Caldwell Books

This is a great book for horror film fans and budding horror filmmakers. Even if you're looking to shoot a 5 minute spoof horror movie in your backyard its definitely worth a read. There's plenty of insight to the business of low budget horror filmmaking, plenty of interviews with honest directors, cinematographers, set designers, writers...everything you need. Many references to classic films that enhance the chapters. It's written well, easy to read. It's going to be beside me when I make my next film.

Hard to know what to expect from a book like this. Sure it would be good for first time film makers, but beyond that.. there is not much here.

I was captivated by "Ceremony of the Innocent" and have loved other books by Taylor Caldwell, but "To Look and Pass" was depressing, dull, slow, and pointless. Don't spend your time or your money.

To Look and Pass is one of Taylor Caldwell's best works. The story revolves around a group of young people at the turn of the century whose lives stay entwined even as they grow older. It is about forgiveness and expectations and the protection of innocence in the face of despair and evil. It is about relationships and how we would like them to be, not the way they really are. Sometimes the appearance of something is more important than the reality of it and the inability to recognize the difference can be dangerous. The setting is the tranquil Midwest with its predictable conventions which make the darker aspects of the story even more disturbing by contrast. In this story love is a twisted thing that serves to protect illusions but ultimately destroys everything that it touches. It is raw in its honest look at people with hidden motives who choose to hide from the truth. I have read this book several times over twenty years and it never fails to amaze me with its honesty and power.

At first when I started reading this book I thought it was going to be helpful in teaching me about the end times---esp the rapture. Dr. Ryrie begins by briefly presenting pre-, a-, and post- millennial views, just enough so the reader will know the basic differences. He goes on to say the book will be focusing, not on the different millennial views, but the rapture. Midtribulationism and partial rapure are both mentioned but not discused as much as pre- and post- tribulationism are. The book is mainly a refutation of posttribulationism and an affirmation of pretribulationism. But after reading most the book and becoming perplexed, I had to put it down. I would suggest this book to those with a sufficient amount of previous knowledge of eschatology. I'll probably read this book again after I research more though. From what I hear, this Ryrie is an expert in the field and if I had been studying when the rapture will occur, this book would not have been so confusing.

In "What You Should Know About the Rapture" you will get a very good explanation of what dispensational premillenialists believe about the sequence of events leading up to Christ's return. Dr. Ryrie argues that the Church will be "caught up" by Christ before the Great Tribulation at the end of time and will then return with the Lord seven years later when He comes back to judge humankind. His use of simple terms, good diagrams, and helpful illustrations of a good teacher are just right for explaining a complex series of events to laymen. It also does a good job of pointing out the weaknesses in the postribulational view (historic premillenialism). It has caused me to rethink some of my assumptions.

However, this strength of simplicity is a weakness, too. Dr. Ryrie's short explanations make his presentation too simple because he does not closely examine his own position for potential weaknesses. Also, the book takes for granted that the reader is a dispensationalist narrowing the audience in such a way that those unfamiliar with this theological school of thought could find their heads spinning. A subject this complex deserves a more thorough treatment.

Having said all that, this book is worth reading so we can examine closely our assumptions about how we read the bible when searching for answers regarding God's program in history; especially prophecy.

We purchased these books for our Star-Wars obsessed 4 year old boy. My wife and I enjoy reading the stories to him because they hold his interest, which allows us to keep the t.v. turned off. After a week of moderate use, the pages started falling out. We returned the first book we purchased and ordered a few more volumes in this series. Both the replacement book and the new volumes have the same problem with the pages falling out. If you intend on reading these books more than once, do not purchase them.

These comic books are great. My son will spend an hour at a time devouring them. He is only 5. The problem I have with them however, is that they are falling apart. At first I thought it was only the one book. We must have broken the spine or soemthing, but no. All of them are loosing their pages. Now I know my son is only five, but believe me when I say he is very careful with his books. He cherishes them. Theya re just made very poorly. We are so diappointed as we have to keep reorganizing the pages and figuring out hwere they belong. Expensive little books to have falling apart. Very disappointed.

The Clone Wars Adventures series is a comic spinoff of the animated show. Those familiar with the cartoon will more or less know what to expect: short, lighthearted action stories. No more, no less.

I'm not a huge fan of the art style, but I feel the cartoon made up for this with its fluid animation. Likewise, the comic features great, stylish action shots and a good sense of movement. However, it lacks the show's visual intensity, which is perfectly understandable given the limitations of the medium.

Writer Haden Blackman has penned some of the darkest (and arguably most powerful) stories in the franchise to date (with Jango Fett: Open Seasons and Clone Wars Volume 2: Last Stand on Jabiim being two brilliant examples). The three stories in Clone Wars Adventures, however, are clearly written with kids in mind. As such, it obviously lacks the darker themes of the Republic series' Clone Wars stories. Older readers looking for a little emotional depth should best look elsewhere, but kids who enjoyed the series should find this a good enough read. CWA is therefore an ideal choice for Star-Wars-obsessed parents keen to share their interest with their children.

However, this is a bit on the expensive side for something that can be finished in 10-15 minutes. Like the show, CWA is fun while it lasts, but is over far too quickly. Furthermore, it simply isn't as compelling as the cartoon - more a fault of the comic book format than the actual writing or art. Casual fans should best steer clear. Younger readers and completists, however, might find this of reasonable interest.

Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures is an ongoing series from Dark Horse comics that takes its inspiration from the extremely successful Clone Wars cartoon series. This inspiration is visible in both the short, action-packed nature of the stories as well as in the art style itself. Volume One contains three stories as follows:

1) "Blind Force" - Obi-Wan and Anakin journey to Nivek, a planet perpetually shrouded in darkness (earning it the somewhat obvious nickname "The Night Planet"). This story is an enjoyable look at the heroes' Master-Padawan relationship in the early months of the war and showcases Anakin's raw strength in the Force. It uses lighting creatively to illustrate the difference between relying on one's eyes to see and using innate powers within.

2) "Heavy Metal Jedi" - Mace Windu and Saesee Tiin engage in light banter while wiping out hosts of Separatist droids, including one serious boss droid, at the Battle of Iktotch. There's a wonderful three-page vignette mid-story. It depicts the action from the viewpoint of a super battle droid suffering the misfortune of being used as a projectile weapon by the Jedi. I had a little trouble with the art in the last two pages; there seemed to be some scale difficulties regarding just how big the boss super battle droid was, exactly.

3) "Fierce Currents" - Kit Fisto tools around underwater on Mon Calamari looking for the source of a disturbance he feels in the Force. The cartoon episode featuring Kit Fisto was a visual delight and it's terrific to see that built upon in this story. Kit discovers what is causing the unrest in the ocean and manages to leave the Mon Calamari and the reader with a tidy moral lesson at the end to boot.

The first three volumes of this series use lower-quality paper than volumes IV and up and present ads for Dark Horse/Gentle Giant products between each of the stories. The choice to eliminate the ads and improve the book quality for subsequent volumes was a good one and makes the later books feel less disposable.

Clone Wars Adventures Volume One is a quality kickoff to the series featuring three solid and engaging stories.

My six year old son is going through the "Star Wars Phase," my mother says I also went through. These books are written on a level he can read on his own with stories that keep him interested enough to read them more than once.
I was glad to find them online as our local bookstores and even comic book shops don't carry them!

While this book has a few (and I mean a very few) nice photos, most of the ideas are nothing to write home about. If you have any decorating experience at all or even a little imagination, then you have most of this book covered. I was disappointed to see most of the author's "ideas". I was so hoping for something new and maybe a little unconventional. Guess I'll just have to stick with HGTV for that.

This book has some really good ideas for special holiday touches throughout the home. It includes autumn decorating as well as Christmas. I used several of her ideas in my own home.

I do not watch QVC and was not familiar with Valerie Parr Hill prior to buying the book. But, I bought it because I was so captivated by the great cover. The photos are beautiful and the ideas inspiring, yet simple. Do not let the Christmas tree on the cover fool you. The book takes you from Thanksgiving through the holiday season. A great little find to add to my book collection.

BUYER BEWARE: I purchased this book and Adoption: Your Step-by-Step Guide (also by Mardie Caldwell) and to my surprise THEY WERE ACTUALLY THE SAME BOOK, PUBLISHED LESS THAN FOUR MONTHS APART UNDER DIFFERENT TITLES! Nowhere did it say that one was a minimally updated version of the other.

While the information that these books contain is very good, I find it a very shady practice indeed to publish two books in this manner less than 4 months apart without informing potential buyers of the duplication. It has left me very wary of the author and the publisher. In fact, I would guess the US ISBN Agency would be interested in knowing these books are the same...

If not for this book, I wouldn't know where to begin. If not for Mardie Caldwell's efforts and talent, her caring heart and experience, I'd be swimming in the vast, endless sea of the Internet floundering around, stumbling upon wonderful websites, but lacking direction and guidance. Thank God for this book. It is a roadmap, clearly explaining everything from how to use a computer and the Internet, to pointing you towards adoption websites and resources. I'd never know most of these websites existed if not for Mardie's book. Her work is a blessing, and am indebted to her for pouring much of her time and heart into this book.

Whatever your circumstances: the pains of infertility, wanting to adopt to add to your current family, or wanting to adopt because you're like me- you just know it's the right thing for you and the child you eventually end up with, I strongly recommend the book Adopting Online.com by Mardie Caldwell. I've looked in bookstores, on the Internet- and have never found such a concise, easy to understand adoption book that breaks down the process and guides you, step by step, through the entire adoption process and then some.

If I could personally thank Mardie Caldwell for writing this book, I'd do it. The next best thing is posting a book review in the hopes that she'll see it, and others will discover, as I have, this amazing adoption resource book.

Oh Puleeeeze. Houston as America's Premier Restaurant City? What happened to New York and San Francisco? Even Las Vegas has better food than the Fat Capital of the US. This cookbook-lite embodies the worst transgression of all -- imagining that the world revolves around its city, and that somehow that matters to foodies. It's pretentious and silly. Besides we all know that nobody in Houston eats mesquite-roasted duck, unless they're trying to impress someone else at the table (usually from out of town). They eat at MacDonalds and hide the supersize when a normal-weight person walks by. Go back in the kitchen and check how many of those recipes REALLY start with cream of mushroom soup.

Houston is an outstanding city for restaurant lovers and this book contains recipes from some of the city's best restaurants. The recipes are complete and accurate and each includes a photo along with a small writeup on either the restaurant or the chef.

If you can't make it to the restaurants, this is the next best thing to being there.

I just received this a copy of this text. Although it is a fascimile, the vast majority of the page images have a background nearly as dark as the typeface. Page 345 is entirely missing.

I would NOT recommend this edition.

I read Jock of the Bushveld by Percy FitzPatrick for a book report and i have to say i enjoyed it very much. The book is about a hunting dog named Jock and his owner, a transport rider, who narrates the story. When the book starts off the narrator talks about the puppies of which Jock is one. Jock is the runt of the litter but the narrator likes him anyway. As the story goes on Jock grows and learns to be a hunting dog. As you read about Jock you also read about the animals and people in the Veld during the Transvaal gold rush. The book is broken up into many stories. Most are about hunting with Jock, such as a hunt for a leopard and an old crocodile. Other stories are about people and the animals that Jock and the narrator face, such as when the duo gets lost in the bush, a fight with a captive baboon, a run from a wildfire, and an encounter with some wild dogs. The book ends peacefully after many years and many more adventures when Jock becomes unable to hunt and must retire.
I enjoyed the book greatly because of the history and the people that were discussed in the book. I also enjoyed the story and the way the author painted the picture of the bushveld. I could literally see two men and a dog running across the bush, away from a roaring wildfire. Jock of the Bushveld is a kind of mix between Where the Red Fern Grows because both of the stories involve a young man who gets a dog (or dogs) and grows up with it. Hunting is also a theme in the two books. It is also like King Solomon's Mines because it takes place in Africa, has many interesting stories of animals, and a history of Africa that is twisted into the story. I would recommend this book to hunters, people who have been to Africa, or people who just enjoy exiting and exotic stories.

...but not enough for anyone. Welcome to this collection of journalism from the right and left of the American political spectrum. For the left, is (or was) Christopher Hitchens, vigorous atheist and internationalist but also unmitigated and uncompromising hater of the Clintons! For the right, Christopher Caldwell, consistent supporter of the Republican Party but critical of its attacks on Clinton! They have come together to present their favorite examples of journalism as each one introduces the other side's journalism. Gee, doesn't that sound unpredictable and exciting! If this sounds more like the introduction of a television sitcom than a volume of intellectual debate, then congratulations, you've encountered the first problem with this collection. The rhetoric of partisan conflict, plus the indulgent flattery of the other side, with the special premium of "unpredicatibilty": there was a time when Christopher Hitchens was above this sort of thing. (In particular, in a November 1985 review of Charles Krauthammer.)

This sort of collection is almost guaranteed to win approval. After all no-one can agree with all the articles here. That is especially the case with the impeachement of Clinton, where there are articles for and against in both halves of the book, with the best one being Kenneth Anderson's opposition to it in the "right" side. So what that Caldwell writes in pseudo-populist vein of how the Democrats hold the presidency and both houses of Congress, something they've only done for two of the past 22 years? Instead we are to admire the book, and presumably the editors, for the wide variety of vigorously presented views. Perhaps. Highlights of the left side include Adolph Reed Jr's critique of The Bell Curve, Andrew Cohen on the fatuousness of "Generation X" buzz, Susan Sontag's lament for Bosnia, Benjamin DeMott's criticism of "civility," Marshall Berman on the Communist Manifesto, Arundhati Roy on India's nuclear bomb, and Nat Hentoff against speech codes. Highlights on the right side include Andrew Sullivan on why he published Charles Murray on the Bell Curve, Ruth Wisse on having an ex-Communist for a father, Bill Kauffmann in praise of Dorothy Day, John O'Sullivan and Thomas Fleming against the Kosovo war, and Kenneth Minogue's polemic against feminism.

Some of the contrasts do not do credit to the Right. Certainly I prefer Susan Sontag's elegy for Bosnia, to Thomas Fleming's whine over the Kosovo war. You could give me Nat Hentoff over David "I may or may not be lying" Brooks any day. And certainly Adolph Reed's criticism of The Bell Curve is much more damaging than Andrew Sullivan's defense of his decision to publish Charles Murray. Sullivan claims he was just defying political orthodoxy. (If he really wanted to challenge his reader's opinions, he could have published Noam Chomsky.) Hitchens praises the right for its wit; personally I only find Tucker Carlson's desperate efforts to avoid telemarketers amusing. It's a pity this collection didn't publish cartoons, so that the Left could have responded with Feiffer, Sorel, Grossman, Tom Tomorrow, Tom Toles or Tom the Dancing Bug.

What is missing? Well, there's no John Leonard or Mike Davis. There's nothing from the Village Voice, though I recall a very stimulating round table on Schindler's List, as well as Micaela Di Leonardo's Fall 1992 essay against the racial consensus of our times. There is little on culture, so on the one hand we miss Jonathan Rosenbaum and Jackson Lears, but on the other hand we escape Caldwell's suggestion that Steven Spielberg was soft on Nazism. One real omission is the absence of any feminist viewpoint: no Katha Pollitt, not that many women, and several anti-feminist pieces on the right. There is a thankfully brief piece by Harvey Mansfield that is insufferably smug. There is a piece by Andrew Ferguson on Strunk and White, which complains that the common use of "he" to refer to an unknown person is gender-neutral. Rubbish. If it was they would have used "she" just as often. Most appalling is a crude and long polemic by Pr. Kenneth Minogue, which blames feminism for the collapse of western civilization.

There is no shortage of flaws with this argument. For a start conservatives have been blaming feminism for this collapse ever since women started asking for the vote. Having been wrong in the past, Minogue offers the view that feminism has been irretrievably wrong since sometime in the seventies, that is when the laws were changed to ban husbands from raping their wives. Let us just take one example to point Minogue's fautity: "A melodrama of oppression was needed to fire up the new tribe...feminist doctrine thrives on horror stories of women not allowed to take degrees at Oxbridge until this century. By contrast with the horrors of the twentieth century...we may diagnose a certain lack of proportion." Three things to point out: First off, if we are going to use the Holocaust as our criterion of human suffering, then political correctness and all the other outrages the right feeds on are going to be very small beer indeed. Secondly feminists also point out such minor problems in women's lot as systematic discrimination, the denial of the vote, the double standard and sexual violence. Third, it's in poor taste for Minogue to sneer at university discrimination, since without his university degree no-one would pay more attention to Kenneth Minogue's views than they would to Kylie Minogue's. What was Caldwell thinking?

I've not yet read the whole book but I've enjoyed the pieces I have read. Mainly, I wanted argue a bit of minutia with the reviewer from Canada. He (or she) says that, "There is a piece by Andrew Ferguson on Strunk and White, which complains that the common use of "he" to refer to an unknown person is gender-neutral." I'm not sure that statement is exactly true. Rather, I think Ferguson's complaint is about the myopia of the editors who revised Strunk and White on the "he" issue.

Ferguson certainly does point out that E.B. White complained that the "use of he to refer to an unknown person is gender-neutral." And, yes, I'm sure Ferguson basically agrees with White. But the point of his essay is not to turn back the clock on political correctness--it's to point out how the zeal of copyeditors to enforce p.c. standards in the language is slightly silly and even harmful, as it (judging by the errors and archaisms that they left in Strunk and White) leads them to neglect other areas of a text.

Like I said, minutia. Nevertheless, I think Ferguson needs defending. It's a terrific piece. Very sharp, funny, and even, in the end, sorta poignant.

Personal disclosure: I'm on the left and I don't agree with the use of "he" to refer to an unknown person. In fact, I argue strenuously, whenever the topic comes up, that American English should adopt "they" for that purpose, which is more-or-less the standard in British English now.

The left desperately needs a sense of humor....

Completely inaccurate. The author does not understand Hinduism and nor does she understand the worship of the Goddess.

This book is very nice. It talks about the problems that mothers have in their life. Kinds, Husbend and many other problems mother has. A very intresting book. I strongly recommend it!