The Telpin Man is the second in a ten part series of the Sol Chronicles. This story takes place far into the future of Venus. Many generations have passed and the closeness of the settlements of Morta, Vika and Zack have turned into separated colonies. While the colonies celebrate the historically traditional festivals, there is an undercurrent of deceit. Tempers flare, people die and bloodlines are drawn.
Enter Rand, a seemingly insignificant young man who becomes the last of the Telpin Men. With the powers derived from the Masters, Rand becomes mentally powerful and leads the colonies through the wars and sends the Mortans and the Vikans to off the planet to be successful someplace else. In the meantime, Rand and two supporters learn the truth about the Masters and battled them to a climatic finish. With the demise of the Masters, the Telpin and the humans find a cache of eggs and devise a plan to protect themselves from future harm. However the end of the book leaves open, the possibilities of future danger.
Now that the three colonies are spread throughout the universe, there will be many opportunities for future exploration and adventure. This book was well written, with several twists and turns that this reader did not expect. I look forward to the next book, Thena's Boy. Where will it start? What planet will be the baseline? How will the colonies be reunited? Questions I hope will be answered.

Donald D. Thompson's Sol Chronicles rule. George Lucas or Steven Spielberg need to cut a deal with him right away so we can see this story on the big screen. The Telpin Man was an excellent sequel to The Final Solician. Thena's Boy was listed as coming in May and I have it marked on my calendar. The characters are real and very easy to visualize. I find my self feeling their emotions. Whatever Donald is doing needs to continue. I do not want to be disappointed.

I love how the Author used characters from his previous book and implemented them into the setting for 1000 years later. The main plot interwoven with the many subplots is a great piece of writing. Donald D. Thompson is an up and comer with a whole world waiting to discover him

Bubbe always made Thanksgiving dinner. Now that she has passed away the family tries to recreate that dinner at the request of the youngest member of the family. When the lights in the house blow, a neighbor comes to the rescue in helping them complete the meal and cook their dinner. In fact, a number of their neighbors help. This book has a true spirit of giving and remembrance. Good read aloud at home or for classes. Excellent writing.

A Thanksgiving Wish by Michael Rosen has become a family story time tradition begining this year! The story relates to all ages and became a favorite the first time I read it to my eight year old daughter. I gave a copy to our minister and he used it as his sermon the Sunday before Thanksgiving! The story of family and community coming together combined with John Tompson's beautiful illustrations makes this a wonderful book! I love it!

Michael Rosen read this story to us last Spring at the West Coast Literacy Conference in Anahem before it was published . There was not a dry-eyed person in the room when he finished. The story of a young girl and the relationship she has with her grandmother will touch your heart. How the family overcomes difficulties and celebrates a truly memorable Thanksgiving will renew your faith in tradition as it did the young girl's. I plan to read this story to my class if I can get through it without tears. I highly recommend it as a holiday read for both children and adults.

This small book presents the story of Tiny Broadwick (true name Georgia Ann Thompson), pioneer parachutist. Ms. Roberson has made an honest and capable attempt at telling us about Tiny's life and her book has many uncommon images of Tiny. The book suffers in its fact checking, however, as at least one of the "firsts" claimed for Tiny was not hers. Self-effacing as she was, Tiny would have been among the first to correct such erroneous enthusiasms. Still and all, while the reader may have to exercise caution about the captions under photographs and should be careful of accepting without question all of the dates and events presented, this is certainly a book well worth having, reading and enjoying.

Tiny (Georgia Ann Thompson) Broadwick was the first woman to jump from an airplane, the first person to jump from a float plane, the first to make an intentional water jump from an airplane and the first to make a manually-operated parachute jump and all these records were prior to 1915. Tiny Broadwick demonstrated that parachutes could be used repeatedly, that escape from a damaged airplane was possible, that you would not pass out in freefall and that a woman could do something most men would not do. This book recounts history of a person that deserves greater recognition. It is easy and fun to read. As a skydiver (1,200 jumps, D-454), pilot (SEL & gliders, hang gliders and paragliders),author and publisher of seven books on parachutes and skydiving, I recommend this book to those interested in aviation and pioneering women. --Dan Poynter, Parachuting, The Skydiver's Handbook.

I started reading this book at nine in the evening and couldn't put it down. I first learned a little about "Tiny's" career back in June of 1997. I had started to build a website which featured the career of my father-in-law, Walter E. Lees, a member of the Early Birds of Aviation. He had soloed in 1913 and references to Tiny kept popping up among his collection of memorabilia. I finally accumulated enough bits and pieces to build a page for her on my "Early Bird" site, but it only told a part of her story. This book, by Elizabeth Roberson, with its many anecdotes and photographs, satisfies my curiosity about the life of this unique woman. I can recommend it very highly to all aviation history buffs or to anyone who is interested in the story of a remarkable person.

The photography in this book is stunning, as is most of Andy's work. The real heroes of the Wall at Stormking are the Dykers, mainly Max Nowell legendary stone worker from South west Scotland.

Imagine that you're a giant playing with pebbles in your backyard. There's a big puddle nearby, and a lot of weeds. You idly pick up pebble after pebble, placing them gently one on top of the other, winding what ends up being a wall through the weeds until it gets to the edge of the puddle. That's the deliciously disconcerting feeling you'll get as you page through Andy Goldsworthy's "Wall."

A document of the design and construction of Goldsworthy's wall at Mountainville, New York, the book details the finding of the original, now-falling-down stone wall and the decision to recreate and embellish upon this. Andy Goldsworthy was called in to design the new wall. While he begins by following what is left of the old wall, his work is looser, more elegant, almost scroll-like as it winds down the hill and plunges directly into the water of the lake. There is a calligraphic quality to this wall that's visually arresting and, quite simply, beautiful.

Along with the wall, Goldsworthy can't resist playing with nature in other ways and these photographs are thoughtfully included as well. We see the line of chrome yellow leaves he's stitched together and placed on the wall, the holes he's filled with crimson leaves and water, and the tree whose bark he's lined with, well, other trees! It's astounding to see how Goldsworthy's brain works and what handsome design statements result from his creativity.

As one of the wallers involved in the building of Andy's wall at Storm King, I can honestly say that this book gives a really good insight into the ideas behind his work and some of the technicalities involved in its construction. The photography is wonderful and the text informative. This book is well worth a look, and so is the wall itself.

Even thought this book was written in 1992 it still has ideas that can be useful to people in business today. A quote that I found to be very good is this, "Find and hang a picture of your vision on your wall. NASA has lots of pictures of space stations and the moon."

Ideas are the keys to the future. They are also the foundation of success, whether you are developing a revolutionary e-business or seeking better ways to organize and motivate a team. Chic Thompson's What A Great Idea! is both essential and joyful in its approach, sharing the very best of creativity approaches. Its lessons are practical, clear, and immediate, approaches you want to apply right away. It is also comprehensive in its scope and lasting in its impact, helping readers immediately grasp and remember both the 'why' and 'how' of effective individual and team creativity. And--wow!--it's fun to read! This book belongs on the desk of every manager generating a success vision. It is ideal for those who seek to develop and champion the best of real-world thinking and challenge response.

Outstanding resource for accessing creativity personally and in the workplace. Chic identifies common "Killer Phrazes" which thwart our actions and gives excellent, fun suggestions for stamping them out. This book is extremely "user friendly". Easy to read, funny - with exercises along the way to drive home the points. He gives practical ways to use mind mapping, metaphors,and analogies to help you get your thinking unstuck and to uncover new solutions. As a creative thinking trainer, I have shared Chic's ideas and strategies to hundreds of individuals across the U.S. The feedback I get is extremely positive. As a matter of fact, his ideas helped me structure my course in a much more innovative, impactful way. Use Chic's ideas and watch the people in your environment become more creative, more open to new ideas, more productive and have one whole heck of a lot of fun.

Sharon Kowalski and Karen Thompson were together four years, before a drunk driver struck Sharon's car, leaving her unable to move or communicate. The only thing that can bring her out of a dangerous coma is Karen's patience and love.

Karen tells her story of fighting for custody and the right to care for her lover against extremely hostile parents and hostile judges. In their eyes, she is a "sick wacko".

This is NOT a novel, it is a real life story, at times tedious, and with no neat ending. Buy it for the historical information, read it to learn what love is all about. Then go get "Eight Bullets" (ISBN=1563410559), another similar story.

More reviews by Bobbi at
http://www.primenet.com/~bobbib/books

I picked up this book thinking it would be a fairly tame, shallow and thoughtless book about a lesbian love affair.

What a mistake I made.

Although I read this book fourteen years after it was originally written, I found it to be the most influential piece of literature I have ever read.

To read of such injustice and predudice towards someone and lack of care to a disabled human being devestated me. I was truly inspired by Karen Thompson's undying struggle to be reunited with her lover and partner despite all hurdles she faced.

This novel highlighted the gross injustice which is being dealt to members of same sex relationships worldwide.

A well written book which deserves to be placed on high school syllabuses.

This is a great book! After I read the Introduction of it and realized that it was about two lesbian/gay women, I didn't really care to read the rest. The thing that kept me reading was the fact that it is also about civil rights of disabled persons. I work in an ICF/MR and the story touched me deeply and really really made me mad at the same time. It seems unreal that this could actually happen to someone and our justice department would allow it to happen. After reading the book (which I finished in a day because I couldn't put it down) I have a far better understanding of civil rights and I even have a different outlook on the gay and lesbian population of the united States. Great job Karen and Julie! You both should be very proud of yourselves for this one! I feel with all my heart for Sharon and I am praying for her return home. NO ONE should be denied the right to choose where they live and who they associate with! Keep the fight going!

I ordered "Summer Madness" a couple of weeks ago and read it the night it hit the doorstep. As a former player who won an NCAA championship with the Texas Longhorns (for which she was named MVP) and a WNBA title with perennial champions, the Houston Comets, Harris writes from personal experience with the greats of the game. As a sports commentator, Harris is an entertaining writer with unvarnished opinions (which she gleefully shares) on the WNBA and its big-name players.

Which team was so cheap it rationed sweat socks? Would you like to know a little more about the enigmatic four-time Championship MVP Cynthia Cooper? Be warned that "Summer Madness" is more akin to a Fran Harris autobiography than an objective examination of the league, but that lends the book a straightforward charm. An entertaining mix of thoughtful essay, personal memoir and dishy gossip, "Summer Madness" is a must-read for anyone who follows the WNBA.

There is a photo section, an enlightening forward written by WNBA star Tina Thompson, and plenty of stuff not already published in Harris' columns. There also are several laugh-out-loud passages (don't read it in your cubicle at work) and a very touching remembrance of Kim Perrott, Harris' Houston Comet teammate.

Well worth the shipping wait! If you enjoy Fran's straight-forward, witty columns then you will love this book. It was insightful and entertaining. Part autobiography, part documentary, and part commentary. A WNBA book like this was long overdue. I've recommended it to all the women's basketball fans I know.

All it needed was a little proofreading :) , but the content and style were da bomb. Can't wait for her novel!

"Two in the Saddle" is the second in the "Three Cowboys and a Baby" series by Thompson. Knowledge of the first book helps but is not required.

In this installment, we meet lighthearted playboy Travis, who seems to be able to get any woman he wants ... except for Gwen, his boss's best friend. Gwen's had it with lighthearted playboy men and wants nothing to do with Travis!

This is a wonderfully funny, engaging read with well-crafted characters and a lot of steamy eroticism. Truly a joy to read. I liked how Travis become something other than what we originally expect, and how we come to know Gwen and her deep insecurities. (And, despite how un-PC this is, I loved the cover! Yum.)

However, I must quibble with two things. First, I hate it when the female characters really don't want anything to do with the guy, yet their bodies "betray them" and they're overcome with lust. I know this was a popular theme 20-30 years ago, but aren't we past that now? Second, the theme holding this series together, baby Elizabeth, is a little tough to swallow.

However, if you can get past these two points, this is a very well-written, funny, engaging read by Thompson. Enjoy!

Hunky cowboy Travis (in the role of best man) tries to pick up bridesmaid Gwen at their mutual close friends wedding. He an extroverted playboy, and she a reserved, domesticated woman with dreams of white gowns , burst into flames with their attraction for each other. The only complications...she refuses him saying she needs commitment, he pleads with her saying he can't commit, and a minor detail...a baby. This is one of the book in the series "Three cowboys and a baby", in which one of three drunk cowboys impregnate a woman, all of them thinking it's themselves, with nobody knowing who the father is till the last book. In this book, Travis is sure it's his, and Gwen too, disapprovingly, thinks it's Travis who's the irresponsible father, putting more distance between them as Gwen worries the mother will appear on the scene and cause problems. Needless to say, at the risk of revealing too much, things work out in the end with Travis letting out his 'big' secret of why his lifestyle is what it is. A nice, interesting story...something different.The only negative aspect is that the characters are somehow lacking in something. But adding the equation of a reluctant girl, a big-muscled hunk who can change diapers, and lots of attraction, it adds up to a good book.

This series of books is wonderful! It has passion, romance and mystery. Just who is baby Elizabeth's daddy? In this book we meet another cowboy who thinks he is the father of the baby. Is he? When will Jessica return to tell everyone what's going on? Read it and find out! I look forward to reading the next book in the series, Boone's Bounty. This is a really great book with a lot of passion and sexy scenes! Any Harlequin Temptation reader will thoroughly enjoy it!

The author tries to postive intrepretations to the astronmical details found in Srimad Bhagavatam. In the process he is drawn to discuss the cosmology of purna and the standard scholar's attitude to these puranas. He weakens his case in chapter 6 & 7 by questioning much of modern astrophysics and the question about moon flight. Appendix 2 is quite important. Here he explores the question whether Aryabhata borrowed from Greek traditions to arrive at the planetary positions at the start of Kali yuga. This part deals with the debate on astronomy transfer among cultures. I recently drawn attention to his approach to astronomy in Bhagavatam ( including ideas in his paper Exact Science in Srimad Bhagavatam) to an Indian academic audience who have explord the histroy of kerala astronomy. Even the professor from Bhubaneswar, who presented about the astronomical works of Samanata Chandrasekhar ( who assisted Puri Temple in last centuary in arriving at calender) felt skeptical about Thompson's claims.

Thompson, who holds a doctorate in mathematics from Cornell, has been a student of Vedic science for many years. This is apparent in his interpretation of the Srimad-Bhagavatam; he explores the possibilities of not only the diffusion of astornomical data and ideas between pre-Roman cultures, but also the possibilities that the Vedas refer to other dimensions and parallel universes -- concepts which have been seriously studied by Western physicists for only the past 60-70 years.

Unfortunately, Thompson is largely underrated or dismissed due to his work on "Forbidden Archaeology" by some critics. Not having read that work, I can only say the following: His contribution to a Western understanding of Vedic science, which occurs within this book, is of supreme importance. It is the best introduction to such Vedic science for Westerners by a Westerner that I have yet seen.

A simple yet definitive interpretation of ancient Indian cosmology, cosmogony and cosmography for the highly suspicious and discerning scientific western mind!

This single book purports to tell the story of three pilots who entered the USAF after its post-war break from the army, and rose to prominent positions by the post Vietnam years. That's a lot of ground to cover (the "Eagles" novels also covered the postwar years, but stopped around the civil-rights era). The Berlin airlift, Korea, Vietnam, the cutbacks of the 1970's, the shift in strategies from high-altitude to low altitude "penetration" - all touch at least a few of the main characters, but don't touch for very long or go very deep. The story keys on three characters - the working-class hero hero, his African-American friend and co-achiever (who exists seemingly as the hero's conscience, but also to remind the hero not to use him to push his northern liberal views on race on southern servicemen) and the hero's inevitable foil - the USAF brat who's not above using family connections to advance his own career or take some potshots at others. Though hero and foil compete against each other in training, foil takes the upper hand when he opts against going to fly fighters in Korea. Later during the golden-age of flight test, our hero's rival pushes his own pet project, a low-level fighter plane that can equip both navy and USAF units, and forces our hero to test it. Characters make transitions back and forth (the rival's wife becomes an alcoholic frump, pulls herself togther, only to regress again, all in the space of a few paragraphs in which she's not otherwise an active participant; the hero becomes an alcoholic as well, if only to give him a flaw which he must vanquish). Too much of what people in "Wild Blue" say comes offless as what people might have been thinking and more of what people today would say years later - it's easy to see in hindsight how the F-4 Phantom, a navy jet, could satisfy the need for a multi-role fighter for all services (it took two planes in each service to replace it entirely), but the extreme complexity, the maintenance nightmare and the revolutionary concept the plane empbodied would have made it an unlikely choice at the time. Also, the novel straddles the line between history and fiction in the wrong places. When Boyne gets to the airplane intended as the multi-service fighter, he pulls off a monumental cheat - in reality, the plane was the F-111, a tactical strike-fighter meant to fly from air force bases and aircraft carriers, and lamented in both roles. While the F-111 eventually earned distinction in Desert Storm (by which time, technology caught up with the concept), it was an unpopular plane with USAF crews, and utterly rejected by the USN entirely. In "Wild Blue", the plane is ignored entirely. Instead, Boyne introduces a completely fictitious aircraft that coincidentally fills the same role, is tailored for high-speed automatic flight with a terrain-following radar, seats its aircrew the same way and, because it's as ahead of its time as the F-111 was, proves as buggy-prone as the real deal. (This is similar to a fighter in Boyne's WWII entry in the Eagle's series, a fictitious plane that otherwise sounds exactly like the P-39). I know that in historical novels, there's always a point at which the history gives way to the novel, and vice-versa, but the F-111 seems the poor place to draw the line. The navy end of the F-111 controversy seems missed completely. Although this is an air force book, the omission only clues us in to how the story leaves out the navy entirely, even though the story of each has significance for the other. (It's like a Vietnam-war novel that has no Vietnamese characters at all). Boyle also misses parts of the USAF story that I would have like to see covered - clashes between the USAF leadership and the president in general, but also some specific historical controversies - whether the B-36 should have won out both over Jack Northrop's flying wings and over the Navy's super-carriers as well, why there were no B-36's in Korea, whether anybody really considered using the bomb there and in Vietnam, and the controversy over manned bombers over missile. (Controversy over the B-70 bomber, one of my favorite planes, was one of several foci between Curt LeMay and the Mcnamara era, yet the issue with its many related sub-issues never comes to light here; instead, a proposed supersonic bomber is sacrificed near the end of the book for political purposes - a story that closer approximates the Russian Backfire bomber than one of our own planes). "Wild Blue" is meant to be an historical novel, but it's not only light on history but on the novel sidea as well. Once we meet our characters, we already know what we're supposed to think of them - there's little plot development and few surprises, and since those who read the book already know enough about the subject matter, what's left to grab them?

A tremendous, well-written, and highly accurate epic story that follows the careers of several USAF officers throughout their careers. As an Air Force Major with 15 years of service, I can tell you that this book is the most realistic concerning all aspects of Air Force life and history that I have ever read. Colonel (retired) Boyne weaves the stories of each officer's life together into the tremendous history of the USAF since 1947. His highly accurate accounts of every major USAF milestone together with honest, heartfelt story telling combine to make this a special book....it should be mandatory reading for every current and future USAF officer!

The Wild Blue by Walter Boyne and Steven Thompson tells it like it really was during the most difficult growing pains and historically significant successes of the U.S. Air Force. The stretch for the stars is seen thru the eyes of the people who did the stretching, from the dedicated sergeant working thru the night to the idealistic pilot willing to sacrifice himself for his mission. The struggles and rewards, the failures and successes of these brave families and patriots are told with the accuracy of a reporter who was there and lived thru it. From the troops in the bars to the all too political movers and shakers who maneuvered the system to build the strongest and most capable Air Force in the world, this book tells it like it was.