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Pendragon Book Seven: The Quillan Games (Pendragon) (Pendragon)

D. J. MacHale

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 45 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Quillan is a territory on the verge of destruction. The people have lost control of their own future and must struggle simply to survive. The only chance they have of finding a better life is by playing the Quillan Games. Hosted by a strange pair of game masters, Veego and LaBerge, the games are a mix of sport and combat. They use the people of Quillan as pawns for their amusement as they force them to enter competitions that range from physical battles, to impossible obstacle courses, to computer-driven tests of agility. To triumph in the games is to live the life of a king. To lose is to die.

This is the dangerous and deadly situation that Bobby Pendragon finds on Quillan. He quickly realizes that the only way to save this troubled territory is to beat Veego and LaBerge at their own games and dismantle their horrible fun house. But there is more at stake for Bobby. The prize for winning the Quillan Games may be discovering the truth of what it really means to be a Traveler.

Heart of Darkness (MP3 CD)

Joseph Conrad

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 385 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Very, Very Short and Unremarkable 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Like most people, I was familiar with Heart of Darkness, both as an acclaimed work of literature and as the inspiration for the remarkable movie Apocolypse Now. For some reason, I recently decided to make an attempt at reading it, despite my concern that it was written at a level beyond my capacity to understand.

Upon receipt of the volume from Amazon, I was initially under the impression that I had mistakenly ordered the Cliff's Notes version of the work. I had no idea that the book was essentially a short story, easily readable in 2-3 hours.

Even more surprising, was the ease with which I was able to follow and understand the story, though admittedly written in a slightly dense prose. Perhaps this was due to having seen Apocolypse Now and being familiar with the broad outline of the story and having read other works of history on the Belgian Congo.

In any event, it was a decent story, filled with some beautifully descriptive language and imagery. I must say, however, that I was not bowled over. Steamship Captain pilots a ragged boat up the Congo, accompanied by colonial agents and support staff (cannibals and other natives) in an attempt to relieve a long stranded station agent (Kurtz) who has "gone native" and become the insane source of worship for the local natives. If you've seen Apocolypse Now, you know the story, just replace the Mekong with the Congo.

I go back to my first paragraph in which I related a concern over my ability to understand what is considered a classic work of literature. I fully understood it, but was perhaps not qualified to fully appreciate it.

Editorial Review:

Horror awaits Marlow, a seaman assigned by an ivory company to retrieve a cargo boat and one of its employees, Mr. Kurtz who is stranded in the heart of the Africa, deep in the Belgian Congo. Marlow's journey up the brooding dark river soon becomes a struggle to maintain his own sanity as he witnesses the brutalization of the natives by white traders and discovers the enigmatic Mr. Kurtz. Kurtz, once a genius and the company's most successful representative, has become a savage. His compound is decorated by a row of human heads mounted on spears. The demonic mastermind, liberated from the conventions of European culture, has traded his soul to become ruler of his own horrific dominion.

Pendragon Book Six: The Rivers of Zadaa (Pendragon) (Pendragon)

D. J. MacHale

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 72 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Great Continuation 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

DJ, you keep me waiting too long. I want you pumping these books out faster.I can't get enough!!!

The Rivers of Zadaa 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The Rivers of Zadaa is the sixth installment to the Pendragon series. I loved this book it had adventure and it has mystery in it. This book was the best of the Pendragon it gave me everything that I wanted in a book. This book starts with a tragic death then ends very surprisingly. Saint Dane has gone to the territory of Zadda were he is influencing two warring tribes now Bobby must stop him with the help of the traveler Loor.
I would recommend this book to anyone who likes an adventure book that is also a fantasy. This book now had to be the best because you had no idea what was going to happen next. I absolutely loved this book I just never wanted to put it down. I definitely would put this book in my top 5 of favorite books.

Editorial Review:

The struggle of good versus evil continues as Bobby Pendragon follows Saint Dane to the territory of Zadaa. Saint Dane’s influence has fueled the fire of discontent between two warring tribes: the Rokador and the Batu. This is also the territory where the Traveler Loor lives as a member of the Batu. Together she and Bobby must work to thwart Saint Dane’s efforts to destroy Zadaa.

But as Bobby pursues Saint Dane, he begins to notice changes in himself. He is no longer a flip kid looking for excitement. He is a young man beginning to see this quest as more than a series of adventures. He is also learning that as a Traveler, he has powers no normal human should have.

In this latest installment of Bobby Pendragon’s battle to save humanity, discovery and danger go hand in hand as D. J. MacHale takes listeners on an emotional thrill ride they won’t soon forget.

The Secret Garden (MP3 CD)

Frances Hodgson Burnett

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 269 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

An Absolute Treasure! 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I can't believe I missed reading this growing up. My daughter and I just read this together. It was wonderful, and we both loved it. She likes to read books over and over, and I think she will appreciate reading this even more when she gets a little older. She loved the idea of secrets, twins, and the transformation of Mary. Having not had similar experiences to the characters in the books, such as losing close family members, she didn't quite understand the concept of a person having to learn to love and cry.

I loved the symbolism of the young girl blossoming with the garden, the relationship she develops with her cousin, the flower imagery, and the many little details like the birds nesting in the chairs in the run-down part of the manor. The mystery of this story is also wonderful and very suspenseful.

I think many adults who missed reading this growing up would enjoy this book. And I think all children, both boys and girls, should read this at least once. It is an absolute treasure.

Editorial Review:

When Mary Lennox's parents die from cholera in India, the spoiled orphan is transplanted to her uncle's 600-year-old gloomy and secretive estate in England. She is certain that she is destined for misery at Misselthwaite Manor. When Mary meets the old groundskeeper, he is the first to tell her what he thinks of her, "We was wove out of th' same cloth. We're neither of us good lookin' an' we're both of us as sour as we look. We've got the same nasty tempers, both of us, I'll warrant."

Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

Koren Zailickas, Koren Zailckas

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 200 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Not what I thought it would be... 1 out of 5 stars.
6 of 9 people found this review helpful.

This book isn't about alcohol abuse, really. It's about a girl from a priviledged family who grows up with lots of friends, becomes a college cheerleader/sorority sister, interns in New York, makes and maintains friendships along the way, and should be an all-around productive, happy citizen. But this girl, from an early age, wants to be a writer. She is especially awestruck by tortured female writers, like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. I think she assumed that to be a great writer/poet, suffering is essential. Her driving force isn't alchohol, it's the pretense of alcohol abuse because it makes her appear to be tortured. She thinks misery drives creativity. Many great writers/artists are and were indeed lost souls, many with mental health problems. But the author's problems are all self-inflicted. "Look at how much I drink...I'm so tortured! Feel sorry for me!"
The more I read this book, the more I got the feeling that she had created a character in her own mind and was living it out. Maybe she should have gone into dramatic performance instead of writing. I wonder if the feminists she so hopelessly wants to impress with her smug treatment of men, are indeed impressed by her? She is certainly impressed enough with herself, blaming her actions on everyone around her.
I got the impression that once she felt that she had suffered enough, she had a book to write. If you continually choose to place yourself in stupid situations, that just makes you stupid, not deep. If you continually remain emotionally and physically detached from "boys," and play mind games with them, guess what, they're not going to stick around. It doesn't make you smarter than them, just more pathetic. This story is like a whiny love letter the author wrote to herself--"See, you are so tortured and filled with angst, you have suffered so greatly, you are a writer!" Making stupid choices and employing the overuse of simile and metaphor doesn't create a great writer...just an annoying story that is written in an annoying manner.

Editorial Review:

From earliest experimentation to habitual excess to full-blown abuse, twenty-four-year-old Koren Zailckas leads us through her experience of a terrifying trend among young girls, exploring how binge drinking becomes routine, how it becomes "the usual."

Raising Dragons (Dragons in Our Midst, Book 1)

Bryan Davis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 86 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The kids at school call Billy "Dragon Breath" for good reason. His breath is bad! It isn't the normal, morning-mouth bad; it's the hot-as-fire, "don't-you-dare-get-near-me" bad. And hearing "Dragon Breath" ringing in his ears, he constantly tries to cool his oral volcano. Trouble erupts when his hot breath sets off the fire sprinklers in the boys' restroom at school, and his parents learn that they've kept their secret for too long.   Billy finally discovers the secret. His father was once a dragon! Now that's a piece of news a guy doesn't deal with every day! Billy feels betrayed, alien, lost. When his father reverts to his dragon form, and they're both chased by dragon slayers, he learns to trust his father again, battling the slayers with weapons of steel and spirit.  Bonnie, an orphan, tries to find a home, someone to love her, even though she feels like a freak because of a body feature that she calls a deformity, her dragon wings, inherited from her now dead dragon mother. She discovers that her love for others and her faith in a Creator hold the answers she is looking for.

Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both

Laura Sessions Stepp

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Unhooked 3 out of 5 stars.
4 of 8 people found this review helpful.

Taking as her focus group young women between the ages of 14 and 22, Laura Sessions Stepp explores the relatively recent culture of "hooking up" in Unhooked. Using a case study model, augmented by her own theories and those of "experts" and "Science," Stepp retells the sexual experiences of several mostly white, upper middle-class women at Northeast schools and extrapolates a whole lot of assumptions about how all American women learn about and pursue their own sexual desires.

While the landscape of gender, sex, and power is rapidly changing for women growing up in a post-feminist 21st century and certainly deserves scholarly attention, Stepp's analysis is never nuanced or encompassing enough to offer a compelling argument. Ultimately, she suggests a reversion to traditionally defined gender roles as the only thing capable of restoring the balance of power between the sexes. More worthwhile would have been suggestions for the possibility of what gender, and the role sex plays in that construction, can be.

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Editorial Review:

An eye-opening examination of the hookup culture, seen through the personal experiences of high-school- and college-age women who confront the hard lessons of dating, love, and sex.

The Robots of Dawn (Robot (Tantor))

Isaac Asimov

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 61 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Tedious and Flat... Wish I had those 400+ pages back... 1 out of 5 stars.
4 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I had to write a review somewhere after reading this book. After reading the Caves of Steel, I thought it would be an enjoyable read. However, it was not. This was the most tedious, long-winded, horribly written piece of snot that I have ever laid my eyes on. Asimov spends way too much time saying the exact same thing over and over as if the reader were completely illiterate. The plot is horribly stupid, and non of the interactions seem 'real' at all. save your time and reread the Foundation series... This book sucked.

Disappointing conclusion to the trilogy 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Robots of Dawn is the third entry in the Robot series and was written quite a few years after the second volume saw print. The story follows Elijah Bailey once again as he tries to solve a murder but this time it is not a human who has been killed but a robot. The leading suspect is a character from the first novel, the leading roboticist on the planet Aurora. Bailey travels off world and goes through his usual routine of interviewing the interested parties and accusing most of them of committing the crime in the process. His old robot partner, R Daneel Olivaw, aids Bailey in his investigation.

Perhaps due to the long delay in writing Robots of Dawn, there are some rather glaring errors in story continuity from the prior novel, The Naked Sun. Early in the story, Olivaw tells Bailey that no robot could impersonate a human on the Spacer worlds and get away with it for even a moment. They have a lengthy conversation on this point and the point is considered proven by the time they are done. Yet, in The Naked Sun, Olivaw himself impersonated a human on the Spacer world of Solaris and no one even suspected him. Bailey witnessed this, yet both characters seem to have forgotten the entire affair.

Robots of Dawn is by far the longest of the Robot novel in the series and does not benefit from the extra pages. Bailey's interviews often drag out as he puts forward exceedingly unlikely theories and forces the suspects to deny and disprove them. This has the unfortunate side effect of making Bailey seem almost stupid as he constantly asserts false solutions to the case. When he finally does come up with a solution, it is very unsatisfying. It actually feels like Asimov had written himself into a corner and didn't know how to get out so he threw together a half-baked solution and called it a day. I expected better from such an accomplished writer.

I enjoyed the earlier novels in this series considerably but was disappointed with Robots of Dawn. Asimov waited many years to write it because he didn't feel that he had a strong concept to move forward with. Having read this, I would have to say that he still didn't have a fully developed foundation for this book even when he did finally write it. He definitely needed to put more thought into the mystery, the characters, and how to keep the story interesting. This book was not lousy but it didn't live up to the earlier entries either. I would recommend it for readers who loved the earlier Robot novels and simply must read one more entry. Just don't expect it to be as strong as what you've already seen.

Editorial Review:

A puzzling case of roboticide sends New York Detective Elijah Baley on an intense search for a murderer. But can anything prepare a simple Earthman for the psychological complexities of a world where a beautiful woman can easily have fallen in love with an all-too-human robot?

The Candlestone (Dragons in Our Midst, Book 2)

Bryan Davis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 36 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Candlestone is the second volume in the contemporary fantasy series Dragons in Our Midst by Bryan Davis. This series inspires young people to pursue faith, courage, and love, and to dig deep within to find their God-given strengths, no matter how difficult the circumstances. The first book, Raising Dragons, plunged two teenagers, Billy Bannister and Bonnie Silver, into mind-boggling mysteries, life or death pursuits, and deadly sword-to-sword battles. In The Candlestone, a mysterious book leads Billy into mortal combat with a powerful dragon slayer. Separated from his friends and finding his dragon traits useless against this enemy, he has to rely on new weapons, a sword and shield he cannot even see. A scientist lures Bonnie to his laboratory with amazing news--her mother is still alive! And he should know; he's her long-lost father. He has learned the secret of long life--dragon blood, and he wants Bonnie to help him with his experiments. But first he must send her to retrieve her mother from the Candlestone, a strange paralyzing gem that absorbs light and with it the strength of dragons and their offspring. The Candlestone is also a prison that captures people who have been transformed into light energy by Excalibur, King Author's great sword. When Bonnie enters the stone, she learns that many disembodied souls have fallen prey to the gem's powers, but no one has ever escaped. Her only hope is for Billy to overcome the dragon slayer and find a way into the candlestone, and, more importantly, a way out. Billy and Bonnie face their greatest fears, and they learn to use their strengths, both innate and newly found. They battle powerful enemies, ancient fiends from times long past, and the horrors of the blackest of prisons, captivity with the walls of unearthly darkness, the crystalline tomb of The Candlestone.

The Caves of Steel (Robot (Tantor))

Isaac Asimov

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 81 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Laws of Robotics ... this is where it all started! 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

A thousand years ago, mankind began the process of leaving mother Earth and colonizing the galaxy. Fifty planets have been now been colonized by thinly spread populations of hardy pioneering spirits - rough and ready types willing to work in hostile environments with robots as help-mates and partners - and it is obvious that mankind has evolved down two diverging sociological paths. The Earthmen - those who chose to stay at home in tightly cramped almost global city hives under the pressure of explosive population growth, an incredibly strict socialist regime and diminishing available resources - have grown timid of the slightest exposure to outside light, weather and even "un-conditioned" air. Robots, seen as competing with humans for jobs, the only meager source of status in this highly regulated environment, are despised and feared. While diplomacy and trade are maintained between Earthmen and Spacers, relations are strained and mutual distrust bordering on hatred has become the norm.

When a Spacer is murdered by a visiting Earthman, the governments on both sides realize that the crime must be solved quickly and quietly to prevent a complete collapse of diplomatic relations and an explosion of tension into riots, chaos, open animosity, perhaps even a war! The Commissioner of the New York City police force orders Elijah Baley, an Earthman detective who doesn't like robots any more than the next guy, to check his emotions at the door and partner up with a Spacer robot, R Daneel Olivaw, to solve the crime.

"Caves of Steel", a classic novel from the pen of Isaac Asimov - one of the acknowledged giants of science fiction writing - can be enjoyed on so many different levels. On the surface, it's an exciting, tightly plotted and nicely conceived police procedural and standard mystery set in a fascinating futuristic setting with a completely unexpected ending twist. On a deeper level, it's a foreboding, grim, bleak look at the imagined social future of mankind unless population growth is brought under control and the problems of diminishing availability of food and energy resources are addressed and solved. Finally, "Caves of Steel" is one of the first of an intricate series of novels that explores Asimov's now famous "Three Laws of Robotics", the behaviour of robots with positronic brains indelibly programmed with these three laws and the potential interactions of these robots with predictably unpredictable humans.

A combination of the best of hard and soft science fiction from one of the very best science fiction writers who sadly is no longer with us! Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss

Editorial Review:

A millennium into the future, two advancements have altered the course of human history: the colonization of the galaxy and the creation of the positronic brain. Isaac Asimov's Robot novels chronicle the unlikely partnership between a New York City detective and a humanoid robot who must learn to work together.