Bingo Books

I live locally in Pacific Grove, where this story takes place. I hate to give a poor review of local writers but my sense of fair literary practice overrides any favoritism I might feel for locals. Either you have a good book, or you don't. This is not a very well written book. The characters are inconsistent in the beginning, their are HUGE gaps in the storyline (why did the woman with cancer up and commit suicide when there were no outward signs of severe depression?) and generally poor story development. That being said, the locations that the authors speak of are interesting (especially to those of us who know where they are) and that is what tended to shine through, not the characters themselves. Although I think some will find this book entertaining (especially those within the medical marijuana field and the elderly person who knows that life doesn't end at retirement).

Like an aging jogger who needs a little time to work through arthritis-stiffened joints, this story and its characters take a while to hit their stride. The lives of the leads initially appear in languid slo-motion, but then a dying cancer patient, Rita Rich, finds she gets by with a little help from her old friends. Their quest for "medicinal marijuana" for Rita and her new friends is quite a caper! As one of these dope procuring grannies, self-dubbed "Politely Passive Terrorists," exhorts: There's more to life than thrift shops and weekly bingo games -we're going beyond bingo!
It's a fun trip for all. Reviewed by TundraVision

This books celebrates the abilities inherent in everyone regardless of age, and illustrates how unused and hidden talents can be revealed and recycled at any age. The plot keeps you in suspense, while illustrating the potential for individual growth. It tells us that profound changes are still possible in spite of the trend for aging people to stop growing and to vegetate and that each of us can make valuable contributions to society and can participate in making things better for those less fortunate. It's a call to wake up, look around and get busy with life - to start new careers, contribute to and increase worth by caring and doing things for others. It celebrates facing fears and limitations, learning new things and rejoicing in the activities around us - and refusing to be "put out to pasture."

I love the philosophy illustrated in this story, even though I don't agree with the advocacy for the harmlessness of marijuana and recreational drugs. It a timely vehicle for illustrating the main theme - be useful and keep growing.

The authors succeed by their own example in showing that seniors can stop trying to hide the aging process, but celebrate its many strengths and values to society in general.

The "introductory horoscope" to this book states "Life will be unpredictable. That doesn't mean BAD unpredictable, simply irreverent toward your plans. Under the circumstances, the best way to prepare for it might be to imagine what it would be like keeping your balance while hula-dancing on the hood of a moving car." This is truly an appropriate beginning for this witty caper among three friends who inadvertantly find themselves a little over their heads trying to help a sick friend. Hilarity ensues amidst bongo brownies, a surprise in a storage locker, and adventures run amok - all driven by the questioning of society's rules and the warmth and compassion of friendship. Laugh a lot, cry a little, and have fun with this one.

This book is truly charming. Three little old ladies and their experiences with marijuana...truly a kick in the pants.

It gives me great hope to see that growing old doesn't have to mean giving up life's adventures and it's refreshing to hear the medical marijuana argument from a different perspective than the usual rhetoric.

Politely Passive Terrorists Unite!

Interesting book but don't let the upper management catch you with it.

Is a bit of a passing fad though.

Good Job

Dry, never ending, buzzword-idiots usually turn the boardroom "Daily" into a yawn-athon. Tired of trying to decypher the latest "Achrobuzzum"? I was, so I looked for an answer. I found it in the form of "The Buzzword BINGO Book". This book not only answered aukward research "buzzword bombshells" but took the parody of boardroom venacular to new levels of hilarity. A must for the soul of every; Boardroom, Power-Luncher, or After-hours participant, or just to stay informed... Either way, it brings another bit of fun in the day's "Race"... it sure did for me...

Every Bingo player will enjoy this book! And, maybe even reap some "cash benefits" from it!!

I bought this game to use with a low level adult ESL class. The students love bingo and loved the chance to learn new vocabulary while having fun at the same time. Learning and laughing at the same time - what a novel concept. And the students seem to remember the words they learn this way.

While the title of the book implies that it's going to give you secret tips on how to actually win at Keno, it actually just explains the origin of the game, how it's played in Nevada casinos and the odds of getting a certain number of spots right in relation to the number played, all from an "insider", a former dealer who worked the keno lounges of various casinos. It is funny, informative and interesting. The thrust of the book is to advise you that keno is a difficult game to win and it should be approached in that manner so you can have fun playing and if you happen to win, it makes you realize how lucky you really were considering the long-shot odds of winning this game. Recommended for anyone serious about playing keno or just anyone curious about this difficult-to-win game.

The author is truly a great person. He is famous for his humor and wit. I have the honor of being aquainted with Mr. Thompson. His stories are real life that everyone can relate to. Buy this book, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy!

This book was flat out depressing. The characters in the book are all typical "trailer trash" with no hope of better lives.

I bought this book thinking it would be a folksy story about life in a small town, and ladies enjoying their togetherness at the local bingo parlor. Something light and cheerful, and--- funny. This book is about as far away from funny as you can get. It is sad, pitiful, irritating, and the main characters are, without exception, all pretty unlikeable. Even Darla Moon,who tells the story and whose mother is the town prostitute, comes across as hard as nails. Underneath, of course, she has a heart, but she is so tough, it's hard to have any sympathy for her. The only likable characters are Elijah, a black friend of the family, and a preacher who sweeps Darla off her feet. It is NOT an easy read-- on every page there is something sad,-- these people live in squalor and hopelessness. I felt totally down in the dumps when I finished it. I wish I had my time back.

A summer/beach book should be one that is easy put down and easy to pick up. It should have characters that intrique you and make you think of them when you aren't reading about them. It should cause you to assess your life, dreams, inner feelings. This book does all those things. It is ripe for a sequel or even a prequel to explore the characters more. Highly recommended.

This is a pretty interesting book in my mind because it's definitely not your typical story line. It's different because the characters aren't your typically happy-go-lucky people where everything ends up just peachy at the end. The family lives in extreme poverty, and the mother was a prostitute in her earlier days while she had young children. The children were often abused by their "uncles," and this has left quite an impression on them. Growing up in a small town, everyone knew the mother was a prostitute, and this led to men assuming that the girls were just as easy. The story shows the family grown up and the effects that the mother's lifestyle had on the children.
I would definitely recommend this book!

Reading the back cover of this book, you don't realize fully what your getting into. This is a very dark and depressing look at a poor family in Paradise, Oklahoma. I thought this was going to be another light southern fiction book that I'd love, but instead I got a book filled with prostitution, sex, rape, murder, child and spousal abuse. I could only take this book in little doses, seeing as how it's such a downer.

It took me a while to finish, the story was intersesting enough to make me want to know how it ended, but not enough for me to read it in one day. I don't know that I'd recommend this to anyone, it being such a dreary book and all...but if your interested in reading it, it's not a bad story, I just wasn't expecting it.

I don't know why I had the misfortune to pick up this Louise Erdrich book out of all her other ones at the bookstore.

This was one of the most painful books I have ever read. The writing was stilted and unnatural. I like books that are a bit sad and melancholy and depressing, but there was something about the complete and utter negativity of the story and the characters that was too much. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I felt no compassion for any of these unlikable characters. Their constant bad choices one after another. I knew from the beginning of the book that nothing would turn out well for any of the characters especially the hapless and directionless Lipsha.

I just love Louise Erdrich's books. I didn't read her fiction until after I read her book "Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country", which is nonfiction. Anyway, I really enjoyed this book, and while it is somewhat impossible to describe the complete plot (and saying "Lipsha is in love with Shawnee" doesn't do it justice), Lipsha is developed into a sympathetic figure, and Lyman is also rounded out more. It's amazing how LE can spin an interesting narrative out of (mostly) ordinary events. I would love to read more about Lipsha and the other, younger members of the families. They seem so real now, after reading the other books such as "Tracks", "Love Medicine", etc.

This being one of Louise Erdrich's earlier works, it forms the basis and framework for the wonderful works that follow. This purchase was a gift, as it is one of my very favorite books by any writer, nevermind by Louise Erdrich, and I have an older edition permanently placed in my front bookcase (for ease or re-reads). Please, read this great book and then what follows along with the connected works by another great writer, Winona Laduke, and you have weeks, months and years of wonderful literary experiences...which will stay with you forever...I don't really want to spoil the fun, except to say that both Erdrich and Laduke write beyond the Native American genre and world: they touch the human condition and offer the experience to the reader....

I fell in love with Louise Erdrich after reading her short story "Fleur". There was something gritty and seductive about her characters.

Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks and this book are all part of a saga. The Bingo Palace is the last one in the series (i believe). There is a big sense of despair in the multiple narrators. It is almost like they know their lives cannot possibly get any better. I found the book depressing and a bit lackluster compared to the previous ones.

Erdrich's latest novel of modern native American life centers on a bright, but aimless young man. Lipsha Morrisey is adrift, one foot in America, one on the North Dakota reservation. Son of a crazy woman and a convict, the tribe has given up on the young man who once showed promise - a product of families recalled from Erdrich's previous books "(Love Medicine," "The Beet Queen," "Tracks").

Summoned back to the reservation by his grandmother for reasons that never come clear - a last chance to make something of himself as an Indian? Lipsha falls in love with the beautiful Shawnee Ray, who's slated to marry the tribal entrepreneur, her son's father, Lyman Lamartine. Lyman is handsome, muscled, skilled in tribal traditions, worldly wealthy and ambitious for tribal power and American success. He is all that Lipsha is not.

But Lipsha believes the strength of his love is a match for all of Lyman's assets. Endowed with his mother's luck, granted him in a vision devoid of love, Lipsha begins to win at Bingo. For Shawnee Ray he amasses unearned wealth, squanders his spiritual power, dreams of greatness in his future, and wastes his present in floundering and backsliding.

Although Lipsha's present is the primary focus, the novel dips into the past with chapters centered around other tribal members including both his grandmothers, his mother, Lyman, Shawnee Ray, and Zelda Kashpaw,Lipsha's aunt and Shawnee's self-appointed guardian. There's also a Greek Chorus sort of voice that speaks with the whole tribe's sorrowful wisdom.

This organization keeps a certain distance between the novel and the reader. Lipsha's obsession widens the gulf. His hunger for Shawnee Ray so overwhelms that it bores. Shawnee becomes the focus of Lipsha's every act but there's so little contact between them that passion never develops into love. Lipsha never develops at all.

Erdrich's prose is vivid and spare, always flowing, moving. Every sentence seems infused with the long history, hardship and spiritual mystery of Indian life. Her characters are enigmatic and firmly anchored in the Dakota setting. But for all this richness, the story never connects, remaining more mysterious than moving. Readers of her earlier novels, who can place this one in a wider context, should enjoy the book more than new readers who may be left cold by too-brief glimpses into too many hearts.

bingo brown is kid that goes to school to met his new teacher when he finds out that the teacher is acttually pretty cool.
after a few weeks he breaks his pencil so he could find out what the three gurls that he likes are writing about till he does it so much that the teacher finds out what bingo is doing.
Then a few weeks later a kid wears a shirt that the princpal doesn't like, so the princpal made a a rule that if you wear a shirt with letters on it he will send them home. After ever thing ends Bingo finds out that what he did was write and that he won the rule over the letters on the shirt.

Bingo Brown is an ordinary kid who tackles The Man and battles censorship in this action packed laugh-a-minute snap of a read

I read this book more than 10 years ago in elementary school. It was such a memorable experience that I bought a copy of it recently. Its quite charming - funny and serious at times. Bingo Brown reminds me of one of those kids from the Francois Traffaut film Argent de poche (Small Change). I would recommend it for 4th-6th graders and to those grown-ups who remember that they were children first.

it sucked like hell. just dont read it. its for 1st graders.

Bingo writes that he falls in love with three girls in one day! That gets me. Better yet: he falls in love with one (Melissa, by far the most charismatic of the three) because in an assignment she says she wants to be a scientist by day and a rock star by night. I don't know about you, but that gives me new career aspirations. I love everything Bingo does. He wears a "Mozart Rocks" shirt. He gets freaked out by the neighbor's misty eyed poodle. He misconstrues his mother's sarcasm and starts a schoolwide rebellion. He writes many, many burning questions. This is a witty, emotional book, the best of the Bingo Brown series. Read it to a kid, or just read it for a fun, light read.

The Bingo Report reports on three quantitative studies conducted in 1997 (Priest Study), 1999 (Victim Study) and 2004 (Literary Study). Had reviewer No. 3 (Mateo el Feo) read the book more closely, he/she would have seen that observations and subsequent research were conducted several years prior to the 2002 revelations, therefore impossible to include citations of the National Review, Jay and Audit Reports. These citations, however, do appear in the later sections of the research and are included in the list of over 150 citations in the back of the book. Of deeper interest is Chapter 8 "How Much Does the Church Know?" that vindicates the work in the prior chapters' quantitative studies because of the proof that the bishops were aware of these causes and effects as early as 1992. Louise Haggett, Author.

While the author attempts to establish this work as academic, it is hard to see objectivity in her writing. Reading her narrative, the reader is exposed to the author's opinions and her personal journey, with a sprinkling of cited facts to back her position.

The main thing that weakens the credibility of this work is the author's background. Mrs. Haggett is the founder of an advocacy organization (CITI Ministries) which promotes married priests (i.e. those who have broken their lifelong vow or promise of celibacy), and which rejects both mandatory celibacy and the male-only priesthood.

One might get the impression that her publisher (Center for the Study of Religious Issues, or CSRI) is a separate organization with no position on this subject of mandatory celibacy. In reality, CSRI is described as the "research division" of CITI ministries, with Mrs. Haggett as the "director."

I find this organizational shell game to be a bit disingenuous. I think it is fair to say that the credibility of this "report" would quickly be called into question if the author had used CITI (aka "Celibacy is the Issue") Ministries as the publishing organization, instead of the CSRI name.

I would recommend the Wiki as a starting point for this topic, since it presents both sides of the issue. It is also a good place to look for references to the latest reseach.

A Treasure of Wisdom for the Church
a review by William Cleary

In the deep mines of this too ambitious underground book are veins of pure gold. You'll be heartened to see proof at last that celibacy itself - and the intense loneliness that goes with it -- helps to foment priestly sexual abuse. You'll hear from some 200 priests and victims scientifically chosen who tell you what it's like to be a priest today, and how faithful-to-vows they think priests are (not very), and how much the official church cares about misbehaving priests (not at all, unless scandal arises.) You'll hear heartbreaking comments from victims of predatory priests and get a sense of the horrific state of despair among clergy persons worldwide. Will you enjoy reading it? No. Should you read it? Yes. The book - not easy to read and rather casually edited and designed - still is a treasure of wisdom for the Church.
Part of my own personal questioning over the years about the clergy scandals is to ask myself why I feel required to at least monitor the daily disgraces found on the NCR Clergy Abuse Tracker (http://www.ncrnews.org/abuse/). I feel I have to read the books about it too - the latest of which is Priests, Sex, and Secret Files by Thomas Doyle and Richard Sipe, Bonus Books, 2005 - not yet available as I write this. Answer: because my ongoing responses are radical, and include insisting the Church in the US close down the seminary system entirely. I believe no other solution will stop the disease and infection that is poisoning the Church. In Haggett's book there is plenty of evidence that only something radical will heal the illness - which is picked up by priests not so much from the flow of culture in general - shows this study-- but from the subculture of the priesthood itself. The principal conclusions of the Haggett study demonstrate that most priests:
1. Don't believe in divine retribution for breaking their vows
2. Know overwhelmingly that other priests break their vows
3. Know overwhelmingly that the church acknowledges the breaking of vows
4. Know that the church almost never disciplines misbehaving priests, and only does it when scandal is present.
In Chapter One I was immediately caught up in the story. For starters, Haggett stumbled on her most explosive issue completely by accident, she says, at a talk given by Rev. Candice Connors at a NFPC conference Haggett attended in 1993 as a participant. What she heard from Connors set her heart on fire - and she is able to convey that feeling in her account of the event. She sat there in disbelief. Connors, head of a facility for healing predatory priests, was begging the audience of priests to take back into service a group he called epedophiles - that is, priests who misbehaved with adolescents and not with children. He also insisted that there was absolutely no connection between celibacy and sexual abuse. Both these statements started Haggett on the long years of study that led finally to this book.
Haggett asks: Celibacy Is The Issue? You mean as a explanation for the abominable clergy sex scandals throughout the world? But of course. Wait: not homosexuality as its cause? No, that's nonsense.
But whence the deviance into crimes against youngsters? Celibacy guilty again. The rule of celibacy skews the personalities of those entering, then the culture of the seminary further bends it out of shape. The subculture of priest residences and monasteries further twists the priesthood out of balance. Celibacy is the issue at the heart of it all, the bad idea that has now, and over hundreds of years, injured and destroyed many lives and souls and the gospel values of the so-called "catholic" Church. Some come through unscathed and are glories to the church. But celibacy is the defining issue to explain what is happening, the poisonous idea that has sickened the whole Church. Read about it and weep. #

(William Cleary writes from Burlington, Vermont.)

The Bingo Report
The current homosexual witch-hunt sponsored by the Vatican is misdirection at its finest; a tribute to their "ministry" of propaganda. The Bingo Report like Toto tugging on the curtain in the Wizard of Oz exposes this fraud. Ninety-three percent of the priests polled by Louise Haggert said, "priests break vows!" ONE-HUNDRED percent of priests stating this indicated that the church only disciplines when there is public knowledge. When asked, "What other factors contribute to priests breaking their vow of celibacy/chastity," LONELINESS was the number one write in answer!

Haggett's The Bingo Report makes one thing perfectly clear: Priestly problems are intrinsic to the system and its governance not homosexuality. "The Learning Theory" which addresses learned deviant behavior in subcultures at the beginning is as important as her description of the cost of the Clergy Abuse Scandal at the end of the book. This book is clear testimony to the fact that the Vatican has no clothes on when it comes to the root causes of clergy sexual abuse.

The Book of Genesis tells us that God said, "It is not good that man should be alone." It also lists four occasions when He tells men and women to: "Go forth and multiply." Jesus recruited apostles with families. St. Paul in his first letter to Timothy in describing the attributes of a good bishop starts off with this sentence, "A bishop must be beyond reproach, the husband of one wife... The Bingo Report confirms what we have been told by God and that which the RCC chooses to ignore: "It is not good for man to be alone." This book is a must read for everyone concerned with the future of the Roman Catholic Church.

Vinnie Nauheimer, Author of: Silent Screams, Epistles on Clergy Abuse and The Predator Wore a Collar