Chang Books

It's a sweet collection of dog stories and unique photographs of dogs showing affection towards each other or their owners. I laughed out loud at several of the stories, and actually wept while reading another. It's on my coffee table, and EVERYONE who picks it up smiles! I'm giving it to several friends this Christmas!

This is the only biography I have found about the famous Siamese Twins. While it has lots of good information about them (Did you know that Cheng and Eng lived in different houses and both were slave owners in the American South?), it is written for young adults, with fairly large print. Essentially this is a medium length essay, which could just about fit in a Sunday Paper Magazine article, for twenty dollars. Not a bad book, but a kid's book, and a costy one.

This book is special to me because it has the recipe for a cake I had tried in a restaurant in New York, Cafe des Artistes, many years ago, the Ilona Torte. Most of the recipes do not have pictures, which is a major turn -off, but if you've been around you will recognize some famous desserts like Le Cirque's Crème Brûlée and the Bresse Farmhouse Chocolate Cake. The book has a chapter on Light desserts, and another in less elaborate desserts mostly homestyle.

Title is misleading; this will definitely will not fit in your lab coat. Otherwise the content is very good and works well for reference.

This is a workbook. It is interesting in addition to the actual text book, but really not needed. Ours is on a shelf, gathering dust.

Cricket

It is a nice and easy to read text book for learning Mandarin Chinese. The dictionary in the back has a small Chinese to English part, but no English to Chinese section. A nice tool for learning on your own or with a class. It also comes with several practice books, to practice writing characters, and tapes to supplement the text.

I found this to be a good book for quick reading. However, you need Lieberman and Lichtenberg (L &L) for a detailed treatment. L & L is of course not a very pleasant reading, so this provides a good break to "keep moving" through the material.

The author and illustrator do not seem to have decided who their audience is. I got this from a local bookstore to teach my kids some basic counting, but the tourist-y cover was pretty off-putting. The cover illustration shows two very brown children dressed in hula skirt and malo, and sewing flower leis, an unusual sight in realtime Hawaii. On the other hand, the typical American kitchen pictured, features a rice cooker next to the toaster, as well as a checkered bag of the local brand of bread, which are familiar sites to locals, but probably not what tourists envision as part of Hawaiian daily life. The traditional yellow school bus driving along a country road instead of the highway is incongruous, unless you do live in the country. But the picture of the tutu in her lace trimmed muumuu, surrounded by a mix of children, including a little towhead, is how we like to view the passing down of local culture. All this aside, this is a very elementary (one through ten only ) counting book. The illustrations cute and very colorful. And a rhyming song follows at the end, but it is written in a range that only sopranos and tenors would find comfortable. I`ve never heard a child sing a high "A" in everyday life.

While the ideas are not necessarily state of the art, this guide provides the basic how-to's for anyone suddenly saddled with the responsibility of producing effective materials for training (without costing an arm and a leg!). The guide is light reading - not bogged down in heavy technical talk - but is truly written for the layman. A nice book to keep tucked away on any manager's desk!

This has some good photographs of Scandinavian homes; particularly country homes in Norway and Finland. The styling of the homes is rather rustic so don't expect to see lots of examples of Danish and Finnish design from the 60's. I found the photography to be a little 'claustrophobic' and not really giving a good view of the whole room; too much focus on details.

The book is not bound very well and mine has started to separate from the cover after only a few readings. I'd only buy this if you are really interested in Scandinavian living.