Book Description
Many of North America’s most beloved regions are artfully celebrated in these boardbooks designed to soothe children before bedtime while instilling an early appreciation for the continent’s natural and cultural wonders. Each book stars a multicultural group of people visiting the featured area’s attractions—such as the Rocky Mountains in Denver, the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, Lake Ontario in Toronto, and volcanoes in Hawaii. Rhythmic language guides children through the passage of both a single day and the four seasons while saluting the iconic aspects of each place.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent for Kids.......2007-05-21
The Good Night... series are good books for young kids to read or to have read to them. It includes basic words and gets the kids interested in different travel locations.
Book Description
When Roz Rosenzweig meets Edwin Anderson fumbling for keys on the stoop of a Manhattan walk-up, the last thing on her mind is falling for a polite Nebraskan–yet fall for him she does. So begins Thisbe Nissen’s breathtaking debut novel, a decidedly urban fairy tale that follows Roz and Edwin as they move from improbable courtship to marriage to the birth of daughter Miranda–the locus of all Roz’s attention, anxiety, and often smothering affection.
As Miranda comes of age and begins to chafe against the intensity of her mother’s neurotic love, Roz must do her best to let those she cherishes move into the world without her. On crowded subways, in strange bedrooms, at Bar Mitzvahs, in brownstone basements and high school gymnasiums, Nissen’s unforgettable characters make their hilarious and wrenching way–and prove, indeed, that good things thrive in New York City.
Customer Reviews:
Writing style great, story mediocre.......2006-10-20
I don't know why, but the Iowa Writers' Workshop produces some of the best writing in America, and as far as style goes, Thisbe Nissen is no exception. Her phrasing is beautiful--a memory that aches like a death, for instance. Her dialogue is good. Where the novel falls down is the story and characters, about two-thirds of the way through. The book simply goes nowhere. Characters who start out being major players drop out and either are never heard of again or briefly described in an irrelevant incident. I thought Edwin was a leading role, it seems all he was there for was to be the father of Miranda. Roz could have gone to a sperm bank. What happened to good friend Fran who was so close to Miranda and at whose party Roz met Edwin? She just disappears. What is the point of that Christmas scene in Nebraska where we get the life story of Kathy and Duane, Shauna and Rod, little Brittney and all the others? To show the contrast with Manhattan? What happens to little Gert, who makes such an impression on Roz, she names her daughter after her? What happens to Miranda's budding acting career? Roz is a lawyer in an interesting field, but we never hear about her work or her clients or her friends. This is one of those books where I finish the last page and ask myself what this was supposed to say to me.
A fascinating collection of interrelated stories.......2005-09-24
Nissen's minimalist writing technique and the steady evolution of the book from the point of view of Edwin Anderson, Nebraska lawyer in the big city to his first wife, Roz Rosenzweig, New York Jew, and finally to their daughter Miranda, seems to have confused some reviewers, but it captivated this one.
The book is meant to make you supply the gaps between the stories and the points of view with your own thoughts and conjectures. Roz and Edwin meet cute, marry cute, become fish out of water in each's milieu, conceive Miranda and try to raise her in the big city. Edwin's disappointment with his own career choices eventually break up the marriage, around the time Miranda is first starting at a ritzy summer camp, and Miranda becomes a precocious latchkey kid. We follow her first three romances, one with a boy at camp, one with the son of her orthodontist, who breaks Roz's heart a second time, and finally with her English teacher in her senior year. And finally we end with her in college in Brown, her mother happy with a man she met at the library and her friend Darrin living in New York watching over them.
I don't see Nissen as having some great literary point here, but rather exploring issues about love and marriage and growing up, both by children and adults, in an indirect and wonderfully written way. The book in may ways gives you what you bring to it, requiring the reader to supply his or her own thoughts and experiences to understand its themes. It is an easy book to read and a difficult book to understand. I enjoyed it immensely.
The good people of New York deserve a better story.......2004-11-03
I had high hopes for this book, but in the end it was quite a let down. The writing, which started out very good, would just kind of trail off. Storylines that might have been original were left hanging there... in the end making them unoriginal and boring. I think this could have been a great story about interesting characters in New York (that in and of itself should be interesting) and yet this was a forced series of narratives that had nothing to do with the city. The main character is one you end up having no sympathy for.
I had heard the author describe this story as "a love letter to the city of New York" and actually it is quite the opposite.
CANT TELL A BOOK BY ITS COVER!.......2004-08-26
This book is so bad. The first two chapters are good,But each page gets worse and worse after that. The only reason i finished the book was because i was waiting for it to get better. I live in new york. This book has nothing to do with new york in any way. When i first saw the books cover i thought.. this should be a good book. Boy was i wrong.
Okay, I guess........2004-03-29
I liked reading bits of this book, which seemed to work fine because the novel was put together in bits. Nissen uses way, way, WAY too many adjectives (and particularly adverbs) to describe the most simple objects and actions, so in that's she's definitely showing off, character's voice or not. I wasn't convinced by how each of the characters fit together and, in the end, I felt no sympathy or empathy for any of them. Typically, I enjoy any novel that describes NYC street for street: it's one of the most relaxed, warm feelings I have, imagining I'm in Manhattan. Nissen did okay with that. What she didn't do so well with was the time period: I felt like she was making fun of the 70s (or was it the 60s?) retro fashions instead of putting us there firsthand. Overall, okay. Don't expect to feel as though you've accomplished anything reading this book, but it can be fun if you pick it up at random.
Book Description
A newly revised and updated guide to a classic fly fishing destination. This newly revised and updated guide to a classic fly fishing destination gives anglers the information they need to: • Fish legendary rivers like the Esopus, Beaver Kill, Neversink, Schoharie, and Willowemoc • Discover many lesser-known streams, with light fishing pressure and plentiful native brookies and other trout • Explore the cold, deep mountain reservoirs—Pepacton, Cannonsville, Schoharie, Neversink, Ashokan, and Rondout—with their miles of undeveloped shorelines and remarkable trophy fish • Fish the Delaware by canoe and find shad in season, as well as trout, bass, and walleye Dozens of maps and local hatch charts provide essential data for the region. 30 black and white photographs, 28 maps, index.
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Melora (G K Hall Large Print Romance Series)
Mignon Good Eberhart
Manufacturer: G. K. Hall & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 United States
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ASIN: 0783891504 |
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R.S.V.P. Murder
Mignon Good Eberhart
Manufacturer: Thorndike Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
United States
| World Literature
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
| 18th Century
| 19th Century
| 20th Century
| African American
| Asian American
| Classics
| Collections & Readers
| Drama
| General
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| Jewish American
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| Native American
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General
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ASIN: 0786235160 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from City Limits, published by Thomson Gale on July 1, 2005. The length of the article is 1484 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Battery Park City recharged: why the city made good on an old housing pledge.(THE PEOPLE'S MAYOR?)
Author: Alyssa Katz
Publication:
City Limits (Magazine/Journal)
Date: July 1, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 30
Issue: 4
Page: 18(3)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from New York Times Upfront, published by Scholastic, Inc. on February 11, 2002. The length of the article is 1641 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: The big slide: as the U.S. economy rolls downhill into a recession, many people are feeling the hurt in lost jobs and budget cutbacks. Will the good times return? (National).
Author: Peter Vilbig
Publication:
New York Times Upfront (Magazine/Journal)
Date: February 11, 2002
Publisher: Scholastic, Inc.
Volume: 134
Issue: 9
Page: 8(5)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Customer Reviews:
Not your normal fantasy setting..........2007-07-23
The Verdant Passage, by Troy Denning, pulls us into a fantasy setting, where the world has been damaged by the heavy use of magic, where metal is rare and where slavery is the norm. The King Tyr, plotting to become a dragon, must be stopped at all costs. So it is up to a slaveholding noble, a half-slave magic using girl and a man-dwarf gladiator to start the revolution. This may not seem that interesting, but the blend of cultures, from the greedy elves to the hairless dwarves, from the great ziggurat to the desolate sand wastes, really hooked me. The author does everything to bring out a different flavor to the setting. He refuses to give us the same old same old. I suggest at LEAST picking up the first book to check it out. I was first exposed to the Dark Sun books when I got the third book in this series and totally enjoyed it.
Teeters between good and bad.......2006-04-13
I've always been drawn to D&D based books, because the authors have such a wealth of pre-defined material to work with. When the entire world, from the peoples to the gods they worship, are already explained in detail, the author's should all be able to spend their time focusing on the characters and the story. Here that theory doesn't really hold true.
Denning seems like he'd be the perfect author for this sort of book - his other works focus on Planescape material, which is all rather odd in comparison to the standard fantasy setting, and Dark Sun is equally odd (but still very intruiging), but "The Verdant Passage" sticks to some pretty old and tired fantasy cliches. We've got the wisened old man who is always right, while constantly being sternly disapproving of everything the young whipersnappers could possibly do, then there is the evil wizard hell-bent on absolute power and domination (this one was actually done pretty well here, no big complaints about this cliche), and then we come to the "Test of Worth". Gah....this galls me every time it occurs in fantasy. The old forest gnome (or whatever he was this time round) needed the main characters to prove themselves before he'd give them the ultimate weapon to destroy the enemy. The party just has to say, "No, we don't deserve the weapon of ultimate everything-slaying, you can have it back" (knowing full well that's the answer to keeping it in their possession), and they pass the test! Why doesn't the wise and powerful old sage, bearing the prized weapon of doom, ever get off his hermetic butt and slay the enemy himself, instead of entrusting the fate of the universe to untried newbies? The world would be in peril far less often...
On the characters themselves - there is a prety diverse group here, featuring a psionicist, a sorceror, a couple of gladiators, and some templar-knight type characters. Actual characterization is minimal, though. At one point in the book, we must simply accept that the gladiator Rikus has always been in love with the sorceror Sadira - simply because someone off-handedly mentions that this is so. Nevermind that they have never had any romantic banter, and they never even give each other a moment's thought, or attempt to be with each other at any point in time. Amazingly, this occurs a second time in the book, when it's just assumed that Rikus and the psionicist of the party are at each other's throats fighting over Sadira - simply because Sadira *thought* about flirting with the psionicst once. Speaking of Rikus, I can't figure out why he's portrayed as the main character. Rikus get his backside handed to him on a silver platter in every single fight. He is always having to be saved by the rest of the party, yet they continue to treat him as though he were the greatest fighter of all time.
Despite these complaints, there are plenty of good things about this book. One of the scenes in this novel is an absolute favorite out of all the fantasy literature I've read. A sorceror and a psionicist both have a vested interest in purchasing a particular slave - and they pull out all the stops to prevent the other from succesfully doing so. This scene was expertly detailed, and was hilarious. The sorceror creates a dismebodied voice that sounds just like the psionicist saying "I withdraw my bid!", while the psionicst uses his mind abilities to steal the sorceror's gold pouch....ah man, you just have to read it.
Even after all my griping, I've still ordered the second novel and am excited to read it, so I guess that says it's not all bad - but be warned, it's not the best D&D has to offer.
Not quite as good as other adventure novels.......2005-12-13
Granted, I bought the books at a garage sale, but I still expected them to be entertaining enough to keep me interested from start to finish. I've played in the Dark Sun campaign setting and I liked it enough to want to read The Verdant Passage.
The plot at base has everything we need to be entertained. There are heroes that are underdogs, the bad guy has a heinous plot to rule the world, there are spies everywhere, there are gratuitous battle scenes and deaths, and there's a creepy old powerful man with a staff.
Where it fails is the writing. I became very bored with the way the book flowed. The writing was slightly more self-indulgent than the average fantasy novel and it caused the flow of the story to be secondary to the pretty combination of words. The characters aren't developed very well, we just get plopped in the middle of the character interactions and aren't shown much more than the body language of the characters in the interactions. They don't seem to have much motivation for themselves, I couldn't pick out a clear goal.
2 stars because the plot was good and I could finish the book in one sitting without much problem, but lacking in charisma and charm. It didn't get much better in the second book, and I couldn't get past the first few chapters of that.
So if you love the roleplaying world of Dark Sun and you really enjoy long written fighting scenes, then you would love this book. If you also like to have a gripping story with really likable stories, choose some other series to read.
Excellent.......2003-12-07
I read these many years ago and am about to order them so I can read them again. They were all so good. Couldn't put them down. I've never been able to understand why Icewind Dale and Salvatore get all the attention. These 5 books put anything Salvatore has ever written to shame. An excellent read.
Different type of D&D.......2003-01-18
This is not your standard d&d fare. It is set in a harsh unforgiving world that is slowly dying, and while you have the impression that they inhabitants of this world are doomed, they do not. In fact, there is a sense of optimism pervasive in each character, although it might not be readily evident. For a first book in a new setting this tale does well to both describe the land, the cultures, and still manages to entertain. I read this while riding to Florida and it really passed the time quickly. I barely noticed that I was in a car. While several of Mr. Denning's novels haven't been all they could be this book really displays his skills.
Average customer rating:
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The Verdant Passage
Troy Denning
Manufacturer: Wizards of the Coast
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000VJRS64 |
Customer Reviews:
Fun Book With Great Duplicates.......2006-08-03
This is a superb way to duplicate some of your favorite snack items like Cinnabon CinnabonStix , KFC Honey BBQ Wings, and Cheese Nips. I've tried several recipes and all of them came out great.
The Boston Market Meatloaf, one of my favorite take-out foods, was right on the money. I also recreated Cheese Nips and got them to taste just like the original, though the color was off slightly. The KFC wings were perfect and delicious (as is his cloned recipe of KFC original recipe chicken in an earlier boook). The recipe for Devil Dogs came out as dry as the actual Devil Dogs you can get in a store. So I made a few slight changes and produced a wonderfully moist version. They're also good with a chocolate glaze and/or a chocolate cream filling.
That's one of the reasons why people want to have these recipes even though you can buy most of these products quite easily. We like to make slight changes or additions that make them more fun. I've made Twinkies with a ton of different fillings, extra-large thin mints, Cinnabon buns with chocolate chips, and a host of other personal variations of popular dishes. It's for cooks who like to have fun. I recommend this highly, along with all of his other books.
Fun and interesting, but I got mixed results.......2004-08-02
If the poor condition of the library copy is any indication, Even More Top Secret Recipes is a very popular book!
Todd Wilbur has a number of books, and it can be a little confusing sorting them out. There are three "Top Secret Recipes" books, Top Secret Recipes, More Top Secret Recipes (this book) and Even More Top Secret Recipes. These books focus on what Wilbur calls "convenience foods." That is, most packaged sweets and fast food. He also has a book Top Secret Restaurant Recipes, in which he attempts to duplicate the foods of mostly casual dining restaurants like Chili's and Applebee's. He also has a book solely on drinks.
Wilbur explains in the Introduction of More Top Secret Recipes that these are not the actual recipes used by restaurants, and he did not obtain them through bribery, theft other illegal or illicit means. He starts with the ingredient list on packages of food and modifies the relative amounts, or with fast food, tries to identify the ingredients by taste. He admits that the real producers of these foods often use custom ingredients unavailable to the consumer, and that the goal was to match the texture and flavor of the food, and appearance is secondary.
So why try to clone commercially-available food? In both More Top Secret Recipes and Even More Top Secret Recipes, the author mentions availability. Some of the foods are regional, and you may not get them where you live. In the introduction to More Top Secret Recipes, he gives a list of reasons including low cost and curiosity. I'm not so sure about the cost argument, since I have to sacrifice two boxes of Macaroni and Cheese to make half a box of Cheese Nips, but the curiosity is what applied to me. I just wanted to know, "Can I really duplicate these commercial foods at home?"
This book contains 88 recipes, a big increase over the 37 of the previous book. The recipes clone the likes of McDonald's, Nabisco, Carl's Jr. and Taco Bell. Every recipe includes a history of the food item, something alone which makes this book valuable, and a dimensioned engineering graphic of the product. Even More Top Secret Recipes includes an interesting introduction discussing the fast food industry, and gives some tips on creating the clones. The recipes make as much use as possible of premade food and mixes. For example, most candy bars are coated with melted chocolate chips, so you will not find that you have to crush cocoa beans, or perform any such low-level task.
From this book, so far, I attempted to make Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies, (I AM a Girl Scout after all. Really. My wife signed me up. It was a surprise to me, too!) and Nabisco Cheese Nips. The thin mints turned out pretty good. The flavor and texture were pretty close. The only problem is that the chocolate was a little thick. Applying it to a desired thickness is difficult. Also, the chocolate remained quite soft. A little more experimentation with cookie thickness and baking time and temperature might make the centers a little more consistent, too. The Cheese Nips are made using the cheese packets from Kraft Macaroni and Cheese (Cheese and Macaroni?). They turned out crispy, and although bright orange like the real thing before baking, turned out grayish-tan when done. Although crispy, they weren't light and bubbly like the real thing, but were more like crispy cookies. They needed to be cheesier. They tasted like the flour and shortening. They weren't bad, though, and my wife liked them, but they weren't much like Cheese Nips. A lot of recipes would benefit from the use of rolling pin rings to establish uniform dough thickness.
I also had mixed results with the recipes from More Top Secret Recipes. You can read my amazingly similar review on that book for more details.
Using this book was fun and informative. I've had mixed results using these books. In short, have fun, but don't expect miracles with every recipe.
Save your money.......2003-09-30
The recipes in this book are mostly on the website and are nothing special.
Worst of the series.......2003-04-06
I own all of the Top Secret books from Tood Wilbur, and this one is the absolute worst of the series. Contains repeats from previous books, and some from his website. A few new, but I was not impressed. If you are new to the Top Secret series, I would recommend the Restaurant Recipes, and the Soda/Smoothies one. They are the best of the series.
Enjoy the dash of humor added to the recipes.......2003-03-08
These recipes cover common brand-name favorites which are now reproducible in the home kitchen, from Girl Scout cookies and Cinnabon to candy bars and Wendy's chicken filet sandwich. Even More Top Secret Recipes will prove particularly intriguing to fans of brand name items and fast foods, who will enjoy the dash of humor added to the recipes and food descriptions.
Books:
- Halfway Up the Mountain: The Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment
- Hindsight: A Novel of the Class of 1972
- Home Across the Road
- I'll Cry Tomorrow
- In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden: A Novel
- In Transit: An Heroi-Cyclic Novel (Irish Literature Series)
- Incidents in the Rue Laugier
- Kafka's Curse: A Novel
- La Prisonniere
- LA Vida De Las Plantas (Mundo Invisible)
Books Index
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Good Night America (Good Night Our World series)
Good Night Chicago (Good Night Our World series)
Good Night Boston (Good Night Our World series)
Good Night Washington, DC (Good Night Our World series)
Good Night San Francisco (Good Night Our World series)
