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I wrote this little story in 1985. It's a story based on memories of my childhood in Louisiana where I lived with my family in Camp Polk. The area was a magical place populated with wonderful families, all living life and enjoying it to the fullest. It was a wonderful place to be a child. We never experienced the likes of a Katrina, or even something smaller...but we had muggy days that ended with a crescendo of lightening and thunder that rattled the rafters. It was glorious! Little did I know that my favorite place would be punished in such a way as we've seen with Katrina. I'm so surprised and glad to see the story still being read and I hope, enjoyed.

My girlfriend read this - she actually enjoyed it so much and it boosted her self-confidence so much, that she put her pic up on this site called HotFlation (www.hotflation.com) where people around the country rate your picture. So I guess that's an endorsement!!

When Paige Holbrook needed help to bring her son out of a
coma, she turned to his favorite children's TV character,
Bidwell Bear. Rather, she turned to the actor who portrayed the dancing bear.
Hunter Blackwell, the man in the bear costume, granted
Paige's request, though reluctantly. He wanted to give up the
beloved character for a popular recording career. Paige guarded
herself against another disappointment, as her ex-husband had
spent his life in the spotlight as a popular NFL player.
Ginny McBlain's book will make the reader laugh in
places, cry in others, and reach for the tissues--lots of them--
when the time comes. It's good old-fashioned romance, and this
one is as good as it gets.

A series of story-like pieces about life in the center of Illinois. Bradway is excellent at getting to the central truth of incidents and relationships. Particularly compelling are the pieces that deal with her family and their relationship to the rest of the human world. Also a compelling and dark story about the effect of industrial pollution on the river system. Pieces about rock and roll and experiences of the midwesterner outside of the midwest (LA, NYC). A beautiful stylist Bradway brings a caring perspective to her subjects. The essays are personal without that becoming the reason for the words.

This book is fun reading if you are in any way interested in the law and especially how the Supreme Court works. It is never dry and lives up to the standards we have come to expect from Ms. Greenhouse.

I work with a lot of school leavers and people outside IT and often have to advise them on how to empower themselves in IT in the right way. Surely SQL and databases are one of the first topics people should understand. HTML was also high on the list. With this book, the author has combined all of them in one making it a very relevant combination for today's beginner. I will recommend this book to school leavers, financial people and people outside IT wanting to empower themselves quickly. Another great advantage of XML and databases is the platform independence. Very well done to the author for combining these topics at the entry level in such an easiliy understandable way!

Hidden in issue ten of volume 15 of this RBOC Update is possibly the most gripping 500 word essay documenting the tireless work of Bellsouth, relentless missionaries of The Real Yellow Pages.

There can be only one Real Yellow Pages according to Thomas Gale. This slyly dry tale of banishing the pagan "Talking Phone Book" from the greater Louisville area literally had me in tears; frightful, horrible tears. Of Joy. To see the word of the Real Yellow Pages reach each and every corner of that godforsaken land.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. + 449 pp. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $19.95 - Swartz attempts the commendable task of motivating nonprofessional philosophers to engage in the activity of identifying and criticizing their own metaphysical theories. He does this first by explaining what a metaphysical theory is and how to evaluate it, and second by examining the plausibility of various theories concerning space, time, properties, synchronic identity, diachronic identity, and personal identity. A professional philosopher will find it easy to read. An upper-level undergraduate or beginning graduate student would, I imagine, find it challenging at times but readable. There is a glossary of technical terms, further readings suggested, bibliographical references, a name index, and a subject index at the end of the book.

Swartz lays out the currently-popular approach to metaphysics used by analytically-trained philosophers, that is, the testing of our intuitions in counterfactual situations. He claims that if we are to learn which metaphysical theories are better than others, we must go beyond what scientific theories are limited by, namely, experience. He shows convincingly that scientific theories are imbedded with metaphysical theories which cannot themselves be adjudicated using experience (or observation) alone. Moreover, there is no mechanical way to decide between metaphysical theories. One simply has to test these theories using conceptual analysis on a case by case basis. Swartz's understanding of conceptual analysis, then, involves analyzing a concept in counterfactual situations. That is, one has to ask whether a logically consistent story could be told such that the story would make sense of a particularly odd use of a term. If so, then one has found out that a commonly-accepted use for a term is not necessarily, that is, metaphysically, the correct use for that term, but is only contingently the correct use.

Swartz then examines briefly (which is surprising in a 449-page book) various metaphysical theories concerning what space is, what time is, what a property is, what synchronic identity is, what diachronic identity is, and what being a person is. He suggests, but does not argue, that a negative theory of space, for example, is more plausible than a positive theory. That is, he suggests that a metaphysical theory which reduces talk of "space" to talk of physical objects without remainder is more plausible than a theory which posits the existence of space in addition to physical objects. He suggests, but again does not argue, that realism as opposed to conceptualism, nominalism, and a theory of tropes, is most plausible, although reluctantly so. This reluctance stems from, I think, his preference for negative theories in general. He then suggests that positive theories concerning synchronic identity just push the problem back one step, and do not solve the problem. On the other hand, negative theories do solve the problem. The same suggestion is made with respect to positive theories concerning diachronic identity and personal identity. In other words, the problems of individuation, identity through time, and personal identity are not solved by positing the existence of some additional kind of thing, called "substance." These problems are just postponed.

I found this book interesting to read. Swartz introduces and motivates nicely some metaphysical problems and some of the main metaphysical theories which have been proposed to solve them. However, his philosophical methodology will look more like a "language game" than a hard-nosed search after truth. This, I believe, makes his goal of motivating the nonprofessional philosopher difficult to achieve. Such a reader, in turn, may be left with the feeling that metaphysics is all "ivory tower" stuff, which, as Swartz agrees, it is not.

Sawyer was acquitted in the murder trial of Cathy Anne Cranston, the daughter of a flamboyant televangelist. Though Mara Taylor felt sure Holden was innocent of the charges, someone else felt both of them were guilty, someone who was sending the rash of threatening messages, causing car "accidents" and littering dead bodies around them? Donna K. Smith's gripping mystery is full of bright dialogue, interesting plot twists and outrageous characters which would make the hardest of detectives blush. Parts of this book are not for the squeamish, but they are for readers who like a fine balance of romance, suspense and faith.

$5.95 for a one-page review of "Big Jabe" in a magazine? Look, I'll GIVE you my review for free, and it has more words (760) than the one you pay for! Here it is:

"Now when I look upon BIG JABE, he certainly was born out of a great need. But, he also symbolizes a wish fulfillment and the desire a nine-year-old girl expressed long ago. My formal introduction to the subject of slavery in the United States came in elementary school. I was horrified. I still am. I wanted to 'do something' for those 'people who were treated as slaves.' May Big Jabe bring us all to the pear tree." Jerdine Nolen thus explains (on her website) how she first felt when confronted with the fact of slavery. "Big Jabe" is her adult attempt to deal with that horror, to honor the slaves, and to give something hopeful to her readers.

She succeeds through a mythic tale that combines themes from Moses and the American John Henry. It's like a fairy tale: There are bad guys and victims, an improbable hero, and a magical resolution. Yet, looming throughout is one's knowledge that the brutality she describes actually happened. By explaining the slaves' escape though Big Jabe's superhero qualities, she personifies the means of their deliverance, yet maintains enough distance that children won't be overwhelmed.

Because the plot is so thoroughly described in the other Amazon.com Big Jabe reviews, I'll just touch on the major points, especially those that parallel motifs found in the Bible. Like Moses, Jabe is discovered in a river. Here, it's a young woman--the brave Addy. In the opening scene, the young boy displays the power of a Biblical hero, as he simply commands scores of fish to jump out of the river: 'Fish, fish, where is you, fish? Jump to the wagon like Miss Addy wish!'" Later nicknamed fish-boy, the man-child Jabe "opened his little-boy mouth and laughed a big man-sized laugh." He also plants a pear tree (Addy takes a bit of pear, and calls it "the fruit of heaven"); that tree figures prominently later in the story.

Although Jabe's strength (single-handedly clearing acres of cotton, building houses, and making "Plenty Plantation as good as its name") equals the work of several slaves, Nolen shows that the owner and overseer aren't content with prosperity--there's a power relationship to preserve. "But as the slaves looked forward to the first soft sleep of their lives [because of the extra cotton that Jabe secretly gave them for their beds], Mr. Sorenson was boiling over. With Jabe doing all the work, just who was he supposed to oversee anyway?"

Kadir Nelson ("ellington Wasn't Always a Street") is a magnificent illustrator, and his large dramatic scenes capture the opposing forces of Jabe and the slave-owners. In another Bible-inspired segment, Jabe creates a tremendous storm, so strong it lifts livestock hundreds of feet into the air, and under its cover a man (who was whipped the night before) and his family escape. That particularly violent storm recalls the plagues besetting the Egyptian slaves owners of the Old Testament; another rainy storm references Noah and the flood. The fury of the storms, along with the life-giving powers of the peach tree, soon enable every slave on the plantation to escape, including Addy, shackled in chains by the suspicious owners.

The book has scenes of violent force and torturous mistreatment, such as the cows flung up in the air and Addy chained inside a smokehouse, but Nelson doesn't show us the aftermath. Very young children may be either thrilled or a little frightened by these spectacles, but the magical elements of Big Jabe and the pear tree keep the more horrible realities at a distance. (It's not exactly clear what the pear tree does, although it makes an old horse younger, and Nolen implies that it's the departure place for the escaping slaves.)

Nolen and Nelson manage to neither minimize slavery nor explicitly picture its bloody truth. Similarly, while every slave on this plantation escapes, Nolen doesn't facilely plant a happy conclusion. Jabe leaves the plantation, "though he turned up at different times in different places throughout the South. And everywhere he did, burdens were lifted." Nolen brings the reader closer to the story as well, by framing her historic myth with a contemporary girl who stands with her grandmother on the very same riverbank where Addy found Jabe, under the same pear tree that they planted. Nolan's exciting story and heavy use of dialogue, along with Nelson's masterful larger-than-life pictures, completely engage the reader. The mythic aspect shows the power of fantasy and hope; adults may want to pair this book with age-appropriate historical or biographical material for balance and contrast. Nolen and, especially, Nelson have informative websites for those interested in their other work.