David Dodge Books

Book offers a wide range of details and styles that are described in an easy to follow format. Patterns are not difficult and user friendly.

Excellent book with beautiful pictures. Leaves plenty of room to your own creativity. Desciptions are straightforward. It's hard for me to say if it would be good for beginners, since I'm trained in dressmaking and patternmaking, but it seems easy to figure out. I can't think of any book I'd rather use when making doll clothes - it has everything.

The Dolls Dressmaker Book is the most complete pattern book I have ever found. It includes everything one could want to dress their doll. Clothes, underwear, accessories, hats, shoes. Excellent instruction information on assembly, mix-n-match pieces. Great rcommendations of trims, laces, etc. All full size patterns grouped by size, easy access in back of book.
I Very Highly recommend.

Before buying this book, I would buy patterns for doll clothes. Sometimes I bought patterns from big companies like Simplicity and sometimes I bought patterns from small outfits. Of course, they were very specific patterns for only a few outfits for only a few limited dolls. Ms. Dodge's book is like owning every pattern for every doll ever created! She provides many basic pattern pieces in a variety of sizes. It will be up to you, however, to design your doll's outfit. Don't worry--the book will show you how! You will also make your own custom pattern pieces in order to get the right fit. This book covers baby dolls, girl dolls and even boy dolls. The only doll that is not represented is the womanly-figured modern fashion doll, but once you have mastered what is covered in this book, you will be able to dress those dolls too. The author provides lots of good, detailed photos and beautiful line drawings of possible outfits to inspire you. My confidence in dressing dolls has increased a hundred-fold. Now I know that if I can dream it, I can achieve it. And you can too!

Detailed patterns, clear explanations and completed with the needed illustrations. Also some tips to modify the lengths of the patterns or to adapt the suggested model in order to create other dresses. Well done.
I was looking since a while for these kind of books till I discovered the Amazon.com and his large choice of books related to 'Dolls' dresses and furniture and am very satisfied about the quality of their service and deliveries.

Just like her other books this is a great book. If I had any problem it not being able to find some on the canvas counts (23 ct coin net.HUH? I'm just going to use 22 ct (hope no ones counting) But seriously this is a great book. Easy to understand with beautiful pictures

This is a book every miniaturist/needlework lover should have in his/her library. It's full of great projects for every room of the dollhouse. I highly reccomend it.

simply wonderful. I spent hours just looking at the pictures showing the samples. i'm looking forward to begin my first work. Great expectations for tiny masterpieces

I expected the tiny samplers & rugs, but tiny crocheted & knitted clothing?! Excellent, excellent, excellent from beginning to end! Too many wonderful things to name.

This is a wonderful book, but I'm a little wary of giving it too good a review. The projects all look great, but I found a mistake in the first project that I tried. If you work the Turkoman rug exactly as the chart, it will not turn out the same as the picture. The border, in fact, will not even be symmetrical (as the picture is). As an experienced crafter, I picked up on this and was able to correct it, but I was disappointed to find the error in the first place. I look forward to trying other projects and hope they are error-free.

Four young cowboys head into Dodge for a wild night to celebrate the end of a trail drive in a book that is very much dialogue driven to begin with. There is also a lot of humour filled conversations as these young men explore Dodge, two even visiting a Collection of Curiosities that came as a welcome addition to the story.

Yet for all the fun - such as the pink parasol scene - David Robbins manages to create an underlying sense of violence to come. This and the cliff-hanger chapter endings combining to hook this reader and thus make it a very difficult book to put down.

The characters we meet are all well drawn and likeable, even those who seem to be the bad guys. It isn't long before our four young cowboys find that Dodge isn't a town that thrives on just fun, it has a darker side into which they are unsuspectingly drawn.

This is when the tone of the book changes and the story becomes less dialogue driven and more descriptive as violence erupts. No-one is safe as death comes calling which results in a spectacular shootout as Rusty goes on a killing spree in the name of vengeance. The savagery of the final chapters of this book contrast darkly with the earlier lighter tones making for a powerful, and a times brutal, ending.

Well worth spending your hard earned dollars on.

This was a terrific western novel! Written by David Robbins, this novel tells of 4 young cowboys who get into a heap of trouble in Dodge city after a cattle drive. All the characters are different and plenty colorful. David Robbin's writing style has been a great addition for Ralph Compton fans. This is the second one I've read by him, and I can't decide which I love most. I hope he continues to write more westerns.

This is an intermediate level book. It is intended for the application developer who already has some knowledge of SQL (which implies some knowledge of what databases do) and of programming (particularly Java). For instance, the first chapter of this book is on the internal structure of Oracle. That's a long ways from the standard beginning of this is what a database does.

A thing this book is not for is the database administrator. There's very little on things like set-up, assigning users, security (there's a little on this); those kinds of administrative details. This book is, as I said at first, for developers.

The book does go heavily into programming techniques like triggers, regular expressions, object types, XML, defining your own functions -- things like that.

The authors all have extensive experience with Oracle, most of them work for or have worked for Oracle. As this series of books proclaims, this is a book written at the programmer to programmer level.

I have read all the books on Oracle and most seem pretty fluffy - lots of pages but the content is on a pretty basic level. This is the first book I have seen that really delves into the guts of Oracle - how it works, and how to program applications effectively for it. Just what I have been looking for!!!

Plunder of the Sun by David Dodge is a prime example of action-adventure writing at its best. The most remarkable aspect of this highly readable book is the utter smoothness with which the fast paced narrative unfolds.

The year is 1948 and most of the action takes place in Peru. Adventurer Al Colby does double duty as the novel's protagonist and narrator. He's come into possession of an ancient manuscript that purports to give the location of a fortune in Inca gold, silver and jewels. Only he's not the only one willing to move heaven and earth in order to find the long buried treasure, easily worth a king's ransom.

As Colby strives to out maneuver his very resourceful adversaries
there are a number of surprising plot twists, several instances of double crossing, and plenty of harrowing action. As an added bonus, Plunder of the Sun is also educational. The reader will pick up a smattering of Spanish vocabulary and learn a thing or two about Incan civilization.

Plunder of the Sun is a welcome addition to the Hard Case Crime series. Highly recommended to action-adventure aficionados.

This is an outstanding lost (and found) treasure story. In many ways it reminded me of B. Traven's classic "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre." This is a realistic, well-written, fast-moving adventure novel. And the lost treasure details are excellent and accurate. One reviewer here didn't exactly go for the Inca treasure history. That's a shame, because the history is the backbone of the story.

Highly recommended for anyone looking for a very good yarn - and while this is a great "beach book" it is quite a bit more than that, as well.

PLUNDER IN THE SUN's cover seems to tout an action packed adventure involving ancient treasure and it DOES have that. It also, however, has needless and repetitive passages about ancient Inca and how it was destroyed making it seem like you needed history lessons to understand why these guys were going plundering for the treasure. Also seemed to get pretty predictable about halfway through.

I just felt like there had to be better worldly adventure pulp out there begging to be reprinted than this mediocre offering.

First, let me say that the Hard Case Crime series is excellent. It certainly opens up the opportunity to obtain great hard boiled detective fiction from the past and the present. This book is not really a detective story, it is more of an adventure story with a hero that could have been a hard boiled detective. The formula is simple: a fortune in buried treasure and a bunch of characters that no one should trust. The author seems to want us to learn the Spanish language while we read this book. There are a lot times that he tells what something is and then gives us the Spanish word to go along with it.
Good story. Good pace.

I am not sure how one goes about the process of having a particular institution declared a national treasure, but I would love to get the ball rolling today for the Hard Case Crime imprint. Over the past several months Hard Case has published a riveting mix of reprinted and original hard-boiled, noir crime fiction in mass market paperback form, drawing readers in with out-of-print titles by familiar names such as Lawrence Block and Erle Stanley Gardner while encouraging others to take a chance on both new and under-appreciated authors and works.

PLUNDER OF THE SUN is one of those works that has fallen into undeserved obscurity, a state that will hopefully be remedied by its new incarnation in the Hard Case Crime catalog. David Dodge was a frequent and fairly prolific writer of hard-boiled fiction from 1940 through 1972. His best-known work, TO CATCH A THIEF, was adapted for film by Alfred Hitchcock. But he was also famous for a series of novels featuring detective and tax expert James "Whit" Whitney. Dodge was also a popular travel writer, and his mystery novels soon became recognized for their exotic backgrounds. Dodge created a second series of mystery novels featuring Al Colby, an American detective and fixer based in South America in general and Chile in particular. PLUNDER IN THE SUN is a Colby novel, and is a stellar example of Dodge's talents as a travel reporter and mystery writer.

At first blush PLUNDER OF THE SUN appears to be a bit of a departure from most of the fare of Hard Case Crime to date. It is more global in scope, taking place in Chile and Peru as opposed to the usual hard-boiled environs of New York or Los Angeles. There is also a bit more at stake here; instead of drugs or a bank heist, it is concerned with smuggling and buried treasure. But all of the other elements that make noir what it is --- deadly situations, treacherous men, beautiful but deadly women --- are here. Dodge transforms Colby, his itinerant soldier of fortune, into a competent stranger in a paradise where the act of turning over a rock can bring either wealth or a sudden and painful death.

PLUNDER OF THE SUN begins with Colby being retained to smuggle a mysterious package from Chile into Peru. It doesn't sound like much of a job; all that Colby has to do is take the package from his erstwhile employer, sail on a ten-day cruise to Peru, and give the package back when they land. By the time the cruise is over, however, Colby's enigmatic employer is dead and he is on the run from at least two gunmen. Even worse, he has been betrayed by two beautiful women. The package that Colby is carrying is worth more money than he can imagine, and incidentally contains the answer to one of history's greatest mysteries.

Colby can trust no one, but he doesn't know this, an element that gives the novel some added twists and turns. Additionally, the people who are trying to separate Colby from his package cannot trust one another; alliances shift and turn, with the only constant being Colby's rough sense of honor and decency. Dodge navigates his reader through a complex plot, keeping a sense of wonder present throughout the proceedings. One cannot read the book without spending at least a few moments wondering how such a work could have gone out of print for so long.

Hopefully the response to PLUNDER OF THE SUN will be such that Hard Case Crime will see fit to reprint in its distinctive format more of Dodge's works. This is a great story, by an under-acknowledged master. Highly recommended.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

The narrator and protagonist of this thoroughly entertaining tale is an American born flim-flam artist who answers to the name Curly. The fast paced narrative has the roguish Curly engaging in a number of scam operations on no less than four continents, while romancing a number of women along the way. But one of these women, the aristocratic British heiress Regina Forbes-Jones, is different than the rest. Her icy exterior hides a passion that only Curly can satisfy.

The Last Match is written using a very smooth, almost conversational style of storytelling that contributes to the book's considerable appeal. Curly's many adventures take him from the French Riviera to the Brazilian jungle and numerous points inbetween. More of a fantasy than an exercise in realism, The Last Match is great escapist fiction. Author David Dodge's good-natured sense of humor makes this book easy to like.

Fans of author David Dodge who were thrilled to see his series character Al Colby back in print with Hard Case Crime's rerelease of Plunder of the Sun are bound to be even more excited to learn that The Last Match, a new, never before published novel and Dodge's last, has been unearthed and is finally available to the public, more than 30 years after it was written.

Dodge, also the author of the novel Alfred Hitchcock used as the basis for To Catch a Thief, used pieces of his life throughout his fiction. A world traveler with his family, he alternated novels fictionalizing his trips around the world with travelogues chronicling the true events. His daughter Kendal Dodge Butler writes in the afterword to The Last Match that "I have such a well-documented childhood that at times I'm not sure whether a thing really happened or it's just something I read in a book." She also believes that Curly, this novel's hero, is simply her father "dreaming of long cons."

But whatever is true and whatever may be recycled from earlier novels (but based on real people), The Last Match is a fine example of Dodge's writing. I didn't particularly enjoy the treasure-hunt aspect of Plunder of the Sun, but the writing was impeccable, and as a fan of long-con stories like The Sting and The Girl with the Long Green Heart (another Hard Case Crime reprint), Dodge's final book was right up my alley. There's not a whole lot in the way of plot; the hero, only known as "Curly" because of his hair, is basically writing a memoir of his time traveling the world pulling cons on unsuspecting marks, and sometimes getting involved with local women.

His adventures take him to many exotic locales, each connected to the last merely by a necessary trip to the next country to escape the authorities of the one he pulled his last job in. He acts as chauffeur to the Honorable (and untouchable) Regina Forbes-Jones in France, and takes charge of a stunningly beautiful (and equally naive) honey-skinned women named Boda while writing suspect letters for Arabs in Tangier. He subsequently hitches a ride in the fire-room of a ship to Peru (after looking out for Boda's future welfare, of course -- he's hardly a cad) where he helps perpetuate a Spanish Prisoner scheme much like the Nigerian scam that permeates e-mail today (and illustrates how old that particular game is). And that's only the first 150 pages or so. On and on Curly goes and it is simply impossible to predict where he'll go or what he'll do next. Often I got the sense that Dodge wasn't even sure, that he was just letting the story go where it took him. This gives The Last Match an immediacy that is equally as fascinating as the story being told.

Which brings me to another reason I liked The Last Match better than Plunder of the Sun: this book displays the easy flow of a writer who is very comfortable behind the typewriter. You don't attempt to chronicle a period in the life of a character in detail unless you are confident in your ability to improvise at the keys. I had the feeling that the other novel was so tightly plotted in order to get the story told efficiently that there was little room for movement, and that comes through Al Colby in his gruff manner. Conversely, The voice of Curly is unforced and very natural. It poured easily off my tongue when I read it out loud to my infant son (yeah, I know, but those board books get tedious after the 37th reading!), even the most complex sentences were easy reading.

Dodge does go a little wrong with the ending of The Last Match in an attempt to give it a climax with some emotional weight, but the rest of this 315-page work (comparatively large for Hard Case Crime, but I'm not complaining) takes the reader on quite a ride. And Curly the life-long confidence artist is not a character I am likely to forget any time soon.

I have greatly enjoyed most of the books in the Hard Case Crime series, and even my least favorites are still quite good. This one was really great. Having read Dodge's other HCC book Plunder of the Sun, this was a special treat. Plunder of the Sun was written over 20 years before this book, and although it was good, was fairly restrained as far as language and innuendo went. Not so much with this book, although generally still tame by today's standards.

The story runs the gamut from humorously absurd to very serious. The character wants to try out scam after scam, often getting into trouble or barely escaping it with each attempt. And yet deep down he's a nice guy. It's a bit silly, but it actually works.

The Thirteen Match game is a nice mathematical puzzle (you'll find a variant of it in Kordemsky's book The Moscow Puzzles, as I recall), ultimately employed as a scam. You get a good explanation of it in this book, and it is one of at least a couple of places that play off of the book's title. You'll also find the Spanish Prisoner (the late 1990s movie by that name is quite good also, btw, and deals a bit with the scam, but I digress) con, and if you look closely at the letter in this book (written in 1973, mind you), you'll see remarkable "similarities" to many of the phishing scams going around by e-mail and fax - this is a very old con, and Dodge breaks it down for us beautifully.

The Afterword by his daughter was also enjoyable to read, shedding light on this excellent author who left our domain only a year after this book was written.

I don't understand why people compare this book to other Hard Case Crime offerings. Yes, it's "different" but so are many of their other books. One of the teriffic things Hard Case has done has been to introduce me to some people I was unfamiliar with: Domenic Stansberry, Seymour Shubin, and one or two others. My absolute favorite is David Dodge. Where did this guy come from? I love his writing and how the narrative flows like water, the international flavors to the story, and even the glib but less than honest voice of the protagonist.

Again, a great book by an author deserving to be discovered and cherished. All Hard Case Crime books should be this enjoyable, and most are. There's one guy who they keep publishing that isn't up to snuff (of course not Lawrence Block) and I wish they'd realize it. Other than that, for those who rate the publisher as much as their books, this one makes them shine.

Hard Case Crime aficionados should rejoice at this new offering --- an unpublished novel by David Dodge, bestselling author of IT TAKES A THIEF. Hard Case also published Dodge's lesser known but equally exciting PLUNDER OF THE SUN in 2005. THE LAST MATCH, written shortly before Dodge's death in 1974, is a bit different from his previous work and, for that matter, from most of the other Hard Case Crime entries. Nonetheless, it is an entertaining and worthwhile read.

THE LAST MATCH takes its title from a con game of the same name, and the novel concerns itself with a layabout con man who seems to have an aversion to honest work. Indeed, the nameless protagonist actually works harder being a crook than he would if he was doing something legitimate. It is doubtful, however, that a public occupation would result in exploits as interesting as those contained in THE LAST MATCH.

When we first encounter our protagonist, he is facing the wrong end of a firearm, being held by a jealous husband; the likable scoundrel is indeed busy, given that at the same time he is employed as the chaste gigolo of a wealthy dowager. It is during this time that he finds himself attracted to a young British noblewoman named Reggie, with resulting fireworks; think TAMING OF THE SHREW, with the issue of who the shrew is being debatable. Our man soon finds himself on the run from Reggie, the authorities and a gangster or two, as he hops from one continent to another, skimming and scamming as he goes.

At times the book has the feel of a series of loosely connected short stories. But just when you think Dodge is becoming predictable, he takes a sudden left turn and everything changes. There is an ending that you really won't see coming and a surprising homage to a scam that is the ancestor to the Bank of Nigeria email drop. Technology may change, but human nature does not.

THE LAST MATCH isn't quite as serious as other Hard Case Crime books, but it's an entertaining addition to the collection by an under-appreciated author who left us too early and with too little.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

Wonderful advice for someone looking to advance their career with the company they currently work for. I've applied several points from this book and have been fast-tracked for the next promotion!!! I will definitely recommend this book for anyone interested in career development.

This is a great back to basics style book. It gives simple and valuable advice on how to succeed. It is a very short read, and it's a must-have for anyone just starting out. I'd recommend it for anyone.

This little book is a quick read and very inspiring. There are simple little things that you can do to start preparing for your promotion or new job. The tips are timeless.

I've used this book as a reference on how to make clay tiles for roofing and flooring. It has other good tips on designing rooms, and information on making the furniture in the rooms. The furniture is way beyond my ability to make, but it's still a lovely book.

Venus and Martin Dodge have produced (what I feel) are the most beautiful books on the skills of making miniature scenes, dolls and accessories. My first project was the kitchen in this book. It turned out beautifully. I cannot stress enough how realistic their roomboxes are. Have a great time creating!

To start a dollhouse may seem discouraging for many people when you think about the time it takes to finish such a project. Here are the ideas how to do just one room box, but still create the atmosphere that you want in a miniature. This may inspire the beginner to really start with a project to try his/her new hobby, but it is also a great source for the advanced hobbyist to try for a real masterpiece. I can only highly recommend this book to everybody who is into 1/12 scale.

I purchased this book as part of my Mopar collection and it is very well done and worth the money.

Out of 63 photo's of Cudas, the Author only gives 14 shots to Challengers. If you need a reference to Challengers there are better books out there.

This is a cool little book, I really like it. I enjoyed the way the story of these cars is told in this book and there are some nice photos, but at less that 100 pages its over too quick. It's not a necessity for all but the the most diehard fans of these models. Its still a good value considering the cheap price tag, and if you are like me, you cant get enough of the Mopar E-Body.

This is an excellent coffee table book. It is the newest book on these cars. There are many cars that have not been previously photographed within this book. Good reference material for a restoration.

Marvin is a kid who tries to do what is right, but somehow his actions get him into trouble! He likes a girl at school and tries to stay away from the school bully. He makes promises and then cannot keep them. He tells a lie that grows and grows!