This book is fantastic. If you like bouldering and John Sherman's humorous tales you will enjoy this book.

The SOFT COVER BINDING FALLS APART after one or two openings. Of three people I know with the soft cover, all three have fallen apart. BUY THE HARD COVER VERSION!

It reads as a guidebook, a history, and as literature. Sherman writes with surprising grace and introspection about the sport. Nice profiles of the locals at different areas, too. And I was relieved to see no reference to the finest, and apparently still secret, problem at Carderock, MD.

Stone Crusade is THE book of bouldering and the history of the sport in the USA. John Sherman's witty and irreverent writing style and his artistic photographic skill capture the true feeling of the sport across the entire country. A guide book, history lesson, and entertainment all rolled into one. You will want to hit the road on your own Stone Crusade.

Of the half-dozen books I bought to help me with a stone project (old fallen-down stone walls recycled into a new retaining wall) this is the one I look at over and over. The first part of the book, under the heading Inspiring Uses for Stone, is exactly that: a group of beautiful pictures that can set your imagination running. The second part, Working with Stone in the Garden, brings you back to earth with the how-to of stonework. (The second half also includes a nice selection of full-color photos to keep your inspiration going.)

Like John Vivian's Building Stone Walls and Kevin Gardner's The Granite Kiss, Hayward's Stone in the Garden has clear and concise instructions. And, like David Reed's Stonescaping, he includes extras like stone under foot, pools and fountains, and stone sculpture. In addition, he includes some interesting (and helpful) extras such as plant selection for stone-walls or near stone pools and descriptions with photographs of the many kinds of stone availble in the US. (This is something that did not appear in any of the other stone how-to books I bought.)

As with Reed's Stonescaping, Stone in the Garden is just too pretty to take to the garden when you're working on your project. No matter how careful you are, when you're in the midst of digging or lifting stone, it's too easy to smear mud on your instructions. The easy solution is to photocopy the necessary pages to take to the project site for reference.

Twice now, I have gone to the bookstore to find a book on a specific topic. Both times I found a book by Hayward to be the book I had been looking for. This time I was looking for using Stone features in my landscaping. Since I had such a great use for his book on paths I picked up his book right away. I could not put it down and was up all night browsing the book from cover to cover. The photos are very useful and inspiring. His descriptions of how-tos, dos and don'ts were especially helpful. I have to give this author a lot of credit for helping us to improve our landscaping to look professional. I had a contractor ask me if I would lay stone for his wife's pond a few days ago - thank you Mr. Hayward!

My parents used stone in a variety of ways in their gardens. My father laid out walkways and patios using blue flagstone and built an outdoor grill (chimney and all) of field stones he collected on his travels through the mountains where we lived. He lined the ravine behind our house where the grill was situated with stones, including a series of stone steps down into the ravine. The banks of the ravine became a rock garden loaded with all sorts of bulbs, ground covers, ferns and low shubs, and small trees overhung with larger trees above.

I had not thought about my father's handiwork in many years, not until I bought STONE IN THE GARDEN by Gordon Hayward. Hayward's book is absolutely lovely, and even if you never build a thing using stone you will enjoy all the wonderful photographs he has included in his book showing stonework he found in the gardens of folks like Frederick McGourty, Tasha Tudor, and a host of other garden writers and enthusiasts. He has captured shots of gardens from Japan to England, France to Canada, and New England to the American Southwest.

Stones frequently form the basis of the "bones" of the garden -- structures that every good gardener incorporates. While fences and arbors and other structures can be made of wood, stone also fills a niche and is frequently a more appealing, practical, and long-lasting material. Hayward's book includes numerous ideas for using stone. Chapters cover garden walls and retaining walls, walkways, ponds, streams, outdoor areas with stone benches designed for contemplation, rock gardens, rock sculpture, and many other features.

A third of Hayward's book covers a series of step-by-step procedures for constructing walkways, walls, ponds and pools, and other useful structures. One of my favorite constucts is the stile which consists of a stone composition built into a wall that allows one to walk over the wall and thus eliminate the need for a gate. Most gardeners are sure to pick up a few good ideas they will want to try.

These are thoughtful, searching poems. They don't strain for effects and so are all the more moving when, again and again, they touch on the emotion being contemplated by their subjects. The emotion is often love, and Judith Parker has much to tell us about how painful and how necessary this is to us through the words of her characters.

Equally impressive is her command of her medium. Subtle rhythms preserve the sense of a human voice speaking each poem, yet ensure that each word packs its full weight of meaning on the page. Judith Parker's masterly management of her verse, and her discriminating deployment of language, ensure that these poems are ones which anyone can savour.

"Stone Pillars" by Judith K. Parker is a book of poetry about the first seasons of the television show, "Xena: Warrior Princess." The poems here focus, as the show did in its early years, on the multi-layered, complex relationship between the lead characters. But you don't need to have ever seen those shows to understand this book. Parker's verse is always accessible - inhabited by three-dimensional people whose emotional lives we not only understand but care about. Her imagery is strong and her wit is subtle.

Writing poetry about cultural work in another medium places Parker's book in the tradition of "Pictures from Brueghel," William Carlos Williams' Pulitzer Prize-winning book from the early sixties.

Judith has given me a book of some of my favourite poetry. She weaves her magic with her words and I would love to read more from Judith.

This book covers a wide range of archaeological finds from all over the world. Cave paintings, skeletons, tombs, the list goes on. There are different (and more specialized) types of archaeology mentioned as well as the discoveries they brought about. Another thing I liked was that the author presents different interpretations and points of view about the information recovered from digs. In the back of the book there's a chronological table of archaeology discoveries that helped me to better organize important dates in my mind.

Well, I wasn't too sure when I started but by the time I finished the first chapter, "Stones, Bones and Ancient Cities" by Lawrence H. Robbins had me hooked so much I didn't get much sleep for the next few days. The writing style is crisp, clean and easy to understand. Robbins presents the cold-hard facts not just in layman's terms but in INTERESTING terms. I really loved the map of important sites discussed in the book which helped to put things into real perspective.

Chapter 2 about Cave Art is really eye-opening and informative about this controversial and speculative area of anthropology. Robbins also presents several Time-Lines at the back of the book that are also very informative. I am also a HUGE fan of the Chapter-by-Chapter form of Notes to be terrific for those of us that like to add more and more reading materials to our shelves. The photographs are fine though MORE is always better in these types of books.

REALLY AN ENJOYABLE READ!!

This book is excellent reading material!! Dr. Robbins is my professor for a Great Discoveries in Archaeology class at MSU and we use this book for the class. I certainly don't feel as if I'm doing homework while reading it. The book is very informative, yet easy reading material. Dr. Robbins is a very talented professor and writer with a great deal of precise and sometimes humorous information to offer anyone interested in reading this book!!

The Stories Julian tells is an exellent story. It is about a young boy named Julian who goes on adventures. One time he and his brother Huey wanted to eat a great pudding that his Dad had made but his Dad said not to touch it and they got in big trouble when they did.If you want to know what happens next just read the book.

After reading the first story about the father and the lemon pudding, i just had to try some lemon pudding and now it is my favorite. All the stories are great and very interesting. I liked how Julian had such a creative imagination. I'm 11 years old and I still love to read it.

One of my all-time favorite read-aloud books, with lively, expressive illustrations. This book and its sequel - More Stories Julian Tells - describes the trials and tribulations of our hero, the ever-inventive Julian. The author, Ann Cameron, lovingly shows how Julian's curiosity and voracious desire to learn get him in and out of all kinds of scrapes. For example, the unforgettable story of how Julian convinces his little brother, Huey, to taste a pudding made for their mother. Taste they do, that fabled pudding, which according to both mom and dad, tastes "like a whole raft of lemons, like a night on the sea." And they keep on tasting 'til the pudding is gone. The punishment leveled by their father - a "beating" and a "whipping" of a new pudding - is both tender and just. Cameron's creative use of language and the way she repeats key phrases, make each story memorable and a pleasure to read aloud. You won't be surprised when you hear your audience chiming in with you!

Today I had the pleasure to hear Mark Cox, this year's Frost poet in residence at the Frost Place in Franconia, NH. He read from this lovely book of poems with such clarity, such honesty, that I was compelled to buy the book on the spot. He writes of the things that we all face, that we can all connect with, but still, with careful word choice and all the other fine things involved with the crafting of good poetry, he evokes our own experience as well. The poetry is accessible, careful, emotion-laden but not "sentimental". Build your own collection, using this one as a valued addition.

Cox is a poet whose work I admire and enjoy (and I'm a hard woman to please -- as I am both a poet and a literary critic). This collection is like a complicated American all -you can eat breakfast with surprises, freebies you never thought you'd get and a bottomless cup of thought provoking images to wash it down with.

See him "read" (aka, perform) these if you can, but in the meantime, buy the book and support the work!

Reviewed by Rustin Larson in The Iowa Source

An often heard praise for a poet these days is that he "takes the straw of the ordinary and spins it into gold." However, it may be said Mark Cox takes it one step further, that he gives his gold an unusual new texture and shine. Ever since the appearance of his chapbook Barbells of the Gods in 1988, Cox has been taking perfectly good poetic lines and spinning them into something even better. One line from that chapbook could well have read "Let's... throw our cigarettes from this car like ecstatic hearts, / and let the sparks lead us home." That would have been a good line for most of us. But Cox does a brilliant thing. He reverses the tenor and the vehicle of the simile so it reads "Let's throw our hearts from this car like ecstatic cigarettes..." and for my money the lyric and imagistic movement of the line is enhanced by this strategy. Something emotionally unexpected and vivid comes from it. This is just the sort of gold weaving Cox has practiced and improved over the past decade. His new book, Thirty-Seven Years from the Stone, exhibits a very high level of accomplishment.

Cox's great sense of the absurdity and communicative strength of similes, and his artistry with them, continues beautifully in poems like Like a Simile:

"Fell into bed like a tree/ Slept like boiling water/ Got from bed like a camel/ And showered like a tin roof./ Went downstairs like a slinky/ Drove to work like a water skier/ Entered the trailer like a bad smell/ Where I changed clothes like a burn victim/ Drank my coffee like a mosquito/ And waited like a bus stop./ A whistle blew./ Then I painted like I was in a knife fight for eight hours/ Drank like a burning building/ Drove home like a bank shot/ Unlocked the door like a jeweler/ And entered the house like an argument next door./ The dog smiled like a chain saw./ The wife pretended to be asleep/ I pretended to eat./ She lay on the bed like a matress/ I sat at the table like a chair./ Until I inched along the stair rail like a sprinkler/ Entered like smoke from a fire in the next room/ And apologized like a toaster./ The covers did not open like I was an envelope/ And she was a 24-hour teller/ So I undressed like an apprentice matador/ Discovering bullsh*t on his shoes."

Working with the concept on a larger scale, with extended metaphor and simile, Cox excels. Even a title might reflect a brilliant reversal of the expected, such as The Tunnel at the End of the Light, and then build upon it: "The summer my body began to fit,/ living seemed fluid/ as putting my arm through a sleeve--/ when I threw crusts of bread in the air,/ they became birds,/ when I held her,/ I held myself-" .

There is a great emotional investment in each poem of Thirty-Seven Years from the Stone, but Cox does not stray toward the sentimental and false. Do not mistake heart and courage for sentimentality. Whether reflecting on fatherhood in poems like Make the Cobra Talk, or on his future death in Grain, the uniquely rendered similes transmit a genuineness within the oddity: "...like a snapping turtle in a two-dollar butterfly net,/ I will refuse the new world" Cox says of the prospect of leaving the ones he loves behind when he dies. It's a tenacious spirit that inhabits these poems, that grabs on and holds us even as it turns the world upside-down. Thirty-Seven Years from the Stone is an accomplished, admirable collection of poems.

This is the first Jean Stine book that I have read and I'm ready to order more. Great characters.

A story that kept you wondering. A beautiful story about two young girls who shared the same experience and a dark secret. The bond between them was the kind of bond all friends should have. I hope Ms. Stone continues her story. Ms. Stone's first book "Sins of Innocence" (which I have not read yet) is the beginning of Jess and Ginny. I am searching high and low to find "Sins" and I know it will be just as good as this one. Share this one with a friend.

What a pleasant surprise to see a sequel to Ms. Stone's excellent book, SINS OF INNOCENCE, a story of 4 unwed girls who gave up their babies for adoption. This book reminds me of why Ms. Stone is my favorite romance author. She knows how to write about women's feelings and the friendships between women with Jessica and Ginny as the lead characters (P.J. passed away in the previous book and Susan is out of the picture). Again, she manages to touch my heart with all the emotion and compassion that she portrays in this book. I love the way she writes dialogue. Her description of Martha's Vineyard sounds quaint and inviting, like someplace I would like to visit soon.

I found myself spending every waking moment reading this book and waiting to see what would happen next, but didn't want the book to end. Great work, Ms. Stone! I am anxiously awaiting your next wonderful novel.

I found Sgt. Stone's book a masterpiece. It proves to me that the US Government is aware of UFOs, Actively engaged in learning more about UFOs, and is actively hiding these truths from us the people and the US Congress. Having read the book, and having heard Sgt. Stone on many radio programs, I was so impressed that I went to his home and interviewed him. His personal story is even more intriguing. His research is so great because he was there. He was part of the secret for many years. He knew where to look for proof of the TRUTH. UFOs Are Real.

I found Sgt. Stone's book a masterpiece. It proves to me that the US Government is aware of UFOs, Actively engaged in learning more about UFOs, and is actively hiding these truths from us the people and the US Congress. Having read the book, and having heard Sgt. Stone on many radio programs, I was so impressed that I went to his home and interviewed him. His personal story is even more intriguing. His research is so great because he was there. He was part of the secret for many years. He knew where to look for proof of the TRUTH. UFOs Are Real.

Good for background information. If you want a good fiction book about UFOs that might as well be real check out AREA 51 by Robert Doherty.

What a delight this book is! As a musician, and as a children's music teacher, I fell in love with the lovely, rhythmic feel! Children will find the illustrations captivating, and the simple musical references in the book are a great teaching tool for young children's music class.

A beauftiful, lyrical book for 2-10 year olds-lovely illustrations and lyrical narrative. creative and captivating. My all time favorite kids book-my three year old boy loves it too!

I read this book to a first grade class. They enjoyed the bright colored pictures and story line. I highly recommend this book for K-3.

The book captured my interest from the start and held it to the end. A phone message from an old friend in Bangkok draws the main character, Harry, from his Asian antiques business in the States into a fantastic adventure with tales of extraordinary and incredible discoveries deep in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Written with humor and just enough detail to make this story fun and believable, the book leads you from the seamy side of Bangkok familiar to expatriots into some very remote and dangerous areas, with forests so thick and deep the only means of movement are on the backs of elephants and by long-tailed boats on a river. An apparently startling discovery has been made and Harry and his friend develop a plot to make themselves rich through an international and illicit network of greed. The plot has enough surprises to make the book difficult to put down. Very enjoyable reading.

Between the covers of these books, the reader will find a little bit of everything that makes up the total package of experiencing Southeast Asia: negotiating the complexities of social relations, colliding with street-level life, peering down the small side streets shrouded in ancient patinas, and stumbling into the riot of everyday adventures, some soft and quiet, others loud and threatening, but all of them worth the price of a return ticket. A great, fun story.

A blistering fast pace takes the reader from the US to Thailand and back, with a fascinating look at the seamy underside of the Asian antiquities market. This is a tale of adventure that is peopled by beautiful women, duplicitous crooks and, of course, an antique dealer with a taste for life. This is a fun read.