visiting the doctor with mommy to listen to the baby's heartbeat, seeing if there are any toys or clothes to be shared with the new baby, and planning the baby's Birth Day part while you are waiting for the baby to come. The illustrations by Renee Andriani are well-suited to the task and the back of the book includes a short course on Attachment parenting and a list of resources, both written and on-line.

We did okay with preparing our son for the arrival of his sister, emphasizing how this was going to be "his" baby and how he had to be careful because he was so big and she was so small. Of course, she fully exploited this advantage and when we had our third child the first two were not too sure about it. Having a book like this back then would have been a thing of good because preparing the old ones for the new one is a big deal. "Baby on the Way" is a very impressive, loving approach to this age old problem.

This is a good book filled with lots of basic information. If you are new to corrections, or are just learning about the subject area, then this is a good starting point. More advanced readers, such as those with extensive legal experience, will want a book with more punch. But as an introductory book this is a good one. I require it in my Correctional Law class.

If you read Hard Times for the sole purpose of being entertained you will probably be highly disappointed. However, if you understand what was happening during this time period, you will realize that Hard Times is in reality, a long commentary. The Industrial Revolution was starting to show its down side. There was rampant poverty and disease, from the overcrowding of the cities. Children of the poor had to work long hours in unsafe factories rather than go to school. The gulf between the haves and the have-nots was very wide. The middle class was only beginning to be a distinct group.
This then was the backdrop of Hard Times. Dickens is making a social and political statement. This is a statement against the mechanizing of society. It starts with Dickens repeated use of the word fact. It is facts that have meaning. Human conventions like feeling, compassion or passion have no meaning or looked down upon as an inconvienent waste of time. If a situation cannot be put down on paper as in an accounting ledger it should not be considered.
This is where the conflict of the book comes in. Which helps humanity more compassion or fact. Is Bounderby a better person than Blackpool? Bounderby, who by his own admission was a self-made man. Untrue as this was he said it enough to make it his own reality. Or Blackpool, a weaver with an alcoholic wife, who was in love with another woman. Facts made Bounderby rich, compassion made Blackpool human.
Louisa presents another conflict. Louisa was educated only by fact. No wonder or inquisitiveness was ever allowed. She was the perfect robot. Doing what she was told when she was told. Just another piece of the machine, however, the piece broke, emotions came out, and they broke down the wall of fact that Mr. Gradgrind had so carefully constructed. Because the feelings have finally been acknowledged things really break down. She finds that not only has she married the wrong man but also the man she did marry is a buffoon whom she cannot respect nor live with.
The reader is left wondering if there is no one who will not be ruined by all the worship to fact. The whelp has certainly been ruined to the point he feels no responsibility to anyone but himself. If a situation can not be used to his advantage then he has no use for it, as a matter of course, he will run when he believes he will have to take responsibility for his own actions.
The gypsies have not been ruined by fact. But only because they live outside of society, they do not conform to the rules of society. These are the people who value character over social status. The gypsies do not value Bounderby and Bitzer with all their pomp and egomania. Rather they value Stephen Blackpool and Cecilia whom can show compassion and kindness no matter a person's station in life.
Hard Times can be used to look at today's society. Are we, as a society more worried about our computers, cell phones, faxes, and other gadgets than our neighbor's well being? Do we only get involved to help others when there is a personal benefit? Or, are we like the gypsies who can look into the character of the person and not worry about the socio-economic status? While Dickens' wrote Hard Times about 19th century England the moral can easily fit into 21st century America

Despite the explicit title, "Hard Times" is not so much an ode to poverty and misery as it is a commentary on the increasing impact of industrialization on the fragmentation of society and on the dehumanization of education. The result, as Dickens implies, leads to lives hollowed by the emptiness of work for work's sake and wealth for wealth's sake.

The setting is Coketown, a factory town befouled by industrial smog and populated by underpaid and undereducated laborers. The novel's most prominent character is one of the town's richest citizens, Josiah Bounderby, a pompous blowhard who owns a textile mill and a bank and whose conversation usually includes some boastful story about his impoverished childhood and the hard work that led to his present fortune.

Bounderby is the commercial projection of Thomas Gradgrind, a local schoolteacher and an extraordinarily pragmatic man who instills in his students and his own children the importance of memorizing facts and figures and the iniquity of indulging in entertaining activities. Gradgrind offers to Bounderby his son, Tom Jr., as an unwilling apprentice, and his daughter, Louisa, as an unwilling bride.

On the other end of the town's social scale is Stephen Blackpool, a simple, downcast man who works as a weaver at Bounderby's mill and slogs through life misunderstood and mistreated. When he refuses to join his fellow workers in a labor uprising, he is ostracized; when he criticizes the economic disparity between Bounderby and the workers, he is fired and forced to leave town; when Bounderby's bank is robbed one night, he is suspected as the thief. So halfway through the novel, Dickens grants his reader an interesting, albeit somewhat contrived, plot element to embellish the narrative.

If this novel contains a ray of sunshine, it is in Sissy Jupe, a girl abandoned by her father and adopted by Gradgrind, whose oppressive educational method nearly breaks her. However, she grows up with her own intuitive sense of propriety, which she uses as a tool to eject a dishonorable character from the novel. Her strong and independent spirit will allow her to do much better in life than Louisa, who withers away in an unhappy marriage, and Tom Jr., whose boredom renders him vulnerable to temptations.

Compared to his other novels, "Hard Times" is relatively short and straightforward and has few characters, as though Dickens felt that what he had to say was so important, it had to be said quickly and bluntly. He is less interested in realism than in making a point, and it's really the poetic power of his prose that enables him to get away with the overbearing sentimentality and often ridiculous caricatures that accompany his poignant human truths.

Dickens creates a novel that virtually revolutionizes literature of the 1800's. At a time where most writers wrote in a stuffy prose full of unrealities and a jaded outlook, Dickens dares to tell with honesty what he sees through his window.

Hard Times has yet a misleading title. It gives one ideas of harshness, depression, poverty, and social decline--although the actual reality of then-London, still not something you would choose to read. However, Hard Times has as much depression and poverty as any of Dickens' other works. It is just in this case that Dickens chooses to remind the world that in the deepest despair there is beauty yet to be seen.

Dickens was a strange author. In his supposedly inspiring books, you get an overdose of sadness, and in his depressing books, you find beauty. It is this case with Hard Times.

It is a poor, honest man's search for justice in a world where only the rich have merit. It is a girl's search for true love while battling the arranged marriage for money. And lastly, a woman's search for recognition against her favored, yet dishonest brother. It is these searches that at last come together and become fufilled. And, while at the same time telling a captivating story, it comments on the then--and still now--presence of greed and total dishonesty one has to go through for money.

The title of this review sums up Hard Times. Its beauty comes from the pure searches for truth, the sorrow comes from the evil the characters most overcome to get there, and the honesty is both the truth with which Dickens portrays life and the the overwhelming truth that these protaganists create.

Holly Burke, PhD.

Clinical Psychologist, Abnormal Psych. Professor

Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins Inst.

I came across this book last summer when I was in Stratford, Ontario, attending their annual Shakespeare festival. I had just seen Henry V so this title caught my eye. A glance through the table of contents made me think this book might be a real eye-opener. Unfortunately, I ended up being a bit disappointed.

Sutherland and Watts take turns addressing what they call different "puzzles" in various Shakespearean plays. The problem is, except for the rare exception, most of these questions can be answered in various ways depending on how the play is performed. For example, is Malvolio vengeful or reconciled at the end of Twelfth Night? Or, does Bottom actually sleep with Titania in Midsummer Nights Dream? In both cases the ultimate answer is, it depends on how you play it. There is no one answer fixed in the text.

Even questions that seem like they should have a specific answer like, who killed Woodstock in Richard II?, are given waffling answers. There's simply no way to know. Again, the ultimate answer will lie in how the play is performed. Different companies will lead their audience to different answers depending on what they decide to focus.

Ultimately, this book has value in the sense that it points out what some of the issues are with various plays. On the other hand, the writing here is not very dynamic. The authors rarely take a position and, when they do, they approach it so weakly that they do not inspire a response in the reader. Perhaps the authors felt that they didn't want to provoke any controversy with their readers but, if they had, it might have made for a more readable book.

Shakespeare wrote plays that were to be seen only as performances before live audiences, running around two and a half hours, on a rather small stage. And he probably wrote pretty fast. Are the numerous inconsistencies (or apparent inconsistencies) one finds in the plays genuine errors of oversight, deliberate toying with the audience, unavoidable given the physical limitations of actors and stage, or part of some grand artistic design? For any given play, the answer can be any or all of the above.

The authors discuss about 30 such "glitches," and seem to derive most of their fun from summarizing how various Shakespearian commentators (few distinguished for intellect) have dealt with the glitches over the past 350 years. Sometimes, the authors appear to me to be deliberately obtuse about an issue, perhaps because they had some trouble finding as many as 30 genuinely puzzling glitches to comment upon.

One comment I have about the whole matter, which the authors do not make: Shakespeare's intellectual and artistic depths seem virtually boundless, and every seeming inconsistency might well have a reason for being other than carelessness or a schedule that didn't allow complete revision. The authors are aware of this, even when they don't state it explicitly.

Among the questions discussed: Why does Shakespeare's Henry V during the battle of Agincourt twice order all French prisoners to be slaughtered in cold blood, yet have "full fifteen hundred" prisoners "of good sort" left after the battle, not to mention a like number of "common men"?

Why does Juliet say, "Oh, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore (why) art thou Romeo," when the problem is that he is a Montague? Why do so many of the plays end with nothing resolved, everything hanging in suspension? [Notorious examples are Troilus and Cressida, and Love's Labour's Lost. The answer here is probably, oh say can you see, a sequel being demanded by audiences.] How is Desdemona able to deliver several lines of dialogue after being strangled or smothered by Othello? How can King Lear be more than 80 and Juliet only 13? And so on.

Some of the answers were fairly obvious to me, although apparently not so to the authors. Juliet falls in love with Romeo when they are both in disguise, and it is the revelation that he is who he is that is upsetting. He could be referred to as Romeo, Romeo Montague, or Montague, and the sense would be the same. The action of Richard II would cover 30 years or so in real time, yet the performers would have looked the same and worn the same costumes throughout the play, so Shakespeare has the characters proclaim themselves as "lusty, young" in the early scenes, and having "worn so many winters out" in the last scenes. Further tipoff to this necessary compression is that where ever the dialogue would naturally refer to "years," it instead refers to "minutes" and "hours." As the authors put it, Shakespeare has invented "Warp Time."

The book is a great pleasure to read, and will greatly deepen your knowledge of Shakespearean drama, and your viewing of any Shakespearean film. Highly recommended.

From these short stories I got the feeling that William Spencer is good game for taking the place of Ira Levin in popular fiction: Great premises, underdeveloped plot and characters, and plain jane prose.

The man CAN write, I'll admit to that. He drops ingenuous metaphors and literary references. But the stories hardly feel as a whole, just some witty tidbits tied together in a bundle.

Frankly, Spencer sets the trap for himself with his introuction, where he analyzes the state of short fiction as a playground for writers, where stories are used as prose exercises of preciousist writing, with little fun in the tale to tell. He admits by the end that some of his own stories can be held for having the same (un)qualities... but it seems they had a lot more of it than he expected.

So, this is my scorecard:

"The Entomologists at Obala" is, arguably, the most enjoyable of this stories. A minimalist reworking of Romeo and Juliet, with young lovers fighing through family feuds over exotic insect and aracnid species.

"Looking out for Eleanor" is a psychological suspense story, and the lenghtiest story in the book. That may be key to its success, for it allows the characters to develop their traits and the plot to move at a pleasurable pace.

Spencer adds three literary exercises in character description through metaphor: "The Wedding Photographer in Crisis", "Pep Talk" and "Snow". They may need to be read more than once to sink in, because they somehow feel flat.

There are also three tales I could envision featured in "Alfred Hitchcock Presents", exercises in twist ending: "Haunted by the Horror King", "The Return of Count Electric" and "Best Man". Sadly, by the time the twist came I was expecting it, and failed to shock me.

Lastly, there are "Graven Images", "A Child's Christmas in Florida" and "Daughter Doom", tales where several elements are left intentionally obscure, and which I found to be the most disappointing from the whole lot.

As I said, Spencer can write, and this book may keep you entertained as you read it. But you shouldn't be surprised if, like me, you finish it feeling nothing really happend while you were at it.

This guy is really funny and dark at the same time. His style flows and is really easy to read. I don't usually like stuff that's this 'normal' but I plan on reading everything this guy has. By normal I don't mean boring I mean there were no 'fantastic' elements in it like magic or monsters, just people and situations. I thought almost all the stories were very original but the last two were definitely the worst. I think I will like his novels even more than his short stories.

Watt describes himself as a "kind of a Muslim" (paraphrase) but he is actually an Anglican priest! He writes a history of Islam in the belief that God(Allah) made Islam triumph. So every now and then rational discourse just vanishes. It is also of the "X in year Y" style. Dull but not without some worthwhile information.

Dr. Watt undoubtedly knows his subject! He writes with a very thorough background of years of extensive study. In this book of just 150 pages, he does a good job of adequately covering a very extensive history of one of the world's great religions.
However, I don't think what the author set out to do can really be adequately accomplished in such a brief book. There are places in which he gives only quick, general mention of the important events in Islamic History. Dr. Watt does the best that a scholar can do with a "short" history of a religion, however, some readers will want more meat.

this book is providing unneccesary info about islam that is false and very unacceptable.. especially page 17 when he writes
"The modern Westerner has no difficulty in showing how Muhammad may have been mistaken." it is
biased
and totally not reflecting history but showing a great deal of propaganda..

If you're looking to gain an understanding of the life of Muhammad, grab this book. Watt presents a prose description of Muhammad's life, backed by sound and comprehensive study. It is actually enjoyable reading, almost like a story, yet completely historically accurate. (Or as much as we can be.) Watt does not make either extreme mistake of simply accepting the traditions of the Hadith or the Qur'an as absolute truth; or of looking only at Western denigrations of Islam. Rather, he appears to recognize historical truths in the Qur'anic traditions, and in Western and Eastern scholarship. If you've been trying to learn about Islam and have spent time looking over the Qur'an, this is *the* book to turn to get that background on Muhammad and "flesh" him out. Watt shows a human, beyond the traditions and myths, that changed his world, and then the rest of the planet.

This book is the first and probably still the definitive work on Minnesota history. Anyone interested in the state ought to consider this book. It offers solid accounts of early French and British explorers and carries the tale through the American period. The work spans four volumes.

However, there are serious flaws as well. First, the books were written in the 1920s. This means there are many words that would be considered politcally incorrect. "Savages" and "heathens" are often used without prejudice in reference to American Indians. Second, the book bogs down in what the author must have thought to be pertinent information on early governmental administration. Unfortunately the text becomes so tedious that it is difficult to continue reading. Finally is the age of the work. There is no mention of the Great Depression and post World War Two troubles because they hadn't happened yet. These particular editions were revised in the 1950s but no attempt was made to bring the story forward.

As said this remains the definitive work on Minnesota history, but what it really begs is for the next historian to come along and redo the entire effort.

I was becoming more impetous as I proceeded in my further reading of Romeo and Juliet. It is a tragedie that is suppost to be good but I found it rather dull and gloomy. It was to easy to find out what was going to happen next but it wasn't do to foreshadowing more just and inside note that let you know before-hand. Prior to reading this I watched the recent movie with Claire Danes and I would have to say that the movie is a much more simplified and interesting way to learn about Romeo and Juliet.------I insist on watching the movie atleast prior of reading or following your reading of this play.