City Leagues Books

Nate Evans has created a Grahame Base, Dr. Seuss- type book that is a fun read for young and old. Lessons about boasting, cynicism, greediness all rolled up into one fun book. Bongo and Lu have their work cut out for them as they help Prof. Yahoo find "animals" for the queen's zoo. The fact that the Professor has lost his glasses is of no concern to him! One last slip at the end of the day saves the day.

Does Nate Evans have any more books I should know about?

Both me and my children have enjoyed this book a ton! The wonderfully bright illustrations and the rhyming story are fun to read over and over again!

The collaborative effort of members and supporters of The Junior Service League of Panama City, Bay Fetes: A Tour Of Celebrations Along The Gulf Coast is a cookbook collection of celebratory and entertainment-themed meals originating from communities, eateries, and families located along the coastline of Panama City, Florida. Helpful hints, decorating ideas, color photographs, and vibrant dishes combine to please the mind and palate with such delicious entries as Crowder Peas With Spinach; Texas-Style Steak On Toast; Pineapple Tequila, and more. Bay Fetes offers delicious themes and creations that can be uniquely adapted to any festive dining occasion or celebration.

ini ada cafe baru, untuk orang yg suka ketawa. Kalo yg nggak suka ketawa jangan liat deh

Have never made anything from this book that was bad. It is written by the KC Junior League and I am not a member and know no members. Give as gift all the time along with the Southern Living Cookbook. This one has a little fancier food that make you look like Martha Stewart but with less effort.

Thank you for sending the cook book so quickly. I have used alot since getting it.

I was one of the first residents of St. Augustine to buy this cookbook and I having been using it regularly since day one. Junior League books are some of the best cookbooks around. You get a collection of people's favorite recipes. There are local flavor recipes in this book including Minorcan and datil pepper recipes. It covers any occasion you may need, including potluck, desserts and full dinners. My favorite recipes are the Lemon Bread and the French Mint Bars. One unique aspect is the chapter separators, which features drawings and history of sites in the nation's oldest city - St. Augustine, FL. Plus, proceeds from the sale of the book go to the wonderful projects of the Junior Service League of St. Augustine.

This cookbook, like every other Junior League cookbook, is just wonderful. The recipes are perfect not only for company, but for family, too. Many of the dishes are easily transportable, making them ideal for covered-dish dinners. Enjoy the recipes!

Few things are worse than seeing a childhood pastime fade away in later generations, especially if that pastime had a positive impact on you while growing up. For me, it's the increasing disinterest in libraries and reading, seen in countless funding cuts and the dominance of the Internet as a research tool for elementary and middle school students.

For author Mark O'Neal, it's the demise of a form of our national pastime - Little League baseball. Not content to sit by for this loss of competition and team spirit, O'Neal has tried to find out why it's losing ground in his book "What Happened to Little League Baseball in the Inner-City?" The end result is a personal and sociological study of the sport's urban decline, with reasoned suggestions as opposed to simple griping about how things used to be.

O'Neal draws on his first-hand experience growing up in the south side of Chicago, backing up his claims with various newspaper and research articles. The blame for the decline of inner-city baseball, according to his research, falls heavily on the decline of black family structure through welfare and drug use, privatization of the sport by wealthy sponsors and an overriding interest in basketball among black youths.

Though O'Neal's book is short on academic support (likely because this is one of the only studies made of the topic) each of his arguments are well-written and feasible. O'Neal is able to link the single-parent trend to the lack of dedicated coaches, college scholarship availability to baseball's long-term survival and the decline of factories to families available to participate.

While several of his arguments place the blame for the sport's decline on the inner city population, the tone is logical rather than accusatory and suggests that since they created the problems, they can fix them. His solutions are a bit too broad - get more affordable coaches, increase Major League involvement and promote black college baseball - but they are focused correctly and leave the door open for more specific reactions.

The troubles of the inner city are problems that one 50-page book won't solve, but it can serve as one of many tools to patch them up. O'Neal promises on the book's back cover that "What Happened to Little League Baseball" will be followed with a series of studies, and if they come close to his first analysis urban renewal may be closer than expected.

The protagonist makes no excuses for himself. I love that. I think he realised early on (after the book was written) that he wanted to be most of all "real." It wasn't to be about how he overcame, living in the ghetto etc but more importantly, the emotions and finding himself.
At certain points, I am like this kid is not a very pleasant person but even with that I could understand where he was coming from. This made him real.
He also along the way learnt he was in charge of his and only his destiny. He couldn't pull his siblings up. or his mom and I think for the longest time that must have irked him a lot.

He had to also learn to let go of this incessant rage murking in his soul. He had to face these demons so he could finally interact in the real world in a full capacity. This was not easy for him to do and he had so many missteps.

This is a tale not fairy tale perfect but gritty and still on-going, right now as we speak.

Cheers,

Great book. It details the last year in high school, and the first year in college of Cedric, a determined, intelligent inner city black kid who fights to make it out of the ghetto and to the promised land -- an ivy league college where he won't be taunted, beaten and despised for being smart.
I lost my first copy, and went out and bought a second. I loan it out to anyone I can. Cedric's story is very compelling and inspirational. I love to give it to people whose idea of a rough upbringing is that the family only owned one car . . .

This is an awesome book that I would have never read if it weren't required by one of my classes! Even though I paid for standard shipping, the book arrived quickly! I am very pleased with my purchase from this company.

A Hope in the Unseen was an engaging read and I absolutely fell in the love with the beginning. Cedric's life was put into a perspective that I could connect to and it was as if I could see everything through is eyes. It is a story that is uplifting and can be appreciated by people of any gender or color.

However, I did find a few things to frown upon. One part of the book that bothered me was the constant racial labeling. Understandably it is one of the main themes throughout the story and it is what makes this book so appealing to many. You get to see a struggling young black man make it out of a situation where many others would have gotten swallowed up. Yet, to me it became annoying because when I would finally reach a moment when I could connect to the characters as people the writer, and sometimes Cedric, would draw the whole focus back to who was what race and where they come from. It is great to be proud of who you are and what your background is but it doesn't have to define you.

During one of the later chapters we encounter Cedric and Zayd eating lunch. Zayd's friend, Josh, wanders over and immediately Cedric makes a remark about he should not be seen with two white guys. Whether he meant it jokingly or not it hurt Josh's feelings and created an awkward situation. Maybe it's because I just don't understand it but I think it was a little insensitive of Cedric. This was the only flaw that I had problems ignoring. It just seemed as if Cedric felt that he was entitled to be at Brown simply because he was a minority. Even if he wasn't in the minority, I sense a certain attitude that develops from attending an ivy league institution. It is almost as if by having your name on their roster that it makes you superior to everyone else.
This is definitely not the case and if people to hold on to such a mentality is disturbing.

Another problem I had with the novel was that after finishing such an uplifting story you start wondering what is next and if the system has ever changed. Sure, Cedric made it out and became successful but what about everyone else who was left behind? What about the students who were not as academically inclined or those who were not fortunate enough to have people supporting and pushing them like Cedric did? This book gives people an insight into a world that many are oblivious to. This could have been a great opportunity to open people's eyes about social injustice and to spark their interest in finding a way for more students to become like Cedric. I believe the author could have steered this book into becoming a link between the readers and social activism. Plenty of people have either had similar experiences or are now more aware of such situations and would be more than happy to support and contribute to any programs that are trying to turn this around. I believe more could have been done with A Hope in the Unseen in this regard.

All in all, this story was fairly interesting and inspiring. It was definitely helpful to read about the transitions from high school to college and to see how one person dealt with the common worries of university life. However, I do not see myself recommending this to many people and I believe that it is highly overrated. I do not believe it is "formula shattering" as one reviewer described it. In fact I think it follows the basic guidelines to any underdog story. I felt as if I could have been reading any number of stories, except with a different setting and character. A Hope in the Unseen is good for classroom reading assignments or book clubs because it has many discussion points and may lead readers to be more aware of the various issues it touches on. Other than that, I must truthfully say that I would not have read this given the chance to choose it for myself.

Ron Suskind's A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League is reminiscent of A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash. In "A Beautiful Mind," our hero, John Nash, faces and fights his own demons to finally succeed and excel in the Ivy League world. In "A Hope Unseen," our hero, Cedric Jennings, fights and faces demons of societal injustice to finally succeed and excel in the Ivy League world.

Suskind's riveting narrative of Jenning's ascension from inner city life to Ivy League life paints a portrait of the contrasts between cultures like few other books ever have or ever could. More importantly, it tells the story of moving beyond suffering to a place of hope through persistence and resilience based upon Christian faith, maternal wisdom (mother wit), and the inspiring tradition of African American music.

Reviwer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction , Soul Physicians, and Spiritual Friends.

First, the problems with the reprint of the best-seller that opened up a wealth of first-person accounts of those wild years with the Yankees:

* Sparky Lyle was not in favor of having the book reissued;
* There is not any new material and the typographical mistakes remain from the first edition;
* Unless you followed baseball in the 1970s or have an appreciation of baseball history, you may have trouble following the personalities and situations chronicled.

My rating is based on the controversy that exploded surrounding Lyle's candid accounts of the crazy 1978 season. Lyle does not shy away from the seemingly daily madness of The Boss, Reggie, Billy, and the closer wars of Goose and the co-author. It makes the stuff that swirled around the 2006 Yankees seem like agate type for the tabloids.

In the spring, Peter Golenbock was pushing the book pretty hard on local and national sports talk shows. I wish he would have done more than just put a nearly 30 year old sports book back in print.

But even the professional laziness of Golenbock cannot lesson the importance that book had in chronicling the Yankees and on Lyle's pitching career. The following season, Lyle was on the mound for the Texas Rangers.

Who knew that Sparky Lyle could be this funny? "The Bronx Zoo" is hilarious, but it's also a voyeuristic glimpse into the genuine, human world of baseball. Our sports figures are so lionized, it's easy to forget they are men with strange superstitions, nervous habits, and sometimes hysterical traits they try to hide when the eyes of the world are upon them.
Lyle writes with a surprisingly crisp and engaging style as he describes the behind the scenes chaos of the Yankees 1978 season. Here are the famed Yanks in all their human nature, sometimes ugly, sometimes odious, almost always entertaining.
Even casual baseball feels will get a sinful thrill out of viewing these superstars in the less than glorious world of the locker room. Baseball greats are humanized as Lyle tells the story of strange behavior with socks, devious practical jokes, and teammates struggling with language barriers.
As the Yankees go, so goes baseball, it sometimes seem. This is a book that will titillate fans of the game today even though the names have changed. And in a day when scandal and big money seem to be the themes of the sport, "The Bronx Zoo" is a refreshing reminder that the game is played by grown up boys and it is, after all, only a game.

Great inside info on a great season. I was surprised however at Sparky's constant complaints throughout the book. He keeps talking about all he wants to do is pitch, but spends the first half of the book complaining he is underpaid. Also talks about how he just wants the team to win, but at various points, refuses to go into games or leaves the team completely for a game. This is a good read and I would recommend it, but Sparky really moved down a notch or two in my eyes.

In this "diary" (what diary has a co-author?) of his season with the Yankees in 1978, Lyle reveals the tension and lunacy of that memorable year. Only problem is, Lyle's frequent whining about being put on the back burner for the younger, stronger, and better Goose Gossage gets tiresome after awhile. It almost made me want to put down the book. While his inside info is nice, he puts himself ahead of the team at times by leaving before a game ends. At times you felt bad for Sparky for being shunned, other times you want to slap him for being so selfish. At any rate, I'd recommend getting Roger Kahn's "October Men" as a reference for the 1978 Yankees before this one.

Though I grew up a total Yankee Hater (and was 15 yrs old when this season took place), the book ranks right up there with "Thin Ice - A Season in Hell with the New York Rangers" as a top quality read for a baseball focus. Probably the best thing about this book is how Golenbock and Lyle are able to put a real personal touch to some of the Yanks that played on that team that year. Nettles is a total cut-up, Munson is a real gamer, Jackson is a media hog, Billy Martin is part psychotic and part genius, and Ron Guidry is the quiet, yet dominating athlete that just goes out and does his job. Some of the more amusing antedotes are the ones involving Fritz Peterson in Lyle's earlier days, and Rawley Eastwick's escapades in the present day. Previous reviews talk about Lyle being "whiny", and I can agree with that perception. It's kind of hard to relate to someone complaining about his stature in life as a professional baseball player, when Joe Schmoe is out there trying to eeke out a living doing whatever. But I have to admit that if you had won a Cy Young the previous year before and all of a sudden was relegated to "mop-up" status, it would be a blow to one's pride. But the book does hit its mark on one thing . .the perception of George Steinbrenner is TOTALLY dead-on.