Warner Books

I seldom listen to audio books because they're usually abridged causing the story to be choppy and narrations are often dull. But this one is delightful mostly due to the narration/performance of Theresa Saldana. Her caustic Brooklyn accent brings the character of Tina to life and lets the reader feel he is actually sitting next to the confused and rather foul mouthed Tina.

At the age of 30, working girl Tina becomes pregnant by Vini, the lovable but unsophisticated plumber. Tina makes decisions about her life that are frustrating and confusing - rejecting Vini, involving herself with a married man - to her friends, especially her best friend Angie, but they are always there to help.

I recommend the book to readers who enjoy a good yarn about friendship and the burdens of life's choices, or if you just want to hear a superb audio performance.

The way Avra Wing expresses the mid-life crisis, and ending of it, is fabulous.

This is a timeless book -- his course was excellent as well. It is just plain common sense and a great foundation.

The Art of Fund Raising tells you nothing about "turn key" operations in development, nothing about "mass mailings." Warner tells you, in his wonderfully simple and very eloquent writing that fund raising is about giving of yourself to help people find what is best for them. He explains that fund raising is the very essence of humanity, and its only money that gets in the way. Your job is to take Warner's work and interpret fund raising and use your own contacts and skills
for your clients. I refer a lot to the Do's and Don'ts section and especially enjoy his
often humorous, and very insightful "It happened to me, don't let it happen to you" section. 35+ years of experience and hundreds of satisfied students, readers and clients can't be wrong. Enjoy

This book is set in an alley in a poor sections of London and allows you to become part of the lives of it's inhabitants. All of the residents come from different races, colors and creeds and how they share their lives through joy, pain, politics, society and WWII.

This is the story of Tim an Irish labourer, his slow friend Dandy and their wifes and families living in a gaslit cobbled alley at the beggining of 1900. Read about Maud, Dandies loud American wife her beloved son, who goes off to fight in the first world war and tearaway daughter Colleen. Discover the dark secret the Brown twins accross the alley share, and their strange sister Ellen. This is an excellent book if you like to get the feel of old London and life before the Great War.

Extremely informative. Publishing in 1986, the numbers need updating (wish the author would consider a reprint!), but the truths still stand firm. If you keep getting rejections from publishers, this author (a literary agent and book packager, who also co-authored WHAT THEY DON'T TEACH YOU AT HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL) pinpoints an approach by telling you how publishers think, then turning the tables and telling the reader how he has to "package" his product (manuscript) in order to sell it to them.

John Boswell has done a great service to all authors with his rare and perceptive overview of the publishing industry. As a professional book editor, I find that most authors -- even experienced ones -- are amazingly ignorant of the industry in which they work. This book will help any book author understand how to work with editors and publishers and how to succeed in the business.

I only discovered this rare and priceless treasure of a book a few days ago, and I am so glad I did. In my opinion this fabulous piece of art should have received much more notice and acclaim. It must have slipped under the radar screens of the public because I hadn't heard of it before.

The scope and vision of the work is very impressive. It has the feel of an epic Hollywood production with its elaborate costumes, painted sets, and the illusion of vast scale.

The text in the book is classic children's-picture-book style, which I think was a clever approach for a morality play clearly aimed at adults. It reminds me of the work of Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) who also used lighthearted characters and themes to confront huge social issues and moral conflicts.

If you are interested in art, photography, or a collector of rare and one of a kind treasure please buy this book.

I was extremely lucky to find this book in a bargain bookstore a couple years ago. If you get your hands on a copy, be sure to buy it and keep it forever.

Once in a while I come across a writer who is so dexterous, so acute, that I am willing to follow him to whatever depths of depravity to which he chooses to descend.

Tim Willocks is such a writer, and in Bad City Blues, he has elected to visit a deeper place than I have gone before. The setting is a Louisiana hotter, dirtier and uglier than the one I have visited and it is peopled with demons disguised as policemen, addicts, thugs and men of the cloth. These creatures are violent and vengeful, heaping pain and indignities upon one another with an abandon that should chill and repel the reader, but the spare beauty of the language keeps us hanging on through the worst of it.

There are only seven characters in Bad City Blues and in lesser hands such paucity of interaction might seem cramped and claustrophobic, but it's clear that Willocks requires every one of the books 245 pages to bring them to life and could probably have done with another hundred or so.

As with most of stories of human nature, Bad City Blues is about two brothers. It is a logical way for a writer to start - two men who have had the same upbringing and background should turn out roughly the same way, yet one goes bad, the other goes worse. Cicero and Luther Grimes (Grimes - dirty, besoiled, low - even the names are evocative) are white trash who haven't spoken in years due to an unnamed wrong committed by Luther on Cicero. Luther spends most of his time in South America, training death squads and dealing drugs, while his brother elected to go to medical school. Cicero could have been a successful doctor, but instead now lives in a broken-down firehouse in a broken-down part of town and tends to the afflicted, often free of charge. Does this make him a good man? No, not really. Violence and retribution boil just below the surface of his calm demeanor. Though the "good" Grimes does not uncork his rage, the bloodlust surges through him and is as ugly as the acts perpetrated by the other characters.

Separated by years and miles, the brothers are pulled together by Callie Carter, a former hooker and current addict, who is on the run with a million dollars stolen from the bank where her husband is a Vice President. The husband, Cleve Carter, is also a television evangelist who sparks through his brief appearance in this book like a high-voltage wire chewed through by wild nutria.

Clarence Jefferson is a crooked cop who destroys or befouls everything he touches, including his sweet and unassuming Baptist wife. He catches wind of the million dollar heist and sets out to claim his piece of it, leaving a wake of bloodied and broken humanity behind him.

Bad City Blues is a ferocious and extraordinary book that will be enjoyed by fans of Chuck Palahniuk and James Lee Burke and burned in horror by fans of Agatha Christie and Joan Hess.

I've got the name of this book tattooed on my arm. Its not neccessarily my favourite book or particularly clever. But it has an underlying current that is like a shooting up smack whilst driving a stolen car through a residential area.

This book is obscure, hard to find, rare. I stumbled across my copy at a bookstore that has since closed down. It quickly became one of the invaluable prizes in my baseball library.

A few qualifiers: This is only for baseball nuts. Casual fans shouldn't bother. Also, the book is only current through 1980.

Now, what the book is. It's every pennant race in baseball history, displayed in graphic form. On the left side of each graph, the teams all start at zero. Time passes from left to right. As teams win, their lines move up. When they lose, their lines move down. Each team is shown at each point on the graph with respect to their number of games above or below .500. Come the far right of each graph, you'll see how they finished.

Well, that really loses a lot in translation, but please take my word for it: the excitement of a pennant race really comes through on these graphs, often more than is the case with just a written description. You can feel the flavor of each pennant race -- the closely fought battles with teams moving back and forth throughout, the amazing comebacks, the sudden collapses, the teams that stumbled along until mid-June or so and then suddenly got hot, the blowouts -- all the different flavors of pennant races are here in full detail.

Many a book has been written that covers many of these pennant races, but try as they might, they can't convey all the information, all the drama, that these graphs do. In many of these books, every so often, the narration will stop to show you the standings at a certain point -- the author's attempt to show you a glimpse of the story that these graphs tell more thoroughly.

For the best pennant races, the author has presented "close ups" -- magnified portions of the closing dates on the graph, the sections involving the key teams, with the scores of key games printed over the points where they occurred.

These graphs really bring a lot of dramas back to life, and are a wonderful supplement to the great tales you might have read elsewhere: the 1908 donnybrook, the 1914 Miracle Braves, the incredible 1920 season, the 1934 Gas House Gang comeback to surpass the Giants, the 1951 Miracle at Coogan's Bluff, anong others.

An unexpected bonus is that the author's capsule prose rundowns of each pennant race are usually quite well written.

Again, this isn't for everyone; this is for the sort of fan who gets something out of graphs. If you're not a numbers person, this probably isn't for you. It's for the type of obsessed baseball fan who has the time and inclination to sit around looking at these pictures and discovering new stories in them.

John Warner Davenport's 1981 book "Baseball's Pennant Races: A Graphic View" presents a series of graphs showing every American and National League pennant race from 1901-1980. When you think of the nature of pennant races, from wild season-long battles between two or more teams to runaways by one dominant team, chances are the way these graphs look is the way you'd see those races in your mind.

For all of the marquee races during this span -- the 1908 chases in both leagues; the 1920 American League battle between the Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees; the 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers-New York Giants tussle; the Philadelphia Phillies' 1964 collapse that created a heated four-team struggle; and others, Davenport gives us "close-up" graphs, that chronicle each day's scores over a period of one or more months. These closeups really give an insight into what was actually happening to these teams day by day, and in some cases, what effect teams outside the race were having on the final result.

In the regular, more broad-based graphs, we get a glimpse at interesting also-rans who were either on the rise -- like the Philadelphia Athletics of 1926-28, right before their domination of the American League over the following three seasons -- or on the way down. These are indicated by bolder lines in Davenport's graphs (as are the teams who won the race).

Perhaps the ideal combination would be this book's graphs and the pure numbers available in Neft and Cohen's "The Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball." Having both books separately is good enough, however.

While on one level it's unfortunate that this book hasn't been updated, either by Davenport or someone else, for some people an update would only be valuable through 1993, in any case. After '93, the Wild Card was introduced, devaluing the pennant race for many observers. Of course, the real purists might point to 1968 as the last year of true pennant races (though neither was particularly close), coming on the eve of divisional play in 1969.

"Baseball's Pennant Races: A Graphic View" is a fine addition to any baseball fan's collection, its lack of updating notwithstanding.

This full cast audio drama was originally released on BBC tapes. Michael Gough had reprised his role of Alfred from the recent movies. The story features the Joker, the Riddler, the Mad Hatter, and Knightwing.

It's a misnomer to call this an audiobook, because it's something far more interesting. KnightFall is a a full scale radio play with sound effects, character readings and brilliant editting that surpasses even the fantastic National Public Radio production of Star Wars.
This book is brilliant and after listening to it, I felt more like I'd seen a really great movie than listened to an audiobook.
It's simply fantastic!

Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900) is largely forgotten today, remembered for his coauthoring of The Gilded Age with Mark Twain, if at all. However, if you have heard the axiom that, "Politics makes strange bed-fellows," then you have heard of Mr. Warner, for it comes from his remarkable book, My Summer in a Garden.

In this book, Mr. Warner reminisces about childhood in rural New England. With a charming sense of nostalgia, the author tells of a young boy's hopes and dreams, his hard work, his hard play and his easy loafing, his delicious triumphs and his shameful mishaps. Overall, I found this to be a wonderfully charming look at being young during a bygone day and age, and of being young even today. I loved this book and highly recommend it to you.

This book is a wonderful read; simple yet complex at the same time. It is an indepth look at exactly what it's like growing up as a young man, full of first experiances. His views of society are insightful yet subtle as they are interjected periodically in the middle of a story. I could'nt help but feel a strong connection with the author. It's like his experiances back then are the same we face today. A delightful book, and a must read for any young man. Get a hold of this book any way you can!

I think that this was a very good book because it tells a lot about friendship and why its real.This book was very interesting and true.I would recommennd this to anyone.

THIS IS THE PERFECT GIFT FOR THAT SPECIAL FRIEND! SOMETHING THAT CAN BE HANDED DOWN AND ADDED TO AS YOU GO. LOTS OF GREAT QUESTIONS TO ANSWER AND COMPARE. MY BEST FRIEND AND I EACH BOUGHT ONE FOR THE OTHER, FILLED IT OUT THEN SWITCHED TO COMPARE ANSWERS. LOTS OF FUN!!!