Long Books

As both a UC Davis alum and California wine lover I was
quite happy to come upon this book. The author really has
put together the best history book on Napa winemaking that
I have found. The historical pictures run the entire length
of winemaking and winery history for Napa and of note is also
the chapter on the viticulture program at UC Davis. The detail
in that particular chapter is really impressive. I would
recommend this book to any and all that are interested in
California wines, Napa Valley wines and UC Davis alums.

After reading and enjoying Maxwell Long's first book on San Luis Obispo and Cal Poly, I decided to purchase this book. Once again, I was impressed by his thorough and impressive research into the history and culture of the Napa Valley. The photographs in this book are outstanding and illustrative of the early days of what we now call "The Premier Wine Country." I recommend this book for a great afternoon read that will lead you into another era of the Napa Valley Wine Country via illuminating photos and commentary.

After reading and enjoying Maxwell Long's first book on San Luis Obispo and Cal Poly, I decided to purchase this book. Once again, I was impressed by his thorough and impressive research into the history and culture of the Napa Valley. The photographs in this book are outstanding and illustrative of the early days of what we now call "The Premier Wine Country." I recommend this book for a great afternoon read that will lead you into another era of the Napa Valley Wine Country via illuminating photos and commentary.

This book of horrors is difficult to characterize, but I am an avid reader of horror and science fiction and do not give 5 stars lightly. The Nightmare Syndrome is worth every penny, buy this book today or give it as a gift to any horror fan. Better than any movie made!

The Nightmare Syndrome was the first thouroughly chilling book I've read in a long time. I look forward to the sequels, and I'd recommend Things Long Dead to anyone who feels bored with typical horror writing. The stories are complex and intruigingly intertwined, it was hard to stop reading.

I couldn't put this book down. The stories were woven together with thick detail. The stories presented in this book blew my mind. They are very detailed!!!
Highly Recommend!

The Nursing Home Handbook is thorough and well written. It answered nearly all my questions and many I never thought of. My remaining questions are: Which are the best places? Are they easily accessible? How much do they cost? I still have to do research, but this book provides criteria by which to judge.

I recommend this book for anyone who needs help choosing a nursing home or dealing with one already chosen. It may also help you decide, as I did, that a nursing home is not the right choice at this time.

This book is a quick read, but is stuffed full of good information and practical tidbits. I read it in just a few hours and learned a tremendous lot. I especially liked the boxed text in the margins with interesting little factoids and suggestions.

For instance, when I asked to read my loved one's medical chart I was told, "okay, but hurry. I don't want anyone to see that I'm letting you do this." In Davis' book, she states that we have a legal right to read our own medical charts. Her book is full of this type of "been there, done that" advice.

The next to last chapter, which gives some information on hospice and practical advice on how to sit by the bedside when it's time for your loved one to leave this world, was very well written and is alone worth the price of this book.

I've read many of these books and this is one of the few that I'd highly recommend.

Ruth Davis writes with humor and great practicality on a topic that I find uncomfortable and somewhat overwhelming. She provides information on all aspects of nursing home care --from finding the right setting, to coping with details of day to day life in a home, to the last moments. I love her use of sidebars, little snippits of advice, often filled with humor and always packed with common sense. I would recommend this book to anyone facing the problem of long term care for self or loved one.

I first read "No Angel" which led me to "Something Dangerous" and "Into Temptation." By that time I was hooked on Penny Vincenzi, and now I have all her books. I have just finished reading "Old Sins", the 4th. of her books I've read. I read it in paperback, which was 1000 pages of reading. The story is very good-- lots of interesting characters, a mystery, all the good things that make a book worthwhile. However, and this is the biggie--- this is a book that wouldn't have been hurt a bit by cutting out at least 500 pages. There was so much character discription that went on page after page on each of the characters, even the minor ones, that I did speed reading thru some of it towards the end. I thought the book was very good, but totally too long. The story could have been told, leaving out nothing important, with a bit of editing. I finished it last night, and frankly I am taking a breather from reading anything for at least a day or two to rest up. This was actually too much of a good thing.

I read this books many years ago when it was released and was completely hooked. It has the perfect combination, glamour, sex, betrayal, love, intelligent writing. Julian is the rat with a double life and all suffer as s consequence. The women in the book are very strong, though somehow manage to get manipulated by Julian because they love him. However they mature and take control of their lives and the results are fantastic conflicts between his daughter and his second wife. The end is bitter sweet as only one of the leading ladies gets her man. It is all the things Dynasty wanted to be but was not. I loved it and I am a BIG fan of modern romance and fiction.

What a wondeful day it was when I discovered this wonderful author. Old Sins was my first reading by her and I throughly enjoyed the characters and the mystery attached. Since then I've read all of her books and I'm now in the middle of her current one No Angel. Old Sins is one of her best. Thnaks Ms. Vincenzi

As a photographer of the "every man," ASMP life member Arthur Leipzig spent more than 60 years documenting the lives and livelihoods of people around the world during his many photographic assignments. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Leipzig worked a range of jobs as a young man before becoming injured while working in a glass plant. Prompted by the advice of a friend, he used the small compensation he received to enroll in photography lessons in the New York Photo League with the legendary Sid Grossman, and his life as a humanistic photographer began.

The book's images were selected from more than four decades of Leipzig's assignments for magazines such as 'Fortune,' 'Look,' 'Parade' and 'The New York Times Magazine.' The subjects range widely - from underground coal miners in Virginia to a community of Ethiopian Jews to winter fishing in the North Atlantic, to name a few. But it is Leipzig's photographs of children that tell us the most about him as a caring, compassionate photographer. Whether photographing children at play (he began his first self-assignment and photo essay, "Children's Street Games," in 1943 and continued working on it through the 1960s), children in hospitals or children found in a variety of situations around the world, Leipzig caught the moments of joy, sadness and contemplations eloquently through his camera lens.

Long Island University, where Leipzig taught for 28 years and where he is now a professor emeritus, published the book, which includes an insightful forward by Anne Wilkes Tucker, curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
- Monica R. Cipnic, American Society of Media Photographers
ASMP Bulletin, Winter 2006
(Used with permission).

ON ASSIGNMENT is many books, all worthy of our admiration and esteem. First we are given a keen sense of what it was like to be a photographer for a New York City newspaper fifty years ago. Leipzig's painful 1944 image of a despondent looking patient in a Veterans Hospital, sits alongside an image of four sailors gazing at the Statue of Liberty as it lights up again on May 8, 1945. There's also a series of four remarkable photographs of the clownish-looking, anti-Semitic propagandist of the 1930's, Father Edward Lodge Curran, as he preens and exhorts his audience in support of the Nazi cause.

Some of Arthur Leipzig's most loving photographs are those of children intensely playing their simple but inventive games on the streets of Brooklyn and New York, games now virtually all forgotten or only remembered fondly. This set of pictures also includes his now iconic and famous photograph of three boys, air borne, diving into the East River.

The book also takes us far from New York following Leipzig's career as a freelance photojournalist in the ensuing decades. With the eyes of this artist photographer, we journey "on assignment" into Ethiopia and Southern Sudan, Israel, Mexico and Central America. He also places us on a winter fishing boat in the North Atlantic, scenes of what looks to be wildly dangerous work for both fisherman and photographer.

Some of his most impressive and dramatic photographs are those of coal miners and their families in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio. One remarkable image is that of a soot-covered miner eating his sandwich sitting stooped in a "low seam" coal mine tunnel, many hundreds of feet under ground. Those that suffer from claustrophobia, beware.

Another winning group of photographs are those of the great cellist, Pablo Casals. These nine intimate photographs bring us into the life of one of the great musicians of the twentieth century. In one of these photographs, at Casals 1966 birthday party Hubert Humphrey stands almost unnoticed in the background. In another, sitting backstage with Piatagorsky and his own wife Martita, he listens intently to a musician playing onstage.

An important feature of the book is the accompanying text where Arthur Leipzig frequently sets the scene or background by telling us why he was there, where he was going, and who he was with. It is this voice of the photographer that I often miss when I walk through a major photograph exhibit at a museum or gallery. Leipzig generously tells a wide variety of stories, some hilarious, others not so, such his "harrowing" night journey over a winding muddy road across the snow covered mountains of West Virginia only to find himself squeezed into a small empty coal car at 5:30 am chugging deep into a mine; or the hotel that turned out to be a local and very busy brothel; or the day in Sudan, after losing his food supplies, he was given a dish of eggplant and calves' eyes to eat by the hospitable and courteous people of Doro Sudan.

The principal aesthetic merit of this very beautiful book, I believe, is the drama of these black and white photographs. The nobility and dignity Leipzig captures in the faces of coal miners and the poor farmers of southern Mexico are unforgettable. This is a master photographer using light in powerfully dramatic ways, frankly superior to that what we might see in most full color images. My favorite photograph in the book was taken in a jungle hospital in Honduras. In a room of unpainted wooden walls stand a grieving mother and father standing over a simple cot where their dead infant child lies. It is a painful scene, but also one of great, stark beauty. In the background of this sorrowful tableau, intense light almost burns through a window, light so transcendent that if Vermeer lived in this century and took up photography, this is what he would have attempted to achieve.

The pictures in this book will take you on a captivating journey: from the streets of New York City in the 40s and 50s to Africa and beyond. Leipzig has a gift for finding the most telling moment. He deserves to be better known and this book will convince you-- he's the real deal!

I read this book, and discovered a whole new world of struggles and stories of times past. Many of us take for granted all of the knowledge that has been passed down through generations and generations. This book will teach you to value all of this knowledge, and realise what it would be like to start from scratch. I recommend this book for children and young adults over the age of 7. Grownups will also enjoy!

I really suggest this book to people about age 7 who are interested in the prehistoric past . The story is set some 50,000 years ago when mankind was just beginning to use primitive tools. One of the reasons I suggest this book is because they discover things that we would consider everyday like fire etc

I really suggest this book to people about age 7 who are interested in the prehistoric past. The story is set some 50,000 years ago when mankind was just beginning to use primitive tools. One of the reasons I suggest this book is because they discover things that we would consider everyday like fire etc.

Almost certainly the most important book of my lifetime. "One Day In My Life" brings the horror and hell of Long Kesh back into the front lines. This short book will bring readers to their knees. As important as "Night" by Eli Weisel to the Holocaust, Bobby Sands is to the Irish troubles. Even if you're not involved or agree with the struggle of the I.R.A. in Northern Ireland, please read this book!
[...]

This book brings home the tragedy of the Statelet of Northern Ireland. My main impression after reading it was that the British Government are guilty of appaling crimes and a total lack of respect for human rights. The people of Britain are disgusted with the justice systems of many 'barbaric' nations, this book shows that the British justice system is guilty of crimes which equal, if not surpass, those perpetrated by any other nation. It is difficult to read this book without shedding a tear, not only for Bobby Sands, but for the countless others who have fallen victim to British 'Justice'.

Book Review: One Day In My Life

OT 02/25/02 05:30

Feb 25, 2002 (M2 Best Books via COMTEX) --

'One Day in My Life' documents a day in late winter, 1979, in which Irish
Republican activist Bobby Sands endures the horrors and humiliations of life in Long
Kesh prison. Bobby Sands was one of many Blanket Men - so- called because they
refused to succumb to being classed as criminals, and so wore blankets instead of
prison uniform - who embarked on numerous protests in an attempt to sway the
attitudes and practices of the British authorities in Ireland.

Every page of this book, from front to back cover, is instilled with
contentious political ire. As this reviewer is a British citizen, I am perhaps
not best placed to fully evaluate the motivations and morality of an Irish
Republican. From the foreword by Gerry Adams onwards, the question invoked in
my mind time and time again was whether the treatment of Bobby Sands and his
fellow Blanket Men was a crime against human decency committed in my name, or a
terrible means to a justifiable end - that is to protect British citizens against the
threat of domestic terrorism. As Bobby Sands and three other men shared a sentence of
eighty-four years for being found in possession of a solitary hand gun, it seems that
the punishment meted out to Bobby Sands was inordinately huge.

Better men than I have raged in blind conviction for both sides of that
argument, and the one thing I am certain of in regard to that issue is that it
will not be answered in the course of a book review. With that in mind I
believe the best way to approach this book is by viewing it as a personal
account of one man's struggle to survive in a hellish existence.

Bobby Sands, alike with the rest of the Blanket-Men, could have extricated
himself from much of the hardship he endured if he were to renounce his claims
that he was a political prisoner and allow himself to be criminalised. This, he and

many others refused to do, and the courage they had in their own convictions -
irrespective of what exactly those beliefs were - is a staggering example of the
strength of man's will.

This document was written on toilet paper using a biro pen refill, and was
concealed within Bobby Sands' own body. During the course of the book it is
revealed that there was but one pencil and one pen refill which was passed man
to man around the entire block. The scarcity of toilet paper is also recounted. These
two facts alone - probably the two tamest indications of the quality of life inside
the H-blocks that could be found in 'One Day in My Life', illustrate the fact that
this book is a labour. Yet no matter how difficult and harrowing it becomes to read
the reader feels duty bound to continue as the very process of recording this
information must have been infinitely more torturous for the author.

The day recounted in 'One Day in My Life' is a squalid microcosm of everything
we fear about being incarcerated. Men are starved, routinely beaten, verbally
and physically abused, and made to live in enforced conditions of filth - with
human waste, mouldy food and congealed rubbish lining the walls and floors of
their unheated cells. Surely even the staunchest advocate of the Thatcherite
British government of the late 1970's would have to concede that the treatment
of the men in the H-blocks - be they political prisoners of war or merely
criminals - was an offence against human decency, in fact an offence against
humanity itself. The Blanket Men were not merely robbed of their liberty, they
were there to be broken by the authorities who knew that to break the will of
the Blanket Men would crush the spirits of their countless supporters in both
Ireland and the United Kingdom. But they would not be broken.

In the introduction to this book a quote from the original edition is
reprinted. Sean MacBride - co-founder of Amnesty International and Nobel Peace
Prize winner - states that 'the majority of ordinary decent people in England
are not really interested in what happens in Ireland'. That was also true of
this reviewer until I read 'One Day in My Life'.

Perhaps the worst aspect of Bobby Sands' recounting of his prison day is that
there is no respite for either him or the reader. The realisation that the day
he has recorded is in fact a typical one for the inmates of the H-block is a
terrible moment and one which makes it hard for the reader to detach this story of
human courage and survival from its political roots. For all Bobby Sands is left with
at the end of the day is the hope - in fact the unwavering belief - that as he says
'our day will come'.

The events which are documented in this book seem like they occurred in some
strange land in a dim and distant uncivilised age. In fact they occurred just
over two decades ago, and no doubt there are people today who are living the
same nightmare that Bobby Sands endured. Read this book as a humanitarian
warning of what crimes were and - are still are - being perpetrated by the
governments of the world in the names of their citizens.

CONCLUSION: 'One Day in My Life' is a seemingly hopeless tale which manages to
leave its lone moment of respite to the very last moment - when we have nothing left
to us but our humanity, and when even that is stolen away our will still remains...

I have never met the author, but he comes across as a real person with honest feelings and struggles. This allows the reader to identify with him and rejoice with him in the power of God manifested through the Holy Spirit even when walking trough the desert...

This book had influinced my life considerably, an impowering and comforting guide through the wilderness and any spiritual struggles. Long takes his owm personal experiene when God chalenged him and disciplinned him, and gives us guide lines on how to bare these dificult times in the spiritual life. Truly brillient and impowering book, five stars are not enough for this masterpiece that has helped so many.

Brad Long has prepared a feast in the wilderness. PCUSA minister, former educational missionary to Taiwan, and currently executive director of Presbyterian And Reformed Renewal Ministries International, Long has co-authored two books with Doug McMurry on the power and joy of the Holy Spirit. In Passage through the Wilderness, he presents another side of the Christian experience, and in doing so, provides a feast to sustain all those experiencing "the dark night of the soul" and a guide to all those who stand by, helplessly watching a parishioner, a patient, or a loved one struggle through the wilderness alone. In the author's own words, "It is an extreme book, written for times of extremity in our spiritual journeys." Through a combination of Scriptural examples and intensely personal accounts of his own battles with Satan, self, and God, Long richly illustrates the pain of living through feelings of dryness, abandonment, and/or overwhelming pressure in one's spiritual life, and the importance of clinging to the Lord though he is seemingly absent or overbearingly harsh. "Whom the Lord loves, He disciplines," and Long testifies clearly to the purpose in the pain - the outcome is often an increase in the power and gifts of the Holy Spirit, bringing growth in the life of the believer and the advancement of the Lord's Kingdom. For many, the reading may be labored by the sheer intensity of the subject matter. But for those who are experiencing or reflecting in bewilderment on such pain, it is a banquet of expression and meaning, and comfort. To the hopeless, it offers a lifeline of promise that the Potter is shaping his vessels for His use. To those who have suffered unspeakable grief, it offers a voice and an affirmation for the heart-cries of the soul. To those who have fallen on their knees and their faces in fear and trembling before the judgement of a Holy God, it offers common ground on which to stand firmly in and for Him. To those who have continued to "cry 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace," it stands as a stark reminder that "common ground" is no substitute for Holy ground. Marge Mills - (Review First Published in The Presbyterian Layman)

Well, I love travelling and I love penguins, I even collect them, so when I saw Joe and Sally in the cover with the great pyramids in the background, I knew this was a book for me. The pictures always put a big smile in my face as I see these penguins come alive. I never thought a book could be heart-warming, but this one really is.

Note to author: Mr. Puchner, please consider yourself cordially invited to bring Joe and Sally to Mexico anytime. We would love to see you around here and the penguins would look even lovelier with a nice suntan.

Wonderful work!

Well, I love travelling and I love penguins, I even collect them, so when I saw Joe and Sally in the cover with the great pyramids in the background, I knew this was a book for me. The pictures always put a big smile in my face as I see these penguins come alive. I never thought a book could be heart-warming, but this one really is...

Wonderful work!

If you love to travel and love penguins this is a book for you. If you love to give gifts to friends that have everything, this is the gift for them. The pictures are perfect and Joe and Sally just add to it. Mr. Puchner's notebook is fascinating, you can see the true artis that he is.

Looking for a book to model good sportsmanship and to interest young readers? As a teacher, I highly recommend this book. "Pete Thompson and the Long Road Home" has become part of my reading curriculum starting with my fifth grade class last year and my fourth grade students this year. They found the book exciting and entertaining. Most of the students read ahead of their assigned reading because they wanted to know what was going to happen next. When you open this book, you take a step back in time to when life was a bit simpler and more innocent. Now our children can enjoy that "time" also.

Pete Thompson And The Long Road Home by Bill Thomas (Preaching Minister, Stony Point Christian Church, Kansas City, Kansas) is the story of growing up in Silar City, with special focus on the thrill of an exciting high school basketball season. But there is more than the intensity of competition troubling a young man learning to polish his game. His best friend has suddenly run away from home and his teammate carries a terrible secret. Pete Thompson And The Long Road Home is an engaging sports oriented story for teen readers of coming of age and learning to deal with difficult problems.

This book might not have been very long, but the road home sometimes can be. Mr. Thomas has given us a real page turner for all age groups. The book does a great job of showing how it is to have Jesus in your life. He can help when you need him, which can be anytime. Thank you Bill, I am inspired.
Recommendation: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Kristen G. is a reviewer, Poet and content editor.