Bats Books

I have recently met LtCol Hambleton in person. He has become a friend of mine and I enjoy every moment we have together to talk things over on his experience. He is a very interesting Gentleman. I have never met personally a person like this before, so I do cherish his friendship.

Mel Lehman Usaf, Ret (1971)

Lt.Col. Hambleton is a man among men. The 5 stars is for his intelligence, determination and humanity. Sir, I salute you.

Allow me to quote the author, William C. Anderson, from Contemporary Authors NR - "To paraphrase Mark Twain, truth is a very rare commodity and should be used sparingly. I subscribe totally to this view, and have seldom been accused of letting the facts interfere with a good story."

The author does tells the reader in the afterword that the book is based on the true story in 'spirit'. However the words "Based on the True Story..." usually mean a high degree of fact. If you're looking for an entertaining story written by a close friend of the main character, you've found the right book.

Good, short story. It can be read fast. Makes a good tale for Halloween!

Ricky just moved in with his parents to a new house. Everything was going well at first, until, during the night he heard a voice, and saw at the foot of the bed a mean small creature hanging upside down... bat!!!! .... and it talked!
It said the house belonged to the bats and that they had to leave or they would regret. Now Ricky has to convince his parents of moving out before the bats makes him very sorry for staying..

I really liked the book Bats on the Bedstead. This story is about a 6th grade boy named Ricky. His family moved into a new house. On his first night, an evil bat named Voro woke him up and asked him what he was doing in his house. The rest of the story is about how Voro tried to scare him away, and how Ricky found the courage to get rid of him.

I liked how Voro kept coming back with more and more bats to try to scare Ricky. I also got to learn about different kinds of bats as Ricky did research on them.I thought it was funny when he hit the bats with his pillow. The book was so interesting I read the whole thing in one day. I would recommend it to other kids in the 3rd grade.

This book should be resurrected in light of bats residing in the Governor's mansion in Olympia, Washington. What fun for Governor Gary Locke, wife Mona and new baby daughter Emily to read aloud. They would gain appreciation for the tiny flying mammels who inhabit older buildings like their own state mansion. Maybe the Locke's have met their Voro, the bat leader who ... but we won't tell the tales of Ricky and Voro

"Bridey's Mountain" is a thick novel(about 600 pages), and it feels like an epic. However, it was a bit too long, but the stories of the four generations of Gregory women are good. Set in Telluride, Colorado, this is the story of Ariana McAllister, great granddaughter to Mona Gregory, who bought the mountain that is Ari's legacy. Ari wants to save the mountain from a greedy developer, but needs help. Luckily, she wins the lottery, and two men become smitted with her. One, Caley, is a snake personified, but he has his own reasons why he wants to save the mountain. The other man works for the developer, but chooses love over money. All of the charcters are intertwined by marriage and love affairs from the past, and we see family secrets unwinding up until the fateful climax where the bad guys get their just desserts, and our heroine gets what she wants. It's a good read, but it will take you a few days to go through it.

This book has much to offer the reader who enjoys a wider depth. I was taken by it's intrigue. The mystic touch was more than believable giving it a thrilling edge. The romance was breathtaking. The reader suffers no loss at the expense of this fine litterateur.

The only problem with loving this book so much is that the author is unknown. The whole idea of going through four generations of women in one family is totally new and wonderful. You will fall in love with the charectors and not want the book to end. If you love a good heart-wrentching story, you will definitely feel that you have got your money's worth out of this book

My family loves the books written by Susan Schade and Jon Buller. They are fun, creative and our daughter absolutely loves them too. I recommend reading some of their other books like Snug House, Bug House; Snow Bugs; Toad Eats Out; Toad on the Road; Toad takes off. Once you read them, you will want to buy them all like we did!

My grandson liked the book, but he was distracted from the print story by the pictures. I think the words need to be in a larger, bolder print. Otherwise the pictures overpower the story instead of enriching it.

This is a nice book for a 3 year old that love to have books read to them and to start showing them how to read. Love it.

This CLIFFS NOTES ON JULIUS CAESAR is a fairly good supplement in helping one to understand or better teacher Shakespeare's play. The guide begins with a short essay about the life of Shakespeare. This is followed by a synopsis of the play. Next comes a list of the characters, including a brief paragraph about each one. The main chunk of the aid are the summaries and commentaries on the text. Like all CLIFFS NOTES (and SPARK NOTES for that matter), the books are not meant to be a replacement for the work, but as a supplement to better understanding. JULIUS CAESAR is filled with many great lines, but the editor's don't even mention many of them in this book. Therefore, if one were to only read the CLIFFS NOTES, one would fail to grasp the most important part of Shakespeare's play, the words themselves.
Following the commentaries, there are some character analyses of the major characters of the play (Caesar, Antony, Octavius, Brutus, and Cassius). Finishing out the book are some review questions, essay topics, and a selected biography. Though the editors don't touch much in their comments about the political implications of the play at the time of Shakespeare's writing, this CLIFFS NOTES does offer a lot of other great information. In short, it is a excellent supplement to a famed Shakespearean play.

I needed cliff notes for English as we were reading the play Julius Caesar. I looked around and finally found these. They are great! They are in modern version and they go along with most/lots of HS English books today. THANKS!

This book helped me understand and study "Julius Caesar" more than most textbooks do, and certainly better than reading it over and over again. I had trouble with decifering the old English text sometimes, and this book clears up meanings while presenting a clear theme, involved analysis of characters, summary, and an explaination of each scene.

This is a fabulous work of scholarship which opens one's eyes to problems in the Middle East, India, the Phillipines, Indonesia,the Sudan, Cyprus, and other areas where Moslems are killing Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Animists, e.g.: anyone who does not submit to Islam.

The history of Jews and Christians living under Islam is not widely known. When thinking of it at all, one looks to the glories of Islamic Spain or to the Ottoman Empire. The general historical reality is different from these however. Bat Ye'or provides an excellent overview of this history in the first part of her book and a wide variety of source documents in the second.

Here we learn of the religiously sanctioned forced conversions, daily humiliations, massacres, oppression, inequitable taxation, and the like, which eventually led to the near disappearance of the extensive Christian and Jewish communities which had flourished throughout the Near East and North Africa prior to the advent of Islam.

As "dhimmi" (people of the contract) Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians and others of the accepted religions had no rights of citizenship within a Muslim state. As "protected peoples" they had no right to self-defense. They were at best tolerated and at all times living without security - subject to the law but not protected by it.

For example, Jews and Christians are specifically accused in the Qur'an of having falsified God's word. In past Islamic societies therefore, Jews and Christians were considered to be willfully and knowingly adhering to a lie. As religiously convicted liars, they were given no standing in courts of law and could be convicted of crimes on the unsupported word of two Muslim males. The abuses of this system were extensive.

All-in-all, Bat Ye'or's two books ("The Dhimmi" and "The Decline of Near Eastern Christianity under Islam") do much to re-illuminate the forgotten history of Jews and Christians under Islam. They deserve a wide readership.

As an aside here to prove the non-partisanship of my review, it's worth pointing out that the historical behavior of Christian societies toward indigenous Jews and heretics was no better. Muslim societies took a cue for much of their discriminatory legislation from the intolerant religious laws of the conquered Christian Byzantines. True religions display peculiar proofs, don't they.

The hard-cover edition of "The Dhimmi" is currently out-of-print it seems. However Amazon.com carries the paper-back. Get it while it is available if you're interested at all in the history of "protected peoples" living under Islam.

There are alot of apologists for Islam out there, and this book is important as it chronicles Islamic treatment of non-muslims, known as dhimmis, from the perspective of a dhimmi historian, the Egyptian Jew, Bat Ye'or. This book is not written from the perspective of the victorous muslims, and there is no doubt many muslims dislike this book for this reason. It is more important to think about toleration of the existence of conquered non-muslims and not "Islamic tolerance", because to give one example, dhimmis payed to the muslim umma a tax called the jiyza and paying this was suppossed to guarantee their lives. There is even in the documents section at the end of the book a document about how in Syria because the Sultan abolished the jiyza for a period, the local muslims saw this a breach of the contract of the dhimma, a contract of toleration of the dhimmi's existence and mobs massacred Christians, looted them, etc.

I particularly disagree with how on pages 121-122, she mentions how as Islamic domination lessened in politics in many muslim nations, with leaders such as Answar Sedat, Ataturk, etc. the situation of dhimmis generally improved. In Turkey the dhimmis have significantly declined since the time of Ataturk due to deliberate Turkish government policies, and she recognizes the problems of Arab nationalism, but not other muslim ultra-nationalisms. One thing Islamic domination of politics did allow dhimmis was a degree of self-rule that is abandoned with the concept of establishing a national state and not a theocracy, where there is only one civil law. In the Ottoman Empire dhimmis would if they were a Christian and had a dispute with another Christian, go to a bishop which functioned much like a muslim kadi, the Jews would go to rabbis, but if they had a dispute with a muslim then the dhimmis had to deal with Islamic law where they were disabled legally and their testimony was not respected. Now without religious domination of politics, they always have to deal with Islamic bias and prejudice and they have lost this kind of autonomy they once had.

The book deals with the first months of the Ford Presidency and almost everybody should know that those were his hardest days : to complete the passage form former to the new administration, the Nixon pardon, the mid-term elections.
These were all tasks difficult to handle and happened in a very strict period of time so that to judge President Ford one should have had - ar least - a stretch of one year. Instead Reeves, who narrates the first 6 months more or less, does not spare his most harsh judgement towards a person that all of a sudden found himself Vice-President and then President.
Almost inhuman.

Few people have the time or interest to read a book about the Ford administration and I am not necessarily proud to be one of them. To be fair to myself I read the book more because of the author then the subject. I must say that I was very pleased. Again what I liked was really not much about President Ford, but the humor and insight of the author. Let's face it, most of us have a rather negative view of good old Jerry, and this book pushes that perception even further. Page after page the author details out one dim witted move after another. It just seamed as though Ford was moving in a world with about 60% of the required IQ points to succeed. All the detail about the blunders and misstep's is done with almost comedic like timing and surprise. If I did not know better you would think this was a Moore or Franklin book. The author used the subject to the fullest in the comedy writings.

The good humor aside, you really do get a negative view of the Ford administration. Not necessarily because of what he did, but more because of what remarkably little he did do. The author stretched to detail out much of anything that Ford did except campaign trips and blanket approvals of Nixon policies that still seemed to be generated within the administration. The one nice consistent with this book and about every other book I have read about the Nixon administration is that this author disliked Al Haig. How this guy has rubbed every single person he has met the wrong way I will never know, but he is the poster child for "does not get along with others". Overall the book was full of humor and some interesting facts. It is a quick read and if for some reason you are looking for something on Ford this book will at least give you a smile if nothing else.

Reeves is a veteran political reporter whose excellent insights and smooth prose are guaranteed to provide a pleasant, educational read. Although Reeves portrays Ford as a dummy, he presents him as a well-meaning dummy. Thus his take can hardly be considered critical. Indeed, Reeves assigns Ford's every success to the latter's naivete combined with his unquestioning loyalty to party. Ford's rise to Minority Leader and eventually Vice President are based on the actions of others, and the estimates of elites that Ford will be inoffensive and controllable. Indeed, he portrays the President as a captive of his own administration, controlled by the Nixon holdovers and their strong ideas, from the ubiquitous Kissinger to the reluctantly deposed Haig. Reeves explains the Nixon pardon strictly in this context, as the innocent action of true party loyalist, not as a cynical payoff for services rendered, or even a cynical partisan f-k you to the country. For those interested in politics and Presidents, Reeves should be classed with Witcover and Germond, as a must read. For those who have a passing interest he should be taken as an excellent readable primer, if it's not all you need to know, it's most of it. A bargain at any price.

I did my review on the book Spring Break. The main character is named Adam Fenster. His family is made up of a sister, mom, dad, and butler. His family is rich! They go to a place called Dreamworld over spring vacation. Adam did not know what he was going to face while he was there at Dreamworld. It goes crazy with all the activites that he is assigned to do. I like how the author writes this great book and has so much detail. Also he makes it interesting so people will want to read it again and again. To find out more read the book Spring Break by Peter Larangis. I enjoyed the book and I hope you do to.

I read this book and thought my parents are embrassing! But at the end I learned that someday I will embrass my children. A great book and is very funny!

This is a really good book about a kid named Adam who has to try and survive spring break. His family want to go to a fat farm to loose some weight. Adam and his friends see an ad for a amusment park camp for seniors. They think it means HIGHSCHOOL seniors, and since their big for their age, they figure they can pass. Adam's friend, Shawn, Adam's butler's son, Bufort, his dad, Dad, his mom, Mom, and his sister, Racheal, all went on this trip. READ THIS BOOK TO SEE IF THEY SURVIVE!!!

I was so inspired by this book and a 1973 speech by Judge Sorrentino that I decided to go to law school myself. It is an incredible, but true, tale of how a young thug can develop into a respected jurist.

Reading this book as a teenager was interesting, but I had never been through any real hardships. Twenty years later when I was at the lowest point in my life I rediscovered it on my bookshelf along with other high school literature books...Reading it again made me feel both fortunate and sure that I could overcome my own "little" problems. I am ordering another copy 30-years later so I can give it to a friend of mine who has yet to believe he can change his own life. God Bless Joseph Sorrentino.

JOSEPH SORRENTINO DID A GREAT JOB RELATING HIS LIFE'S STORY. I WAS SO IMPRESSED WITH HIS HONESTY AND HIS ACCOMPLISHMENTS. HE TRULY TURNED HIS LIFE AROUND FROM CERTAIN DOOM. IF HE CAN MAKE ANYTHING OUT OF HIS LIFE ANYONE CAN. HE HAD NO WHERE TO GO BUT UP. EVERY TEENAGER SHOULD READ THIS BOOK

Now in a revised and updated second edition, Who's Who In Egyptian Mythology compiled and co-authored by Antony S. Mercatante and Robert Steven Bianchi presents the Egyptian pantheon and a compendium of related topics, historical personages, and themes pertinent to it in and arranged in an alphabetical order, and an encyclopedia-style, from Akhenaten to Zehuti (another name for Thoth). A most fascinating reference filled cover to cover with condensed myths, history, and archaeological discoveries, Who's Who In Egyptian Mythology is a highly recommended addition to any personal, professional, academic, or community library Egyptology reference collection.

I am always drawing the gods & godesses of Egyptian myth, but there are very few good books that give descriptions and/or pictures of a large amount of their dieties. This book proved to be the largest and best guide to the egyptian myths, folklore, and symbols that I have found. The pictures are OK, but the information is WONDERFUL! I use it all the time.

Alphabetically organized, this dictionary lists numerous entries on the Egyptian pantheon of gods, mythology and religious beliefs. It also covers such subjects as mummies, pyramids, magic and calendar. The complete translation of major Egyptian tales (The Tale of Sinuhe, the Tale of the Magicians and the Doomed Prince, among many others) are included in this book. Illustrated in black and white, it is mostly useful for students of Egyptology.