This is a lyrical and inspiring collection of true stories about people who made a difference. In each case, an individual or group of citizens, motivated by love of place, decided to take on big powers and seemingly overwhelming challenges. Bottom line: determined and creative citizens can win. The book is a pleasure to read and a powerful antidote to the cynical and defeatist attitude that it is too late and too difficult to defend our habitats, watersheds, rivers, and last wild places from degradation.

Forget Angela's Ashes, This is the classic novel of the Irish. Set in Ulster, it describes how the Famine unlike the popular fallacy, hit poor Protestants as well as Catholics. The Author, Alexander Irvine became a Preacher and Union Organiser in North America towards the end of the 19th Century. This is the true story of his Co Antrim chilhood. A brilliant read and one to keep going back to. A true classic.

I am an American who owns over 300 cookbooks, and I consider myself a gourmet cook. On a recent trip to Britain, I scoured bookstores and chose this book over all the others. I'm glad I did. I have to say, this is absolutely the BEST cookbook I have come across in the past 20 years.

This book is not as comprehensive as The Joy of Cooking, which tries to tell you how to cook absolutely everything under the sun. But this book IS inclusive of everything that's important in classic British Cooking (and in traditional American cooking, as well)'soups, sauces, cheese and eggs, vegetables, fish, meat, poultry, picnics, puddings, cakes and baking, and preserves and pickles. In addition, it has chapters on The Great British Breakfast, Savories and Snacks, Sunday Lunch Roasts, A Festive Christmas, and Afternoon and High Tea.

As an American, I learned SO much from this book. I learned about the ORIGIN of bacon and eggs for breakfasts, about the histories of many different vegetables (quite different information than is included in The Joy of Cooking), HOW and WHY British cuisine got a reputation for being bland (it wasn't always so), and many things about the history of eating which have just been plainly lost to us in America. For example, I did not know before that the origin of certain foods sometimes being served on a piece of toast was from the 'trenchers' used in medieval times--'trenchers' being big slabs of bread which were laid directly on the table, and food put on top. The reason for the use of trenchers was that plates were too expensive for ordinary people to use. Not only are so many interesting discussions about the origins of different foods and customs included in this book, but ALL the recipies are interesting and FANTASTIC!

British readers will enjoy the depth and style of this book, while American readers will really learn a lot about the origin of our own traditional cuisine. I will treasure this book for many years. I am buying four more copies to give as gifts this Christmas. I bought the paperback edition. This book is so wonderful and will be used for so many years, that I highly recommend to other readers to spend the extra money and get a hardcover edition, if it is available.

Sian Irvine demuestra una vez más su talento para fotografiar platos. Sus fotografías son maravillosas y le dan a uno ganas de ponerse el delantal y comenzar a cocinar. Aquellos que hemos disfrutado sus anteriores libros, "Mozzarella" y "Mushrooms",no somos defraudados en ésta nueva propuesta: "Olive Oil". Esperemos que sigan muchos más títulos!

How is it that the Final Opus of Leon Solomon is out of print in both hardcover and paperback?

The book's author, Jerome Badanes, died halfway through the sequel to The Final Opus of Leon Solomon. What he had written, and revised himself, was a pretty amazing 100 page novella called Change or Die which appears in Issue number #5 of Open City in its entirety.

It is always a peculiar thing when you take a piece of writing that has so much peculiar character and substance, and lump it in with all the other stuff that happens to comprise that issue of the magazine.

This issue has some absurd wild cards - when seen in the light of its central feature, "Change or Die," - such as an Irvine Welsh story he wrote shortly after completely Trainspotting, and this wonderful piece of non-sense that Delmore Schwartz wrote about T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism. That is the one interesting thematic thread in this issue--Both Shwartz and the academic protagonist of Change or Die (a man trying to recover from Shakespeare,) have a certain lovely fatedness about them.

And Change or Die has one of my favorite short lead sentences:

"The Blik family was a dream and an education."

What a great beginning to such a great story!

(And what a concise and honest use of the short sentence, which has been bastardized and beaten up on any number of fronts, from Hemingway imitators to the cold pragmatism of news providers).

If this whole computer as a means to shop for books is to have any good side, then it is that finding a book like, "The Final Opus of Leon Solomon," or getting your hands on the novella "Change of Die" is something you MUST GET! If only to make use of the fact that you are sitting in front of a computer and perusing.

Jerome Badanes. He is coming back in the only way he can.

This book is sheer brilliance. The fact that it is taken from lectures may be the reason behind its clear and unpretentious language. But while clear and unpretentious, Professor Keller's reflections shows philosophy, or for that matter academics, in its simplest yet most currently significant form: rather than bombarded with theoretical jargon (read nonsense if you wish), the reader is presented with a history of a specific knowledge (the biologist's explanation of "life" in the early and mid 20th. century). The preface serves as an outline of how to read this book, and, when effective, sets the context for reading any similar epistemological analysis. Unlike many other "postmodern" philosophical works, this book fits beautifully in the context it sets. It is multi-dimensional - feminists, philosophers, biologists, and others will benefit from incisive commentary which is extremely pertinent to their field. As a work which is set (and sets itself) in the context of epistemological relativism, it has one drawback: within the next few years, I expect its relevance to shift, from work of contemporary genius and immediate relevance to harbinger of new epistomological foundations. Still, it is refreshing to read a work of genius by a living person; if you have not realized this yet, I recommend you take a few days to read this book and be enlightened . . .

As a Royal Doulton collector of toby and character mugs ... I couldn't do without Jean Dale's wonderful books! This 5th Edition goes with me to every Antique store. When I spot a neat looking mug,I find it in the book, take out my black light and magnifying glass .. and then bid with confidence.

This is a very good pamphlet. It gives quotes from the Bible on seven different subjects and then quotes from several different cults on the same subjects. It shows quite clearly how these cults cannot be considered Christian and why they only lead to destruction. I highly recommend it.

Bokovoy et al present here the most important contribution to the study of post-war Yugoslavia yet published. This volume includes important studies of archival materials unavailable to earlier researchers, precisely translated from Slovene, Serbian and Russian and analysed with intelligence, clarity and verve. (Willis Johnson, Univ. of California, Berkeley

I knew of Cixous, had a general idea of her doing work toward a kind of ecriture feminine (feminine writing), but hadn't actually read her writing until I read this book while tanning in Southern New Jersey this past June. This book was on a recommended reading list for a writing class I was taking, though I think I'm the only one who read it; it's not at all your usual writer's-help book, but that's good. It is dense, genre-breaking academic-poetic writing that I ended up having to get out of the sun to read. This book is comprised of a set of essays originally given as lectures, separated into "The School of the Dead," "The School of Dreams," and "The School of Roots." The writers that resonate with Cixous are "descenders, explorers of the lowest and the deepest," (a concept introduced in "The School of the Dead") and include some I knew -- Kafka, Dostoevsky, Genet, and Ingeborg Bachmann, and others I hadn't -- Clarice Lispector and Marina Tsvetaeva. I see there's a Derrida "endorsement" both here on the Amazon website and on the cover of the book, and so, as you would expect, this book's meditation on the connection between language and desire, between writing and the body, some wordplay and deconstruction of the very shape of letters or the names of writers is what you might expect from a French poststructuralist. What set this book apart for me was its attitude toward the works cited. Cixous doesn't use literature to promote flashy ideas; it's seriously personal work, a "Schooling" on thinking about one's own writing, she's actually interested in defining "truth." The first part of "The Dead," especially the kind of cataloguing of "deaths-as-beginnings" was fascinating. I found the "School of Roots" section absolutely packed with virtuoso readings and ideas. Her closing, "Toward a book without an author" is the perfect payoff culmination of her/our hard work from the pages that preceded it. You'll have to read it yourself to see if you "get it" / agree with it. Now I'm inspired to read more Cixous.