Literature & Fiction Books - Page 9

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Harper Fiction)

Gregory Maguire

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1522 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Not Worth the Hype 1 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I picked up Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West after hearing great praise from family and friends. What I found was a terrible disappointment.

Looking at the book and title you would think it would give you an insight into this previously evil cast character and perhaps shed new light. It does none of the above. The book is a convulted train ride with twists and turns, not to mention missing pieces of track! You'll be reading along at one point in Elephaba's life and suddenly the next chapter jumps five years later, that would not be a problem in most biographies except that we are expected to know everything that happened in that interim!

All the book amounted to was a view on politics and extreme crudity simply because it could. From the get-go inappropriate sexual themes are thrown in but instead of being used as necessary devices to enhance the story they are used simply because they can be.

I'm told the sequel is far better but after suffering through this book I have no desire at all to read any more of this series.

Editorial Review:

When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum's classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the true nature of evil?

Gregory Maguire creates a fantasy world so rich and vivid that we will never look at Oz the same way again. Wicked is about a land where animals talk and strive to be treated like first-class citizens, Munchkinlanders seek the comfort of middle-class stability and the Tin Man becomes a victim of domestic violence. And then there is the little green-skinned girl named Elphaba, who will grow up to be the infamous Wicked Witch of the West, a smart, prickly and misunderstood creature who challenges all our preconceived notions about the nature of good and evil.

Dashing Through the Snow

Mary Higgins Clark, Carol Higgins Clark

Amazon Price: $15.64 List Price: $23.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Simon & Schuster Amazon Marketplace: 37 new & used starting at $10.00

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From beloved mother-daughter duo Mary Higgins Clark, America's Queen of Suspense, and Carol Higgins Clark, author of the hugely popular Regan Reilly mystery series, comes Dashing Through the Snow, a holiday treat you won't want to miss.

In the picturesque village of Branscombe, New Hampshire, the townsfolk are all pitching in to prepare for the first (and many hope annual) Festival of Joy. The night before the festival begins, a group of employees at the local market learn that they have won $160 million in the lottery. One of their co-workers, Duncan, decided at the last minute, on the advice of a pair of crooks masquerading as financial advisers, not to play. Then he goes missing. A second winning lottery ticket was purchased in the next town, but the winner hasn't come forward. Could Duncan have secretly bought it?

The Clarks' endearing heroes -- Alvirah Meehan, the amateur sleuth, and private investigator Regan Reilly -- have arrived in Branscombe for the festival. They are just the people to find out what is amiss. As they dig beneath the surface, they find that life in Branscombe is not as tranquil as it appears. So much for an old-fashioned weekend in the country. This fast-paced holiday caper will keep you dashing through the pages!

Harold and the Purple Crayon

Crockett Johnson

By: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Amazon Marketplace: 16 new & used starting at $33.20

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 151 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Someone dropped the ball! 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I love this story so I bought it for my son. When we got it there were at least 10 blank pages in the book fragmenting the story so badly that it didnt make any sence. My beef is not with the story its with Amazon for selling it to me in that condition and with the publisher for their quality control issues. I only paid 6.99 for it so I didnt mess with returning it. Im going to try it again and see if we can get the whole story this time. If the book is not right this time I will return it and not purchase books from Amazon again. Hopefully we will get a full story and we can enjoy it like my parents and I did when I was a kid.

Editorial Review:

One evening Harold decided to go for a walk in the moonlight. But there wasn't any moon, and Harold needed a moon for a walk in the moonlight. Fortunately, he had brought his purple crayon. So he drew a moon. He also needed something to walk on. So he drew a path...

And thus begins one of the most imaginative and enchanting adventures in all of children's books. The creative concept behind this beloved story has intrigued children and kept them absorbed for generations, as page by page unfolds the dramatic and clever adventures of Harold and his purple crayon.

Great Crash 1929, the (Penguin business)

John Kenneth Galbraith

List Price: $15.60 By: Penguin Books Amazon Marketplace: 13 new & used starting at $10.11

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 48 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Spooky 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I started reading this book the day before the most recent crash started. Every night I picked it up, and it mirrored the current events so closely, that it was more than a little scary. Why won't we learn from the mistakes of the past?

Relevant Again - and Readable as Always 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Galbraith wrote The Great Crash in 1954 and he notes in his introduction that every time it was about to go out-of-print a new speculative mania would come along and a new printing would issue. One expects that the 2008 version must be in the works.

Galbraith writes for the general audience, which means he not only leaves out most of the arcane details, but he also writes in an engaging style. Galbraith's view is that the great speculative boom that preceded the Great Crash was fueled by not by easy credit, but rather by a mindset that ignored risk and assumed that the market would go ever upwards - in short, a mania. The leverage that helped raise the market to unknown heights, particularly buying on the margin, also built in the means for the sudden collapse. Once the market nosed over, margin calls went out, some were met, many were not, and the market tumbled faster and farther. Galbraith demonstrates that many leaders held onto a `boundless optimism' long after any rational support for such a view had disappeared.

Galbraith's main focus is on the market speculation and its collapse, but he also takes the view that the stock market collapse did in fact contribute greatly to the cause of the Great Depression. Galbraith asserts that the economy was not in strong shape before the stock market collapse. He likens the Great Crash to `typhoon which blew out of lower Manhattan'. The crash in the market struck the rich especially hard and because wealth was so concentrated the subsequent shrinkage in spending and investment by the rich caused serious damage to the economy. While we have significant safeguards in place today that did not exist in the 1930's, we also once again have a concentration of income and wealth eerily comparable to the pre-depression era.

Highest recommendation. Well-written, well-argued, and timely (once again). Readers may also appreciate Galbraith's equally readable A Short History of Financial Euphoria (Whittle)

Editorial Review:

This work examines the 'gold-rush fantasy' in American psychology and describes its dire consequences. The Florida land boom, the operations of Insull, Kreuger and Hatry, and the Shandoah Corporation all come together in Galbraith's study of concerted human greed and folly.

The Alchemist

Paulo Coelho

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1290 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

My Heart Is Afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky."Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams."

Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. The Alchemist is such a book. With over a million and a half copies sold around the world, The Alchemist has already established itself as a modern classic, universally admired. Paulo Coelho's charming fable, now available in English for the first time, will enchant and inspire an even wider audience of readers for generations to come.

The Alchemist is the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found. From his home in Spain he journeys to the markets of Tangiers and across the Egyptian desert to a fateful encounter with the alchemist.

The story of the treasures Santiago finds along the way teaches us, as only a few stories have done, about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, above all, following our dreams.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Jeff Kinney

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 177 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Boys don’t keep diaries—or do they?

The launch of an exciting and innovatively illustrated new series narrated by an unforgettable kid every family can relate to

It’s a new school year, and Greg Heffley finds himself thrust into middle school, where undersized weaklings share the hallways with kids who are taller, meaner, and already shaving. The hazards of growing up before you’re ready are uniquely revealed through words and drawings as Greg records them in his diary.

In book one of this debut series, Greg is happy to have Rowley, his sidekick, along for the ride. But when Rowley’s star starts to rise, Greg tries to use his best friend’s newfound popularity to his own advantage, kicking off a chain of events that will test their friendship in hilarious fashion.

Author/illustrator Jeff Kinney recalls the growing pains of school life and introduces a new kind of hero who epitomizes the challenges of being a kid. As Greg says in his diary, “Just don’t expect me to be all ‘Dear Diary’ this and ‘Dear Diary’ that.” Luckily for us, what Greg Heffley says he won’t do and what he actually does are two very different things.

Since its launch in May 2004 on Funbrain.com, the Web version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid has been viewed by 20 million unique online readers. This year, it is averaging 70,000 readers a day.

The Bodies Left Behind

Jeffery Deaver

Amazon Price: $26.39 List Price: $39.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Simon & Schuster Audio Amazon Marketplace: 30 new & used starting at $22.30

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The New York Times bestselling master of suspense is back!

When a night-time call to 911 from a secluded Wisconsin vacation house is cut short, off-duty deputy Brynn McKenzie leaves her husband and son at the dinner table and drives up to Lake Mondac to investigate. Was it a misdial or an aborted crime report?

Brynn stumbles onto a scene of true horror and narrowly escapes from two professional criminals. She and a terrified visitor to the weekend house, Michelle, flee into the woods in a race for their lives. As different as night and day, and stripped of modern-day resources, Brynn, a tough deputy with a difficult past, and Michelle, a pampered city girl, must overcome their natural reluctance to trust each other and learn to use their wits and courage to survive the relentless pursuit. The deputy's disappearance spurs both her troubled son and her new husband to action, while the incident sets in motion Brynn's loyal fellow deputies and elements from Milwaukee's underside. These various forces race along inexorably toward the novel's gritty and stunning conclusion.

The Bodies Left Behind is an epic cat-and-mouse chase, told nearly in real-time, and is filled with Deaver's patented twists and turns, where nothing is what it seems, and death lingers just around the next curve on a deserted path deep in the midnight forest.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle CD: A Year of Food Life

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 321 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Don't Believe the Hype 1 out of 5 stars.
3 of 9 people found this review helpful.

While the author makes many valid points about the benefits of consuming locally grown food, she is guilty of one (literally) fatal error: eating animals for food is neither necessary nor healthy for humans, the environment, or, of course, the animals themselves.

Moving from a vegetarian diet to a flesh-based diet is not progress, either physically or spiritually, and teaching children that slaughterhouses are bad, yet killing and eating animals whom they "know" is perfectly acceptable, is unconscionable.

Not only is our flesh-based diet destroying the planet, making excuses for and/or shielding ourselves from the true reality of unnecessary bloodshed desensitizes us and makes us less compassionate towards all types of suffering, human and otherwise. Anyone who can't admit that just doesn't want to face it.

Editorial Review:

Hang on for the ride: with characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table.

Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life, and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea

Chelsea Handler

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 264 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

I HEART CHELSEA! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

this is honestly the funniest book i have ever read. i was at home by myself laughing histerically! i have even bought a couple for gifts. i absolutely LOVED it!

Kathy Griffin on ludes 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I almost didn't buy this book because The New York Times review mentioned Kathy Griffin. "The everywoman spirit of Kathy Griffin" is what's quoted on Amazon but I remember the wording slightly differently. Rest assured Chelsea Handler is nothing like Kathy Griffin. Or Sarah Silverman. Or Tina Fey. It's like the NYT tried to just drop in every comedy it girl it could think of. Get a thesaurus. Of people.

Chelsea is a comedian and her essays don't scuttle even as close to the thought-provoking tree as, say, David Sedaris. I have to admit my joy may have been related to so many recent skull-liquifying experiences with "humor" books. This one is funny. She has a schtick and you have to appreciate the vapid whore persona or you just won't get anything from it. But then why would you buy a book called Are You There, Vodka anyway?

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Fourth Edition

American Psychological Association

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 259 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Necessary Evil 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The program that I am in requires that I write all of my papers in this style, so I was forced to purchase the book. I do highly recommend the spiral format, as it is awfully easy to use.

Publichcation Manual of the American Psychological association 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I got this book just in time because I live in Bangkok. The seller said it took 21 days to delivery the book. I got exactly what I order I mean it brand new condition.

Editorial Review:

This fourth edition of the "Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association" offers updated information in four key areas: reporting statistics; writing without bias; preparing manuscripts with a word processor for electronic production; publishing research in accordance with ethical principles of scientific publishing. Two goals shape the changes throughout the fourth edition: to encourage authors (a) to write about their research with specificity and (b) to write about their participants with sensitivity and accuracy. Regular users should find the chapters on editorial style and manuscript preparation a little easier to use than previous editions. Manuscript format requirements are more flexible and enable authors to take advantage of default settings on most word processors.