If you were a Clevelander in the 50's and 60's and wanted to shop in style, Halle's was your store. This book refreshes the memories of those who had the pleasure of shopping this retail institution while it told how a family of merchants experienced the successes and ultimate failure of a Cleveland retail icon.

If you are not a Clevelander, this book gives great detail of what "carriage trade" retail was and what happened to it.

Good reading, lots of memories, good fun.

Halle Brothers was a Cleveland institution. It was, like many family-owned department stores, a vital player in the city's history. As the city grew, so did Halle Brothers. Author James Wood paints an interesting, vivid portrait of a store, the likes of which, are rarely seen in today's world of "cookie cutter" chains.

Finally. A well thought out and well executed book about a major movement in American art that is often dismissed as being one dimensional. Dennis' introspective look into the most revered "Regionalist" artists not only offers engaging scholarship, but a very good education in American social history as well. A must read for anyone who thinks they know what "Regionalism" is.

This book makes you rethink any ideas you might have about Regionalism. Whether you agree with James Dennis or not is up to you, but he certainly does bring up some very interesting ideas. The basic ideas of the Regionalism school are initially laid out for the reader, and from this beginning it is already possible to see the weak foundation of the very definition of "Regionalism," as it was defined NOT by the artists, but by their critics and the public. The sterotyping generalities inherent in this 'school' set the stage for Dennis' questioning of the similarities of the work of Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steurat Curry, the triumvirate of Regionalism. The author proceeds to explicate the inherent differences between the 3 artists' work, as well as the eventually obvious flawed general definition of "Regionalism." Dennis breaks down his discussions into realism vs. abstraction, realistic subject matter vs. fantasies, the ideas of nationalism and fascism in the artists' work, their varying depictions of women, and finally compares the three Regionalists to three contemporary modernists, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, and Marsden Hartley. Dennis concludes with the assertion that the so-called "Regionalists" are in many ways more "modern" than their modernists contemporaries. The book has plenty of pictures, sadly only in black and white, and thus the book is a surprisingly quick read. Each chapter is thorough however, and must be studied to be fully understood. The reader should have some art historical background, and some knowledge of the history of the first half of the 20th century. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Regionalism, and the history of American art. Makes you think.

Morely researched this book for five years and documented it with over 70 pictures, diagrams and trail maps; but most of all it is readable, current and accurate.

New Wood Puzzle Designs: A Guide To The Construction Of Both New And Historic Puzzles is a detailed, involved and definitive woodworker's guide to creating timeless classic wooden puzzles as well as new and innovative wood puzzle types. Superbly illustrated throughout with full-color photographs and unambiguous sketches, New Wood Puzzle Designs is clearly and cleanly written in language the lay reader and novice woodworker can understand as readily as the long-devoted hobbyist. New Wood Puzzle Designs in a truly excellent and highly recommended book for woodcrafters of all ages and skill levels.

The better book you have

This book is in an easy to read format. It has activities for the reader to do, so that he/she will gain a better knowledge of Microsoft Office 2000. Some parts of the book were difficult to understand, but overall it is a well written book.

I find "Redgauntlet" one of the less satisfactory novels in the Waverley series. Certainly, it has the local flavor, the dialect, the imaginative description of evocative landscapes all his novels have, but it is not a blast as some of the others are. The plot involves a fictitious third Jacobite rebellion, and it is interesting to see how Scott (especially in the notes from the Magnum edition, included in this edition) argues this time not for the historicity but for the historical probability of the events described. While Scott is often hailed as the inventor of the historical novel, "Redgauntlet" also shows him to be a forerunner in the historically probable novel--a genre practiced to great effect by our present-day history buff, Umberto Eco.

But probability alone does not a great novel make. Darsie Latimer's character is even less probable than his semi-historical counterparts, such as Edmund Waverley and Henry Morton. And this is strange, since moving further into fictionality, one could argue, a writer might allow themselves more latitude to make a character interesting, even if certain circumstances remain historical. Is this a conscious effort on Scott's part to show, after the fictionality of history, the fictionality of fiction?

Scott disturbs narrative conventions even further when the conspiracy against the Hanoverian King George III completely fails to materialize--ironically, for what seems to be the silliest of reasons: the Pretender (or the Chevalier if you're a Jacobite), Charles Stuart, refuses to give up his mistress. Thus, the main plot of the novel sizzles out and really not much happens in these 400 pages. Mind you, I personally don't need much to happen, but the 19th century novel did. Scott as a postmodern writer? That is pushing it too far, but this novel awaits a postmodern critique enlightened by a reading of Eco and Bakhtin.

That said, there are some really interesting things going on. Apart from the "regular" set of characters of Scott's Scottish novels, this one features an orthodox Quaker who is the epitome of anti-militant mercantilism. The form is also quite new for Scott--the novel is an epistolary, a set of letters between Darsie Latimer and his friend Alan Fairford. Thus, the novel's first-person point of view is split, and this provides for interesting contrasts.

For me, Scott sort of shot himself in the foot with this novel. His earlier novels ("Redgauntlet" is the last of the Scottish novels, written eight years before his death) lead one to expect a major action to happen before the denouement, and this one avoids that a bit too artificially. It seems that Scott was at pains to stick to history, and his own political convictions, a bit too much: a fictitious Jacobite rebellion is OK as a narrative vehicle, but it shouldn't interfere with the peaceful Great Britain (in which Scotland was in many respects subsidiary to England) that Scott himself inhabited and advocated. And so narrative excitement has to give way to Scott's pacifist politics--an honest choice, which Scott consistently maintains in all the Waverley novels--and character development and politics take precedent.

A final note: Scott has always proven himself a masterful and honest critic of royalty and nobility, especially of those characters he seems to love. "Waverley"'s Mac-Ivor is chastised for his political obstinacy, in "The Fortunes of Nigel" King James I (a Scot) is rebuked for his fickleness and corruption, and in "Redgauntlet" the formerly charismatic Stuart proves effeminate and tragic (dying an impoverished alcoholic, in the footnotes). And often enough, these tragic characters are of more interest than the somewhat ineffectual and sometimes foolish main characters: something for readers of literature to sink their teeth into.