This book tells a lot about Mandie's heritage. She learns about life in the past and how it was for her father to live.

The early Mandie adventures are some of the best in the series. This one is no exception! Mandie gets to meet Uncle Ned's family for the first time. She meets Morning Star, his wife; Sallie Sweetwater, his grandaughter; and Tsa'ni, Mandie's cousin. Tsa'ni leads Mandie and Sallie on an expedition into a cliffside. They find a treasure..and get lost! What follows brings a kidnapping, a new friend, and a fortune! This is one Mandie Adventure you don't want to miss!

I always like how Mandie handles her problems with her Cherokee cousin Tsa'ni. Even though he doens't like her and tries to get her lost in a cave, she still handles it like God would want her to. Read this book for another great mystery!

Dr. Gladys Hankins has done an excellent job at highlighting many of the subtle forms of racial prejudice and discrimination in corporate America. Her insight is rather compelling with documented real-life interviews and workshops with working adults of different races and gender, as well as individuals working in different capacities and corporate levels. She presents very balanced and fair perspectives of individuals of different racial backgrounds and gender. She has excellently highlighted rather destructive but subtle forms of racial prejudice and discrimination that are designed consciously or unconsciously to stifle or frustrate many talented and hardworking individuals in corporate America. She has presented these issues in a constructive and non-judgmental manner. No well-meaning company executive and leader would read this book without being propelled to "question" their own stand on fostering true diversity which must include fairness and equity in giving all deserving individuals (regardless of race and gender) equal opportunities for career development and vertical promotion. After reading this book, any well-meaning company executive and leader would be propelled to playing an imaginary role of switching places with a very qualified and hardworking woman or minority man. Such a person must then ask how they would feel if a glass or concrete ceiling were placed on them regardless of their output, productivity, talents, abilities and skills. In this book, Dr. Hankins does a terrific job of bringing out your humanity and reminding you that empowering others equates to empowering yourself, your company, your community and the country as a whole.

Dr. Hankins very nicely addresses the White Male fears of seeing any kind of advancement of women or minority men. She brings to light that the feelings and fears of the White Male must be adequately addressed before real progress in corporate diversity issues can be measured. Finally, she offers empowering statements to women and minority men reminding them that to value self from within still surpasses external value by others.

This book pierced through the very heart of many subtle forms of racial prejudice and discrimination in the workplace bringing to light the "Diversity Blues". Blues that continue to limit great minds and potentials, and essentially causing many companies to operate at 50% of their human potential. This book is a "must read" for every company executive and leader because it holds many empowering tools that can help any company maximize the potentials of their intelligent, hardworking, well-meaning and well-deserving employees of the human race. Five stars to "Diversity Blues" and congratulations to Dr. Hankins for a brilliant job!!!

Dr. Gladys Hankins has done an excellent job at highlighting many of the subtle forms of racial prejudice and discrimination in corporate America. Her insight is rather compelling with documented real-life interviews and workshops with working adults of different races and gender, as well as individuals working in different capacities and corporate levels. She presents very balanced and fair perspectives of individuals of different racial backgrounds and gender. She has excellently highlighted rather destructive but subtle forms of racial prejudice and discrimination that are designed consciously or unconsciously to stifle or frustrate many talented and hardworking individuals in corporate America. She has presented these issues in a constructive and non-judgmental manner. No well-meaning company executive and leader would read this book without being propelled to "question" their own stand on fostering true diversity which must include fairness and equity in giving all deserving individuals (regardless of race and gender) equal opportunities for career development and vertical promotion. After reading this book, any well-meaning company executive and leader would be propelled to playing an imaginary role of switching places with a very qualified and hardworking woman or minority man. Such a person must then ask how they would feel if a glass or concrete ceiling were placed on them regardless of their output, productivity, talents, abilities and skills. In this book, Dr. Hankins does a terrific job of bringing out your humanity and reminding you that empowering others equates to empowering yourself, your company, your community and the country as a whole.

Dr. Hankins very nicely addresses the White Male fears of seeing any kind of advancement of women or minority men. She brings to light that the feelings and fears of the White Male must be adequately addressed before real progress in corporate diversity issues can be measured. Finally, she offers empowering statements to women and minority men reminding them that to value self from within still surpasses external value by others.

This book pierced through the very heart of many subtle forms of racial prejudice and discrimination in the workplace bringing to light the "Diversity Blues". Blues that continue to limit great minds and potentials, and essentially causing many companies to operate at 50% of their human potential. This book is a "must read" for every company executive and leader because it holds many empowering tools that can help any company maximize the potentials of their intelligent, hardworking, well-meaning and well-deserving employees of the human race. Five stars to "Diversity Blues" and congratulations to Dr. Hankins for an excellent job!!!

At this crucial point in the history of the world's major organizations, when far too many are struggling for economic survival, Dr. Hankins makes it painfully clear that Diversity is often misunderstood, undervalued, and benignly, if not overtly, neglected. She goes on to make a compelling case for proactively managing diversity; not the least of her arguments is that an ongoing process for managing divesity must be built into every facet of an organization's business. Her prescription for a healthy organization is to implement ongoing diversity that affects a real change in attitudes so that its members acknowledge and respect human and cultural differences. She makes good common sense! A healthy organization is empowered and enabled to deliver critical results that assure business success and profitabilty. Finally! A book on diversity for the boardroom and the lunch bunch!

While accomplishing a clear and valid intellectual case for "principle-based diversity in today's workplace, Dr. Hankins conveys a deep understanding of the negative human emotions that foster racism and sexism. She challenged me to introspection and reflection by presenting more than statistics and scientific data alone. Personal and group interviews, along with her own personal experience and observation uncover the raw, destructive nature of racism and sexism.

Then, with style and savvy, Dr. Hankins shares a vision for a prejudice-free, discrimination free-organization and addresses key roles all of us must play to create it. Unlike any other dissertation I've read on diversity, "Diversity Blues" has inspired me to reaffirm my commitment to be part of the solution of living a principle-based diversity.

I really liked this book!! It starts out when Mandie, Jonathan, Sallie, Joe and Polly are at Mandie's house for the holidays. Then the turkey dissapeared right out of the oven. After that mysteries keep adding on and on. Like the green scarf they found in the bushes, and the old quilt and papers they found in the attic. But things get worse when Dr. Woodward is missing! But none of these things can hide the saddness Mandie will have when Joe goes of to colledge

I am probably one of the oldest Mandie Book readers around. I began reading them when I was eight years old, and now I am twenty. And I still wait in anticipation for each book to come out. This book was somewhat more suspenseful than some of her books. Joe, Jonathan, Polly, and Sallie are all part of the plot. I normally enjoy the ones in which Joe plays a prominant role better than the ones without him. And as always, she ends the book with the reader just itching to get her hands on the next one. Once again, she has written a great book for, in my opinion, readers of all ages. I cannot wait to see what happens in the books that follow as Lois Gladys Leppard reports at the front of this book that "Mandy will grow a little older and things will start moving faster in time in the coming five books."

It was fabulous! But it was sad, Joe going off to college, leaving Mandie behind. But...I didn't know Lois was still writing them! Does anyone know an e-mail adress for me to e-mail Lois?

It is summer in 1903. Mandie is returning home for summer vacation and she already has a mystery on her hands. Joining her is Joe who came home from college in New Orleans also for the summer. The two had a few advertures trying to figure out who was living in the old house on the edge of the Shaw property. However with much help from Liza, Aunt Lou, Abraham, and Uncle John the searches come to no avil. Then out of nowhere a tornado strikes and the debris is not the only thing left that will surprise Mandie and her friends.

This was another great Mandie book for kids. I can't wait for the next one. However a one year wait is way too long. Hopefully Mrs.Leppard will decide to write more Mandie books throughout the year for they are trully great books!

Mandie And The Tornado! is the latest in one of the most beloved series for children. Mandie's search for her beloved cat Snowball leads to her discovery of a mysterious secret - someone is hiding out in an old, abandoned house. The compelling mystery of who is in hiding and why, combined with the coming of a dangerous storm, makes this story a delightful page-turner especially for young people.

Hello! My name is Cecily Millen. This might sound firmiliar. If it does, its because Cecily Millen is a charactor in the latest Mandie book, Mandie and the Tornado. Ms.Leppard took part in an auction to have your name put in a book and I won it! I was very excited and couldn't wait for the book to come out. It is also dedicated to me! Thank you Ms.Leppard I feel very honored to be in your book!

Anyway, this book is great. Once again Mandie sniffs a mystery right as she returns home from Miss Heathwoods'. It seems a light has been strangely appearing everynight in an abandoned barn near the Shaw's property. With the help of Joe, and Celia, and sometimes Liza,not to mention a tornado that sends them for shelter in the secret tunnel, they figure out the mystery of the strange light. Read it!

I've just read Precious Bane and it was very moving. It should be better-known, her style is excellent, the characterisations extremely vivid, and the twist in the plot at the end quite unexpected. Prue Sarn is not at all your typical wet 19th c heroine, she is intelligent, sensitive, and assertive (which is why she gets into trouble with the society of her day). The Precious Bane of the title is usually interpreted as being her hare lip, which is certainly a very prominent theme in the book, but it could also be interpreted as the money after her which her brother Gideon constantly strives, which causes so much misfortune. And the hero is really good too, an animal rights campaigner before his time.

I am a senior in high school. I read this book under reccomendation from both my father and sister. Precious Bane truly was a breathtaking story. It's a shame it's out of regular print; I think if more people knew about this book, it would be much more widely read. I reccomended it to all my friends in school, and we together convinced our English teacher to use it as material for the course. Unfortunatly we all might have to pay the hefty $14 price if the school won't pay for it! I was hoping to find some used or paperback editions but alas my search has been to no avail!

I watched the last five minutes of the "PBS version" in '89 or '90, and it was so beautiful that it haunted me for years. Once I had found the book, I had little patience with the text's "accent", and I couldn't read it. A couple of years later, I was determined to conquer the book. I finally came to the realization that it's a love story. The dialect became easy, and I couldn't put the book down. Although the subject matter can be heavy at times, it's a must read for true romantics. Jane Eyre, eat your heart out!

Honey for a Child's Heart is an outstanding guide to fine children's literature. Though Ms. Hunt writes from the perspective of a dedicated Christian, as a non-Christian parent I did not feel the least uncomfortable with her expression of her views. The subtitle of the book "the Imaginative Use of Books in Family Life" is really the major focus of the book. Recognizing good literature, and incorporating it into one's home life is a value which transcends a specific religious point of view. The author's chapter on What Makes A Good Book will be invaluable to parents attempting to locate books which will stand the test of time from among the mind-boggling swarm which one meets in any children's book section. The books highlighted for discussion by Ms. Hunt are from a broad range of authors including Kenneth Grahame, Charles Dickens, C.S. Lewis, Emily Dickenson, James Thurber and Miriam Cohen. The bibliography, comprising approximatley one-third of the book, is one of most complete guides to quality children's literature available anywhere. I pack this book with me to libraries and bookstores when I'm selecting children's books. No parent who wishes to introduce their children to fine literature and/or create a reading centered environment in the home should be without this book!

If reading with your children is important to you, this book will be very exciting. Mrs. Hunt's enthusiasm for children's literature is contagious; I couldn't put the book down! She creates an enviable list of the advantages a well-read child will gain. The book guides you in choosing books & in placing reading as a delightful priority in your & your child's day. While her recommended reading covers a broad spcetrum, her focus is narrow: developing a whole child. The whole child is grounded in God's Word &, with the example & encouragement of parents, is free to grow intellectually & emotionally. With so much information in an easy to read style, all I could ask for is a fourth edition!

In this book, Gladys Hunt introduces a veritable feast in the manner of choosing and reading books to one's children. Now, I am not a parent, I am merely a teenager who loves to read. :) When I came across this book in my parents' library, like almost every other book I have read, I fell in love with it.
Mrs. Hunt shows how reading good books together and introducing children to classics will build "children who are alive emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually." I know from experience that my parents are the ones who instilled in me that reading is one of the most important things of all. Whether or not they learned that from this book or not, I am so grateful that they taught me such a wonderful thing.
Gladys Hunt states (by quoting Erich Fromm's book The Art of Loving) that "...a child's basic need for milk and honey is from his parents. Milk is the symbol of the care a child recieves for his physical needs, for his person. Honey symbolizes the sweetness of life, that special quality that gives the sparkle within a person. To give honey, one must love honey and have it to give."
In the first 124 pages she illustrates how good books have enriched her family, and how she hopes that they will enrich yours, in the latter 45 pages or so a bibliography of some truly grand books are listed.
Honey for a Child's Heart is truly magnificent, and some day, when I marry and have children I hope to utilize everything I have learned within it. :)

Cassandra Mortmain is the middle child in an eccentric English family. Her father is a once-published, once-celebrated author who has had writer's block for years, and as a result, his wife and three children are on the brink of starvation, although they live in a crumbling, albeit leased, castle. They hope that their father will one day begin writing again, or that Cassandra's beautiful elder sister, Rose, will marry well and save them all.

Enter the American Cotton brothers, who are wealthy and have just inherited the nearby estate of Scoatney, as well as the landlordship of the Mortmain's dwelling. Rose Mortmain and her stepmother see nothing but dollar signs as they scheme to marry Rose off to Simon, the eldest Cotton. But Cassandra has fallen for Simon herself...

I was skeptical of this book because the cover was so outdated and plain. The story itself is set in the 1930's, but the book was published in 1948, and it seemed so dated. But once I started reading, I could scarcely put it down. This is classic English literature at its best, with a storyline that will pass from age to age without ever seeming old-fashioned. I highly recommend it and plan to keep my copy forever!!

Dodie Smith may be best-known as the author of The One Hundred and One Dalmatians, but she was the author of many hit West End plays and several best-selling books. If you enjoy mid-20th-century British fiction, may I recommend a perfect gem of a novel, back in print after many years a-languishing: I Capture the Castle, told in first-person narration by Cassandra Mortmain, the younger daughter of a family of impoverished eccentrics living in a small run-down castle in the British countryside, as she tries to "capture" her life in her private journal. Her father is a once-famous writer with a seemingly-insurmountable case of writer's block; her stepmother Topaz is an unusually-gorgeous former model with pretentions of artistry and a loving heart; her beloved sister Rose is hungry for some sort--any sort!--of change. Into this almost Austen-like situation comes Simon, the new landlord, an upper-class American from New England, along with his informal younger brother, raised in California, and their "club woman" mother, and suddenly the potentials and possibilities and coincidences become endlessly interesting...Will Simon propose to Rose? Will Mortmain ever write again? Will Cassandra's swain kiss her in the bluebell wood? Perhaps it doesn't sound like much, but it's engaging and endearing, a period-piece with "good bones" and long-lasting, pleasurable resonance, still holding up well after half a century on the shelves.

On my top-40 list, certainly, if not my top-10. I can't recommend this one highly enough.

"I Capture the Castle" is the 1930's coming-of-age story of 17-year-old Cassandra, who lives in rural Britain with a cast of simultaneously comic and tragic family and friends. During the spring, summer, and autumn months spanned by the story, she pens a diary that describes her first adult lessons about love, sisterhood, and friendship. Although the voice is believably adolescent, the lessons Cassandra learns are completely adult.

"I Capture the Castle" is beautiful in every way a book should be. It's gentle without being sappy, humorous without being mocking, gorgeously (although a bit painstakingly) written without digressing into flights of narcissistic prose. The narrator is both an ordinary child and an extraordinary woman, and her greatest strength as a character is the believability of her weakness. The other characters are interesting and unusual and completely human. The setting, a barely-refurbished medieval castle, is very nearly a character in its own right, and it informs and interacts with the story in a way I've rarely seen outside of the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The book, with all of its lyricism and innocence and wise optimism, teaches a gentle and almost invisible lesson. It's about learning to love fairly and accept love gracefully, about being faithful to your friends even when it hurts, about who constitutes a family and how one goes about caring for them, about how growing up is not the end of a the road but the beginning. It's not a new lesson, but it's one we all need to learn a little more.

But "I Capture the Castle" is more than a beautiful book, and more than a lesson. It's an experience. It's as if Jane Austen had been reborn 130 years later and rewritten "Sense and Sensibility" with a compassion and magic her original work missed. Or as if "Little Women" had been written for adults: just as so many little girls start their own "Pickwick Papers" and take to eating apples in attics after reading Alcott's book, after reading "I Capture the Castle" I wanted to find a ruin in Britain, fit it with indoor plumbing, and spend the timeless days of summer sitting in the tower and penning a journal of my own days and dreams and loves.

Gladys Alyward was rejected by the CIM because she failed on her theology test, still certain that God wanted her in China, she crosses Russia when they were at war with China over Manchuria, She makes a narrow escape from Russia,as the Russian soldiers mistake missionary for mechanic,gets to China and travels to a small city in northern Shansi. Here she learnd Chinese fluently, gets her name Ai-Wah -Deh (The Victorius One)from stopping a blooy prison riot,converts the mandarin to christianity, falls in love with Linan, a nationalist general and finally amid typhod fever and internal injuries marches to Sian with one hundred children orphaned by Japanese bombs.

I did find it a little disapointing that it does not quite finish the story...but as she was still alive when this book was written it can't be helped.

The movie made me want to read the book. I've read & re-read it. It wets your appetite for adventure in another place, another time. I've begun looking for other books about China and Gladys. I'm enjoying discovering the History, the time, the landscape, it's inhabitants and the many authors who've written about China. It has made me want to go to China to see the places she roamed and walk there. It's romance, history, adventure, so many things in one small book.

Can YOU help. Gladys Aylward's life story has been a source of insipiration for many and I'm currently researching the possibility of producing a TV documentary about her life. I'm trying to track down some of the Children who treked across the mountains with her or anyone who worked with her for a short while and can tell her story. I would love to hear from you if you could assist me in any way. Thank you

The book is reasonably good. but a bit decptive in the title. Only about 1/3 of the book is actualy about rafting on the river. The river is known as the Salmon, nicknamed the river of no return because of the rapids and waterfalls that make it a one-way river.

I spent much of my childhood in the wilderness learning the joy of nature from a woman much the same as Hattie. It was a treasured weekend spent reliving my own memories within this wonderfully descriptive tale. My "action/suspense" reading husband couldn't put it down. We eagerly await Gladys Smith's next adventure.

I could not put this book down. It caught my sense of adventure and swept me through the pages before I knew what hit me. I think this would make a great movie. I hope someone has already bought this to make the film. I would love to read more of this author's work.

The tour of Europe cut short, Mandie and Celia return home to the states. When Mandie gets back to North Carolian though, she can immediatly tell something's wrong. Who are all the people in her house, and why are they all so sad? Has something happened to Samuel? Or much worse, to Mother? And did she really see an angel? This Mandie book keeps you guessing up until the very end. All though I would have liked to read more about Mandie's adventures in Europe, this is a good (but sad) mystery for her to return home to.

This book is hard to put down because its' secrets are not revealed until the very end. Mandie returns from her trip, unaware that her mother is lying in bed, close to death and that her little brother Samuel has died. Not being able to sleep, she has a visit from an angel, who tells her "you will know, you will know". She contacts a doctor she knows, without telling the docter who is already looking after her mother. She keeps hearing this voice saying "So you are Amanda," but she does not no saying this. You have to ready this amazing book to find out what happens next. This book is perfectly written and is a heart-warming story.

When Mandie, her best friend, and her grandmother return from their trip to Europe, Mandie expects something is wrong. No one tells her anything, but when she returns home, her house is full of strangers dressed in black. When she finds that her baby brother has died, and her mother is near death, she blams her grandmother for not telling her. This book is full of emotions, but a side from those there is a thrilling mystery to be solved.