O Books

This was the first time i ever read citizen dog. I read my first strip in Chicken soup for the cat and dog lovers soul. Then i ordered this offline. Once i read it i ordered the other books. Fergus is so funny. There are amazingly funny stories in this like when Fergus steals all the fire hydrants and Fergus and Arlo challenge the mailman to a basketball game.

"Citizen Dog" Fergus was the best canine to ever hit a newspaper. This initial collection of comic strips featuring the ever suave Fergus and his well-meaning and overwhelmed "owner", Mel, is a real treat for those of us who faithfully read the strip back in the day. For those who haven't had the pleasure of seeing a dog converse with a French waiter or become the top salesdog in a pet store, you don't know what you've been missing. So, if you only buy one book this year...hey, don't be cheap! Get this book, and pick up Mark O'Hare's other two volumes: "Dog's Best Friend: More Citizen Dog Reflections" and "D Is For Dog." (Warning: If your dog happens to read these books, hide the car keys. Really.)

The "Citizen Dog" comic strip was one of the best ever. Mark O'Hare has a delightfully wicked sense of humor and he brings such life and animation to his characters. You don't have to be a dog lover to appreciate Fergus, the smart-mouthed dog in this series ... or the lovable antics of his owner, Mel. Get a taste for the comic strip at: http://www.ucomics.com/citizendog/.

Unfortunately, Mark O'Hare is no longer creating new Citizen Dog strips, so all we have left is these fabulous books. There are three in the series:
1) Citizen Dog: The First Collection [ISBN: 0836251865]
2) Dog's Best Friend: More Citizen Dog Reflections [ISBN: 0836267516]
3) D is for Dog [ISBN: 0740704575]

Buy two of each ... because someone's gonna want your copy!
Happy reading!

I started reading this book and within two pages was hooked. It is hilarious. Help us if all dogs start acting like Fergus. I think O'Hare has surpassed his Purdue "Art Gallery" strip.

Fans of the currently syndicated newspaper strip will find through this collection that Citizen Dog has been through some changes since its origin. If nothing else, O'Hare is a superb artist with a flair for both motionless and kinetic moments. His draftsmanship sustains the strip. At this point, however, the humor is much more slapstick than verbal or intellectual. Many of the gags are Tex Avery-esque, or harken back to vaudeville days. That's an interesting style in itself, but as humor, it pales in comparison to the current incarnation of the strip. Those who think the artistic side of cartooning and gag writing is in decline, however, need look no further than this book for a spirited refutation.

I bought this for my four-year-old daughter, and this has become a favorite bedtime story book for her. It is perfectly gear for the younger ages with many colorful examples of coats of arms along with some elementary explanations of why they existed. The stencil is great and allows the youngest artist to make their very own arms. (I recommend make copies fo the blank shield and letting the wee ones mark up the copies.)

This book is great! It has lots of color, very kid-friendly. It has explanations of the colors and many designs or pictures you may find on a coat of arms. Very helpful for coat of arms lessons and as a tool to help a child create their own coat of arms. My homeschool group used this for children aged 4-11 and they all loved looking at it!

Catherine Daly-Weir has done an excellent job of presenting a general and yet fairly complete introduction to Heraldry. The illustrations are beautiful and attractive. Obviusly written for the younger reader, adults will enjoy just as well. If you are working on a club/class project and need to creat a Coat of Arms, this book and Rosemary Chorzempa's "Design Your Own Coat of Arms" are all you need! You will have no trouble creating your own Coat of Arms expecially with the plastic stencil which is included in the book. A must have!

This book is great. It covers several aspects of heraldry (history, battlefield, heralds, tournaments, rules, positioning, meaning of designs etc.) without being overwhelming for children. I have used this book with my art therapy students, and my sister has used it with her students with art class...all the students loved it. Even those who can't read can get alot from the book as illustrations are excellent. I highly recommend. Ages 6-adult...I have even used this book to design a shield for myself. For those interested in other sources...Heraldic Design by Hubert Allcock is also a great sourcebook.

I think this is excellent for younger children. It is a good basic introduction.

A Young Surgeon joins forces with the twentieth century's boldest industrialist in "Courage to Heal". Paul Bernstein, MD lends his medical expertise to his this medical thriller novel set in the Great Depression of one determined doctor to provide the best medical care he could in the face of a paranoid government. Enthralling from the first page to the last, it's highly recommended for fiction fans in general and any community library fiction shelves.

(Disclaimer: I am a former colleague of the author, and worked in the Kaiser Permanente system for most of my career).

Having been a Permanente physician since the days when we were close to being "persona non grata" in the local medical community, I was somewhat familiar with the history of the Medical group, but Paul Bernstein has made its humble beginnings spring from the page with a living and exciting narrative that takes the reader into the very soul of Sydney Garfield, whose name I knew as our founder, but not much else about him. Henry Kaiser is also brought into the mix as a larger-than-life industrialist who believed in what Garfield was doing and provided the capital and know-how to build the prepaid system that spans the country today---though still heavily weighted on the West Coast. I heartily recommend this book to anyone trying to fathom today's health care controversy. When you finish this book, pick up "Overtreated" by Shannon Brownlee, for a fascinating look at what has happened to American medicine, and suggestions for reform. Not surprisingly, she holds Kaiser up as an example of how things could work. And Sydney Garfield is the reason. Good work, Paul!

Who would suspect that a book about the creation of an HMO could be so captivating? I started reading at bedtime and just couldn't stop. The author skillfully weaves together fact and fiction, vividly describing scenes and characters, keeping the reader constantly in suspense. The historical images of the times before, during and after WWII are particularly striking to those of us too young to remember things like the polio epidemic. The plot conflict about health insurance is as timely now as it was then, with millions of Americans still without coverage.
This is my favorite kind of book: it is great reading for entertainment alone, and informative and thought-provoking at the same time!

This is a fictionalized account of the creation of Kaiser Permanente, the granddaddy of HMOs. Dr. Bernstein has told a fascinating story of its creation and successful rise in the face of resistance from the medical establishment. Highly recommended.

The courage to heal reads more like an adventure than a biography. Sidney Garfield, like all great pioneers, is single-minded in his quest to bring affordable health care to the people. I found it interesting to see how the concept of prepaid medicine evolved and particularly the resistance they met from the medical establishment. I particularly enjoyed the historical setting in the thirties, forties and fifties. Bernstein brings us into the dramas of medical emergencies. We get a glimpse into what that world was like when polio was rampant and antibiotics were still a novelty. This book seems particularly relevant today with so many people without access to medical care due to deficiencies of the fee for service system. I recommend this book highly.

It is vital we form mutual understandings between cultures so that stereotypes and prejudice don't start cultural conflicts. Cross-Cultural Communication has helped me in my way of thinking. I am more conscious now of other cultures than I have ever been before. My interaction with others will change gradually as I attempt to work successfully with different people. I will need these skills especially when I leave Tennessee State University and have to work in a multicultural setting or organization.

I would highly recommend this book to any student who is seeking a great source of knowledge in the communication area. Dr. Norales is obviously an expert in the field and delves into the issues by using her knowledge as well as other experts in the communication field. I hope she continues to assign this text to her future classes at Tennessee State University as I feel it will be a benefit to all who read it.

This book proved to be a thorough and detailed text of cultural relations worldwide. I found the book to be full of positive knowledge and culturally beneficial. The information and tools contained in this book could inspire many individuals to communicate well with all people of various cultures. The facts related to cultural negligence and violence are certainly disheartening. However, the reality of "cultural clashes" is not pleasant. It is my hope that more people will read books of this nature to inspire a positive change worldwide.

I would like to say that the Cross-Cultural Communication book was great. It was helpful in many ways. I feel like it will help me as it relates to communicating in the business world. It has expanded my knowledge of cultures. I would recommend this book to anyone. I think that the writers did a great job. They were excellent in relaying the information they had in each chapter.

This book is very easy to read. The sentences are concise. It provides some interesting concepts about intercultural challenges. It inspired me to write a report about my African-American culture.

Book arrived quickly and in shape described. I am very satisfied with the seller. Thanks.

This book was very good. I saw more of Rachel and Moshe and less of the characters that I didn't like, the would-be-murderer David Meyer for example. I also was introduced to Leah and Shimon Feldstein who later play an important role in the prequal series Zion Covenant. There is a lot of senseless killing in this book and anti-Semitism from the British. Some of the scenes made me so angry that I swore off this series for a while and went on to the Zion Covenant which I could understand better. I didn't complete the Chronicles until later when I checked sound recordings of the last three novels out of the library. These books are supposed to create anger; the author accomplishes that very well. I don't know as much about the Israeli question, about Zionism, as I do WWII. My lack of knowledge made it difficult to know the "good guys" from the "bad guys," but one thing was very clear: innocent people do get killed because of the actions of a few, and that is the real tragedy. A reader sees an age old conflict in an earlier stage and can judge for himself if any progress has been made.

I was really surprised to see how much prostitution is despised amongst the Jews. Rachel was forced into it to save her life, and everyone hates her for it, except for a few. I really sympathized with her and hoped she would find happiness in the end.

Excellent and fast service.
Love all the Zion series by Brock & Bodie Thoene
1. A Daughter of Zion

Never have I come across a better author. Bodie Theone (tay-nee) is truly amazing. These books are full of drama. It's like the characters became my friends. When I finished the series, It felt as though I lost some good friends. I really don't know if I could be as entertained, enlightened and fulfilled by reading anything else after reading this series. Originally I was checking the series out one at a time from the library. But when I realized I'd finally found something I couldn't put down, I figured I better buy the whole series. I have never bought books before, because I've never found anything worthy of being read more than once. I was just so compelled and I want to share her writings with all my friends and family. She's spectacular. So is anything written by her husband Brock, who helps her co-write everything. It's almost like watching a movie, because there are so many plots intertwined. I was shocked to read the epilogue in RETURN TO ZION. You'll have to find out for yourself. Just don't start reading in the middle of the series. If I could never read another authors works but one it would be the Theone's. - Megan Villa

I had to write this review to encourage people to read these books. I discovered them during exam time in my second year of Uni and can't believe I managed to pass my exams when I read each book non stop over four days. Truly exception books and an inspirational writer. I have never been so deeply effected by a novel before.

I enjoyed Sylvia Nobel's second novel, Devil's Cradle, as muchas I enjoyed her first novel, Deadly Sanctuary. The heroine, KendellO'Dell, is a feisty redhead who is smart, quick-witted and very daring. The book is written in a lively, fun-to-read style that keeps you turning page after page. Each new page adds new questions and just when you think you have something figured out, you find out you are heading down the wrong path. The whodunit ending was not at all what I expected. I challenge any one to figure this story out before they get to the end - it is anything but predictable. In addition to providing an excellent story line, Devil's Cradle gives an excellent description of Arizona and its many wonders. By the time you finish the book - which won't take long if you're like me and have trouble putting it down - you'll feel as though you've traveled with Kendell through the Arizona desert, mountains and plains. If you like a good mystery with a little romance, you'll truly enjoy Devil's Cradle. I hope Ms. Nobel finishes her next book soon - I'm ready to read it.

The Devil's Cradle is so well written that you do not want to put it down. You just have to find out what happens next and house work and everything else just has to wait! I love the fact that I have visited many of the places in Arizona that she writes about in her stories. After reading her first two books, I immediately went on line and ordered the next three. Can't wait for the next one to be published!!

Ms. Nobel is very talented and gifted. It was also a pleasure to meet her at a book signing! An intense rollercoaster ride of emotions from start to finish. A great who dun it! And she makes you want to visit the beautiful places that she's written about! Run do not walk to buy Dark Moon Rising!

I am in the middle of THE DEVIL'S CRADLE and am completely engrossed! What a fun time it is to be able to visit Kendall O'Dell and tag along on her journies. Both DEADLY SANCTUARY and THE DEVIL'S CRADLE were loaned to be my a good friend, and I have throughly enjoyed them both.

Hopefully, we'll be able to enjoy Sylvia Nobel's next book very soon.

vicki galloway poormansq2@aol.com

Five stars is not enough to rate this top notch book. It was a page turner to say the very least and most enjoyable! Very, very clever and witty. Couldn't put it down! I'd say it's a good thing I have found this brilliant author because Sue Grafton is running out of letters.

Contains a wealth of solid and in-depth information aimed at scholars and educated lay persons. Articles are well written (and can be a bit dense), very informative, and contain a select bibliography for further study. An indispensible tool for any serious student of the Bible.

This book is a great resource. Very deep info. It is a wealth of scholarly information and covers every topic. Amazon has the best price on these books with free shipping. What more could anyone ask for. Aslo quick service. Amazon also ships quickly to APO/FPO boxes and is still free! Awesome.

This is an outstanding resource book for the novice or the scholar. It is well written and very easy to understand. Arnold covers the Old Tesatment thoroughly. You will not be disappointed.

Editors Bill Arnold and Paul Williamson have enlisted an international cast of scholars; each addressing topics within their specialties. In the past twenty years a burgeoning list of titles addressing the historicity of the OT has appeared, thus making it necessary for a dictionary that addresses these particular concerns. With entries ranging from "agriculture" to "Zion traditions," DOTHB packs competently presented information cover-to-cover. One of the best dictionaries I have encountered.

Over 150 articles comprise the Dictionary of the Old Testament: Historical Books, which covers the books of Joshua, Judges, 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings, 1-2 Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah.

Each entry is concluded by an extensive bibliography and useful cross-references to other articles in the Dictionary Of The Historical Books.

A unique feature that enhances the readability and usefulness of this dictionary is that the entries are in reality "macro-essays" on larger categories or topics instead of separate smaller essays on the component parts. For example, "Absalom" will be found in the discussion
of "David's Family," and "Anat" under "Canaanite Gods and Religion."

The entries discuss and evaluate many of the key interpretative problems and the relevance of comparative data from literary, cultural, and archaeological sources that pertain to these biblical texts. Archaeological studies are used extensively throughout the entries, with numerous sites being treated separately in addition to their citation within other contexts.

With a wide range of backgrounds and points of view among the 120 contributors, this dictionary contains fairly even and well-balanced entries that provide a panoramic view of the present landscape in this segment of scholarly research on the historical books. It must be noted, however, that the contributors to the dictionary do not merely present but also evaluate data. While some readers no doubt will take issue with some of the interpretations of the various contributors, the entries articulate the state of the question for these issues and topics and offer new directions and interpretative possibilities for the future.

The volume concludes with three indexes: Scripture, subjects,
and articles. Whether you are a scholar, a graduate student, or a layman looking for a summation of scholarly opinion, this volume is for you!

This is a wonderful book for those looking to find their calling. It lays out in a very straight forward way how to discover what it is God is calling you to do with your life at any stage in your life.

This book has enriched my life. I have bought several copies to gift to friends and loved ones. It contains an empowering message of what we can be and accomplish with and through God in our lives.

For any Christian who is stuck in a rut, this is a good book to read. It gives some spiritual and practical advice about finding your own niche. Doing the written exercises will give you a great starting off point to make changes in your life.

I have to agree with Marc from Pennsylvania below. This is one of the most important books ever written for Christians--it deserves a much wider reputation than it has thus far.

In 1997, I turned 40. My father had just lost his final battle with cancer, and I was questioning my career direction. I'd read Kathy Peel's "Do Plastic Surgeons Take Visa?" and loved how she combined humor with practical suggestions for coping with everyday life--and I especially loved her story about how she went from being a housewife to a woman with a speaking and writing ministry. That story is repeated in "Discover Your Destiny" and it alone would be worth the price of the book. But there's MUCH more. Chapter by chapter, they talk about everything from discovering your dreams and passions, to preparing yourself physically, spiritually, and practically to embark on your next step. There are three great lists that I used not only with myself, but now with my students: "Spotting a Dream from God," "Preparing for Your Dream (this one is great--very practical and powerful at the same time) and the Growth Op for discovering what you're passionate about (For example, what issues make you pound the table and say, "Someone's got to do something about this?")

It was through doing the work in this book that I realized what was missing in my own everyday work--the career counseling component. These last five years I've attended professional meetings, bought books, gone out of my way to work on things related to what I wanted to do. And. . .oh, yes. . .I prayed. OFTEN. It took time. . .but when I finally helped create a position last year that combined academic advising with career counseling, it was the RIGHT time. I was truly ready to do the work. Even a year ago, I wouldn't have been ready.

This WORKS. Though I cannot proselytize on the job, I can certainly use the principles outlined by the Peels as the foundation for how I live and how I help others do what their book did for me.

This one is another one of my desert island books. Five stars are NOT enough!

It's revolutionized the way I live from day to day. The Peels have masterfuuly written a book that catapults the dreams in your heart while showing you how to practically live them out each and every day. Besides, it's loaded with quotes from major players in history who have reached their maximum, God-given potential. I recommend this book those who are worthy of it!

You might call this review a little 'belated.' We used to read this book to our children from the time they were in pre-school and it was first published (now both in college), but it is without a doubt one of the most fun books we've found of the hundreds we've read to and with them, and one of the most memorable both for them and for us.

I have to agree with everything the other reviewers have said. It is so much fun to read aloud and children of just about any age above 2 will get a kick out of the illustrations as Donna is being chased "past chickens and turkeys and birds, through bunches of buffalo running in herds..." To this day I can recite the entire book from memory.

And I believe that it was becasue of books like this, and this one in particular, that helped establish our children's love of reading.

Over the years we have given this book to our friends as they have had their children, and today use the out of print service to find copies for gifts. We have never failed to get very positive comments about the book years after (and others can't get the story out of their heads' either).

I love this book. My kids love to read this book with me. This is more for 4 to 6 year olds, but I am sure there are 2 and 3 year olds that will enjoy the pictures and story of Donna Being chased through her town, Through fences and gardens and the barber shop. Very cute. Easy to ready.

My mom used to read this book to us when I was a lass and I can still remember exactly how it goes from cover to cover. I'm a 25 year old grad student, and I STILL can't get the contagious, singsong rhyme scheme out of my head. This will be a book you'll remember for the rest of your life, whether you want to or not. It also contains great pictures, and may have initially formed my equally enduring fascination with redheads. I especially like how she ends up with the hot guy with the bike at the end. I love Donna and I love head pats.

Even if the story weren's so darn cute, the rhythm of the words would have hooked my two-year-old (and me!) Kudos to Grossman and also to illustrator Truesdell who has pictured all the action so delightfully.

I have read literally hundreds of books to my children (3 and 5) and this is one of the best we have found so far. My 5 year old is memorizing it line by line and I don't mind reading it over and over and over as the rhythms are so much fun and the rhyming is clever!

Tragic book, very well written. I suspect all of it is true. If 10% is true, people who care about America need to tell our leaders that things must change now. We must respect the rights of people we have in custody, whether they are Americans, Iraqis, or people without a country. Our leaders have embarrassed our country by doing the things outlined here. Respect for human rights should be our starting point.

In vivid, engaging prose uncommon among attorney authors, Clive Stafford Smith offers a startling first-hand account of America's most well-known gulag: the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay. Smith's volume places the U.S. Government's hypocrisy in the Bush II era on full display, with the prisoners there -- very few of whom, it appears, guilty of any crime at all (let alone legitimate involvement in Islamist terrorism) -- tragic protagonists in a prolonged tour through hell. Despite assiduous compliance with strict military classification and censorship requirements, Smith gives a stark account of torture, rendition, legal tricks, and a relentless war on due process -- by the same folks supposedly spreading "democracy" to the Middle East. With new precision details and personal prisoner histories, Smith's book is shocking even to those who never believed the news coverage. Read it with anger; the outrage is still going on.

If you haven't read Robert Conquest's seminal work The Great Terror about the purges, the show trials, law, and justice under Stalin, you might want to consider reading that first. Perhaps visit the Amazon site which has a quote from Harrison Salisbury saying the book is "an odyssey of madness, tragedy, and sadism". Then read Smith's eloquent book. Much is different, of course, but there is a lot that seems eerily similar. In Russia it was a crime to be suspected of anti-Soviet activities. This did not mean that you were actually guilty of such activities--it just meant that someone thought you might possibly be guilty, and being thought possibly guilty was a crime in itself, worthy of torture, a one-way trip to the cellars, or death in the labor camps. Evidence of guilt seemed to take a back seat to suspicion of guilt. Then read Smith's book.

The Russian show trials were carefully scripted, and designed to give the mostly leftist press in attendance and the rest of the world through media coverage the impression that the rules of law were being followed and that justice was indeed being carried out. Much of the world wanted to believe that the deviationist wreckers were truly guilty and deserved the ultimate punishment for trying to sabotage the workers' paradise. Reading Smith's book will show that the Stalinists were not the only ones who loved carefully scripted show trials before handpicked judges.

There is, as I've said, much that is different. In Russia, a popular sentence was "exile, without right of communication", a hypocritical euphemism for being shot in the cellars. In Guantanamo, as you'll see in the book, "detention, without right of communication", is not a sentence from a judge at a two-minute hearing, as in Russia. The criminal isn't taken to the cellars and shot, at least not at Guantanamo. Prior to some Supreme Court decisions, a prisoner could be held without right of communication for the duration of the war on terror, and since terrorism has been going on for thousands of years, there is no reason to think that many of the prisoners would have ever had a hearing or seen a lawyer for the rest of their life.

In Russia, family members could wait in long lines outside the Butyrka and other prisons with packages of food and clothing for their loved ones: if the package was accepted, it meant the spouse, brother, etc, was still alive there. If refused, they had been taken to the cellars or sent to a labor camp. No such bleeding-heart tenderness at Guantanamo.

Smith's book shows that there are some truly dangerous prisoners at Guantanamo--but there are too many who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. 11-year-old boys, 93-year-old men, goatherders (how do you prove that while herding goats you didn't meet with Bin Laden?),etc. Pakistan was happy to show it was doing its part in the war on terror by turning in Arabs and collecting nice bounties no questions asked. Kafka's novel The Trial is appropriate reading here. In Russia, the populace, as a whole, heartily endorsed Stalin's war on the wrecker saboteurs: someone, after all, must be to blame for all the problems, and an alternative obvious source to blame was not conducive to good health and long life. The people were not concerned about the rights of the accused, or legal niceties. In America, there is not widespread concern about legal niceties for a bunch of Moslems in Guantanamo and other places of detention. So if you read Smith's book, you'll find it quite depressing, especially if you've read The Great Terror. There's too much in Smith's book that most of us would prefer not to hear about or think about: we'd rather turn on the TV and see Happy News or a nice patriotic CSI TV show or something. It's a fine book, but not a fun one.

From various newspaper articles, I had heard that many of the people in Guantanamo Bay were innocent and that torture happens there. But all of that seemed very abstract until I read this book. I was frequently upset by the things I read in this book. It is difficult to read about torture, as well as your own goverment's ability to waste time, tax-payer money and other people's lives for information that bears no fruit, or worse, fruit that meets their pre-conceived notions. I think that is the saddest aspect of reading this book. Why is the government still detaining people for which there is hard evidence of their innocence? How can we be spending bllions of $$ on the war on terror, yet not get the detainees' ages and names correct?

Highlights of the book:

- How politically-charged the words 'terror' and 'torture' are.
- The account of Binyam Mohamed's 18-month torture abroad and his military trial.
- The discussion of the 'ticking time bomb' scenario, which is often used to justify torture, and why the detention and torture of people held longer than a day, let alone 3+ years, will likely give obsolete or false information.
- The discussion of how the US has given far more dangerous enemies of the past the benefit of a public trial, and our part in ensuring fair trials for Nazi war crime criminals.
- Portraits of people in Guantanamo, both detainess and Americans stationed there.
- Arguments for fair trials and open society versus the current policy of secrecy, torture and secret prisons, even for the baddest of the bad.

The last chapter, where Mr. Smith talks about the effect of the US's decisions on terrorism recruitment, reads more like political rant. I am sympathetic to the argument, but it is speculation. And frankly, not needed. The preceding chapters are powerful on their own. I would encourage people to read this book.

Imagine that you have been swept away to a prison, kept in solitary confinement and when taken out for questioning you are continually asked about the tomatoes you were carrying ( the translators don't always have a full command of dialects )and you have no idea what your interrogators want or if they are totally insane. Because this book is written from a lawyer's point of view and lays out only the facts ( only what he has been able to ascertain and what he is allowed to make known ) it takes some reflection and imagination to put yourself in the place of the detainees and savour the experience that they have had and continue to have.
In other words this isn't "Midnight Express", but a look at guantanamo, its rules, the U.S. military, the stories of a few of the detainees and the constitutional and humanitarian issues involved.