Wisconsin Books

My 6-year-old daughter designated this her favorite book on her class questionnaire. She cherishes her own copy and gave it to two friends for Christmas. Author Mary Eccles has a wonderful ability to write of family dynamics with humor and insight and to create very believable child characters and situations. The format is also appealing: Each chapter corresponds to a month in one year of 9-year-old Lizzie's life. I read the book aloud to my daughter--but it is a good read-alone for young people ages 8 to 10. And I won't give away one surprise but will say that, once you read this book, you will never again pour dry cereal from a box without first checking inside. My daughter is hoping for a sequel and a chance to share more adventures with Lizzie.

BY LIZZIE is an exciting novel.Lizzie is a nine year old in the middle of her family. She has an annoying older brother named Norman, and a younger copycat sister named Ellie. The story starts on January 1, the day after Lizzie's ninth birthday. Lizzie is looking for her dog Winston's leash,and ends up finding her mom's old typewriter. She decides to record and write down the year before she turns ten.Lizzie writes a story for each month. My favorite month is March, when Lizzie calls swimming lessons "water torture", because she's the oldest in the beginner class by far, and she can't swim! Mary Eccles uses many details in her writing. I highly recommend this book for eager readers.

By Lizzie is a great story with characters that young readers will identify with, laugh with, and care about through the end of this book and beyond. I am already looking forward to reading more stories "By Lizzie" and Mary Eccles. Young readers (and adults!) will enjoy this glimpse into Lizzie's year -- from the trials of family life to laughing through her escapades... mice in cereal boxes, secret codes, Brownie the puppy, getting even with her big brother and more. Lizzie and her story are both winners!

I enjoyed the way this book is structured: a 9-year-old girl is frustrated with aspects of her life, and desides to chronicle each month as she waits to turn 10. Each chapter is an account of a difficulty she faces at school or at home. The problems are ones all children would recognize--annoying siblings, worries about a new teacher, for example. The chapters are written with good humor and not a trace of condescension.

PLEASE GIVE CHAPTER AND VERSE FOR YOUR PENTECOST AND YOUR RESTORATION

History is. This book is about history. Few people (let alone christians) know the history of christian religious experience in the United States. This book provides a detailed and rare scholarly description of what happened during the August 1801 revival in Kentucky which has come to be known as the Cane Ridge revival. This book makes no attempt to provide a theological framework for revival, either for or against, nor the many experiences which may occur during and after revival. Rather, it is an honest and unbiased effort to give you a window to the past so you can see what happened and come to your own conclusions. I wish all books on revival were this well written!

Coming from a background that is neither of the Restoration Movement, nor of the Holiness movements that came from the Cane Ridge American revival period, I still found this book to be objective and interesting. Conkin, as previously stated by other reviewers, does an excellent job of presenting the materials in a way that is neither flattering, nor insulting to the frontier's people. Instead, he gives rational explanation for why they behave how they do and a peek into the 17th century religious mindset that would prompt the religious exercising. This is a book worth checking out, even according to this 20-something Bible College student.

Much has been written about the "objectivity question" in history. Can a historian put his biases aside and write an objective account of an historical event? Conkin's Cane Ridge demonstrates with what dignity and power a historian is able to treat a religious movement to which he has little spiritual or emotional attachment. Conkin has written a first-rate intellectual history that includes the best delineation of biblical Christianity by a non-believer that I've ever read.

Conkin's careful examination of the 1801 Kentucky revival demonstrates that the religious changes which began there had roots deep in devout, but staid, Presbyterianism. Conkin rejects the notion that the revival was simply an example of frontier backwardness and downplays the swooning and "barking" that continue to be the staple of college lecturers.

This is the first volume in Shakhashiri's unequalled Chemical Demonstrations series. There are over 80 demonstrations in this book, each one with a list of required materials, a detailed procedure, notes on hazards and disposal, a discussion of the chemical principles involved, and references. The demonstrations cover the areas of thermochemistry (Chapter 1), Chemiluminescence (Chapter 2), Polymers (Chapter 3), and Equilibria of Metal Ion Precipitates and Complexes (Chapter 4). Included in the introductory text is an article by Richard W. Ramette entitled "Exocharmic Reactions" which relates how chemical demonstrations for teaching purposes have evolved and what qualities the successful demonstrator should possess for maximum impact.

There is absolutely nothing so good as a demonstration for getting students interested in chemistry and keeping them interested. Demonstrations may take a bit of extra work on the part of the teacher, but they are worth the effort, and the effort is minimal when Shakhashiri has written such a magnificant collection of useful experiments.

I acutally love this book for chem demonstrations. Shakhashiri gives in depth explanations for all of his demonstrations and it is just a great book. I recommend this book to anyone who is doing any demonstrations.

The book is very interesting and useful for teachers whom use the lecture and demostration method in teaching chemistry. The experiments are well tested and one can create some other new experiments taking the basis from this book. I recommend the whole series (Vols. 1 to 4). Dr. Shakhashiri is a talent chemistry teacher and he transmits his enthusiasm in teaching this science.

I am a first year teacher and this book has been the best investment I've made. I may have had to buy it with my own money, but it has been worth every cent. Lots of ideas are presented in this book and it gives really good ways to integrate the demonstrations to teach particular concepts. I plan to buy the other three books by this author.

For our camping family, this is absolutely great. We had no idea such a book existed or so many county parks could be found in Wisconsin. Accurate and detailed information on so much. Extremely useful!

This book is so easy to use! It's organized very logically and gives a good summary of the state's county parks. I took it out of the library and have used it to find great camping destinations, but there's also information on other specific activities; i.e., fishing, canoeing, hiking, etc. When used in conjunction with the websites which most of the state's counties now have, it makes planning a camping trip a breeze. I plan on buying the revised addition. All in all, an excellent resource for families or individuals who enjoy the outdoors in the Badger state.

This is one of the best book on parks that I have ever seen. I have 11 excellent books on Wisconsin (camping, hiking, state parks, backpacking, and touring), but this is the best book for finding a good county park while traveling or planning a vacation. This book is a hidden treasure: it contains information on 600 wonderful county parks in Wisconsin. This appears to be the only consolidated book on county parks in Wisconsin. The book is incredibly well-organized: 1- They provided a chapter on the 25 best parks. (This is useful if you are specifically planning to go to one of the best parks out of 600 county parks.) 2- The 600 parks are organized by location, which means when you are traveling in a particular county, you can easily find a county park. The book is organized first by location, and then alphabetical. It is a very clever and helpful way to organize a book because you can find a park in the area you want very quickly. This makes vacation planning so easy. (I own State Parks, Wisconsin by Bailey and while a good book, it's not organized like this, which makes planning a vacation more of a challenge because the parks are scattered in the book because they are not organized by location.) This books is an excellent tool for planning a vacation. 3- Each county represents one chapter in which that one county's parks are described. At the top of each chapter on each county, they have a really handy picture where the county of interest is bolded on miniature Wisc map. So, if you are planning a trip up North, but you're not familiar with all of the names of the northern counties, you'll instantly know if this chapter is the right area for you, just by looking at the picture. This makes it really efficient to find what you need. 4- It's the only book (out of the 11 Wisc books that I bought) that also has a chapter that covers best parks for a particular use. It's "Best Parks for Special Uses" chapter tells you where to find the best parks for: a) Nature Study, b) Horseback riding, c) out-of-the-way camping, d) historic sites, e) bird watching, f) folk art, g) waterfalls, h) Native American history, i) Caving, j) cannoeing, k) family camping, l) winter sports. 5- When describing a park, the book provides the following information: a) directions, b) facilities (e.g. none, swimming, beach, picnic tables, outhouses, toilets, hiking, cross-country skiing, mountain biking, playground, boat landing, grills, picnic shelter, tent sites, trailer sites, hiking, nature trails, etc.) It's a very handy book because of the depth of material that is displayed in a very effective way. I highly recommend this book. It's excellent.

I picked up this book at the library. It is a listing of county parks in Wisconsin and what the facilities are in each. I began bookmarking the pages that I wanted to copy information from. When I got to 30, I decided to buy the book.

This book is especially useful for those that camp. Wisconsin state parks have raised the camping rates and this year even the National Forest sites have to be reserved. This book is a powerful tool for those that make spontanious decisions about how and where to spend week-ends.

I was very satisfied with the biology book. It arrived 2 days after I ordered it with no flaws. Thank you!

I am learning a lot of things from the book and study card useful for class.

My 16 year old just finished this book for homeschool biology. It was comprehensive, thorough, yet easy for her to follow. The illustrations are excellent and prolific. It had quizes she could take to track her progress. I highly recommmend this book for high school biology.

I used this book to homeschool my 13 year old daughter, who went on to obtain a 750 on the SAT II Biology. I also taught a class to homeschoolers using THE WAY LIFE WORKS (much cheaper) as the main text, but using many of the CD-ROM activites from ESSENTIAL BIOLOGY as class material. I especially liked the MendAliens for genetics problems! There are many useful activites, quizzes, and chapter tests, wonderful graphics. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand "essential" biology.

Lippman's erudite and insightful observations about the world around him are still very pertinent today. Lippman goes on throughout the book to make keen observations about the society around him hoping the reader will take note. The main idea is that the culture has approached a crossroads and will need to make a decision about where to go next: Should the changes and cultural norms be mastered? Or will we just drift along letting them control us. This is one of the first and monumental Lippman works, differing from his post WW1 analysis of the world. Keep in mind this work is the last where Lippman contends that we can still take hold of our destiny and master the changes. With the publication of "Public Opinion" and the new idea of the Phantom public, Lippman has no faith in the public or their observations to take charge and master the world around them. Overall great introduction to Lippman and culture in the progressive era.

Walter Lippmann's vision of a cooperative America in 1914 has withstood the test of time as a paradigm for retaining our humanity during industrialization. His emphasis on science, communication, labor organization, and the women's movement has uncannily mirrored the intervening 90 years. Although a few of his sentiments and observations are outdated, the majority of his recommendations are still applicable to today's society.

The title is the clearest indication of the timeless pertinence of this work. In all eras of change, drift has been of the utmost importance. In today's world of exponentially progressing technology and corporate mechanization, we often feel helpless against the tides of nation-wide change. Mastery, then, is the ability to band together and set those changes on the course of prosperity without sacrificing our individuality.

Lippmann outlines the problems, solutions, and repercussions of mastery. Despite some aspects of the text being idealistic or anachronistic, much of what he predicted has come to pass. Although the average reader like myself may not be able to put Lippmann's ideas into direct action, his concepts still ought to help understand our responsibilities as citizens.

This is Walter Lippmann's erudite and often perspicuous examination of the "progressing" American society of the early twentieth century. For Lippmann society is in a constant state of drift and confusion. The confusion is promulgated throughout society by means of the large scale shift from pre-modern industrialism to modern industrialism. In order to obtain mastery what new forms of cohesion have to emerge? Lippmann rejects laissez-fair, William Graham Sumner's brand of individualism, and aligns himself with men like Herbert Croly (his soon to be partner at the New Republic). Society needs cohesion. Lippmann's answer, similar to Croly's, is pluralism (this is mastery). He does not buy the totally homogenous vision of society. Instead his vision is pluralist - large interest groups are emerging and social order can be achieved if a balance or common principle can be met between these common interest groups. In Drift and Mastery Lippmann discusses organized labor (in which he welcomes unions distinguishing himself from Croly), the consumer movement (the importance of objective consumer advice), the women's movement, and corporate managers (Lippmann had already abandoned his previous attraction to socialism. For Lippmann socialism was no longer needed because the robber barons were being replaced by socially minded managers who wanted to establish market share. Ownership is being democratized by the share of stock.
The book is rooted in actual observation allowing its readers to identify with it immediately. In it they observe the new modern era that is taking shape. How will the problems be solved? Lippmann sees science replacing religion as the primary device for solving peoples' problems. Science is the discipline of democracy. Science is no longer a threat. Instead it is a good thing in the Progressive Era.

This is Walter Lippmann's erudite and often perspicuous examination of the "progressing" American society of the early twentieth century. For Lippmann society is in a constant state of drift and confusion. The confusion is promulgated throughout society by means of the large scale shift from pre-modern industrialism to modern industrialism. In order to obtain mastery what new forms of cohesion have to emerge? Lippmann rejects laissez-fair, William Graham Sumner's brand of individualism, and aligns himself with men like Herbert Croly (his soon to be partner at the New Republic). Society needs cohesion. Lippmann's answer, similar to Croly's, is pluralism (this is mastery). He does not buy the totally homogenous vision of society. Instead his vision is pluralist - large interest groups are emerging and social order can be achieved if a balance or common principle can be met between these common interest groups. In Drift and Mastery Lippmann discusses organized labor (in which he welcomes unions distinguishing himself from Croly), the consumer movement (the importance of objective consumer advice), the women's movement, and corporate managers (Lippmann had already abandoned his previous attraction to socialism). For Lippmann socialism was no longer needed because the robber barons were being replaced by socially minded managers who wanted to establish market share. Ownership is being democratized by the share of stock.
The book is rooted in actual observation allowing its readers to identify with it immediately. In it they observe the new modern era that is taking shape. How will the problems be solved? Lippmann sees science replacing religion as the primary device for solving peoples' problems. Science is the discipline of democracy. Science is no longer a threat. Instead it is a good thing in the Progressive Era. Lippmann even uses the word diagnose (a word with explict scientific conotations) in the subtitle.

Concise and interesting. A wonderful link between the anecdotes of folklore and the juggernaut of scientific research. The photos make this book possible possible for use in the field, albeit a bit bulky for travel.

Excellent, not limited to Minn and Wis. An excellent overview of 100 plants from the Prairies and forests of the upper midwest. In-depth review of historical uses balanced with the author's own clinical experience and practical how-to informaiton. Good safety data and recommendations. Most of these plants grow around me in Colorado, and everywhere in the 1500 miles to the authors home, so the book's title is too limited.

I wouldn't say this is the one and only book you'll ever need. But it certainly is a GREAT addition to anyone's herbal library. It's relatively easy to use, because the plants are listed in alphabetical order by their common names. The food qualities and health benefits of the plants are thorough and informative, as well as their habitat and visual description. Points of interest are easy to find and there is a listing of plants that are good for certain illnesses. Plus short descriptions of how to use and prepare them.

This book is very scientific and seems to cover it all in an up-to-date fashion. But if you're not familiar with terms in botany and biology you'll find this book a little difficult to understand. It has a good glossary but a dictionary is still handy at times.
None the less the book has true to life color photos, which are the best I've seen for wild plant identification. Considerably this just may be the answer book for this topic. It's defiantly worth the price, if you desire to take wild herb collecting seriously.

A disclaimer at the beginning of Edible & Medicinal Wild Plants Of Minnesota & Wisconsin warns that some wild plants are toxic or even deadly; though the author Matthew Alfs has made every effort to completely describe safe ways to recognize, harvest, and prepare edible wild plants, they cannot be held liable for any adverse effects. With that sober caution in mind, Edible & Medicinal Wild Plants Of Minnesota & Wisconsin is a truly impressive compendium of information and lore about the art of foraging. A beautiful section of color photographs aptly illustrates the many species of edible plants discussed and described herein. User-friendly introductions to using wild plants for food and health benefits are written in clear, concise text easily accessible to the lay reader. A glossary, exhaustive list of references and comprehensive index round out this superbly presented and very highly recommended guide.

Greg Borowski is truly one of America's great young writers. After reading "First and Long," I felt I had been in the locker room and on the practice field all season long. It's a fascinating and poignant account of two Milwaukee schools close in proximity but worlds apart as players and coaches struggle and grow and struggle some more. Borowski has an amazing eye for detail and a gift for sharing it with the reader. "First and Long" is a terrific story for anyone who loves Friday Night football or who wants insights into American cities today. Can't wait for his next book.

Featuring a Foreword by Vince Lombardi Jr., First And Long: A Black School, A White School And Their Season Of Dreams by Greg Borowski is the inherently fascinating and superbly told story of the first year of the combined Messmer High School/Shorewood High School football team. These two southern Wisconsin schools were almost exact opposites of each other with one being black, private and urban, while the other was white, public, and suburban. First And Long is a story about football, but even more, it is the story of contemporary life and the modern issues of cultural adjustment, racial harmony, and the ideals and idealism of youth as mentored by their imaginative and persevering mentors. Unique and highly recommended reading for sports enthusiasts in general, and Wisconsin highschool football fans in particular!

I really enjoyed First and Long, even though I have to say I am not a sports fan. The author is known for his attention to detail, his ability to put a story in context, and his engaging style. All of these really come through in his account of a landmark season for the country's first high school football team formed from a partnership of a central-city Catholic and a suburban public school. Although the two schools are located merely 2 miles from each other, the author shows us how far apart the schools really in so many other ways.

Clearly, countless hours of interviews and observation went into this book. The players really come to life in its pages -- First and Long allowed me to get to know them, and the coaches as well. The glimpses of their lives off the field were every bit as intriguing as the accounts of their work on the field. Intriguing because they didn't fit squarely into one's expectations formed from Hollywood stories of underdog teams facing adversity. This team displayed a different kind of courage, and by the end of the season I wanted to continue following the players beyond the book's final page.

This book reminded me a good deal of "My Losing Season" by Pat Conroy (a excellent look at the author's challenging season playing basketball for The Citadel). I heartily recommend First and Long.

"First and Long" is a must-read for everyone who loves high school football. Greg Borowski gets as close to the gridiron as George Plimpton did. But his story tells so much more: How boys not only from different schools but from such disparate backgrounds forged a team and refused to fail against seemingly insurmountable odds. What's more, this is a story told with a perceptive eye and exquisite detail. See if it doesn't inspire you, too.

I am reviewing this book because Eric Broder, rules, ok? He RULES! Is that sufficient enough for ya? (see how I pick up the Broder speech patterns? Read the hilarious book, you'll see what I mean). Ok ok, Broder influenced MANY of us fellow Cleveland writers, took us thru endless drab rainy lunch hours downtown as we read his weekly column, Eric Broder deserves his place up there with the masters, dangit! And I mean no paper plate award ceremony, either!Dont keep it such a secret, Eric! Spread your words to the masses! In my own lovely comedic writing, I often scorn the fact that Broder is not writing for Letterman or Conan.. if u like those two, you'll see broder as their 'brother'. And, dont worry if youre not a big reader, the essays in this book are just as easily skimmed than read. I carry GREAT INDOORS in my special CA packing suitcase place, the only book I'll take on the long plane ride.. ok, so I had nothing better to do today but review this (Eric, if youre reading this, kiss kiss hug hug.. although youre taken). WENDY W cleveburg, oh

A very amusing and easy read, Broder's "Great Indoors" is simply a must have of anyone who has followed the man's weekly column in the Cleveland Free Times (or the old Cleveland Edition). It's a veritable autobiography of an indoor intellectual in serial form, and myriad points of cosmic import are established. You'll read, and will doubtlessly recognize yourself somewhere in Broder's tales of tribulation and triumph set here in the wondrous urban armpit of our Great Nation, Cleveland. The best part is that these columns are presented chronologically, and in bite-size readings. So you can put it down whenever you like. Read a couple bits on the bus. Peruse a few more nuggets while making your evening toilet. You'll come to realize that you aren't the only one who does silly and stupid things when left alone in the confines of one's domicile. This stuff is funny, and the author is to be lauded profusely.

Just reading the table of contents of this book makes me laugh. I'll show you. I'll close my eyes and put my finger someplace on one of the 4 pages listing the two-page long essays in the book. I'll bet that reading just the titles of the 5 entries nearest my finger will make you laugh. Here goes-

My Hot Date with Ivana Trump; Fashion: Pants and Stains; Attack of the Kitten People; Impending Domestic Bliss; You'll Hear from My Psychologist.

To prove my little theory to myself I made several more points (of my finger). These points, as well as making me laugh, reminded me that these reprinted columns from almost 10 years of the Cleveland Edition and the Cleveland Free Times are cumulative in their funniness as the reader learns all that he/she really doesn't need to know about the author, Eric Broder. The author himself does a good job of giving the flavor of the book so I'll just quote a section of his introduction to the work. "The theme of the endless, futile, Homeric search for the lost snacks of youth. The theme of raging hypochondria and medical misinformation. The theme of enraged babies and cats. The theme of whining and sniveling at every minor inconvenience. And don't forget the theme of sexual self-delusion. That one's in there big-time."

The book is wierd and useless and about the funniest thing I have ever read. I'm kind of worried about what that might mean, but I think YOU should get this book and dream along with Eric Broder.

PS: I AM NOT related to Eric Broder. I don't even know him.

First of all, I am not related to nor do I personally know Eric Broder...but he is wicked funny and he causes me to run to the newspaper rack each week to read his column. Rants about small animals, his celebrity garden at the Home and Garden show, potato chips...plus some faux "60 Minutes" fantasies to boot? Pure comedic genius. By the way - I met someone who used to work with him at a bookstore many years ago - she reports he's ALWAYS been like this, it's not just a front.

Hearing is a really satisfying novel because of the way it builds and accumulates and stores and supplies meaning little by little, page by page, in gripping patches of prose laid out like a vast acreage of many crops growing side by side to produce a bountiful plenty. But I'm not sure it can be read at the beach, it's not to be dipped into and enjoyed at random-it can only be fully established by reading it sentence by sentence from beginning to end because of the way meaning slowly accumulates even as decades of time are covered. There are no end of stories. They are used, story after story, story on top of story, to build meaning. The authors seem to want the power of stories to be questioned, not to get rid of them or put them down but to break their hold on us. The novel's facinating voodoo sanctuary hidden in a antebellum house depicts a place where its votaries go to tell stories and give them a new kind of hearing. There, they can at the same time freely hear stories and, as one of them puts it, hear "the speech of deliverance" from stories.

As for me, I just want to hear more stories woven together like these. Reading this book brings a new experience of how stories can be heard moving over a vast range of feeling in a short compass like an unfamiliar musical composition.

An incident recounted on the first page or two of this novel sets the stage for what it's all about. Jael B. Juba catches a plane from New York to New Orleans and sits beside a man "wearing one of those Italian silk suits women always want." It's not the man she wants but his suit. Busy with her own personal matters and put off by her perception that he's preparing to come on to her, she resorts to a queer form of protection from unwanted bids for attention. From her briefcase, she pulls out a sheaf of papers she carries to use for just such occasions and studies a sheet closely. A display of what she's looking at takes up the whole of page 2 or so in the novel and certainly confirms Jael's comment that it's "just the right amount of alien without that fatal exotic-erotic combo" to put them off: "the most dense, absolute nonsense computers can generate, every element scaled, cropped, flipped, modified beyond recognition, overprinted, no telltale repetitions." At the very beginning, this device, besides recalling eighteenth century novelists we may have read in high school, like Sterne or Defoe, performs all kinds of functions. It questions our expectations and distances us as it does the attractive man beside her but it also sets up a playful, teasing interaction with us. This foregrounding of print technology (along with a reference to the man's "closed laptop astride his genitals, IBM compatible") situates us in today's world of media. It clues us in on what not to expect in this novel. There's no budding romance here. Jael's feelings are strong and deep but, we discover shortly, they are directed toward an old handwritten diary: "Old leather as soft-skinned as a smooth fat baby." An object produced with the older technology of the pen and one that links her to others, alive and dead, from a past not of her own making.
As in many modern novels (Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Joyce's Ulysses, McEwan's Saturday, to name a few), time in Hearing is restricted to a day or so in the life of one character (Jael) while covering decades, even centuries, of events (as far back as sixteenth century European struggles for control of the Americas). The novel unfolds as the telling and `hearing' of Jael. We read the diary at the same time as Jael re-reads it. We hear Jael's stories as she tells them and we travel with her into a wild spit of Florida for consecration of her beloved book, the old diary, and on to South Beach, Florida where she leaves us with a sketch for a flyer and a sign advertising a new line of work she envisions for herself:
Jael B. Juba, Travay Philousiac
first and last practitioner
As to what this sign could possibly mean, only Hearing, its centuries of movement resounding through a couple of days from one woman's life, offers an answer.

Hearing is fiction in the grand tradition and will appeal, I think, to readers ready and willing to be transported by fabulous writing into the reaches and depths of a fictional world. This novel gets my highest recommendation, but this one is not for you if you're looking for nonfiction embroidered with fictional touches.

I'll flip through each chapter to give some idea of what you can expect, while trying not to give away particulars of the twists and turns that make reading this novel such a pleasure. In the first chapter, "Trail of Seduction," the narrator Jael B. Juba describes how she's following the "trail" made some 15 years earlier (in l977) by her friend Elizabeth Harding Dumot-from Athena, New York, to an antebellum house in Old Tarragona, the historic section of a Florida Gulf Coast town advertised as "the oldest continuous settlement in America." As you move along with Jael over this terrain, you begin to understand how Harding was seduced into buying the broken-down old Boullet House and how Jael experiences that seductive pull when she travels the same route in l993 to return the diary of the long dead Frances Boullet to the Boullet House, where Harding found it. You hear the story of how Harding falls through a rotting windowseat one day while restoring the house, and finds herself in an architecturally concealed voodoo sanctuary. This secret space is so vividly and realistically described that you actually believe in its reality. By the end of the long first chapter all living major characters have been introduced. You have the feeling that you know the people of Old Tarragona and you know where you are in this semi-tropical atmosphere. You're now prepared to hear what's in the diary.

In the second chapter, "Bride of Freedom," you begin reading the diary compiled by Frances Boullet as she approached her ninetieth birthday, back in l935. She originally had 40 volumes of diary and had filled up 39 of them, starting at age 15 on the eve of the Civil War. To fill the remaining blank volume (the one you'll be reading) she cut the material she wanted out of the other 39, burned what was left of them, and pasted her selections into the remaining one. From the way she puts together these cut-outs you get slices of her life and world over a period from l860 to l935. You hear what she sounds like as a teenager, a young woman, a mature woman, and as the old Frances putting together volume number 40. As you listen to changes over time in her voice, you get a strong sense of how she and her cronies develop over decades of time and how America developed from its Floridian and Caribbean beginnings. This chapter is highly entertaining.

Continuing with the diary, the third chapter, "Heroes and Refugees," takes on Frances's father and his ancestral line, showing her turns of character as well as those of America's early settlers. In the fourth chapter, "Of Legacy and Dispossession," you hear the story of how the times brought people together in such unexpected connections that a woman with Frances Boullet's French and English lineage found it natural to adapt the practice of voodoo to her life-and many other fascinating stories of her kin and kind. In chapter 5, "Blood Washes Blood," Frances reveals how the African diaspora and the Caribbean islands, especially Haiti, came to play a profound and lasting role in her life and death (a fascinating and moving read). Chapter 6, "Remains," does a smashing job of tying up loose ends from this amazingly rich and unusual range of material.

The last chapter, "The Opening," may be my favorite. All the other chapters prepare you for this one, which is a celebration of the opening of the secret voodoo sanctuary to the public. Besides being very funny, it brings you to the sudden realization that you, the reader, have involuntarily acquired an insider's ease of understanding what goes on here in the heart of "the oldest continuous settlement in America." The voodoo sanctuary has opened for you too, it seems. Beware!

Hearing by Lydia Fakundiny and Joyce Elbrecht is a highly complex and totally engrossing novel, a tour de force in collaborative fiction. It works as a sequel to The Restorationist, from 1993, but it isn't necessary to have read its predecessor to enjoy Hearing. The work is brilliantly conceived, using the device of one composite diary, compiled from forty volumes of diaries with significant incidents, stories, and history cut and pasted into this final volume. The forty volumes span as many years from the late 19th century into the first half of the 20th, but dip far back into the early years of this country. The myriad layers of time flow logically and smoothly in and out of one another. I thought of it as a tightly packed flower bud with each diary entry like a petal unfolding, and each one opening a new dimension of either time or locale or culture. There are many distinct voices in this novel, each one clear and different from the others - a truly masterful handling of language. Furthermore, the story is completely engaging with shocking surprises along the way, a bit of mystery, a wealth of history and Caribbean culture, and a touch of serious social commentary. If you enjoy reading works that fully engage your brain and all your senses, that open up new worlds and suck you right in, this is the novel for you.