Collins Books

One of the most beautiful love stories ever told, ABSENT IN THE SPRING takes Henry James' donnee about an unreliable narrator, and brings it to a peak of perfection even James might have envied. Joan Scudamore, the unlikeable, ultimately tragic figure at the heart of the novel, is delayed coming home to England and stuck in a "rest house" in the desert outside Baghdad for what amounts to days on end, with nothing to read after finishing the life of Lady Catherine Dysart, and John Buchan's THE POWER HOUSE. With no one who speaks English toi chat with, and not even a deck of cards, she finds herself thrown back on her own devices, which grow increasingly threadbare until she begins reflecting, at first smugly and then with more self-awareness, on her own life as a young bride, mother, and suburban wife to Rodney, a successful county solicitor.

It soon becomes apparent to the reader that, unbeknownst to Joan, everyone in her life either pities or despises her. Her grown children can't bear to see her around, and her husband feels sorry for her apparently sociopathic inability to care for anyone else but herself. And little by little we realize, as Joan does, that in fact Rodney once had an affair that was the kind of thing great songs are written for, an affair with a married woman in their little town, not an exotic beauty, in fact rather a dowdy, plain woman called Leslie Sherston. As Joan becomes more and more shocked at what the depths of the subconscious are telling her, her walks outside the rest house into the desert become more and more perilous, for so strong are her memories that she loses track of where she is and threatens to get lose in the desert sand, under the implacable, cruel sun.

She feels God has deserted her completely. In the words of one of Shakespeare's sonnets, "From you have I been absent in the spring." Joan was absent in her marriage, absent from Rodney, because she only believed in a certain limited bourgeois way of knowledge. He in turn absented himself from her by falling in love with the charming, if doomed, Leslie Sherston. Rodney and Leslie are too "fine" as human beings to have actually slept together, but like Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in BRIEF ENCOUNTER, an erotic and romantic tension animates their every interchange.

Agatha Christie wrote six novels under the name of Mary Westmacott. At the end of this one, Joan's feverish memories begin to break down into sentence fragments.

Each paragraph is only a sentence long.

An emotional sentence.

A fragment, a piece of something.

Oh, God, Joan prays, make me a normal woman again!

Some people can never get it straight and still, even in 2006, they doubt that Christie is one of the greatest Modernist writers in the English language.

Fools!

They're blind, unseeing, fools, do you hear me?

This is a great story, told in a necessarily slow fashion, that will really make you think.

Agatha Christie believed that a person is never truly alone when by themselves. There is always someone, a book, a song or an activity of some nature. She believed that absolute solitary, outside of the interference of any person or object, would lead to a profound reflection of who we really are. In absent in the Spring, she tells of the journey of self discovery of one woman which was brought on by an unexpected retreat in the desert out in the middle of nothing. This undesired reflection, which had been avoided at all costs, brings Joan, the main character, to great discoveries about her own life. Step by step, the veil, which shrouds a superficial and frivolous existence, is removed. This is a solitary, painful and transforming journey. This book, written more than 50 years ago, takes on an incredible relevance in our present world. This is a world that offers an excess of outside stimulus and very little of internal relevance. To wonder that Agatha Christie wrote this book before the advent of the television, computer, Internet, etc. is surprising and stands her out as an author of intuition, vision and definitely ahead of her time. This is a book that you simply cannot miss. It will make you reflect on your life and the way with which you view the world. In the very least it ought to save you a few trips to your therapist.

I agree with the other reviews: these ACCESS guides are by far the best for cities, and I am really sorry there isn't one more recent than 1999 for Santa Fe. I bought more recent guides for Santa Fe - ehh. The others are very limited in the scope of information.

I buy and Access guide for any city which I am about to visit. I have found their reviews to be topnotch.

I wish they would publish and updated guide to Santa Fe!

I always find the ACCESS Guides to be the best travel guides overall, and look for them whenever I am about to travel to a new location. So far, I have used their guides to Alb/SantaFe/Taos, Seattle, Montreal/Quebec City, Phoenix, San Francisco, Hawaii, San Diego, and London.

I like their format - they are organized by neighborhoods, so you don't have to seach around through the book all day; and they have an empasis on restaurants and shopping, which I find the other guides don't give enough info on and which are my FAVORITE activities when travelling. Also their print is large, clear, and color coded, which also makes it easy to find what you want (restaurants in one color, shopping in another, tourist sites in another).

It's the best guide to carry around each day while travelling.

First, how is this book so cheap? I've never seen many of the pictures in this book even though the subjects are so familiar. There are some very unique stories and subjects chosen for presentation in After Sputnik. I highly recommend this book for people who just want to collect 5-10 books on general space history. Extremely well-done.

Definitely coffee table size. The photos were an initial attraction, but the text is easy to read, interesting and very informative. Most of the pictures come from exhibits in the Smithsonian Institution. This book is good for a casual browse, but is also the sort of book that you might like to read from cover to cover. It is well worth the price.

Another great book from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
The book has many color photos and some black and white of each artifact and a one page detail of each item , starting with Robert Goddard's Liquid Oxygen Flask and the Carrier and goes forward with Rockets and V-2, Satellites, and Guidence systems and many unusal items such as the Bell Rocket Belt No 2. Pressure Suits, Russian stamp of Gagarin flight, lunch box, sample of Soviet Green Cabbage Soup, a pack of Apollo and Soyuz cigarettes and it also has Sally Ride's flight suite Mercury, Gemini and Apollo Capsules,Apollo 16 Commander Checklist, Gemini V mission patch that was never used and the Soyuz spacecraft and many other in glorious color .And the book ends with SpaceShip One ( the first Private spaceship to enter outer space) This book will entertain you and your children and will teach you about the space race through the many different items on display, it the next best thing to being at the Air and Space Museum.

Have you ever felt like your mom did'nt plan you? Try going to your closest library and get the book Alice-By-Accident.She felt the same way.

This book is amazing she went step by step telling her story when she was born her father left her mom so when she got older she wonder where was her father.Her mom told her he left and told her she had her on accident she didn't know what that meanso when she went to school on her announment the principal said that a little was hit by a car.The teacher said that was an accident so she thought that was a bad thing.She went home and told her mom about it and she told her the story.

I really enjoy this book hope you will!

I thought Alice By Acciedent was a great book, you feel like you are side by side with her during her story. I sugggest this book to anybody who likes realistic fiction and enjoys hearing stories in first person and also likes stories that remind themselves of them.

Alice Elizabeth Williamson-Stone is the nine-and-a-half-year-old voice of her generation. Asked to write an autobiography in her School Notebook, she records much of the turmoil of her young life: being raised by her struggling single mom, never having met her father, and coping with the plit between her mom and Gene, her paternal grandmother . Gene doesn't approve of the fact that Alice's mom and dad never married and now are asked to move out of Gene's house because Alice's father and his new wife need it. alice's loyalties are torn between her mom and grandmom and she struggles to comprehend adult relationships and her place in the world. But the book rings true to the voices of 10 year olds everywhere. Alice is sensitive, quirky British girl and is a likeable believable herioine.

Though I liked the book, the writing style is a little overly complex for a children's book...it goes back and forth from Alice's journal entries to a replay of past events which can make it a bit confusing at times. American readers may at first be put off by the british dialogue and the style of writing (deliberately infused with grammatical and spelling errors, or, as Alice puts it, her "an ilustrated ortobiography"), but the book is both lively and insightful as is Alive herself. A great book for all, especially kids who live in single parent households.

This little field guide (6" x 4") is great for carting around. The west edition covers the states west of the Rockies very well. The full color book begins with a foreward about attracting birds. The next few pages describe how ot look at a bird, how to read the range maps, and how the birds are organized in this guide. And then here comes the birds! On each left bage, there is a catergorized column with the catergory name at top (catbird and bluebirds, chickadees and titmice, crowned sparrows, etc.), followed by range maps and a cool fact. On the ajoining right page, the birds are shown (male and/or female and/or juvenile). I think this is a great little field guide.

This is a very useful little book. We bought this because we live in Seattle and recently bought a bird feeder that's now being visited by all kinds of birds. The book is really helpful - it starts with a few pages of info about how to attract birds to your garden and then the rest of the book has colour pictures of birds on the right-hand side page and writing about them on the left. The birds are organized by type, but also by colour which makes them pretty easy to identify. I think this is a great book for beginners like me who just want to know roughly who's feeding in their garden!

Thanks to this book, I am becoming an avid bird-watching. Together with my binoculars, I now have the tools I need to identify most every bird I see in my backyard or when I'm out hiking. An excellent resource.

This is a really clever story with great illustrations. I've read it to my children many, many times. It's a very entertaining book that I enjoy as well.

We originally checked this book out at the library-but it was such a big hit we had to buy one of our own! That was a couple of years ago. Even though our now 7 yr. old son reads Magic Tree House and Junie B. Jones, he continues to come back to Alvie on a normal basis. He loves changing his voice for each of the characters-having the text in comic bubbles made it easy for him to see who says what. The pictures are alot of fun. We even had a Mulligatawny night using the recipe in the book!

My 3 and a half year old daughter just got into this book and LOVES it. The illustrations are so well-done and interesting, with extra things going on in the pictures that you can point out, that it is a pleasure to read (again and again) even for an adult. The story is simple and funny, but you don't feel like you're being dumbed-down-to. And it's great for doing the different characters in different voices, if you're into that.

J. Wilson Bowman has done an exemplenary job of providing a comprehensive resource for students, parents, counselors, and educational advisors. As a mentor for an At-Risk youth group in the San Francisco Bay Area, I will definitely recommend that all of our students and parents purchase and read J. Wilson Bowman's reference guide. I just wish that I had such an outstanding guide when I was in high school!!

It is the most complete resource on Historically Black Colleges. Anyone thinking of going to college should review this book, particularly African Americans. After working in many urban school districts, I found that most High School Students want information on all of the options available to them. To Parents, Educators and Counselors who want to provide a full picture of the eduactional landscape, America's Black and Tribal Colleges provides great detail.

This is an excellent resource book to have,because nowhere else can you find the information compiled the way that it is in this particular book. The author has obviously done his homework. There are colleges in this book that many people, myself in- cluded, did not even know existed. With so many people looking to get a quality education without having to own a bank to pay for the tuition, this is definitely a place to start!!

From the truly bizarre scene at the river, through the Fat Man's unexpected romance, to the not quite satisfactory winding down of the tale, this book is one riveting read.

I would say that one of Reginald Hill's touchstones is the unflinching honesty of his two protagonists, Pascoe and Dalziel (read this book, by the way, to learn how to say the Fat Man's name; I haven't quite mastered it, but it's nice to have the phonetics at hand). He simply does not allow them to lie to themselves. And, when they are not quite up to deconstructing (or admitting) all that is to be known in the moment about their motives, he doesn't shirk from laying it out for the reader.

Hill refuses to blink, too, at his supporting cast. Even the characters who might be considered sympathetic (are ANY of Hill's characters people I'd like to know? I kind of doubt it, fascinated though I am by them) receive the full Hill treatment, i.e. any warts and sins well highlighted along with their wit and good grooming.

And then there's the superb writing. Beautiful sentences. Descriptions evocative, but never over-wrought. Dialog that sounds right in the reader's "ear".

The other books in the series I've read so far (I'm taking the series in order and am only a book or two beyond this one) show far less of Dalziel, the man. So if you've read later books without having yet picked up this one, this provides some back story you might find interesting.

If you read this book and love it as I did, no worries: there's plenty wonderful writing ahead in this grand series.

This is one of the earlier Dalziel/Pascoe books and is devoted largely to Andy Dalziel's exploits while he is "on holiday" at the same time Peter and Ellie Pascoe are on their honeymoon. Reginald Hill's series does an excellent job both in plotting and in character development, and if you are intrigued by Fat Andy, then you really need to read this to see a side of his character you may not have seen before.

This book is a little different than most in this series because it focuses on Andy Dalziel on his own. It also shows a side of Andy that we have never seen before. We see him at his most vulnerable - in the middle of a love affair with a widow. It is also a story set in an old crumbling country house (a la Agatha Christie). But there the similarity ends. This book has more twists in it than a small English country road. It is filled with wonderful eccentric characters and Dalziel knows that at least one of them is a murderer. He sets out to find out, hoping that his paramour is not the one. The book is also very funny. This is a must-read for any Dalziel and Pascoe fans. It gives the best picture of Andy Dalziel that you'll find in any of these books. Hill is a master storyteller, and he has used his considerable skills to pen a nice country manor mystery that isn't like any English country manor mystery that you'll find anywhere else.

What a fabulous book!

If you paint flowers in watercolour or are enrolled on a course of Botanical Illustration, as I am, then this is the book for you.

Written by Margaret Stevens in association with the Society of Botanical Artists, the book takes the reader briefly through the beginnings of Botanical Art to a useful chapter on materials including paper, watercolours and brushes. Whilst it doesn't proscribe a palette of colours, the great majority of the illustrations detail the colours used. The chapter on plant anatomy is useful for the non-botanist as is the one on drawing technique for those new to this aspect of painting.

What gives this book a considerable edge over others of this type is that its other purpose is as the text book for a two-year diploma course in Botanical Illustration run by the SBA. (The author is the course director.) There are up to a dozen examples of work covered from start to finish over several pages produced by members of the SBA, some of whom are tutors on the course. There is excellent detail of watercolour technique and superb coverage of the production of varied coloured leaves and flowers and the colours used in their painting. The chapters on composition, working in the field and painting fruit and vegetables are extremely useful. All chapters are illustrated by high quality botanical paintings, mostly by SBA members.

A beautiful book to own, better as an inspiration to painting but best of all as a reference when painting flowers in watercolours.

I've bought all sorts of books on botanical painting but this is the best of the best. The illustrations are fabulous, the instructions clear and comprehensive. Have you ever heard of "botanical gray"? This book is something you can't live without.

It is a nice book and the explain it good the art of flowers. I recommanded on every the draw with flowers.

This book is a beautiful. You do not have to be a car enthusiast to enjoy this book, where art and beauty come together in a well-detailed book. An excellent edition to any coffee table collection.

The author does it again! This time he captures 50 of the best sportscars with purpose made photography, done especially for the book, and writes simple but very informative text so everyone can relive the best of the best.
Bravo!

This is a great book of historical sports cars, with lots of information and beautiful pictures. This is a neat reference and a great coffee table book, very informative and very very classy too! I really recommend this for a car person, of just someone who loves the history or simply the art of beautiful cars.

Sam Kochel: STi driver