Sally Field Books

I was fooled when I read the back cover and Scott Tinley's recommendation. The book is total fluff. Ms. Edwards tries so hard to cover everything, she ends up covering nothing in any worthwhile detail. I spent less money on the Triathlete's Training Bible by Joe Freil and it was worth so much more. For beginner triathletes, there are much better books. (Swim/Bike/Run by Wes Hobson and even Triathlon 101) For current triathletes looking to improve, stick with Joe Freil's Bible.

I became hooked on this book when I did my first Triathlon last autumn. I felt it gave me the information I needed and the upbeat way it was presented just added to my excitement. I can tell that the author is completely in love with triathlon and wants to see others have the same kind of fun she does. I keep this book handy and have referred to it several times this spring as I train for the three tri's I plan to do this summer. The book is my main triathlon reference and I very much recommend it.

As a newby to the sport it was nice to read a book that gave me an overview of what I could expect. I had only done 2 races when I read this book and it really helped me understand what I was doing right and wrong. If you want an overview of the sport and are planning to do your first race this is a MUST BUY!!

Sally does a great job of explaining all the ins/outs of the sport and provides a good base of knowledge. She provides resources to more information on specific subjects which is helpful.

For both the novice and the experienced, this book offers triathletes all they need to know to finish the race ahead of the pack. There's detailed information on how to rate yourself physically in swimming, bicycling, and running and refine your skills at each; how to improve fitness for peak performance; develop a training program; keep a training log; cope with hazards and avoid injury; select the right apparel and equipment; eat properly in training and during the race; and condition the "mental muscle" as well as your heart--There is a great section on training using your heart rate monitor that is particularly informing for those just getting started with a heart rate monitor--all in all, I thought it was very complete, precise and to the point--Lots of good tips and helpful information for the Newbie and more experienced. I keep it handy for referencing and recommend it to those who are new to the sport or looking for ways to improve.

"When you identify birds by name, they feel like friends."

That is Sally Roth's assertion noted on the back of her very pleasant book, The Backyard Bird Lover's Field Guide. If you are accustomed to the usual suspects utilized for bird identification, such as the Peterson's guide or Sibley's, Roth's work will give you a refreshing, simple alternative. And if you're a novice birder, it's just what you need.

Roth begins by describing a bit of bird-watching history along with personal reasons on how and why one should pursue such an activity. She writes with a casual, light-hearted style that makes it seem like you're reading notes from a familiar acquaintance. The large number of vivid photographs adds additional life to her homespun tales.

The author gets to heart of solving the avian identification riddle by describing specific geographic regions around the United States detailed with native birds in mind. The information is especially handy for those who enjoy traveling or are just curious about common bird populations around the country.

The book provides easy directions for identifying a variety of well-known species. What are your "First Impressions" of the bird in question? "Details, details," and "Listen up!" are just a few of the categories one should consider. Roth even tells us what seeds they will eat from birdfeeders and the types of vegetation they prefer. Each page is capped off with a short recollection or insight of the featured bird.

The focus and style of Sally Roth's field guide make this a valued addition to any bird lovers collection. It may be slanted to newcomers, but it's a great way for anyone to become friends with the birds.


Reviewer: Gene Berger

Great little book - easy to identify all the backyard birds I have right
in my back yard!

I was getting a book to try to teach my daughter, 10, to pitch. This book was very helpful. It broke the whole process of pitching down into steps that were managable to learn. She had a positive experience with it. It also goes on to more difficult tasks after you master some of the most basic maneuvers. There are drills at the back to work specific parts of the pitch. I highly recommend this book.

The book "The Twilight Seas" by Sally Carrigher was a terrific book. It was a very descriptive book. I really liked it. It is aboout a baby whale and the first crucial moments of his life. It is also about the migration routes and how careful the whale had to be when people were allowed to hunt them. I recommended this book to any person young (no younger than about 10) or old that really enjoys learning about animals and how they live. But it did have some unexcting points. Some times it was on a subject too long and it lost my interest sometimes. It used very advanced vocabulary that I didn't understand.

There are so many good running books. Don't waste your time with this poor effort. Ms. Pont's prose is passable but she has no feel for the sport of cross country. A very poor effort.

The story lines that make up this book are interesting, and the development of the team and individual student-athletes during the season makes the book a worthwhile read. Still, I found the author's relentless overuse of adverbs and adjectives almost unbearable at times. There is almost no event too trivial to be overdescribed. I would encourage the author to "think Hemingway" in the future, because sometimes less is more. I do not mean this criticism to be overly harsh, and perhaps for younger readers -- and by that I mean students, not middle-aged former runners like me -- the stylistic elements that annoyed me wouldn't be a concern. I have a son who's an aspiring runner, and he enjoyed the book, so maybe it's best suited for readers close to the age of the students the author teaches and coaches.

As a cross country coach and runner, I found this book appealing on several levels. It is an easy read and it shows the joys of running to run, not just to win. The style was very descriptive, but it gave a unique and original twist to the book. That is one thing about distance runners . . . they all have a unique and original twist!

Great topic, but I wish she'd written more like a coach and less like an English teacher. Does every runner on her team have blue shadows for muscles? Not a complete waste of time, but pretty close.

What a wonderful book!

Sally Pont truly captures the pain and glory of running in this elegant portrait of the Moravian Academy co-ed cross-country team. If you've confronted and embraced the daunting task of running at any time in your life--especially on a competetive level--you will love Sally Pont. As an extremely involved coach and teacher, Pont takes us on a journey through the fall cross-country season, showing us the changes in the leaves and the obstacles her athletes encounter as they continually ask themselves: Why run?

Surprisingly, this book is not just about or for the runners. Reaching into her bag of literary treats, the English teacher in Pont emerges as she looks lovingly at her athletes and compares them to Shakespearean characters or analyses the team in terms of Greek mythology. Her writing is lyrical and beautiful; even for those who have never run a mile, this book is inspirational in the pure feeling that Pont puts into her prose.

In glorious detail, she describes the ins and outs of training for a 5 kilometer race (3.1 miles), the struggle for improving a personal time, and the team effort that is its own ultimate reward at the end of the day. Through Pont, the reader shares in this experience as we find ourselves cheering through each winning race and empathizing with the disappointment of defeat.

An inspiring read for both runner and non-runner alike--I highly recommend Sally Pont's book for all readers!

This book could have been much better. First, it is full of factual errors (many noted by other reviewers here). Those errors should have been caught before the book was published. Second, Ms. Pont leaned much too heavily on the metaphors she introduced in her chapter titles (e.g., "Irony," "Knowing," "Full Circle," "Luck"), and so hammered the reader with them, under the flimsiest of pretexts, that it at times felt like reading a freshman term paper. That problem might have been resolved with another draft or two. Finally, the book would have felt more structured if the author had focused more tightly on the amazing streak of Miami of Ohio coaches (Gillman, Hayes, Parseghian, Pont, Schembechler, Mallory) and not pursued tangents with other members of the "brotherhood of Ohio coaches."

But I still fully enjoyed the book, because Ms. Pont's affection for her subjects is contagious. And because she seemed to pull warmth out of those subjects that other writers do not necessarily find.

So I recommend the book to anyone who loves college football. But I do wish it were better.

I had been wanting to pick up this book for some time and finally did. It is a far cry from Junction Boys and The Undefeated, mainly because it lacks some detail. Possibly there could have been more of the interaction of the coaches and their players (Woody's Boys is a good example). I was lost at some times about the actual occurrences because it seemed somewhat disjointed at times. I found the twilight section to be somewhat interesting, but could there not been some emphasis on the middle of these coaches careers a little more? The early sense I had of the book was the significance of Miami as the "Cradle of Coaches" but that seemed to be lost in the significance of these individuals being from Ohio. More coaches could have been added - possibly more on Doyt Perry at BG, Dr. Lee Tressell, Earle Bruce (Ohio born and bred), and others. I did not like the use of backward scores (lost to . . . 17-20). To people who follow sports heavily that is a silly way to list the scores. Also the author and publisher might have wanted to check details. Pont writes on page 119 that Ohio State lost to Colorado 27-10 in the 1976 Orange Bowl. I remember that game and it seemed to me that OSU pushed the Buffs all over the field . . . and according to a 2001 OSU football program, Ohio State won that game 27-10. Future re-printings should reflect that correction.

Every coach, college football history fan should read this book. This is a manual for every coach on how to coach and act. The best college football history book I have read. You can learn a lot about how to live life, coach, and work.

A very cute but very very short book - keep in mind it only has 32 pages and it is one long strip, as opposed to most other books, which are nice collections of daily strips.

This is a great book for five year olds who are starting to learn about the use of sarcasm. Very funny and engaging. My son actually quotes this book!

Formerly of Washington, D.C., I couldn't resist reading this lighthearted romp into Sally Quinn's world of entertaining. I don't believe Quinn wanted to write a book that laid out clear "do's and don'ts" á la Judith Martin, but instead wanted to lead by example - sharing stories of her party successes and misfires. Some of the stories are absolutely priceless, especially the ones involving Colin Powell. Quinn stresses overall the Golden Rule of Hostessing: treat others as you would want to be treated. Another one of my favourite tips is "no matter how bad the food is or what disaster befalls you in the kitchen, when all else fails, make sure you have plenty of booze on hand, and the party won't be a total bomb." So very, very true.

If you have some down time in your own world of adventurous entertaining, pick up this book and settle in for a good time.

I live in Bermuda and picked this book up at our local "high end" charity thrift shop for a dollar. Being from Virginia, I thought "Why not? - I entertain quite a bit, perhaps she'll have some pointers." Well, this book was SO funny, SO GOOD that I took it to six different countries with me while reading it. I got to the final four chapters, left it in the hospital accidentally, and am now frantic to find another one. I read parts of it to my hubby, and being a non-hostess-like, rugby playing Canadian - HE even found it funny!!! This book is PERFECT for us retired old sorority girls that still believe in crystal wine glasses, cloth napkins, and a proper dining room. - Would love to get all her books and meet her!

I entertain a lot so I bought this book thinking in was a guide to entertaining.I am not from the USA so I didn't have a clue who this women was I also hadn't heard of half the people she mentioned.I found the book boring and thought that Mizz Quinn was a big headed bore.There are many good books out there on Entertaining but this is NOT one of them

OK, so it's not an etiquette book, nor is it a step-by-step party guide. The lessons are given via examples -- and what examples! The rich and famous -- including Sally herself -- are all grist for the mill.

But the key factor is Sally's breezy writing style. It's good enough that I am back on Amazon looking for other books she has authored.

The title of this book implies that it's a how-to-guide to throwing a great party. You do get a few tips here and there, but this book serves mainly for Sally Quinn to name drop, describe the fun parties she's hosted, and generally tell you how terrific she is. Sally Quinn was the style editor for the Washington Post; her husband is Ben Bradlee, the famous Washington Post editor during Watergate, the Pentagon Papers and a number of other significant historical events. The tone of this book is lighthearted, and many of the stories are quite funny. After a while, though, I got tired of reading about "when Hillary and Bill came over one time," or "when all these Senators and Representatives were at our house," or "when we hosted this fabulous dinner party and everyone in Washington was talking about it for weeks." The tone of this book was too self-congratulatory for me to fully enjoy it.

a sanitized justification for the experiment. While I enjoyed the insights gained, I was much more interested in the human interaction, foibles, fights and sex among the human participants. A long space voyage and colonization requires humans to interact with humans. How did they cope, little on this subject. Great experiment, to bad it is not being continued as this will be our outpost on the moon. David Doremus

I've always been fascinated by the Biosphere 2 project, especially the concept of 8 people living solely on food grown in the project's half-acre agricultural area for two years. It's a pretty remarkable achievement, and that's what 'Eating In' is about. Nothing in here about the personality disputes that went on inside the biosphere; if that's your interest check out 'The Human Experiment' by biospherian Jane Poynter. This one's about FOOD.

Silverstone's book is kind of a quick look at the whole process of B2's food system, from growing the crops and raising and slaughtering the animals, to processing the food and preparing it for the table. About half the book is descriptions of the food system, and half is recipes. Some really good color pictures help give a feel for what life was like inside the biosphere,and the tremendous amount of work the biospherians had to do to stay fed. I enjoyed 'Eating In'; my only fault with it is that it's WAY too short -- I would have preferred a much more in-depth look at B2's ag system than what I found here, but I found this book great as far as it goes.

Author Helgeson, a Harper's magazine contributor spent a year in 1979 interviewing the three generations of surviving Texas "wildcat" independent oil producers and delivers a servicable book about men such as "Monty" Moncrief, Clint Murchison, and Sid Richardson and their post WW2 offspring who continued the practice of exploration without conglomerate sanction. If you want a snapshot of the indie oil & gas business circa 1980, this will do. Reads like an expanded feature magazine article, which is appropriate to the subject.