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I highly recommend this book to the past, present and future Virtual Assistants. This book I found to be extremely resourceful - information, knowledge and wisdom from those who contributed to it and the amazing dedication shown from the authors. Diana Ennens and Kelly Poelker are great ambassadors for the industry

Description from the book back cover:

Getting close was easy - getting personal was not. The only thing that stood between Riley Hanrahan and another bullet was Morgan Cassidy. It was just luck that Morgan had stumbled across his wounded body in the desert, but after three days in his company Morgan was beginning to have sympathy with his would-be [...]! Riley was overbearing, infuriating ... and a walking temptation! Although both of them had reasons for fearing intimacy, Morgan had never felt so alive. And it wasn't fear or their situation that was making her feel that way ... it was Riley Hanrahan!

This was a really good book. I had previously purchased the "Johnny Cash Up Close" book. And although this book did not have any reviews when I purchased it, I liked the Johnny Cash Upclose. So I figured I would most likely enjoy this upclose book. I was so right. The main reason I wanted this book was because, I was going to Graceland a week before I ordered this book, and I wanted to read a book that would help me refresh my memory on Elvis's history. And boy did this book do its job. I recommend this book to anyone who is intrested in Elvis. And from only owning two Upclose books so far, I would recommend all Upclose books. This was a GREAT Book!!!

I ended up checking this book out from the library because it seemed to be the only decent biography on Rachel Carson. I didn't realize until I got home that it was written for middle schoolers. I read it anyway because I hadn't read any biographies on her.

This a great introduction to Rachel Carson, especially for children and young adults who have more than a passing interest in marine biology or environmental issues and who might even be considering devoting their lives to one, the other or both. If nothing else, it would be a good source for a paper or report that needs to be written.

This book was written in a way that reminds the reader that women weren't always treated as first class citizens - even after we got the vote. Ellen Levine does a great job illuminating Rachel Carson as a person, scientist and author of her generation without providing a history lesson or going into details that her audience might find boring.

The book contains many excerpts of Rachel Carson's work so that whoever is reading it can get a taste for how she wrote, if she hasn't read any of her books before. There are also excerpts from letters to and from Rachel.

There is a helpful bibliography at the end of the book that will point you in the write direction if you want to read more about Rachel Carson - and this book should really whet your appetite when it comes to learning more about the woman who pretty much single handedly sparked the environmental movement.

"Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up over the hill
With Abraham, Martin and John."
--Dion DiMucci

"Bobby Kennedy's short, eventful, and ultimately tragic life, you might say, was the transition from a time of secrets to one of exposure. We now know as much about his crippling flaws as his lofty aspirations. If he no longer looms as a pure Kennedy prince, that is all the better. For instead of an idol, he comes across as a dark, complex -- and deeply human --human being."

It is rare for me to share a book's ending but, in this instance, it is difficult to improve upon Marc Aronson's own conclusion of what he has so successfully accomplished in crafting this exceptional biography for middle school and high school students about Robert F. Kennedy, a larger than life figure from my childhood. I'd previously thought I knew a lot about Bobby Kennedy. Boy, was I wrong!

Actually, this is not a biography exclusively for adolescents, for the impeccable research that is at the foundation of this work will easily hold up when some college student decides to use it for a class, and the drama of Aronson's tale will quite handily engage adult readers as well. Marc Aronson is well known for doing informational adolescent literature the right way; in fact, he was awarded the very first Sibert Informational Book Award, an American Library Association award which honors an author "whose work of nonfiction has made a significant contribution to the field of children's literature."

What Marc Aronson was required to do, in writing his first book for Penguin's brand new CLOSEUP biography series for adolescents, debuting this spring, was to distill all of his extensive research down to 200 pages of adolescent reading. (This will be one of the trademarks of this series.) And while this has got to be a significant challenge for someone like Marc who is known for thoroughly exploring both their subject and the world in which that subject lives, what the reader ends up with here is a 200-page biography that is quite a manageable read for most teens and is an utterly engaging and often horrifying story containing not a single clunker or superfluous sentence.

In revealing the person that was Bobby Kennedy, the author lays out how Bobby's disposition, his position in the birth order of the famous Kennedy clan, and his father's disdain for him in contrast to the paternal nurturing of Joe Jr. and Jack, all had an immense -- some would say, fatal -- influence upon the man that Robert Kennedy grew up to be:

"Reckless courage was a characteristic Robert Francis Kennedy showed throughout his life. The bigger the challenge, the more eager he was to throw himself at it. As a child, Bobby flung himself into cold waters. As a lawyer in Washington, and later as Attorney General, he took on the nation's most dangerous mobsters. He went up, one-on-one, against Jimmy Hoffa, a corrupt union official who was as ruthless as he was powerful. At the height of white racial violence, Kennedy made himself the number-one target of armed and hate-crazed segregationists. Then at the worst moment of African-American fury and dispair he chose to speak in an all-black neighborhood. In a time when assassinations of outspoken leaders were all too common, he plunged into endless crowds."

An interesting strategy that Aronson employs in his writing here is his allusion to pieces of well known children's literature in explaining Bobby Kennedy's story, such as when he refers to Portsmouth Priory "as a kind of Hogwarts-under-construction," or when he compares the severing of Bobby from his brother through Jack's 1963 assassination to the agony suffered in THE GOLDEN COMPASS when people are severed from their daemons.

Looking like it will be the antithesis and an antidote to the vapid and/or exceedingly dense institutional biography series that you so often find on school library shelves, UPCLOSE: ROBERT KENNEDY is a superb piece of writing that transforms an icon into a real human being.

Excellent book. The best I have seen on the subject. Get them all if you can find them!!

It is a verry funny book. It has alot of Top ten charts. Like one are top ten albums. There is also alot of different things. Like it shows you how to do the Fish hook, from the movie.

Haim Chertok is one of the finest writers in Israel. This work done in 1989 is a collection of interviews with a wide variety of writers .It is conducted with intelligence, insight and sympathetic literary understanding. What I found especially illuminating is not the interviews with the very well- known authors like Amos Oz, but rather with a rare personality like Asenath Petrie who few know the work of .
A highly enjoyable work, and highly recommended.

This book is the story of one woman's struggle against abuse first from her alcoholic parents, then from the husband she married to escape her parents at the age of 15. It tells of her progress and eventual success as a person and a human being. From the loss of her first child from a beating while pregnant to the murder of her son she never loses faith or gives up. The book provides valuable guidance and direction to anyone suffering from similar treatment. Today she is counseling others to help them escape their problems.

A wonderful insight to the world of Christine Rosamond, a sad and tragic story of an artist who died too young and had so much more to give to the world.