Stuart Books

This book is just darling. I love the vintage, even antiquated, pictures. The stories are refreshing for young ones. It's the kind that makes you want to sit out on the porch swing with your children, drinking lemonade and reading to your kids; or else you can light the fire in the woodstove and eat popcorn under fuzzy blankets with your kids while you read to them. Delightful.

This book can be found at other websites. I can't leave an URL here, but just Google the title. I found mine at a Catholic homeschool store. I'm not Catholic and neither is the book, but you can find it there.

This is the first romance novel I ever read! It's been over ten years and I still love it. Luc's "cat and mouse" games with Charlotte are mind boggling and Charlotte's naivete is delightful. This is Ann Stuart at her best!

Lew Fonesca has a lot on his plate these days, and he doesn't want any of it. Still grieving from the death of his wife four years earlier, he's learned to survive by pretty much leaving the world alone, and wishing the world would do the same to him. Still, he has to earn money for food and the two rooms he rents behind the Dairy Queen.

Lou's a process server who's good at finding people. In fact, he's developing a bit of a reputation, so it's no surprise when an actress asks him to find the driver who ran down and killed her fourteen-year-old son. The same week, a senior in a retirement home asks him to find out who was murdered down the hall from her. There isn't a body and all residents are accounted for, so no one believes her. But Dorothy knows what she saw, and she wants Lew to prove it.

Stuart M. Kaminsky's DENIAL is a sad, elegantly told story about learning to live with loss. It's also about the quest for closure and, for a lucky few, maybe even redemption. Despite Lew's depressed, lethargic nature, I liked this character a lot. He tries to do the right thing, doesn't have a temper or violent streak, and doesn't wish harm on the world, except perhaps the driver who killed his wife. But since he doesn't know who this person is, he thinks about it as little as possible.

This interesting story offers well-drawn characters, perfect pacing, and a great blend of dialogue and narrative description. What I loved most about this book, though, is Kaminsky's simple, exquisite style. Absolutely terrific.

From police detectives like Dick Tracy and Charlie Chan, private gumshoes like Mike Shane, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, gentlemen detectives like Philo Vance and Nick Charles, international men of mystery like Kintaro Moto and The Saint, to local busybodies like Hildegarde Martha-Withers and Miss Marple. They are the silver screen's greatest crime solvers and we can't get enough of them! Every year, more of them make their debut on DVD.



Everson does a great job bringinug us the great film detectives we grew up with, and some of the lesser well-known sleuths. The evolution of the genre is traced from it's origins in the silent era.



The photographs are top notch, typical of Everson's books.

Samuel Pepys was a paper pusher in the 1600's who had the fantastic luck to get a political job with the English Navy, who knew Charles II, who dined with William Pitt, who was a scamp of a philanderer (and details it all!)-- This amazing journal takes place between 1660 and 1669. It is possibly the most entertaining journal you will ever read. Imagine seeing the Great London Fire of 1666 through his eyes? Details and personalities, all here. For those of you who love history, for those who love personal journals, this is the book to read! And it's only 350 years old. You will be amazed at how forthright he is about his lust for other women than his wife, at how he chastises himself, yet still commits the same sins. He is perfectly human, this Samuel Pepys, and a delight to read!

This monumental work in three large volumes is the one which I use most frequently when wanting to inform myself on the use of "bawdy", or sexually "indecent" language or imagery, in Renaissance literature (especially plays, but also poetry like Donne's). The author has for one thing assembled a much larger range of examples to illustrate sexual meanings than are provided by any other scholars. In the case of this area of language, that really matters. Many readers, even today, vastly underrate the frequency of sexual meanings in e.g. Shakespeare or other Renaissance dramatists. The truth is that they and their audiences were almost addictively fond of sexual jokes, and these often are not understood by people today, or at best glimpsed as just possibly a local "quibble". What Williams shows is that most of such instances of word-play are not at all incidental, but so frequent that one can in fact speak of a sexual "language" or "code" which was clearly widely shared and understood during the period he covers. This can only be done by producing MANY examples of a particular usage, as he does. He also demonstrates that many hitherto "unsuspected" words frequently carried a sexual meaning. Neither he nor I want to suggest that the sexual meaning is usually the ONLY (or even the DOMINANT) meaning in all but a limited number of words which are "merely" sexual. Our point is, rather, that many seemingly "innocuous" words are so frequently used in a sexual sense that that sense should not be seen as something occasional or additional, but as commonplace and central.

The dictionary is, for all its comprehensiveness, by no means complete. See for example Joost Daalder and Antony Telford Moore, "*Mandrakes* and *Whiblins* in *The Honest Whore*" (*Studies in Philology*, Fall 1997, 494-507) as a discussion of words not adequately covered - or understood - by Williams. Another word he does not list (or at least not as a separate entry) is *thatch* for "pubic hair". And there certainly are other omissions. Nevertheless, this work far more often helps one out than it lets one down, and it is difficult to see how any editor of a Renaissance play containing sexual punning (and many do!) can afford to ignore this work. All university libraries should own it as an important reference tool. - Joost Daalder, Profesor of English, South Australia

I was assigned to provide an evaluation of digitizing a collection. Just by chance I picked up this book in our library. I thought it was about imagery, but it is realy about what most people call digitization. This book has an very high information to fluff ratio. It is filled with pracital advice ranging from technical advice (image formats, digitization engines) to project organization tips. Although aimed at the library/archival community is is invaluable to anyone who has to digitize a large body of documents.

Woods seems to write smooth and solid thrillers as fast as most of us read them. Cop-turned-lawyer Stone Barrington of New York Dead returns with all his street smarts intact in this story about a powerful gossip-monger who has the tables turned when dirty pictures of her start appearing on fax machines across the country. The characters are so rich, famous, and upscale that you might get a nosebleed, but Woods has a light, deft touch that makes the book hard to resist.

This book traces the history of happiness in Western and Asian societies using religion and philosophy as a basis for analysis. The discovery of happiness analyses Hindu, Buddhist, Judaism, Christian scripture plus Greek philosophical points of views on contentment and happiness--and how these anciet views can applied to achieve maximization in ones life in present day. Moreover, happiness is a state of mind that can only be achieved through internal self maximization, contentment, dignity and selfless concern for the welfare of others. Although, religion, relationships, democracy, prestige, love, and even artificial drugs can help achieve happiness in a short term basis, again, it is self awareness, contentment, selfless concern of others which are the true first steps of achieving happiness.

Guy Stuart has presented in a very cogent and readable way some of the reasons why discrimination and segregation persist in U.S. housing markets and it may not be for the reasons most assume. Stuart illustrates how conceptions of "value", particularly in the process of property appraisals, risk estimation in underwriting, and lender-broker-realtor networks characterized by racial homogeneity all contribute to disparities in lending to minorities, particularly African Americans. Stuart illustrates how all of the participants in the process play a role, though none may be directly intending to encourage the negative consequences.

To break the cycle, Stuart correctly suggests that we need to hold GSEs, lenders, regulators, appraisers, and others responsible for correcting disparite EFFECTS, with or without assigning intent to discriminate to any specific actor or group. Whether or not such accountability can or will occur will depend on whether there is political will and a solid understanding of the issues. At least on the latter point, the public is well-served by this book.

The book is well-written in clear and direct prose. Stuart succeeds in avoiding confusing and jargon-laden descriptions. Given the subject matter, this is a real victory for the reader. The book also provides a very useful history of the mortgage lending industry and is recommended for students and activist alike trying to get their heads around a confusing and poorly understood field that has profound impacts on the persistence of racial segregation in the U.S.