Reminiscing Books

A good mix of humor and the terror of surviving in WW II Leningrad. Not a top-tier novel, but one that reads smoothly, moves quickly and holds one's interest.

One of the better books I've read in a long time. On par with "Kite Runner", this novel also provides historical background. Like others, I read this in two sittings and was saddened that it had to end. A book that creates such vivid pictures as this does is a treasure. Enjoy!

The great storytellers like Singer, Twain, and O'Henry, always seemed to write invisibly. They served story so strongly, that it was easy to get lost in their powers. David Benioff serves us just such a feast in "City of Thieves". These days, it is so rare to read a book where the author is confident and skilled enough to step back from the craft of writing. He is clearly in control, but his deftness allows a great yarn to simply capture the reader. The richness of word is palpable, yet Benioff is so comfortable in his skin, that story never serves writer. The themes are so universal that this work transcends a war story, a coming of age story, and a love story. It is simply about the human spirit, and how in our most difficult moments perhaps we live our most fully.
There is no greater thrill for a reader, than to witness a writer "become". "City of Thieves" is that moment for David Benioff. Not only is it great literature, but it is one terrific "read".

This book was really excellent. I enjoy reading WWII novels, and this one is one of the finest I've read. All the characters are well written and the dialogue between Lev and Kolya is witty and entertaining. The author does a great job describing the cold and the conditions in which Leningrad's residents lived during the siege, without making it a "bummer" of a story to read.

The premise--finding a dozen eggs--is a crazy one, but when you consider the conditions in which the characters are searching, it seems plausible. The people and sites they encounter along the way are believable and entertaining, just like the main characters.

I highly recommend this book. It was very, very good.

In City of Thieves David Benioff sets his characters off on an absurdist quest: to find a dozen eggs in a frozen, starving war zone. Along the way the readers are treated to a detailed treatise on the meaning of survival, friendship, and hope, all of it dressed up in a story that is deftly plotted and wonderfully described. This is a novel you don't want to miss.

I'm quite impressed with the author's memories of her mother and how she uses that as a base to help others get in touch with their own loss. Writing down family stories is so valuable to the one recalling the memories and to others in the family who read them. Remembering food, our mother's activities in the kitchen, what we shared together there... these are all powerful memories.
The author gives the reader the tools to get in touch with your loss and grief and to heal through your memories and writing. Through memories the person is still a part of our life.
The sections are titled:
Where to Begin: Follow Your Senses
Keep the Memories Alive: Laughter Is Good Medicine
Look for the Lesson: Hindsight is 20/20
Treasure the Touchstones: Make Rituals from Memories

Does the smell of baking bread take you back to a familiar kitchen? Does the first snowfall of the season remind you of holidays past? Robin Edgar shows us how to use these memories to reconnect with our past as a way to heal our present and preserve precious family traditions. In My Mother's Kitchen is a rich medley of Robin's own recollections of life with her mother. Each section of the book is followed by a set of practical exercises aimed at assisting the reader with the delicate mining of memories and the careful excavation of the attached emotions. "Your memory is like a muscle", the author tells us, "the more you use it the stronger it becomes." And like any good coach she leads us through the calisthenics that will get our memory muscle back into top form. If your goal is to preserve family history, work your way through bereavement, or recognize the value of the people, places and things that have shaped your life, this workshop in book form is a great place to start.

Robin Adelman's storytelling flare is what lures us into this very helpful guide to remembering. In a pragmatic (workbook format), yet sensitive way she turns us inward to the stories that bring lost loved ones back into our consciousness and back into our hearts. In My Mother's Kitchen teaches us to tell our stories, painful or peaceful, happy or sad. Because telling our stories bears our souls, we become transformed in the process. Robin took me to places that I had forgotten to go. Read this book and become nourished In My Mother's Kitchen.

Better than grief counselling, or assistance with medication, In My Mother's Kitchen is a must for every bookshelf.
Healing by reminiscence created by the author, is a unique method of dealing and overcoming grief, and loss.
I was priveledged to have had a personal encounter with Robin and her book, at the time of my Mother's stroke.
In My Mother's Kitchen has helped comfort and humour me through this difficult period, and I regularly reach for the book in times of need.Thank you Robin.

Robin Edgar's book is a comforting, charming memorial to the loving relationship she had with her mother. It could have been just that and still be an enjoyable read; however, Edgar takes the reader further by suggesting rituals to call up special times with a lost loved one and exercises to help one write family stories.

In My Mother's Kitchen can be read in a single sitting, yet it is worth returning and savoring the memories which Edgar's reminiscences trigger. She writes of her mother's disapproval of the young Edgar's experimenting with makeup. I immediately recalled my own father telling me, "Wipe that lipstick off your face. You could paint the side of a barn." I imagine many women have a similar memory which is a great story to pass on to our daughters and granddaughters. Or don't they wear makeup anymore?

Edgar writes of her mother's illness when Edgar is fifteen, and of her mother's struggle for the next ten years. However, this is not a sad story. Instead, it is a celebration and a savoring. Each vignette is charming within the four chapters: Where to Begin: Follow Your Senses, Keep the Memories Alive: Laughter Is Good Medicine, Look for the Lesson: Hindsight is 20/20, and Treasure the Touchstones: Make Rituals from Memories. I felt that the author was talking to me.

The book has been used by families in Hospice and grief counseling situations. Joy Johnson, founder of The Centering Corporation, a bereavement resource center, in her foreword calls In My Mother's Kitchen one of her favorite tools.

This is a gentle book for pleasure now, and for healing when we need it.

Reviewed by Judith Helburn
For Story Circle Book Reviews
www.storycirclebookreviews.org
reviewing books by, for, and about women

'My Jim' was a interesting love story. I have never read 'Huckleberry Finn', but I will now. I would like to know Jim from Mark's point of view. Although the story was told in the ending days of slavery, the lives of Jim and Sadie are so similar to black men and women's lives today. Men are setting out to find whatever and leaving their families behind, often making new ones along their journey. Meanwhile, the woman waits behind trying to hold to the love and the keep the family together.

My Jim flowed like a great poem through its rhythm and imagery. I read this book in eight hours and enjoyed every minute. Sadie was a rock, who had weakenesses, like real people. I appreiciated that about her character. The only thing that took me for a loop was the absence of punctuation marks, particularly commas and quotation marks. I believe Ms. Rawles omitted them for dialect effect, but it forced me to re-read some sentences to see who was speaking, or to clarify the meaning for the sentences. But otherwise a great read!

Among the many poignant scenes in Twain's "Huckleberry Finn", few stand out like "Jim's" soliloquy on his lost family's life. Jim's discovery that a daughter was deaf was one of many things Huck discovered about Jim's humanity - and his own. What was omitted in the account was mention of Jim's wife, dear Elizabeth's mother. Nancy Rawles has taken Twain's character, a runaway slave who shatters Huck's traditional views, and weaves a tale about this unknown woman. Of greater significance, however, is Rawles' vivid personalising of what it meant to be a black slave in the freedom-loving United States. In a book economical with words, but graphically rich, Rawles has given us a gut-wrenching account of slave life.

Jim's granddaughter has an offer of marriage, but is hesitant. The gran, Jim's wife Sadie, urges her to accept the proposal from "a good man". Sadie will make the pair a quilt, which will have the family story illustrated in the patches and pieces sewn in. As the quilt is assembled, Sadie relates the story of her own life and the man she loved. As a slave with "healing" talents, Sadie led a precarious life on a tobacco plantation near Hannibal, Missouri. While her powers were in demand by white and black alike, her situation as a slave made her vulnerable. The scenes of abuse, both verbal and physical, are sure to keep the book out of the reach of children. That's a shame, since the story is being told to a teen-ager, who has little more notion of slave life than today's youngsters. Sadie is able to glean some comfort from Jim, finally coming to love him. The marriage scene, performed by members of the slave community instead of a white church, is telling.

Jim, owned by Miz Watson and kept out of the fields, follows a peripatetic life. He is in and out of Sadie's ken, and Rawles' technique for imparting his journey with Huck down the Mississippi is handled with tantalising subtlety. If you haven't read "Huck Finn" much will be lost in translation. Jim's more extensive experiences in comparison with other slaves gives him a raging desire for freedom. Sadie, ever cautious and wary of patrollers who recover runaways, tries but fails to temper Jim's ambition. Later, when emancipation does come during the Civil War, it proves largely illusory. The blacks may be free, but they're hardly secure - and never "equal" with those who fought to end slavery. If for no other reason, this situation is a strong motivation for Sadie's daughter to marry a man who seizes opportunities for betterment.

In one sense, this book is a tease. Jim's infrequent appearances depict him as a man of intense feelings. Twain's picture of Jim pointed out that he was as human as the next man - a significant departure in US literature at a time when segregation was coming into its own as a legal fiction. Rawles' sketches project him fully as a man - an individual with hopes, fears, successes and failures - just like the rest of us. Rawles' created character Sadie, strong and enduring as she is, remains locked in a narrow perspective. She doesn't see the world as Jim had. While she endures with a strength he might lack - after all, he ran away and left her behind - her wants are limited to family. What is needed is a companion to this volume. It's time some skilled author, who understands Twain, the era and the people, tackle the job of producing "Jim's" biography or "autobiography"? [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

What an amazing novel! Rawles' portrayal is of Jim the man, seen through the eyes of the woman who loved him, the woman who was left behind when he escaped and who was tortured and punished for years because of it. I don't think I have ever read anything that speaks more poignantly about the power of love, or the misery that was wrought by it at a time when people (black people, that is) did not control their own bodies. I was so moved, inspired, and devastated by My Jim that I cried for a full 15 minutes after I finished it.

On behalf of all of the people whose anscestors have been the Jims and Tontos and Prissies in HISstory, thank you, Nancy Rawles, for adding this remarkable work to the body of American literature. I can't wait to read what's next.

In MY JIM, as Sadie, a former slave, and her granddaughter, Marianne, piece together a quilt, Sadie pieces together her own story, gradually revealing the history of the items she has kept for years in a canning jar: a small knife, a piece of felt, the bottom of a clay bowl, a child's tooth, a shiny gold button, and a corn pipe thick with tar. The contents of the jar represent a lifetime of misery, pain, heartache, and survival.

"I gives you my first heart Marianne. The heart I gots for my mama. And the heart I gots for my Jim." In those few words, Rawles lets the main character, Sadie, tell us her stark truth: To survive a brutal life that would drive some to suicide or madness, Sadie has allowed few people into her "first heart." Living as a slave, Sadie learns quickly that friends, family, even your own children, can be wrenched from you with no warning. But Jim enters a young Sadie's "first heart" on the day he is born and lives in it always; his love for her, her love for him, and the hope of his return carry Sadie through years of soul-deadening losses.

Rawles writes simply, relating the most gut-wrenching scenes with control and reserve, with a matter-of-factness that serves to underscore the fact that Sadie's losses were not uncommon but rather a fact of life for a person in bondage. As I read MY JIM, I wondered about the other Sadies and Jims that walked this earth, knowing that this story isn't the story of one but of many.

I finished the book with tears forming, a weight on my chest, and admiration for the writing of Nancy Rawles. She has produced a work of art.

This is one of the best books I have read. The author has a wonderful and fluid way of writing that gives the prose she writes a flowing poetic way of moving through the places of ones life that enables the reader to look at the dark and light places of his or herself and the times one spends growing up. In order to discover the truth that seems to be waiting to reveal itself through the gift of human experience whether it seems to be hidden or fully revealed at the time, she moves us through each revelation. All things seem to be fully revealed through the gift of time and through each revelation comes the fulfillment of who one truly is to become. We worth the time and effort expended in the reading. I have now read two of the four books that this author has written, and am looking forward to reading the rest of her work.

Settling for anything less always makes us wonder what if? This was true for Kara. Maeve Mahoney, a nursing home resident, talks to Kara about her own lost love. Kara begins to see that her upcoming marriage and her job isn't what she wanted all along. Pleasing others had been her downfall. She never forgot her first love Jack Sullivan. She sets out to find him and see where things go. I won't give away the ending but the journey is well worth the trip and the read. Good job Patti Callahan Henry!

Fabulous story in making sure one lives to be their authentic self. Beautifully told.

I loved this book! It rates up there with Losing the Moon. It's a very sweet story about how our beliefs about the past, what other people believe we should be, affect us. It's also a lesson for us to find our own way and follow the passions within us with or without familial support. It takes a lot of courage sometimes to follow one's heart, but it can be so worth it in the long run. I love the characters; they were very real people to me. I would highly recommend this one.

"Should an old woman's story change the present?" Kara Larson asks in WHEN LIGHT BREAKS. The power of storytelling is at the heart of Patti Callahan Henry's new novel, and as Kara discovers, stories are sometimes more than simply entertaining tales.

Returning to the Carolina Lowcountry (also the setting for her novels LOSING THE MOON and WHERE THE RIVER RUNS), Henry brings together two women from different generations who share a common bond: each lost her first love. For one of these women, memories are all that remain. But for the other, who's about to make a life-altering decision, there is the possibility of a second chance --- if she has the courage to take it.

Twenty-seven-year-old Kara lives in her childhood home with her widowed father in the small town of Palmetto Pointe, South Carolina, where jasmine scents the air and Spanish moss drapes the stately oaks that line Main Street. Ever the good girl, Kara has always done the things other people believe are right for her --- including setting aside her desire to become a photographer in favor of a more "suitable" job, and becoming engaged to professional golfer Peyton Ellers.

The turning point in Kara's well-ordered life comes when she is assigned to visit a resident at a local nursing home. Six hours behind on her volunteer quota for the Palmetto Pointe Junior Society, Kara views it as another task to be completed and crossed off her to-do list...until she meets Maeve Mahoney. Ninety-six-year-old Maeve begins to tell Kara a story about the boy she loved and lost in Ireland more than eight decades earlier. During their first visit she also asks Kara if the man she is marrying is her first love, sending Kara on her own memory-laden trip into the past.

Jack Sullivan was the boy next door and Kara's first love, until the morning 13 years ago when his mother spirited away her two sons to escape an abusive husband. Maeve's question makes Kara, who is set to marry Peyton in two months, realize that she has never fully put the past --- and her long-buried feelings for Jack --- to rest. Kara's curiosity is piqued about the direction Jack's life might have taken, and a cursory search reveals that he is a songwriter for a band called the Unknown Souls.

Kara, a PGA TOUR manager, organizes golf tournaments and events with the same precision with which she orchestrates her life. In addition to planning a lavish wedding for 400 guests, she's overseeing a benefit gala for the first-ever Palmetto Pointe Open. When the band scheduled to play at the event cancels, Kara thinks of Jack and makes a solo road trip to Savannah to hear the Unknown Souls in concert --- and to renew her acquaintance with Jack.

As Kara becomes increasingly intrigued by the rambling narrative Maeve unfolds over the course of their visits --- a true story intertwined with Irish legend --- she gradually comes to recognize that she found her future 13 years ago. And along with a rekindling of her romance with Jack, Maeve's story leads Kara to finally start living her life the way she wants.

WHEN LIGHT BREAKS is a multi-faceted tale. Henry (who is of Irish descent) enhances the love-triangle storyline with an Emerald Isle myth, a sultry Southern setting, dashes of humor, and compellingly drawn characters. "All anyone ever wants to do is get to the end of the story," Maeve tells Kara. "It is not about how it ends; it is about the journey. The full story. You have to know the full story to care about or know the ending." Take heed of Maeve's advice. Savoring the details will make the journey through the pages of WHEN LIGHT BREAKS all the more enjoyable.

--- Reviewed by Shannon McKenna

A beautiful book...snapshots threaded together with lyrical prose, rich and textured. With soul and heart. You'll dog-ear pages, you'll underline revelations, you'll keep it on your nightstand, you'll want to share it with the world...but only if the world gets their own copy. You won't dare part with yours. And you shouldn't.

Without hype or hysterics, this is a memoir of the perfect form. Deceptively simple in its prose structure, the many emotions, the many stories and the many desires build to a very powerful story. A must read for format and for the story.

Peggy Shumaker is an English professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the author of several books of poetry, including Blaze and Underground Rivers. Her poetry background is evident in every carefully sculpted sentence of her memoir, Just Breathe Normally. This book is more than just pretty prose, though. It's a gripping account of one woman's struggle through a potentially life-ending accident and through her chaotic childhood. The wounds are on the body and in the mind. This is a book I will read again and again to decipher how Shumaker makes her magic happen. Clearly, this is a seasoned writer with an intriguing story to tell.

The beginning sets up the hardy Norwegian stock that Shumaker descends from, and, more importantly, the history of women in her family marrying because they were pregnant. In the case of her great-grandmother, a birth resulted in her death, and with her mother, it figuratively ended her life. The impact of this history is felt in Shumaker's decision not to have children and to marry later in life. Sadly, another child almost ended her life; a careless one driving a three-wheeler on the same bicycle path on which she and her husband were cycling.

The title of Just Breathe Normally relates to her mother's lifelong asthma, as well as Shumaker's own problems breathing after her accident. The image of breath ripples throughout. One of my favorite passages is this one about her mother's asthma: "The reason she quit eating. The reason she loved quiet more than her own kids...The reason she didn't want to be here. The reason she left. The reason we buried her breathless." So many passages are lyrical, succinct, and see into the heart of her characters and their situations.

Aside from difficult breathing, Shumaker's life-threatening injuries also resulted in sight and memory problems. This off-kilter feeling is used throughout the book, as well as switching time periods between her accident, present day injuries, and her childhood. This fluctuating time mimics the way memory and breathing work. In trying to piece the details of her accident together to understand it, Shumaker says, "It takes months before my mind can see these nuggets not as separate chunks, but as part of one vein, as story." This sums up her memoir's structure as well, and those little sections add up to a satisfying whole.

The heart of Just Breathe Normally is about Shumaker's unstable childhood with a wonderful, supportive grandmother, and young, immature parents that couldn't stay together. Even though these character types are familiar, each of them manages to surprise throughout. Shumaker is a generous narrator, towards the boy who almost ended her life with his careless driving, towards the mother who neglected her, and towards her absent father. There is no whining about her life or her circumstances, and there isn't a single false note. This is a narrator who knows herself, and her family, and lays it all out for us in rich details and vivid writing.

Her parents' marriage is introduced as My Father's Wives #1; a clever way to set the tone, as well as her father's future marriages. Shumaker describes her absent father as, "We grew around the empty place his absence left in the family. When he was in the house, everybody felt crowded. It felt like having company that hadn't called first." But even the father surprises towards the end of the book.

The section of "Mother's First Words After the Birth" is also powerful:

Because I was her first, no one listened when my mother cried...So I was almost born between floors, my mother clamping shut her thighs, some panicky orderly pinning her shoulders to the gurney. My father, a lanky teenager dreaming of a shovel-head Harley with a suicide clutch, paced...Face to the wall, my mother spoke from far away. "I'm sorry it isn't a boy for you, honey"...Imagine being the woman who would think, just after giving birth for the first time, that. Imagine her saying it out loud to her young man. Imagine her writing it down in the baby book.

Just Breathe Normally is what a book should be: moving and multi-layered. There is a surprise in the ending, which I won't ruin, but after knowing it, the previous passages become even more interesting. Pick up Just Breathe Normally, it just might change the way you breathe, and think.

I thought Peggy has an awesome way of writing..at once a prose poem and then a flowing narrative. I had a hard putting this book down it was very engrossing and powerful. Thank you Peggy for a moving memoir. I really like the poem she quotes at the end of her book--it isn't hers but it very well could have been. I won't quote it here but the poem will stay with me for a long time; I have written it down as not to forget what it says and what it means.

At first glance the simple, short paragraphs trick you into almost missing the very profound thoughts and deep feelings of the writer. This is a marvelous read!

I have always liked this book, with its vast international canvas and 'fin de siecle' feel. It was the only one HS Bhabra published under his own name, but fans may like to try the thrillers he wrote as A M KABAL too.

Sometimes novelists overreach. Bhabra almost certainly did, when he undertook to write a book that encompasses all the upheaval, dislocation, pain, betrayal and romance of pre-WWII Venice and post-WWII Amsterdam, as seen through the eyes of an aging aristocratic British career diplomat. Yet what is astonishing is how close this book comes to perfection. It is, after whatever criticism one might have of the plot and the development of the central character, a beautifully written book that displays a formidable knowledge of history and geography. You may not remember the twists and turns of the story, but you will never forget the sense of being completely engrossed in the world that Bhabra creates and of the array of emotions it evokes. It may not be a perfect book, if in fact there is such a thing, but it comes within a hair's breadth of being so. Don't miss it.

For those who appreciate the old-fashioned British style of novel writing, this Penguin paperback telling of life as a British consul in the 1920's-1930's Venice will be a delight. The man plays as if in his 80's, writing of his youthful work when sent out to Venice. (The author in fact seems to be an Anglo-Indian born in 1955!) He tells of interesting English ex-patriates enjoying the cheap prices of post-WWI Europe, and life in Venice amongst their charms, their parties, their endless hours of leisure. He becomes fond of one Jewish art appraiser and comes to his rescue, he finds himself in confusion over love, and he comments always as if he were now very old and considering all of it again, but in retrospect.

I thoroughly enjoyed this style, and his ability to keep one attached and interested in the motley characters who are tied together by time, place, English language and money, but who then find themselves blown apart by the rise of the Fascisti and the revolutionary forces afloat in Europe.

...It is a joy to read, and transports the reader to a world that is lost and which few of us living today ever knew existed. But that is only part 1.
It gets better! Taking up the narrative twenty years later in the shambles of post-war Amsterdam, the story, like life, gets deeper. I guessed at less than half of the intrigues and interconnections that are revealed in the denouement.
I was up half the night trying to finish this book, and the other half trying to comprehend what I had read. It is a compelling commetary on the interplay of good and evil, the limits of government, and the tension between truth and diplomacy. I was left turning over in my mind the well-worn words of Edmund Burke "In order for evil to flourish, all that is required is for good men to do nothing". But which of us is good, and which "nothing" should we not do?

I hesitate writing a review for this book because I fear I lack the words to do it justice. Still, I like to try - if only for the hope that maybe I end up saying something that might convince another reader to pick up this exceptional novel. Certain that he/she will at the end agree that the reading of this novel has been one of the richest reading experiences in his/her life; I know it has been for me.

I first read Gestures over a decade ago and the memory of that experience is still vivid in my mind. What H.S. Bhabra managed to do was draw me in in such an artful way that I wasn't even aware of what was happening. And not until I found myself surrounded by the atmosphere of the characters and places was it that I knew that I was lost in the tale that H.S. Bhabra was telling. A tale told with the virtuosity of an extremely gifted writer.

Like the other reviewer I too stayed up till deep in the night, experiencing a wide range of emotions and feelings that to this day impresses me deeply. Rarely has an author's words managed to evoke half that many emotions and feelings from me as H.S. Bhabra has.

I could, of course, talk about what befalls the characters. Tell about their fate, the places they visit, the relations they have, but I won't. I won't because I'd hate to ruin the surprise. All I will say is that to not read this novel will make you poorer by having missed out on what undoubtedly would have been one of the best reading experiences of your entire life. A big statement, yet I'm certain of its truth.

One last remark. For years I've searched for other books by H.S. Bhabra, to my surprise Amazon did not even have Gestures for sale (this made me anxiously guard my copy of Gestures as I feared losing it and never again being able to read it), and today was the first time when searching for books by Bhabra yielded results. To my surprise I found Gestures. :) It makes me very happy to see this story in print again (it was first published in Great Britain in 1986). Some stories are simply too great to ever be out of print.

This is a historical novel about life in rural Georgia in during the World War Two era. If you like the works of Ferrol Sams, you will also like this one. As a baby-boomer, this gave me an insite into my parents childhood. The character are charming, and well-drawn.

Nobody does small towns better than Mignon Ballard. In her delightful mystery series starring temp angel Augusta Goodnight, Ballard captures the personality of each setting with an uncanny eye for character, an infallible ear for dialogue and an unabashed passion for food. She applies the same foolproof formula for "The War In Sallie's Station." Although she claims it's her first "straight" novel, "Sallie's" is full of mystery: Why is Miss Havergal so nasty? What did the children do to get rid of her and will they be found out? Will Frannie survive a very real, very normal life fraught with family conflict and cancer? In Ballard's stories, present-day events and emotions always lead to the past. What is different about "Sallie's" is the theme of war. There's World War II, the very adult, very masculine fight for freedom and democracy. There are the very personal battles women fight everyday for self-preservation. And there are the struggles of children to be heard, as symbolized by young Frannie's "Dear Mr. Hitler" letter. No battle -- whether fought on foreign soil, on the home front, or in the heart -- is less significant than any other. Another great wholesome read from one of the South's best.

Having grown up in a small southern town with the curses and blessings of larger than life small town characters and their intense involvment in each other's lives, The War in Sallie's Station rang true on every front. It is a marvelous book which has more than a few turns of phrase which remind me of my literary idol, Harper Lee--I could not reccomend it more highly. The War in Sallie's Station is a story of friendship and love that span not only changing years but cultures, of evil that transends imagination, and of ultimate good that conquors all.

I know Sallies Station, in fact I know Mignon Franklin Ballard.
We grew up in the same small town that Sallies Station is based on.
She has captured my town and all other small towns in America.
I have enjoyed her angel series and eagerly await the new one due in April of next year.
Sallies Station goes between the years of WW II and present day and the characters are wonderful.
I only wish she would write faster and hope she will write a sequel to this book.

If you are into music and the artists that are legends today then this is the book for you. I was especially fascinated with what "Fats" Domino had to say. As is mentioned in the book blurb there are a number of photos that I had never seen before.

Overall if your into music legends then this is a book to buy. Five stars and a hearty recommendation. I'm looking forward to the next volume!

This is a very good and intertaining book of interviews with Rock N Roll artists. Everyone that has read it has loved it.

This academically written book offers a step-by-step research and methodological approach to the "Art and Science of Reminiscence". Each chapter is written by experts in their field. The compilation of these experts/contributors provide a concise review of this topics history, future and most importantly its practical applications. Excellent resource manual for scholars interested in furthering their knowledge base on reminiscence. The reference bibliography itself is and outstanding tool for continued research for it lists most international scholars involved in reminiscence.

This is a wonderful book! I am a practicing psychotherapist (Licensed Clinical Social Worker) in Los Angeles. I have used this book in my work with clients to assist them to revisit their childhoods for clues into their family background-- particularly when they have had a hard time remembering their childhood.

This book gives wonderful tools to gain insight into both the "outer world" of childhood, and the "inner world" of childhood-- recreating the physical memories, and ultimately the decisions we make about our childhood experiences and its impact upon our adult lives.

It is also a great book for creative writers. Get this book-- it's a wonderful tool!