Warner Books

I found this book better than others of Chesbro's...almost seemed like it was written by someone else. Knowing that a lot of good books are turned into movies, I could imagine Nick Nolte playing the lead and I could see and smell the subways...chilling! I think, in the hands of a master, this could be an exceptional movie. A real thriller

I am surprised this hasn't been made into a movie. Maybe George was ahead of his time. But this book makes you think, had me on the edge of my seat. This is a great book for anyone. I highly suggest this to anyone who can read. I wish I were a movie director, I would do this and it would be a great movie. One to ponder over after the movie is through.

As with many of my novels, the notion for Bone was borne of a sense of outrage - - this time over the sorry state of affairs in a country as wealthy as the United States where so many impoverished, mentally ill people are forced to live on the streets. I had my setting; being a mystery writer, I naturally had to have a mystery, as well as a corpse or two. I did more research on this novel, on amnesia as well as the milieu of the homeless in New York City, than for any other. The opening scene came to me almost at once, but the rest came very gradually; I was halfway through the first draft before I even discovered where Bone came from, and what he did.

Okay, so this little volume (number 4 in the Far Side series of collections) is "outdated." As far as I'm concerned, however, these cartoons are timeless! Bride of the Far Side is probably the best of Larson's works. How is this determined? In large part, it is the "Schmidt scale"... the percentage of Larson works found on the walls and doors of practicing scientists from a particular volume (cartoons used in lectures are added to this scale).

Remember these classics?

"And now Edgar's gone... Something's going on around here."

"Early vegetarians returning from the kill."

"Well, what the?... I THOUGHT I smelled something."

"Wait a minute! Isn't anyone here a real sheep?"

And my personal all-time favorite:

"Late again!... This better be good!"

Reading Bride Of The Far Side made me remember how great Gary Larson's daily dose mentally deranged cartoons were. I grew up reading his strip and boy do I miss him. In this collection of about two-hundred Far Sides, he carries on his tradition of good-natured insanity. Almost every cartoon in the book made me laugh, grin or at least go, "Eeeeewwww!" More than a few also made me stop and think. See, Larson is, in his better moments (which describes most of his moments) also a man of profound insight and deep thought. You have to keep your mind on its toes (yuck) to follow his punchlines. I do sincerely wish he'd make a return to the daily papers, or at least be more forthcoming with brand new material released in book form. I'd love to see that. Until the coming of that glorious day, I'll keep myself entertained with his '80's and '90's anthologies like Bride Of The Far Side, which is a truly awesome book!

Bride of The Far Side, the fourth in the Far Side series, is a must have for any true fan of The Far Side. Packed with 200 cartoons, this book is hilarious. I have read this book dozens of times over the years and it seems to grow funnier each and every time. All of the classic, warped animals and insects and bizarre human characters are contained in this collection. If you do not have this one in your Far Side collection yet then add it to your shopping cart right away. You will not be disappointed. It is truly a gem of a book.

This book is indeed a trip back to Haworth. Once you are there you can't forget it and this only strengthens my
memories of this home and town on the Yorkshire Moors. Each family member is giving a short biography. Portraits of family members are shown. The pictures of the parsonage and the area surrounding it are beautiful. I've collected many Bronte books and I would say that this ranks with the best of them.

I just happened to find this book on our library shelf. I intend to purchase it as a gift this coming Christmas for my niece. What a lovely and heartbreaking and informative look into the lives of, especially, three young ladies (Charlotte, Emily, Anne Bronte) and the legacy they created within such a short lifetime...Charlotte dead at 38, Emily at age 30, and Anne at 29. The beautifully presented book contains so many intimate looks into the lives of the family...into the lives of the girls who gave us "Jane Eyre," "Wuthering Heights," and "Agnes Grey." The family seems to have been rife with talent and Ann Dinsdale lovingly and informatively creates a picture of lives cut short but legacies which continue 150 years after each left this earth. With this book as background, reading or rereading each of the girls' novels will be all the more a rewarding experience.

This is a beautifully photographed and well written book. The text has chapers on each family member as well as an overall history of the family.
I found it very interesting to read and felt it gave a good comprehensive look at the family and the times in which they lived without being too weighty or long and the photographs interspersed with the text add just the right touch. Recommended for all Bronte fans.

I enjoyed the story becaue it is written by Harry Warner's beautiful grandaughter, who made a promise to her grandfather to tell his story---and she did.

For anyone who has a dream and a family, this book is an inspiration and a lesson worth learning.

The Brothers Warner

What an amazing story. I loved learning about the first days of film, hearing about the family that had so much to do with the first films and learning the true story of how the Warner Bros. came to be! Captivating.

I read "The Brothers Warner" with great interest and curiosity. Author, Ms. Cass Warner Sperling has kept her unspoken "promise" made to Grandpa Harry (patriarch of the Warner brothers) at his deathbed when she was a ten year old girl, to convey to others his deep beliefs and ideals.
I rate it 5 stars because the story and writing style paints an incredible picture of not just another "rags to riches" story but one of tragedy and great sacrifice leading to an enduring legend of the motion picture industry directly because of the "can do and make it go right" attitudes of the Warners.

From the family gold watch (later to be hocked in order to secure payment for the brothers first projector) placed in 1883 into the secret pocket of Benjamin Warner for his immigration to America into New York and the arrival of wife Pearl and children less than a year later, to a realization of a movie empire that had as its motto "Educate, entertain, and enlighten" which is a Hollywood legacy.

A must read for movie buffs and those interested in the beginnings of Hollywood. This is a book that has "all the right stuff" for the making of a fascinating mini-series as told by granddaughter Cass and others.

Shelley Abate, movie buff and avid reader.

Hill is a wonderful writer, and this series just gets better and better. In this book we have a little bit of everything - greed, murder, police politics, and of course the guy who never lets any of that bother him in his efforts to solve mysteries - Andy Dalziel. Hill unfolds his plot like a wonderfully wrapped package - layer upon layer comes off until we get to the surprising ending! One thing about Reginald Hill - he is never predictable and every book is surprisingly different. Enough to keep me guessing, and continuing to read this wonderful series.

Hill is one of the top mystery writers. The world he has created in the Dalziel and Pascoe series is as real as Nero Wolfe's. The interplay between liberal, educated, and sexy Pascoe and gross, vulgar, and brilliant Dalziel is well observed and outrageously funny. Hill has a sly wit, often leading to laugh-out-loud outbursts that can be embarrassing in public places. Read the whole series, spend time with his characters.

I'm flabbergasted that nobody has chosen to review this book before. This is my first exposure to Mr. Hill's writing and I am impressed. Hill is an English writer of detective mystery fiction. This book is one in a series that revolves around the workings of a pair of policemen based in Northern England, one of whom is a Rabelaisian, dyed in the wool Yorkshireman, the other a University educated middle class everyman. Childs Play is a story that evolves around the entwined fates of two families and, of all things, a repressed homosexual cop. When a mystery man appears graveside to claim the heritance of a prodigal son, things quickly spin wildly out of control when he and another complete stranger are killed within a week of each other in apparently unrelated incidents. Complexity is added when an eager representative of a named party in the origingal deceased's will begins to cobble together an alliance in order to overturn the will, which makes any one of the interested parties a suspect in the murders. Dalziel and Pascoe work together to puzzle the pieces and solve this fine mystery in an ending that is sure to have you curling your toes in anticipation and suspense. I am giving this book five stars because it is truly well-written and the suspense becomes wonderfully excruciating as the author proceeds to weave a half-dozen seemingly disparate threads together into Gordian knot before cutting it. My only objections to Mr. Hill's story telling is his penchant for throwing in obscure high culture references that seem oddly out of place and his willingness to place extreme pressure upon his audience's suspension of disbelief. All in all though, this story will have you panting for more, I am quite sure.

This book is one of my favorites. I am glad to see several editions (hopefully not abridged!)available...I hope more people will read it. It was once widely read. Read it and find out why! My copy is hardcover in 2 volumes. It was more expensive, but this is one I definately am handing down to my daughters...trouble is I have three, so I guess I'll have to get a couple more copies:)

I am a 14-year old girl, and I have read this book twice! It is exceptional in that it teaches good Christian values that are much needed in our society today. If everybody learned to die to themselves and have the self-control that Ellen did in the book, this world would be a much happier place. I dislike the feminists' biased criticism of the book, but I am thankful that they had the book reprinted.

Susan Warner's _The Wide, Wide World_ was first published in 1852 and is often acclaimed as America's first bestseller.
Its heroine, Ellen Montgomery, is her mother's sole companion, confidante, and spiritual prodigy. Ellen's father wisks the mother away under the pretense of taking her to a climate more favorable to her health. Her mother's last words to Ellen are "We must endure, but we must not rebel." Ellen is sent to her father's sister's house in the country. Miss Fortune is a pragmatic independent manager of a small farm. She takes Ellen in though she was not told of Ellen's coming. Ellen's
sensibilities are crushed by Miss Fortune's lack of sympathy
for Ellen's tastes. Ellen will find friends in the more genteel and conventionally religious neighbors, Alice and John Humphreys, who agree that Ellen would make a good wife for John when she grows up. Ellen's foil is the "wild girl" Nancy Vawse who roams the countryside and turns up to torment Ellen with her rough ways. When Ellen reaches her teens, she learns some very surprising news which precipitates a trip to Scotland. The intensly emotional and high-strung Ellen who "conquers her will" represents everything contemporary psychology and feminism denounce.

`The Cook Book Decoder or Culinary Alchemy Explained' by retired Canadian professor of Chemistry, Arthur E. Grosser is easily the spiritual godfather of current impresario of culinary information, Alton Brown, in that it seeks to explain everyday cooking phenomena with a big dollop of humor.

While this little book pales in comparison to Harold McGee's encyclopedic coverage of food science in `On Food and Cooking', this book serves its purpose by making it easy to read and to understand a few good facts about a few really important aspects of food chemistry. Oddly enough, the book also can revive interest in some backwaters of cooking technique.

It is meet and right that the very first subject is the egg, the single most useful natural product in the kitchen. In this chapter, the author introduces a feature of his book that would make it an excellent text for a grammar school or middle school course in food science. A chemist to the end, the author offers numerous suggestions on simple experiments that may be performed with standard kitchen equipment. The first topic is the whys and wherefores of cooking a hard-boiled egg. This is my first sense that the good professor may have a few clay feet. In my great survey of cooking praxis, there are two competing methods for successfully making a hard-boiled egg. The method endorsed by this author suggests poking a hole in the blunt end of the eggshell and dropping the prepared egg into boiling water. The alternate method which my experience shows works equally well involves placing the raw eggs in cold water in a pan on the burner and bringing the water and eggs up to boiling whereupon both methods have us simmer eggs for about 12 minutes. Oddly, the second method relies on a fact of egg anatomy that the author clearly describes and uses as a justification for his recommendation. This is the presence of tiny pores in the eggshell at the blunt end. The cold start uses these by increasing heat slowly. The hot start uses the same principle, but helps its case by creating a much larger hole to let air escape from the egg rather than build up pressure and crack the shell. All of this is relatively unimportant beside the fact that the author's discussion of egg cookery is both entertaining and informative.

One of this book's greatest services may be the author's giving us procedures on how to bake and how to coddle eggs. I have not seen such loving attention paid to egg cookery lately except in the very French `Essential Cuisine' by Chef Michel Bras. Compared to the arcane techniques needed to poach eggs or cook omelets, coddling and baking seem to be simplicity itself. And, coddling offers an enormous range of enhancements comparable in many ways to the great variety of omelet preparations.

Aside from eggs, the author discusses:

Vegetables, especially their colors and how colors are affected by cooking.
Garlic, Onions, Cabbage, and Potatoes, and how these smelly veggies can be tamed
Beast and Bird and how to keep juicy
Fish: Food for Thought and how to fry
A Bowl of Plastic Fruit and Thou
Sauces, Cereal, Pasta and Other Thick Things
Desserts: "It Comes with the Meal"
Baking: "If It's Enriched, It Needs Enrichment"
Beverages: The Devil's Works

Each chapter ends with a nice little resume that is much more a collection of mottoes for improving our cooking than it is a summary of the facts presented in the chapter. These are suggestions you hear from all the `Food Network' experts for which our author has given us the explanation of why these are good things to do or to avoid. This `resume' is the basis for the book's whimsical title, as it explains this kitchen lore which cookbook writers and chefs have been following for generations, often with no thought to why the practices work.

I did find a few other nits to pick. The author was curiously obtuse in explaining the origin of the term `Maillard reactions', as if this former professor was quite satisfied in passing on what may be no more than hearsay. These phenomenons, along with caramelization, are two cornerstones of our understanding of what happens when high heat encounters sugars and protein. This tells me that while the good professor was a chemist, he was not a professional `food chemist'. Another small lapse is in his explanation of why it is important to have a high oil temperature when putting fish in to fry. Grosser states that this is needed to form a crust to keep the oil from entering the flesh and creating a greasy dish. A much more likely explanation from both Alton Brown and Shirley Corriher is that the high heat turns water in the food into steam and the outward pressure of the steam bars the oil from entering the food. While it may seem to be a small point, as both explanations recommend a high oil heat, the steam explanation means that food should be removed from the hot oil as soon as the flesh is cooked, while the crust explanation suggests the food could stay in the oil indefinitely without becoming greasy. So, the correct explanation is important for practical cooking.

As mentioned at the outset, this book makes excellent use of humor to make this subject entertaining. Other virtues that distinguish this book from some others are the very nice little experiments and the practical summaries. Even if you have memorized your McGee and have read other good food science books such as `The Science of Cooking' by Bristol University (UK) don Peter Barham, I recommend Dr. Grosser's inexpensive little volume, especially if you have budding adolescent cooks under your wing.

I am both a chemist and an amateur chef. I have, on occasion, cooked chinese food for as many as 25 people - which is not bad considering that I am not Chinese! But, of course, the question that always lies at the back of my mind when making something is "why?" as in "why do eggs turn white when fried?" or "why does cornstarch thicken a sauce?". Arthur Grosser's "The Cookbook Decoder or Culinary Alchemy Explained" answers these questions and many more. It is an engaging tour through the chemistry behind cooking by a master chef. It is filled with gentle explanations and interesting experiments. And some absolutely delightful recipes. What more can you want in a book?

Arthur Grosser makes acquiring useful knowledge an appetising prospect. This book's combination of chemical facts, easy and delicious recipes and fun cartoons makes it an excellent read and a useful gift. The text is clear, the style amusing and the results gratifyingly edible - and drinkable - try recipe 121 followed by 120!

STILL A GREAT WALKING TAPE. Was surprised that the music (except in the Pump Up the Pace WalkFit tape there were a few different "pop" songs) was the same. I think maybe Kathy Smith should have different music for all her tapes? This is for people who like to walk and like country western music. Perfect time of year to start using these walking tapes.

This tape is just one of a series of excellent audio cassettes by Kathy Smith which motivate you to keep moving for a great walking workout. The music is upbeat and is interspersed with reminders about technique, posture and positive attitude. You are also reminded halfway through the tape so you can turn around. I have been able to stay with my walking program on a regular basis since I began using the Kathy Smith Walk-Fit tapes and I credit the tapes with keeping me interested and motivated.

Kathy showed me how to turn a walk into a workout--wow! I've burned more fat and toned my body like no other exercise. Walking is fun and easy! I've bought all her walking audios. They're great.

Alcoholism cuts across all divides, afflicting the young, the old, the rich, the poor, the famous, the unknown. In this very absorbing book, author and interviewer Dennis Wholey meets with a few of them and presents their thoughts on how they became alcoholics, how it affected their lives, and what they did in an effort to control their disease.

The book breaks down into several sections. After a short introduction by actor, singer, and alcoholic Gordon MacRae, Wholey describes his own journey--and then launches into sections titled "The Beginning," "The Progression," "Quitting," and "A New Life," in which the likes of Doc Severinson, Shecky Green, Gary Crosby, Bob Welch, and Thomas Tryon describe their personal experiences with the disease at various stages. Other sections include "The Woman Alcoholic," "Alcoholism and Homosexuality," "Wives and Alcoholic Husbands," and "The Families of Alcoholics."

Although the book finishes out with information on Al-Anon and A.A., it does not actually "preach" either organization as a cure-all for every alcoholic, and several of the interview subjects found relief through various other organizations or techniques.

You might suppose this book will be of interest only to other alcoholics, but that is far from the case. With a broad range of personalities involved--Gale Storm, Jason Robarbs, Grace Slick, and Billy Carter to name but four more--it offers a truly fascinating look into both the individual and the disease. It also offers inspiration for any one who has ever faced the need to make substantial life-changes for any reason.

If there is a flaw in the book, it is that it has a slightly dated quality. Although it offers a section on "The Woman Alcoholic," the emphasis is on men, and the "Alcoholism and Homosexuality" section consists of a single interview that has, in many respects, suffered a great deal from changing attitudes and better research. Even so, while an update would be welcome, COURAGE TO CHANGE remains a powerful testament and inspiration.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

Great buy, would definately recommend this book to anyone who is struggling with the affects of alcohol in their life.

When I read The Courage to Change the first time (1987, the original edition) it changed my life because it explained alcoholism in a concrete way that was easy to understand. The stories from alcoholic (and some nonalcoholic) celebrities go a long way toward illustrating the damage this disease causes while showing that you don't have to be the proverbial falling-down drunk or daily drinker to be an alcoholic. The stories also, by the way, are entertaining and show the humanity of some of the household names who tell them. Wholey mixes up the rhythm of this book enough that you don't get bored. Something here for everyone--I've personally bought literally more than 12 copies to give away. I recommend it highly. Thanks, Dennis Wholey!

I thought the book was easy to read and understand. I liked how the author used crayons as her subject. Crayons are something all kids love! I liked how she showed how the crayons can get along even tho they are different colors. Just like how people can get along no matter what color we are! I would recommend this book!

We already owned a copy of this book when I decided to order another one as a gift. The book is designed to help children see that God made all people of all colors and it takes all of us to make up this world. It shows how dull the pictures would be if only one color is used. The only problem I had was that the description of the item # I ordered from Amazon.com didn't specify that I wasn't ordering another copy of the book - I was ordering a 5 pack of Crayon Kingdom Coloring Books??

When I first opened the Crayon Kingdom, I thought it was a beautiful book full of interesting characters like the Veggie Tales but as I started to get into the story, I found it to be much more. Teaching our children about different cultures and how we all work together to make a beautiful world so is important and this author does a wonderful job of doing just that! The book is easy to read and is suitable for the child to read by himself or for a parent to read to the child. The working parent will like the appreciate this book as it can easily be read in just a short period of time and teach values that will last a lifetime! Recommend you pick up a copy soon!