Phillips Books

In this book, you will find coffee's fascinating history and lore. Yes, there are recipes, but you will enjoy the illustrations and as you page through the book, you will swear there is a pot of coffee brewing!

If you are looking for more recipes to use up mascarpone cheese, there is an interesting recipe for Baked Apples. There is not a drop of coffee in the recipe, but how it would taste with a great Italian roast.

Do you love Biscotti, but hate to pay the high price. Well, there is a recipe for Chocolate-Hazelnut Biscotti. Orange-Pecan Pound Cake and Rhubarb Crumble are just a few of the delicious desserts you will find to accompany your coffee.

If you are new to making your own coffee, you will appreciate the page after page of brewing options. Do you want to use a press, a drip filter, a cold water brewer, a vacuum pot (as I have only seen once before in The Graham Kerr Cookbook on page 267.) There is also a picture of the coffee cherries which might surprise you as I had never thought about how coffee actually grew.

There is also a poem by Peter Altenberg from All About Coffee, 1922. I was also delighted to find a recipe for Panettone on page 51! How often do you find that recipe.

So many ways to enjoy coffee, morning, afternoon and night.

The Rebecca Review

Nothing piques the morbid fascination of a dinner guest quite like a platter of veal frappuccino. Top it off with a decaffeinated stock reduction and you're a host whose meals will be recounted for decades. This book has afforded us years of excellent in-home dining, as well as cheap laughter. My wife also once used it to great effect in ridding us of an in-law babysitter that she considered too sultry and promiscuous for duty. She merely left Carmen (her young cousin, who served briefly as our sitter to my unbounded delight) with a tray of Chicken Satay Latte that she had secretly made with thrice the active ingredient. Carmen dutifully served it to the twins at dinnertime, and by the time we returned she had permanently sworn off of babysitting - as well as motherhood, marriage, and quite possibly the male gender, which she rightly surmised was in large part to blame for the scourge of children.

Okay, being the quintesential lefty feminist, I theoretically had better keep a distance from major multinational corporations, but I just can't abstain from Starbucks! Even if they are part of the "corporatization" of America, I proudly declare my love for them.

Since it first came to my hometown (to somehow tie in with the "Alterna-rock" facination with all things pacific NW) I fell in love with their coffee--and related concoctions. Following a stressful (but adventurous day) there is nothing more relaxing than drinking one of their numerous creations and feeling the world melt away.

The recipies in this book continue the romance by providing easy to follow recipies to satisfy the coffee lover in everybody. Little to no previous cooking experience is required, as the point of this cookbook is to help everybody wind down in a deliciously rich way.

I have been a stepmom for 4 years now, but I still find myself running into dilemnas that my friends who are not stepmoms cannot relate to. This book has helped me find reassurance from God's word and has reminded me how strongly God's presence can be felt in every day things. I highly recommend this book whether you are just becoming a stepmom or if you have been one for years.

In my own stepmom experience, storms of anger, envy, fear, insecurity and despair came all too often to disable my effectiveness, not only as a stepmom, but in work, friendships and other family roles as well. When I read Karon Goodman's newest book--A Stepmom's Book of Prayer--I found I wasn't alone. This book takes stepmom's to the throne of God, the One who has the wisdom and the power to help us persevere, maintain our integrity, and grow in our own personhood in spite of so many seemingly endless trials.

Goodman's book is a shopping list of things we stepmoms can trust to God and allow Him to work on, first and foremost in our own hearts. She shows us how we can depend on our Heavenly Father to walk with us through every stepfamily dis-ease, and how He can keep us on track by supplying us with those vital ingredients of honesty, courage, understanding, forgiveness, and even joy. Goodman states, "When we understand how protected we are with His words of truth, the chaos others cause becomes far less important than we thought it was. It is still real and painful, of course, but our path is through God's footsteps, in holding onto Him through the storm and not wallowing in what hurts."--How true!

Goodman honestly and caringly shows stepmoms how their whole perspective can change when we depend on God for strength, courage, guidance, and love. Stepmom's will want to read this book again and again, every time a new wave of emotional stress hits, to re-focus on the Source, and have their hope renewed.

In her latest book stepmom Karon Goodman discusses how stepmoms can find strength through prayer. Written from a Christian perspective, the book is divided into four sections - beginning, struggling, coping and growing. Each section reviews common five emotions felt by stepmoms, discusses Biblical scriptures relating to those emotions, and offers questions to stimulate thinking and prayer. Comments from real-life stepmoms reflecting on their spiritual insights, struggles and triumphs make the book down-to-earth and ground it in the reality stepmoms face. At a slim 132 pages, the book is a quick read. However, this is a lot to absorb, and readers may want to pace themselves through one emotional highlight per day as a devotional - in 20 days you will be through the entire book!

This book is a reference every manager should keep in his desk or by his bed to read from time to time. It is uplifting, encouraging and simple to read. I rate this little book very highly. There are plenty of topics and with 365 quotes more than enough material to bring you back again and again.

This is a wonderful compilation of thought provoking and inspiring quotes on many different and important topics! This book is applicable to many different ages of people with diverse occupations, gender and religions. I will love to have this book for all of my adolescent and adult clients so as to inspire them to reach higher and further than they already are reaching. I think it is important for all of us to try not to re-create the wheel, but to pull from the experience and words of those who have already "said it so well". I was impressed by the wide range of topics and the quotes to cover them. I challenge anyone to read this book and become inspired to grow. There isn't a person around who could read this book and NOT be inspired to change something in their lives!

Elissa Gifford, LPC NBCC

I am a 31 year old wife and mother with a B.S. and Masters degree and a state license in clinical social work. I am always on the look-out for motivating and introspective literature to help inspire my clients, and to teach my 2 year old daughter. What I found in reading this book were several quotes that were so profound I had to sit with my thoughts for a while. I had expected to find only chapters dealing with happiness and well being, but discovered from the first chapter that overcoming adversity is key to both. The words in this book have already inspired me to create change in my life, to value all of my strengths, and to think hard about what my definition of a successful life really is.

Lisa Wright, LPC

Katie Brewer and Sully Maguire are unforgettable characters who clutch your heart as you read their story. Here's a story you'll want to read in one sitting, then re-read for the pleasure of absorbing over again all the drama and sensitivity the book portrays. The world would be a far better place if all of us had a Sully Maguire in our lives!

There is a part of Sully and Katie in each of us. Not everyone is blessed enough to have a friend step into our lives and restore our faith in people. A friendship, a love, a respect is born and there is not a motive in the world. When one stops long enough to care, to open themselves to another, you never know..you may find yourself flying a kite and enjoying the simpliest things in this world. Everyone should know a Sully, we would have a better world.

There is a part of Sully and Katie in each of us. Not everyone is blessed enough to have a friend step into our lives and restore our faith in people. A friendship, a love, a respect is born and there is not a motive in the world. When one stops long enough to care, to open themselves to another, you never know..you may find yourself flying a kite and enjoying the simpliest things in this world. Everyone should know a Sully, we would have a better world.

I first encountered Susan Lenox as she was personified by Garbo in an enjoyable but rather unbelievable film that is a hash of melodrama and Hollywood "meet cute" conventions. As another reviewer has noted, there's virtually no correlation between the film and the book. Nontheless, when I saw an old copy of the novel in a used book store something told me I had to have it. My nudge was correct; Susan Lenox is a bang-up, amazingly gritty early 20th century novel (1908 or so) about an illegitimate child raised as a total innocent in the "lady class" but destined to become an astonishingly self-aware and highly intelligent New York City street prostitute after she is driven from her small town. She learns by hard experience that working women of her times could not make a living on their own without a supporting family. I could not believe at times that I was not reading a fast-moving historical novel written by a modern feminist author. I repeatedly closed the book to look at the back-cover photograph of the stern young Victorian era author in wonder. He is very hard on sexist men and has an uncanny bead on women's inner lives, outer lives, and--how odd!--their relations with clothing (yes, throughout the ages we females have suffered from fabric dependencies and have drawn inordinate satisfaction from satisfying them--but as the author DGP is aware, PEOPLE ONLY KNOW WHAT THEY SEE, so one's clothing can be tragically important, out of all proportion, as far as how one is treated). Follow Susan from her first arousing crush, to her horrid marital rape the day and evening of her family-forced wedding, to her sweatshop and tenement days,and through her graft-paying, opium-smoking, hard-drinking street prostitue years--and on to, surprise!, success. But the muck-raking author makes it clear 100 that times Susan's "rise" is a fluke and unfairly impossible without a sponsoring male. It is a gripping read--much more so than the books of the "canonical" realistic authors of the era. From other books of DGP I found on-line after reading Susan Lenox, I found he was starry-eyed about Karl Marx--but, hey, cut him a break since DGP was murdered in 1911 by someone who took offense at one of his books and therefore was spared seeing what a horror the Russian revolution and communism unleashed upon the globe. In his day, the grinding of the faces of the poor under mega-capitalists' feet (robber barons--remember them from US History 101?) and colluding politicians (Boss Tweed ring a bell?) made socialism (then just a theory) seem a kinder, gentler alternative to the status quo. Under DGP's proper Victorian waistcoat beat the heart of a dis-illusioned idealist who obviously cared about the plight of the poor and about the crippling social conditioning of women. And the gent could really turn out page-turners! Enjoy an unjustly lost classic.

This lost classic is one of the great books of the turn of the century. Anything that could possibly happen to a woman at the turn of the century happens to Susan Lenox, so it's a panorama of the social conditions and mores of the period. I think it's a better book than Dreiser's SISTER CARRIE, but similar. It's a thousand-word page turner, written by a muckraking journalist-turned novelist with lots of axes to gring, and it's all fascinating. Twenty years after the book came out, MGM made a movie version of it with Greta Garbo, but the movie has virtually nothing to do with the book, and it's terrible (aside from Garbo, who is always interesting.) That's a particular shame, since the story of Susan had many parallels with Garbo's life, and a genuine adaptation might have been wonderful.

I read this book at least five years ago, if not longer, and the impression is still with me. We meet Susan as a young lady in a small, closed minded town in the "Western" state of Ohio, just past the turn of the century. (the last century.) She believes a young man that he has fallen in love with her and will run away with her to marry. This was viewed as a terrible scandal by the petty members of the community, "forcing" her guardians to find a farmer for her to marry; a dreadful creature. This is the beginning of her fall, and she falls and falls for some number of years following. She ecapes to a city- was in New York? and makes her way as a well brought up young woman forced to do so in a man's world. Men were essential to women for their livlihood, and a woman without reputation and introduction were cast adrift with dreadful housing, horrible food, terrible job prospects, if they can even be called a job. The gap between rich and poor was tremendous even then, and literally pennies were all that were needed to improve the lot of the "working poor", just as is the case now. The lot of the workers was easily improved, and it was tragic to see how callous the manufacturers were to the needs of their laborors.

Susan, luckily, "rises" but has a talent and ability to develop it that so few have. That she had the opportunity at all was mere chance.

Every time you think you know what's coming you're surprised. I have never read another author who can immediately make you feel you know the characters and care about them as quickly as this one. The story line is never boring or predictable. There is always a twist and the story lingers and plays with your mind long after the read is over. The character Blue who is obsessed with the the singer Mai keeps the reader wondering long after the book is done - was Blue male or female? And before you know it you're reading it again sifting for more clues and being surprised all over again.

I found out about this book through an interview done through the Greek HIM fan club Dark Secret Club. After checking out the interview, and JD's myspace, I realized that this novel heavily influenced by the band HIM, Oscar Wilde, and Velvet Goldmine. Tainted is an erotic, sensual and ethereal trip through the mind of Blue, a vagabond who sees Mai Evans, the main character of the novel performing at a bar under the group name Nefarious. Mai is one of the most bewitching characters I've come across in literature. He's beautiful, charming, dangerous, and intelligent and some may say cursed. That's all I am willing to let slip. If you like stories of drugs, mental instability, homoeroticism, rock and roll and the pleasures of androgyny and eyeliner, this is the book for you.

I look forward to her future works. This is one author to watch.

I, too, found this through the band HIM, and it's very obvious that that band had a pretty strong influence on this book. In a good way, of course!

Mai Evans is one of the most unique characters I've ever read... he's charasmatic, charming, and sometimes so melancholic that it's shocking.

Blue is easy to relate to, articulate, and understandable in a way it doesn't seem he could be.

Their story is breathtaking beyond words, and I'm running right now to buy everything this author has ever written.

Good case selection and pictures.
Highly recommended just like all the others books from this series.

Its an excellent companion to the Chest requisites. It is the best book in the case review series based on the requisites. Combined with the requisites its more than enouch for the chest section of the residency boards. A must buy for the residents!

Presents broad range of common (and some rare) diseases/pathology with pithy, relevant discussion. Questions highlight important pearls. Quality of the images is sometimes less than desirable for demonstrating the findings, but this is a minor complaint.

Tiger is sooo......scared of everything. This book gently shows Tiger's fears of many things. This is a very gentle book, not too scarey. This book is also great for early reading, easy too read, repeating words. Be prepared to read and listen to this book many times. This book also is great for teaching compassion. Tiger over comes his fears by helping a baby mouse. This book is very cute. If you are looking for a little more reading for a beginner reading and staying on the theme of compassion. I love the "Good night, Good Knight" books. This book has more reading per page, but a lot of repeating words and teaches compassion for others.

I am 18 years old, and this book was the book I learned how to read with when I was 4 years old!!! It was my absolute favorite book and I would recommend it to any parent looking for a cute book for their child!

This is a heart-warming story of a kitten with many fears. He overcomes his fears in the story because of his compassion for a smaller, more needy animal than himself. Through repetition in the text beginning and emerging young readers will find this a delightful, easy-to-read story. My daughter has read it so many times the cover and pages are worn with love! It was the first story she mastered reading cover to cover.

Toil Under The Sun is a moving account of an adopted boy who grows to manhood amidst tumultuous emotions about love and acceptance. Mr. Ritter does a fine job of blending these character emotions in a story complete with action, suspence, humor, love, and sacrifice. The book is well-written, with action of the present blended nicely with reflections from the past. A very enjoyable read.

Toil Under the Sun is a moving account of an adopted child's struggle to accept love. For any individual or family dealing with adoption issues, it gives insight into the wound of having been relinquished. The parallel stories in each chapter are well crafted together to move the reader from the past to the present. I was uplifted by the final outcome, and only regretted that I didn't get to follow Timothy into his new acceptance of being loved. This wonderful, moving novel is one that you are sorry to have end.

Mr. Ritter provides a story which explores the shoals of cynicism to the depths of acceptance of life. The vehicle for this exploration is an adopted son, analytical father, best friend, and a cold war policing action. The characters are new and familiar so as to be interesting, insightful and meaningful to the reader. The reader can expect to spend a pleasant weekend with these enjoyable characters as they come to terms with their "toil under the sun".

I am often amazed that this wonderful classic is so often overlooked. The author's style and syntax is pure Victorian, through and through with wonderfully convoluted sentences, and indeed, paragraphs. This work, which takes place during the mid 1800s, circa 1840, is the story of a young man in a English Public School (which, unlike in the U.S. is actually a private school to which only the elite can afford to attend) and his adventures at this school. This of course is a boarding school. While not absolute, this work is obviously autobiographical in nature. When this work is read, the reader must keep in mind when it was written, the society in which it was written and most importantly, the attitude of the society in which it was written. I was first introduced to this work well over forty years ago and have given it several reads since that time. I strongly suspect that many young readers of today may find the syntax difficult at first, but if they press on, there is so much to learn from this book. As another reviewer well pointed out, some of the events addressed here are not what you would call "politically correct" by our standards to day in this country, but then we must remember when and where it was written. Any student of the history of literature or a student of our language will most likely be fascinated with this work. I highly recommend.

"Tom Brown's School Days"?, That's junenile fiction. That's a kid running down a merry lane in England with a satchel on his back, right? So wrong. How could this classic piece of little literature have escaped my attention? A stunning book about a boy's life in boarding school in mid 19th Century England, it tells it's adolescence tale with all the discipline of a Cub Scout Manual and whimsy of a comic book. Author Hughes frequently stops the action and intercedes on behalf of himself, commenting on the progress of the story as a teacher might. His defense of boys boxing with hard fists and fractured skulls is so socially incorrect it becomes amusing in it's conviction. Maybe skulls were harder then. A good knock-a-round is good for a boy. But school-yard fights aside, this is an adult piece of classic literature with a deeply moral narrative and a devoted sense of well-being. In it's second century of publication, it is a breath of fresh air.

For the last five generations this has been the book every British parent wanted their sons to read, and Tom Brown is the mold which every parent wanted their sons to fit. He loves his parents. He attends church. He is a good student. He is kind to his juniors and respectful of his seniors. He is a true sportsman, and always plays fair. He is the beloved of his headmaster at Rugby school, Mr. Arnold, and Arnold himself is elevated by his mentorship of young Tom. He has an unbounded future, like Britain herself. Yes, it is an idealistic view of youth, but part of a parent's responsibility is surely to instill idealism, along with everything else.

To more effectively enshrine his protagonist in glory, to place in relief his exceptionalism, to show the depravity of his antognist, and to put a human face on the Devil, Hughes also gives us Harry Flashman. While it was Tom's popularity which created the book's commercial success for the last five generations, my guess is that it will be George McDonald Fraser's references to Tom and Arnold, in his series of Flashman books, which will draw the contemporary reader's attention. Harry cheats and lies; he's a bully; he drinks, and is ultimately expelled from Rugby School for drunkeness. Please refer to Fraser's book, "Flashman," and the rest of the series of Flashman books to see how young Harry turned out. Not so bad actually. The Victoria Cross, highly respected, and extremely wealthy.

Naturally, this is far from Hughes' intent in creating a counterpart to the ideal child, but the existence of such a child as Tom Brown creates a disequilibrium in nature, which requires remedy. The reader will need to decide for himself whether the prototype of good or evil is more compelling. "Tom Brown's School Days" was a book of idealism for young boys at the turn of the 20th century. "Flashman" is a book of realism (okay, of humor, too) for the modern rogue at the turn of the 21st. Read both for the clash of perspectives.