Brooks Books

Bobby Bright's Greatest Christmas Ever is a magical holiday novel for young adults, about a strand of Christmas tree light bulbs miraculously created with the amazing ability to talk among themselves. They hope to shine brightly at Christmastime and make everyone happy; but year after year, they are condemned to the back of the McGillicuddy's Christmas tree. On the tenth year, the Bright family of bulbs and blue bulb Bobby Bright in particular finally gets a chance to shine. Excitement ensues when the McGillicuddy's grandson, Remington, comes by for Christmas and discovers for himself the unique and amazing Christmas tree bulbs! A heartwarming and cheerful read.

This is the probably the best poetry in the world. On par with Robert Burns and Dylan Thomas. Should be used in Schools, colleges and universities as an example to follow and learn from. Brian Teasdale is obviously a gifted and talented poet who's work expresses real feeling in an earthy style comparable to only the greatest. Highly recommended to those who appreciate art in it's highest.

Before, I would always wonder why Bordeaux wine is so expensive. Many had told me that it was, indeed, superior. I am glad that Stephen Brook took the time to explain in common language, all the factors that have made this wine region such a "hot-spot" for the wine industry.

This book is not only a look at this wine region and it's wines, but a must read for all who are interested in the power structure of Europe, especially France.

I love this book. It told me much more about the history and culture of the town I grew up in. I
learned so many things I never knew for sure. Like about the First flag, Washington's troops,
and the industrial history of Bound Brook. I wish I had learned these things while I still lived
there. I grew up right across from a huge house I loved that I learned from this book was the
very first house built in Bound Brook. If you happen to be from Bound Brook or are living
there now, you must read this book. Also, a good companion to this is "Somerset County, NJ :
Crossroads of the American Revolution" by William A. Schleicher, Susan J. Winter, & Bill Schleicher.

Authors tackling Grimm Brother stories today have the difficult task of not always knowing what the best way to present the authors' original material is. If you've ever read a direct translation of a Grimm story then you know that they have a tendency towards violence, black and white terms of good and bad, didacticism, and some truly disgusting scenes. For her part, German born Doris Orgel has just translated and retold some of the Grimm Bros animal tales for the pleasure of young readers everywhere. Orgel recently translated the truly marvelous young adult novel, "Daniel Half Human and the Good Nazi", but her talents extend beyond rote rewrites. "The Bremen Town Musicians" is perhaps one of the smartest, friendliest, and beautiful picture books based on animal Grimm tales available to kids today.

The tales included in this collection are the standard tale of the Bremen Town Musicians, The Hare and the Hedgehog, King of the Birds, When the Birds and the Beasts Went to War, The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids, and finally The Fox and the Geese. Some of these stories will sound familiar. The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids, for example, has only slight variations from the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. As such, it's probably the most violent of the tales (which is impressive when you consider the source). Each story is retold in an accessible and pleasurable way. Orgel, in her preface, notes that she made a few changes "skipping what seemed preachy or obscure, but always very carefully, so as not to harm the 'oldness,' because that's where the magic is". The result is a meticulous series of tales that are just as new an interesting today as they were when first conjured up. Of these stories, "The Fox and the Geese" was undoubtedly my favorite. Not just because I'd never heard the story before, but because there's a great deal of mature joking going on behind the tale.

The illustrations in this tale are by Bert Kitchen and compliment the author's tone perfectly. In many ways, the pictures bear some similarities to those of fellow illustrator Genedy Spirin. They contain muted natural colors and characters with realistic looks. In this book, a donkey looks like a donkey and a fox looks like a fox. Kitchen never makes his characters cartoonish in any way, but that doesn't mean they don't engage in ridiculous behavior. There is a dignity to this book that, in the hands of any other illustrator, could easily have been lost.

If Orgel feels like making a second collection of tales based on Aesop, I wouldn't object a jot. A companion book would be just the thing to accompany such this particular collection. In the meantime, consider pairing this book with, "Anno's Aesop: A Book of Fables" by Mitsumasa Anno for a well-rounded animal-based fable storytime. Both are necessary to any well-rounded children's literary collection.

I loved this book, I must have read it about thirty times. One of the best things about the book is the way the author portrays the setting, her use of vocabulary. I liked how she kept all the events that happened therein very clear and straight to the point. I also believe that the author's form of keeping the reader in suspense was great. I hung on to every page, because it had an incredible romance between the main characters, a romance that a hopeless romantic only dreams of. So, for all of you who love romance that is fantastic and yet realistic, I recommend that you read this book.

We needn't act so surprised that the great twentieth century American poet Gwendolyn Brooks wrote books of poetry for children. What could be more natural? This poet shares her gifts with the small people that inhabit her hometown (in this case, Chicago). What did surprise me was the original publication date of this title. Now I read through this entire collection of urban poetry and I had a fairly clear idea that these poems must have been written in the 1970s. After all, collections of poems featuring African-American children were just beginning to blossom after the Civil Rights movement. I was feeling pretty smug until I glanced at the date in question. 1956. So roughly twenty years before the United States understood the importance of creating children's literature for people from all walks of life, Gwendolyn Brooks was taking matters into her own hands.

"Bronzeville Boys and Girls" collects thirty-four short poems about children into a single compendium. Each poem contains the name of a child. This child is either the subject of the poem, or the person delivering it. Taken as a whole, the book feels like nothing so much as a slightly updated series of nursery rhymes. Brooks is an accomplished poet and there is something about the way her lines scan that feels old and established. Take, for example, this poem entitled, "John, Who Is Poor". "Give him a berry, boys, when you may/ And, girls, some mint when you can/ And do not ask when his hunger will end/ Nor yet when it began". For me, these poems acknowledge the struggles that all children, regardless of race, face in the world's poverty laden big cities. Though most the poems have an element of whimsy or light-heartedness to them, many are socially conscious. The boy who does not receive what he wants for Christmas reflects, "To frown or fret would not be fair/ My Dad must never know I care/ It's hard enough for him to bear". You won't find any poems about some of the harsher aspects of city living (drugs, prostitution, etc.) that are so common these days, in part because this book was published so very long ago. Also, it is written with a distinctly young age group in mind. Accompanying Ms. Brooks's verses are various illustrations by Ronni Solbert. The combination of words with images felt almost like a predecessor to Shel Silverstein at times, though I'd be hard pressed to tell you exactly why. It's just something about the occasional silliness of the children pictured.

At the moment, the big urban nursery rhyme crowd pleaser is the accomplished, "The Neighborhood Mother Goose". But that book just restructures old nursery rhymes for contemporary kids. Gwendolyn Brooks went so far as to create new and exiting nursery rhymes for the children of her day and age. Today, most of them read as crisp and clearly as they did the day they were made. There are some exceptions, of course. A couple poems feel a little stilted or overly formal towards the kids reading them today. But many are fine examples of superior writing. If you ever find that you are able to locate a copy of "Bronzeville Boys and Girls", I suspect that you will not regret the fact any time soon.

George Moore's stunningly ambitious tale of what might have happened had Christ survived the wounds of his crucifixion and subsequently attempted to lead a solitary, ordinary life. The central figure in Moore's tome is Joseph of Arimethea, the wealthy aristocrat who enlists in the discipleship of Christ and is accessible to the ear of Pontius Pilate. It is Arimethea who uses his influence to have Christ removed from the cross and who then takes it upon himself to steal him away to his estate when he discovers that Jesus is still alive.

Many readers of a strong faith may find much of this novel offensive. There are two Christs portrayed here; and neither fit the traditional bill. The first is a contemptuous revolutionary, bent on the destruction of social order to make way for a new kingdom of justice. The second is a reposeful, passive figure who retreats to the solitude of nature and comes to dismisses his former self as an impetuous, caustic purveyor of wrath.

I found Moore's portrayal of the duality of Jesus to be a refreshingly original portrait of the times and circumstances of Christ, as well as a daring hypothesis of the origin of myth. The climactic confrontation between Paul, the vanguard of the new Christ, and Jesus, the shepherd, is a turn of creative genius, and does more to confront the notions of traditional Christianity than any scholarly tome before or since.

This is a solid treatise on how to construct perspective images of given objects, and there is also some discussion of inverse problems of perspective, notably to determine for a given painting where the artist would have wanted you to put your eye to best enjoy his perspective virtuosity. The modern mathematical reader may not be very interested in perfecting his skill in perspective drawing, but neglect of theory of perspective is unhealthy if only for the narrow reason that it creates a blind spot in our understanding of projective geometry (itself sadly neglected, but that's a different matter). For example, Desargues's theorem emerges from the construction of the perspective of a triangle (fig. 20 of the 1715 ed.) by means of one of Taylor's most elegant techniques, the "visual ray construction", where both the triangle and the eye-point are rotated into the picture plane (the triangle plane is rotated down about its intersection with the picture plane and the eye is rotated up about the horizon of the triangle plane). Taylor even manages to hint at the cross-ratio in the context of finding the perspective image of a line segment divided in a given ratio (p. 183; Andersen's commentary pp. 27-29).

I used this book in school and it has guided me for decades.
One learns how to construct paragraphs, make the writing flow,
avoid awkward sentences. Get it and read it. Then write.