Timothy Dalton Books

This is a well written refence book for all those involved inprenatal diagnosis and counseling of pregnant women with a suspectedor known fetal problem. It is concise, offers acurate informationregarding numerous conditions, the follow up during pregnancy,necessary testing prenatally and postnatally, recurrence risks andwhat patients can expect after the birth of their child. It alsocontains many ultrasound images and photographs. Highly recommended.

I loved this book! This is the latest in my collection books by Timothy Alberts. From beginning to end the author captivates you with attention to detail. Although this book does not delve deeply into the more intricate aspects of how to make the designs shown, most are not for the beginner anyway. The designs featured in this book are some of the finest that I have seen. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in millinery, and eagerly await future works.

I was unhappy to see that this book did not contain explicit hat making instructions. The best example was chapter 5 on straw hats. In the instructions you are told to sew the straw braid together either by hand or machine but did not tell you if you should butt the straw braid together or over lap the braid. No help was given for hand sewing the braid either... what stitch to use? Nothing was mentioned about machine settings either. For example, if you use a straight stitch how long should the stitch be? If you use a machine zigzag stitch what is the best length and width. I was also surprised at the how to pictures in the book. I expected better close-ups. This was my first book about millinery so my expectations may be too high but I still feel the book left out a lot of very important information.

Not to mince words, Christine Falls is a dreadful mystery. The plot is banal, the 'villain' the transparent first choice. The 'conspiracy' is not fully developed, and it is not even apparent why the author sees it as as inherently evil as he evidently believes it to be. Early on, one of the minor characters is the victim of a homicide. The author never clarifies who is responsible, or just what the culprits (whoever they are)hoped to accomplish by the murder. The prose, which is highly praised in the mainstream reviews, is quite ordinary. We are not talking Raymond Chandler or Ross MacDonald here - not by a country mile.

What is going on, not to mince words again, is that the critical community is keeling over at the spectacle of a Booker Prize winner trying his hand at genre fiction under a pseudonym. Whoop-de-doo - the Lemming effect, as we sometimes see in film criticism, when the critic obviously looks no further than the name above the title.

Other than that he can't plot, his hero has no vitality or interest - did I forget to add that the book is relentlessly downbeat? - and that he has not even managed to create a credible conspiracy, the author succeeds.

This is, plainly and simply, a flat, dull, terribly uninteresting book.

Black employs some lovely imagery--the frequent references to the wind surrounding the characters and other climatic descriptions are exquisitely phrased, which makes it all the more disappointing to read the hyper-melodramatic cliches tumbling from his characters' mouths. Every character seems to get the same treatment, a tormented psychological backstory, no matter how trivial he or she is, so you keep expecting them to reappear and fulfill an important role in the plot (but you're frequently disappointed).
And as for that plot, it's also full of the moldiest cliches: the Church--too powerful! Its members--sometimes (gasp) corrupt! Illegitimacy in a Catholic country in the 1950s--disapproved of!
I might have been more impressed, but I couldn't work up any concern or interest in any of the sighing, whimpering, twitching characters, so it was hard to be moved by any of the ridiculous things befalling them.

The writting in this book is much better than that of the usual mystery. It is however a very depressing story,

Christine Falls is the name of a young woman who dies just before the start of this mystery story that begins in Ireland in the nineteen-fifties. The principal character Quirke, consultant pathologist at a Dublin hospital, finds his brother-in-law Mal Griffin in his office writing up her death certificate. Mal is also a consultant at the hospital, a society obstetrician. Quirke, an antisocial alcoholic widower, seems to have moved down as his former childhood friend has moved up. Although he does not challenge Mal's cover-up, he doggedly persists in an attempt to discover the truth. This book is the result.

Benjamin Black is the pen name of John Banville, who won the Man Booker Prize for his novel THE SEA. I recently reviewed an earlier Banville novel, ATHENA, which also has elements of mystery. Both these books are distinguished by a richly ornate style which creates a fog of unknowing just by itself. Can Banville write simply enough to lay out a mystery that is created by facts, events, and characters, rather than by words? The answer is yes; CHRISTINE FALLS is easy to read, its people and settings lucidly described. And yet I do feel that even as Benjamin Black, Banville cherishes mystery almost as an existential state, deliberately delaying the release of information that the reader has probably seen coming a long way back, and having his protagonist wallow in uncertainty: "Why was he persisting like this? he asked himself. What were they to him?... And yet he knew he could not leave it behind him, this dark and tangled business. He had some kind of duty, he owed some kind of debt, to whom, he was not sure."

Fortunately, such overt Banvillean moments are relatively rare, and I would have given this four stars as a readable mystery, and perhaps five for its unusually well-rounded characters. But two things hold me back. One is the drinking. I don't know why it seems de rigueur in an Irish novel for most of the characters to spend their lives in bars. But a mystery reader must be able to trust the perceptions of the leading characters; instead, I find myself trying to keep count of the whiskeys. More seriously, as a non-Catholic at least, I cannot buy into the motives that lie behind the plot that Quirke uncovers in Dublin and later in Boston. There are certainly crimes committed in the course of this book -- murder and assault for starters -- but they are incidental to the more pervasive wrongdoing which they are intended to cover up. And while this is certainly a spiritual sin, it is not clear that it is a crime in the eyes of the law. In the last chapters of the book, I sense the author trying to reconcile spiritual aspects which are the province of the novel with criminal ones that are the concern of a mystery; I am not convinced that he succeeds.

A mysteriously high amount of praise has been afforded to John Banville's CHRISTINE FALLS, his first mystery novel published under the nom de plume Benjamin Black. The protagonist of this novel (and of its follow-up THE SILVER SWAN), a Dublin pathologist in the 1950s, has been given the sole name of Quirke, which Banville seems to have fallen in love with because all the other characters hail him by his name almost constantly and in almost every sentence they address to him ("How are you today, Quirke?", "Well, Quirke, I have something to tell you...", etc.). That's just one of the many highly affected quirks in this disappointing mystery novel which seems mostly to be a kind of re-working (a tribute?) to Raymond Chandler, since it features many of the stock types associated with the Philip Marlowe novels, particularly THE BIG SLEEP: a scheming and corrupt aging millionaire with sinister plans involving his daughters; his beautiful and highly sexed younger wife; a spoiled heiress wanting to marry an ineffectual man; her sleazy and violent chauffeur; a pair of freakish goons who work the hero over; and so forth.

Removed from its Los Angeles context the whole thing seems a bit odd, especially since Banville also retains a sort of Greek tragedy structure for the whole thing. It certainly plugs along, and Banville's flair for the ringing phrase is always evident, but there's not much new or even all that interesting here.

Banville is a wonderful writer (I enjoyed THE SEA), but he is not, as others have noted, a good mystery plotter. The pleasures of this text lie in his evocation of 50s Dublin and his characterizations. Anyone who reads mysteries will guess the murderer early in the plot, which relies too much on coincidence, irrational behavior, and implausibility.

Let me start by saying that I enjoyed reading this novel, which I read after finishing Christine Falls, the first Quirke novel. The writing is excellent, and it's full of rich descriptions of Dublin life, from a rather bleak perspective. Having said that, I must say that as a crime novel, it is flawed. Our protagonist Quirke does attempt to investigate the death of Laura Swan, but he never quite grasps what is going on.

There is one serious chronological error in the plot. The author's only explanation of where the killer acquired the drug used to kill Laura Swan has him getting it well after she is dead. One thing we expect from a crime novel is to have the details of the events hang together, and this book fails in that respect.

Benjamin Black, The Silver Swan (Henry Holt, 2008)

The Silver Swan is one of those books that reminds me of why I like to read series novels in order. I hadn't read the first book John Banville published under the Benjamin Black name, but Henry Holt were kind enough to drop this one on my doorstep unannounced a couple of months ago, so I figured I'd read it. Black, even more than, say, Robert Parker, draws heavily on the events of his earlier novel for this one; I'm sure the epilogue would have resonated with me a great deal more had I read Christine Falls. That said, Banville still writes a very capable mystery, when he's not wallowing in the past misdeeds of Garret Quirke, the medical examiner/amateur sleuth who once again finds himself enmeshed in a mystery he doesn't really want anything to do with.

In this case, he is approached by an old college classmate, Billy Hunt, with a simple request-- his wife has just died, drowned, and Billy would like Quirke not to perform an autopsy on the body, Quirke agrees, but it's pretty standard operating procedure in mystery novels that such a request (which is relatively common in real life for religious reasons) is going to spark some neurons; in performing a quick examination of the body, Quirke finds a fresh needle mark, and we're off to the races. Things are not helped out by the fact that Quirke's daughter Phoebe is a client at the Silver Swan, Hunt's wife's salon, and that her flamboyant ex-business partner seems to be taking more than a consumerly interest in the girl.

The best thing about Banville-writing-as-Black is that he's not afraid to slap both the reader and the mystery genre around a bit. (The police sergeant's final line in the book is about as slappy as one can possibly get in a mystery novel, and we feel just as chagrined as Quirke when we realize what he's on about. Or we should.) That is always welcome in a genre that he become as codified as mystery has, and if you can get round Black's wallowing-- or if you've already read Christine Falls-- then I say have at it. There's some fun to be had with this one. ***

This is the second book Timothy Dalton has read by Benjamin Black and the characters are the same. If you remember where the first book left off, you're in good shape and if you've forgotten you can pretty much limp along. This book deals with the murder of a young woman, investigated by Quirk, the pathologist. Like the first novel, this one plods along without any particularly memorable (or likeable) characters and the ending comes as no surprise. Add to that the book is terribly depressing and it makes for uneasy listening.
The sole attraction for me was the fact Timothy Dalton narrated the book. The Irish and American characters gave him a good chance to stretch his talents with dialects and I found (as always) his voice soothing and rich with enunciation and emotion. I thought he was a little lazier with the American "Texan" this time (whom author Black referred to as a "Yankee" and nearly made me drive off the road) but altogether the first six discs were brilliantly read and eased along the otherwise sluggish plot. Interestingly, however, disc 7 represented an entirely different Timothy Dalton. It were as though he had to come back to the studio to re-record the final chapters and had entirely forgotten which voices he used for each character. The transition was so startling and persisted for the entire disc, that I have to believe some time lapsed between the narration of the first 6 discs and the last. He never did get the voices back and that made the final chapters of the book seem disjointed and out of place.
Without question if you're buying this for Timothy, you won't be disappointed; but beware of disc 7.

In a sequel to his first crime novel, the 2008 Edgar-nominated Christine Falls, Benjamin Black (nom de plume of John Banville) creates a complicated tale, filled with unnecessary characters and obfuscations clouding the mystery. It brings back Quirke, the Dublin pathologist with an "incurable curiosity."

A college acquaintance implores Quirke to forgo an autopsy on his wife who jumped off a pier and drowned in Dublin bay. In eyeing the body, Quirke discovers a puncture in her arm, and blood-work shows presence of alcohol and morphine. But Quirke allows the coroner to give a finding of accidental death. The plot involves the back story of the dead woman, alternating with events including those of Quirke's family, especially his daughter. The narratives are intended to lead the reader forward to decide whether her death really was suicide or murder, as well as laying the groundwork for future developments.

The novel is atypical of the usual mystery or crime book, and is more like an Irish drama (written without the brogue, fortunately). Perhaps that is the shortcoming of the novel, no matter how well-written it is. Nevertheless, it should be read and despite my problems with it, it is recommended.

I really loved this book. I have no experience in creating clothing for my 15½" Franklin Mint fashion dolls & the shoes that came with the dolls are a major disappointment. I hope to be able to rectify that soon with my husband's help in creating lasts & molds.

I gave the book 4 stars because, although the creation & design processes are detailed very thoroughly, there is a dearth of good photos of finished shoes. Many of the shoes that are shown tend to be somewhat hidden under the hem of a doll's outfit, the folds of artistically draped fabric, or the lid of a colorful candy box.

As suggestions for a second edition: If I could re-edit this book, I would add more finished shoes, add patterns for other popular fashion dolls (such as Franklin Mint vinyls,) & change the typeface font to something less fussy, with full margin justification.

This book is pretty on the inside and outside. Lots of colored photos. Plenty of photos of the shoes they have made and who they were made for. But no patterns to go with any of them except two. Very involved detailed process for making the solid shape to build your shoes upon. Brief explanations of various shoes over the centuries is nice, but don't expect to be able to design a shoe from many of the line drawings of shoes. The drawings are crude with no variations for each time period. They are not in color and mention no fabrics or popular colors for the time period. Nice glossary of tools used, shoe parts and techniques. There are 8 sources where you can purchased parts, etc. And last but not least there is a nice full page plug for the new upcoming book. I gave a three because the book is pretty, photos done nicely and process explanations were clear.

I make and design clothes for the Madame Alexander doll Cissy and have always been frustrated with the scarcity/lack of selection/high price of shoes that I can buy for this doll. So, when I saw this book advertised in one of the many doll magazines I browse monthly, I knew I had to have it. The instructions are fairly easy to follow though sometimes the photographs showing the various steps are not located on the page facing the written instruction (the sole reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5). The instructions for making a permanent last were very helpful. This book contains patterns for lasts & shoes for Cissy and Gene in particular, but the instructions and methods in this book could be applied to many dolls though I wouldn't recommend it for people wanting to make anything for Barbie. There are also instructions for making molds for heels (if you have a high-heeled doll like Cissy or Gene). Following these instructions, I successfully made my first pair of shoes, and, because I made them myself, I was able to customize them to the outfit I had made. A great book for making shoes for dolls for whom you cannot cheaply and easily buy decent shoes.