Quake Books

Like the first book in the Disaster Zone series, "In the Eye of the Tornado," this is an exciting story with heroes young readers can relate to. Brothers Adam and Stieg race against time and a mysterious enemy to warn people of an impending earthquake; the urgency of their mission will leave readers as breathless as the latest high-budget disaster movie does. Unlike so many cartoons, movies, and other entertainment for boys, however, the protagonists here don't posture fearlessly or thrill to violence without apparent consequences. And unlike so much entertainment for boys, this book includes a smart, determined woman without whom the boys' mission will fail.

With good humor and emotional maturity, the two protagonists of this sequel to "In the Eye of the Tornado" tackle the cataclysmic consequences both of earthquakes and of growing up. I recommend reading the two books in order, though "In the Heart of the Quake" can stand on its own. This series packs in the action and suspense without the gratuitous violence or mindless machismo of so many TV cartoons, movies and books aimed at boys.

My 11 year-old son loved this series. The minute he finished the first one, we had to go out and get the second one. We are both eagerly anticipating the third book. It's nice to have a series that boys can relate to!

A horrible Earthquake is tearing Stieg apart. It is up to Adam and Stieg to save San Fran. Agent Tagget finds out where they are and holds them at gun point. Stieg runs away to a near by carnival and thats were the EARTHQUAKE hit's. To find out the end READ THE BOOK

SURVIVING SERENDIPITY
JACQUELYN SYLVAN

Rating: 4 Enchantments



June didn't expect much from her twenty-first birthday, all she wanted was a night out with her two best friends and fiancé Kyle. But when she returns home alone from a rather depressing night out, she could never imagine what would be waiting for her or how very life changing a guy dressed like an extra from the 'Pirates of The Caribbean' could be when he whisks her away to a whole new world, one that everyone there expects her to save.

June's a very fun, likeable character. A definite fish out of water story, June must learn to deal very quickly with the information thrown at her. Nothing in her life was what it seemed and now she must accept who she really is and step into a life she never expected, all to save a world she doesn't know.

The scene that sticks out in my head long after finishing SURVIVING SERENDIPITY takes place quite early in the book when June has just been transported to her new world. Waking up in a foreign room, she follows the sound of voices to find a group of blue men around the kitchen table, with the now familiar pirate/genie right there with them. I so loved this scene because it's where June starts to learn the truth about herself, that she isn't who she thinks she is and in a laugh out loud moment, that she isn't speaking English like she thinks she is, she's speaking fluently in a whole other language she never knew existed.

Ms. Sylvan creates a very unique, very detailed world in which to set SURVIVING SERENDIPITY. I look forward to reading more from this talented debut author.

You can visit Ms. Sylvan online at her website, [...]

Lisa
YA Director
Enchanting Reviews
April 2008

I loved this book. A wonderful fantasy sprinkled with a little romance. Bringing all the mythical creatures and stories we've all heard about to life. I couldn't put it down.

I loved it. The author paints such vivid pictures that you can see them very clearly. I enjoyed the strong female story line. I cant wait to read the sequel or better yet seen this on the wide screen.This is one author I will keep on my list of must reads.

June lives a nice comfortable middle class life as she approaches her twenty-first birthday. She expects a little celebration with her friends Ashleigh and Shannon, and her fiancé Kyle, but nothing life changing. She is disappointed that Kyle could not get out of a late meeting.

However, when a somewhat tipsy June enters her unlit apartment after designated driver Ashleigh drops her off, someone wearing purple pants that belonged in a Johnny Depp swashbuckler or a genie is in her kitchen. The stranger abducts her although June has no idea why as she has no one can pay a ransom to free her. She quickly realizes no one she knows has the technology to pay a ransom as her kidnapper takes her across the galaxy to on the planet Thallafrith where she is the only surviving member of the royal family that has ruled the kingdom of Prendawr. Her people expect Princess June to use the magical skills she did not know she had to save the day. With the guidance of Halryan the sorcerer and the nearly extinct blue warriors, June feels so unready to fight the evil that is destroying her new old world.

This is a fabulous young adult sci-fi novel that is much more complex than the above paragraphs describe as the heroine learns how relative truth is to the beholder. Everyone seems to have a personal agenda while interpreting events to foster the achievement of that objective regardless of side effects on others. June is great as a displaced person wondering how she fell through the rabbit hole from being a young American whose worst fear is butt growth to being a world savior mage with enemies who want her dead. SURVIVING SERENDIPITY is a superb story as June just wanted a little excitement in her life.

Harriet Klausner

Doug Herman goes to my church. His testimony and the Lord helped me become saved. This book is worth it!

Faith Quake is powerful and rich - in a concise, easy-to-read format. The author's personal struggles deem him credible for this subject. Section One: Surviving Tragedy, and Section Two: Rebuilding after Tragedy are very well edited and usable. I personally love the "First Aid Tools" and "Rebuilding Tools" located throughout the book. I bought 3 for my friends who definitely need this

Faith Quake is not just Doug Herman's telling of a tragic story- this book offers help and hope unlike any current book of this topic. The sensitivity and compassion that flows is healing in itself. The first-aid and rebuilding tools are practical and helpful words to look at each day. Many across the nation will benifit (as I did) from the tender encouragement found between the pages

At last, the book we've all searched for...Soul Quake...poetry by Tamara Hamilton. It is powerful beyond measure, exhilarating and compelling. It holds you captive. It sets you free. It takes you on a journey that allows you to see, hear and experience a soul quake. I couldn't put down.

Odessa Taylor, Educator

These are soul-shaking poems---a sincere, sensuous, and insightful depiction of human life and feelings!

Tamara captures the span of life's journey. Her writing brings me into stillness and power, deep energy flows.

I thought this book of poetry had a sense of very raw emotion. Some poems made me laugh, some made me cry, and more so some made me empowered. In these poems Joelle puts her thought and life into these poems. She writes about real feelings and when reading many of them I found I had to stop and process. There is deep thought and emotion in this book.
This book could used in several classroom setting as well as inspire you or your friends to dive into what it is like to live the life of a transamazon.

Gender Quake is a book of revolutionary poems that explores what it means to be a transgendered individual in America. Joelle Ruby Ryan, a self-styled 6'6" transgender warrior, bares her soul in this collection of poems which is at turns humorous, poignant, searing and deeply passionate. From the ashes of loneliness, rage, and despair, Ryan charts an emotional trajectory which jolts readers into confronting their own shared humanity with differently-gendered people. Ryan covers topics as diverse as feminism, porn, passing, violence, activism and the urgent need for solidarity across lines of identity and difference. While the book explores the darkest corners of a life marred by pain, discrimination and self-hatred, it also repeatedly calls upon hope, love and justice as the primary correctives for imagining a better world. Gender Quake will shock you, educate you and most of all move you to join the fight for a gender revolution.
"So World, take note: the Gender Quake is ready to activate, and the whirl is gonna be blissful, and divine, and unstoppable."

If you loved quake and love the evil feel of the game, make you own feel of the game!! This helps you make you own world! This book is a must buy after you beat Quake and want more then just deathmatchs!

This book has opened a whole new world to me. I have designed numerous maps (specifically for the Painkeep mod.) and play them on the LAN at my office every day at lunch. My targets, I mean co-workers :), love to make suggestions about the placement of items, lighting, etc. and I can make them a reality easily, tweaking the maps we play till they rock! If you would like to play a couple of my best maps E-mail me. You'll love this book, I couldn't put it down for almost two weeks straight!

I took a chance when ordering this book but it turned out the very best book on the subject. This book has both order and a extremely well thought out plan. Both Scientific and reaches to common sense, which Barbara courageously enters into. I don't care what type of rehabilitaion you offer, this book will help. By all means. Also read Mad Light by Karl Mark Maddox

Love the book. OTA students and all OTs this is a great goal writing book !!

I found this book extremely helpful while writing my report on earthquakes. Being one of the survivors of this earthquake, I found this book to be something to remember it by. It's great to flip through the pages and look at the pictures and say, "Hey! I know where that is!" I recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject.

Susan Hough, rising star of the southern California earthquake science scene, and Roger Bilham, professor extraordinaire from the University of Colorado Boulder, have given us a very different earthquake book in _After the Earth Quakes: elastic rebound on an Urban planet_. Hough and Bilham focus primarily on historical earthquakes for which no instrumental readings exist and for which researchers must use anecdotal and often flawed "felt reports" and pre-photographic damage surveys to reconstruct the events surrounding an earthquake. The authors show us how the seismic sciences advanced with each new devastating earthquake, starting with the great Lisbon earthquake [and tsunami and fire] of 1755. The book is more or less chronological through chapter 8 and then splays off like a complex fault zone into more topical chapters [tsunamis, Los Angeles]. The book is both optimistic - the use of the term elastic rebound metaphorically to refer to how humans usually react [positively and generously] after a destructive earthquake - and pessimistic - even though scientists long ago internalized the idea that Nick Ambraseys summarizes with the quote "Earthquakes don't kill people, buildings do!", urban humanity may bring on even bigger disasters by failing to enact or ignoring well-designed building codes [often after the cold calculations of a cost-benefit analysis].

In my opinion, by focusing on earthquake intensity [as measured on the modified Mercalli scale using "felt reports" and damage surveys], _After the Earth Quakes_ is a great companion piece to other earthquakes books that focus on geophysics and earthquake magnitude [as measured on the Gutenberg-Richter scale]. I learned my earthquake theory at Penn State, but I've done my earthquake field work as a resident of southern California, where I've seen smaller quakes like the M5.9 Whittier Narrows earthquake do major damage and larger earthquakes like the M7.3 Landers quake and the M7.1 Hector Mine quake do little to no damage. It is hard not to resonate deeply with _After the Earth Quakes_ when one lives in a state that still has unreinforced masonry buildings in earthquake zones over a hundred years after we first figured out that they don't stand up to strong ground shaking.

I highly recommend _After the Earth Quakes_ to any reader with an interest in earthquakes and history and I think it should be mandatory reading for all politicians, civil engineers, and city planners.

In a simple, unpretentious, and totally accessible style, Murakami tells six tales, each with a message about life and death and love and loss. Simple, straightforward stories, haunting and hypnotic in tone, belie a complexity of themes and thought-provoking observations about the importance of creating your own identity, building relationships, sharing, and avoiding the emptiness of the "bogeyman's" box, "ready for everybody...[and] waiting with the lid open."

All the main characters are single or separated, and all feel isolated and empty, naïve in matters of love and life. In "UFO in Kashiro," an abandoned husband agrees to help a friend by delivering a box to Hokkaido, learning that the box "contains the something that was inside you. You'll never get it back." In "Landscape in Flatiron," a 40-ish artist and a young girl meet and build a bonfire. "The fire itself has to be free," he remarks, while the young girl comments on the emptiness of her life. In "All God's Children Can Dance," a young man pursues the man he believes to be his father to an abandoned baseball field, "chasing the tail of the darkness inside [him]." "Thailand" features a doctor in her 40's who is told that she must get rid of the stone inside her and that "living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value."

In the last two stories, "Superfrog Saves Tokyo," and "Honey Pie," Murakami begins to offer more hope and direction to his characters. Superfrog, a 6' tall frog who needs a plodding banker to help him fight the Worm and save Tokyo from an earthquake, teaches that "the ultimate value of our lives is decided not by how we win but by how we lose." And in "Honey Pie," which brings all these themes together, a young man has an opportunity to find happiness with the only woman he's ever loved and her young daughter.

Despite the fact that Murakami states his themes overtly, the stories themselves are enigmatic and the action unpredictable, and the reader will ponder his meanings and his images long after the stories are finished. Wonderful descriptions, small details which reflect the characters' class and educational level, sympathetic and well drawn characters, and a sense that the world is absurd and illogical make this short collection memorable. pp Mary Whipple