And I was...through every perfect page of this book. I loved it. The twists. The turns. The very surprising ending I never dreamed was coming. It all made perfect cohesive sense, too. Seldom, if ever, have I read a book so rich in characters that I am sure I would know them if I ran into them. And the plot is like something one hopes not to be involved in, but probably exists in your own day to day life. Lots of drama and tragedy, but written deftly, never hightened prose. Fantastic stuff! Memorable and, even better than that, a book to highly recomend to everytone! Fiction, I'm sure....but it happens alot. You can't go wrong with this book. As they say on TV: TRY IT, YOU'LL LIKE IT!

I liked this book alot. It made me want to look twice at the people who I work with and wonder about them. Classy stuff, and very appealing. I like the work of this writer and his imagination! TOO REAL!

I was one of the fortunate ones to read this book before it's publication. Now everyone can enjoy this fantastic rollercoaster ride. The author explores serious subject matters in a way that I've never seen before. It's witty and gritty. What was most amazing was that in the several twists and turns in the book, I never was able to see one coming; yet it always made sense. Even though clues were provided throughout, I was surprised each time. AND THAT ENDING! Give yourself some pleasure and read this fine book. Verbally explicit, but not to a fault. Try it! You'll like it!

It doesn't matter what kind of recipe I look for to please my family, I find it in this book. I want my daughter and daughter-in-law add this great cookbook to their collection.

This really is a super cookbook. Great recipes and clear instructions. Nice little history of Western Colorado in the front of the book. I particularly enjoy preparing the "Egg Dishes" and the yummy cookies from "The Cookies Jar".

I think that this book is my favorite cookbook and I have over 1000 cookbooks! The game and lean recipes were my favorite.The desserts are great --the Raspberry Upside Cake is fabulous!

Hasselstrom's poetry is simply written, easily understood and compelling, but don't let that fool you, her subjects and thinking are complex. This author of both essays and poetry confronts and defines the toughest of life's problems including the death of those we love or hate. My favorite poems are those about accepting and making peace with the ghosts who visit us from time to time. Women with women friends will cherish it.

The acclaimed poet and critic Randall Jarrell must have had Linda Hasselstrom in mind when he described a good poet as "...someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times." If you have read previous works by Hasselstrom you will readily recognize what Jarrell meant. If you have not had that opportunity, you are in luck. This latest effort is your chance to stand in the eye of a thunderstorm and smell the rain, hear the thunder, and experience the brilliant light of pure talent up close and personal. Bitter Creek Junction is the author's fourth volume of poetry and it is a keeper. She writes from, and out, of her western experience but manages to relate such experiences in a manner that has universal meaning and appeal. While I did not grow up in the new or old west and have never experienced ranching, Hasselstrom's narrative poems dealing with her personal experiences in such venues, touch me in familiar ways. But don't be misled. These are not touchy-feely, sugar and spice poems. They are gritty, haunting, powerful, no-nonsense, straight-talking stories of everyday life and living. They are also hopeful, poignant, sensual and, in short, a recognition of the stuff that everyday life demands of each of us. The trick is in the way we handle such events. She writes tellingly about "the stranger Death..." both in memory of her husband; in the story of a cowhand that was the subject of an obituary sent her by a friend; and the death of a friend thirty years ago. The references to a daughter never realized will give you pause. The stories of ranch life, the lives of mothers and grandmothers, and a poem with the advice "Slow grinding-a good technique for any job," will leave you with a longing for more lightning strikes. The title poem, about a mother and her daughter and the non-western cowboy myth of domestic abuse, will leave you with a sense of the landscape and environment Hasselstrom knows so well. I suspect you will long remember this powerful and stirring poem. Randall Jarrell would be proud of Linda Hasselstrom.This is a wonderful collection of life's experiences by a poet that ranks among the best.

It is a superb story, well written with never a dull moment. I love the club house and gang scenes which rekindled memories of my childhood with all its imaginative drama. The letters to Harold are priceless and the "Yours till I rot" closing salutations make perfect sense. I found myself totally caught up in the Junction City to Denmark relocation. To say the book is "interesting" would be a colossal understatement. I don't know when, if ever, I've enjoyed anything so much.

Chester Beavon from Anglemont, British Columbia, Canada

Junction City to Denmark is a scintillating account of a boyhood that nurtured loyalties bound in dreams and aspirations, and fired by real and imaginary conflicts. In clear and poignant passages, the author leads us through transitions in life that confront us all. Keys to this adventure are found in letters, fortunately saved, real life gems that sparkle with an amazing range of insights. At times, the language is reminiscent of Mark Twain's Tom or Huck. And, simultaneously, mature concerns emerge in a powerful descriptive sweep that carries us between two small towns in two different countries. This is one journey worth traveling.

This is a true story of the plight of an American boy in 1933, who at the age of thirteen, finds himself removed from his happy, carefree boyhood environment in the small town of Junction City, Oregon, to a town in Denmark. He must leave behind his friends, his school, his favorite school teacher, and everything that makes up his life. His father, a Danish preacher with a large family, manages to find employment in Scandinavia.

In Denmark the boy experiences a very difficult time. People dress differently. They speak a language he cannot understand. The houses look different. He has no friends. The climate is dark and cold. In school he is put back three grades as a consequence of his basic schooling in Oregon, and because he is unable to communicate. He is subject to frequent ridicule and humiliation by kids his own age who label him the "Dumb American."

Although he is in a good family environment, he is determined to get back to Junction City as soon as possible. He keeps an American flag at half mast and attempts to save money in a cookie jar for the return trip. He writes letters to his best boyfriend, Harold in Junction City, telling about all the trouble he encounters and about his determination to return to paradise. In his letters he is still "living" in Oregon, running the affairs of their boyhood gang. Harold becomes his "sounding board" and the only link with the outside world.

It is these actual preserved boyhood letters from the thirties that makes this book unique, with an appealing blend of humor and pathos throughout.

Otto N. Larsen, Professor Emeritus, University of Washington, Seattle.

This book and this writer are just like Gerald A. Browne at his best in his prime, only the main characters and the supporting roles are more vicious and low. Great and smooth writing style, logic and interesting plot and scenario, unique yet weird characters. Simply wonderful! Just wish more readers could discover this great writer and his fantastic works. Mr. Finch should have a shot at the main-stream publishers with deep pocket for marketing promotion and strategy, because every one of his books should be in the top 10 bestsellers. Very glad to find a writer who could take over the retiring and downhilled Gerald A. Browne.

I gotta tell you the truth. I loved the book! It has excellent dialogue and it is well written. Maybe at some parts it can improve because at some parts I found it a little dull. I'd recommend this book for someone who wants a good book to read with not little but not too much action. The ending is excellent

This is my favorite book,and possibly Long's best (ROCK JOCKS... is more factual and interesting but less entertaining.) This collection of Long's short stories, drawn from his incredible personal experiences, is creative, adventurous, and riveting as ever, but here he has truly perfected his writing style which flows seemlessly. "My Friend Phil" is worth the purchase price alone, and is the roaring gut laugh til you are crying funniest prose in the history of the english language. Any outdoors person with a pulse must own this book!

Yet another anthology from John Long, however, this time it's all his own stuff, which is infinitely better than a collection of other writers. This includes some fiction, based on fact, and fact. Some stuff is repeated here from his previous books and instructional rock climbing guides. Surprise! 'Green Arch' again. This does, however, still has enough new stuff to keep any John Long fan happy. His fiction I haven't seen anywhere else and it is very good. Overall, next to 'Rock Rats,' his best book.

John found this book for me. Walking round the tables, he liked the square shape of the book, and I liked the cover art, so we bought it: Up the Junction. I don't know Nell Dunn's other work, but I love this collection of stories, narrated by a Chelsea "heiress," with her deadpan knack for mimicking dialect of Battersea women, who work at a candy factory and make fun of their love of men. Nights out in pubs! Overflowing toilets! Hairspray and panstick makeup! But there is sadness, there is violence, there are unwanted babies, there is laughter and toughness. It's a great paperback novel (or interwoven stories)--what you will--and it is about real life.

My friend found this book for me. He picked it out of a stack of paperbacks. The portrait on the cover, the square shape and design of the Counterpoint edition, the sixties London setting suit my taste. Nell Dunn, described as "an heiress from Chelsea," narrates these stories of working-class women and captures the rhythms of a dialect I've never heard. It makes me laugh, reminds me of Mary Lavin's stories, and weirdly evokes memories of my own girlhood growing up in a different country.

There ought to be a name for this genre. The jacket blurb says "nature/Southwest literature". But Annie Dillard did this in the Northeast and Edward Abbey did it all over the Southwest and down rivers. Everett Ruess and Ann Zwinger did it in SE Utah with superb sketches and wood cuts. C.L. Rawlins and Gretel Ehrlich do it in Wyoming with sketches and photographs. Stanley Crawford did it with *Mayordomo* and *A Garlic Testament* a few miles SE of Tom Ireland in the Embudo Valley between Taos and Santa Fe (or halfway to Los Alamos - whichever way your crow flies).

"People who bond with 'place' and then write about it with philosophical comments and profound/funny/zen-like observations along the way" is a bit cumbersome. These people out-Thoreau Thoreau (and I'm from Thoreau, New Mexico [heh heh]; I ought to know). All these authors (and more) do this thing superbly well, in their own unique voices, but all the same, the genre deserves a better name than "nature/Southwest" or "nature/Northeast."

Ireland has added a new dimension with Angie Coleman's joyful paintings of exactly this same country round about. [I've debated about extracting and framing these paintings - still debating. Think I'll have to buy another copy of the book.]

This author reproduces his encounters with his Spanish and Indian neighbors (sometimes poignant, somtimes frustrating, always funny). These little essays/vignettes stand by themselves, but at the very end, the writer includes a story about La Pascualita - a real person who sweeps the roads with her broom and is housed and adopted by the entire community of La Madera. Ireland weaves her into a story that is reminiscent of Rudolfo Anaya, but very much his own.

And his piece about Magdalena, the magpie he adopted, is an original for sure.

"Walking around with a bird on your head is like watching life from a tenement window." "What's the collective noun for magpies? How about 'complaint'? There's a complaint of magpies in a cottonwood on the hillside across the river."

He watches the ravens of La Junta: "I was still standing there when the raven blew up over the cliff and almost into my face. It must have scared him almost as much as it scared me, to be riding the blast sixty feet off the ground and then all of a sudden to be facing a man. He shat, climbed up over the reach of harm, and held there at the closest safe distance to look again, reassembling his world into the kind of order he trusted it to have. (Ravens up. Men down.) Then he spoke. It was a sort of rattle, as much from the bowel as from the throat, and in it there was both fear and outrage: 'This cliff is taken. You are not wanted here.' He drifted north, riding the thermal, checking to see if there were any more of me around, then fell up and away into the bottomless sky."

About roosters: "...their voices make me think of the smell of joss sticks because *things mean things:" the rooster means incense, and the helicopter means searching the river for the body of a dead man, and I deceive myself that at eight o'clock this morning the real work will begin. Things mean things: the substance of faith, what we live for, those meanings, those coincidences of sky & rain & thought that jump at us."

He makes you feel like you're perching on his shoulder, looking through his eyes, seeing what he sees, hearing what he hears, and understanding through his mind and heart.

"Towards evening, the sun dropped into a corridor between the clouds and the little valley was filled with pink light. I put down my shovel and stood under a juniper to witness the change. It was like being in an aquarium: immersed, the bare cottonwoods, the hillside, the vacant house across the river, the fence posts, my own hands acquired a light of their own. The air filled with sugary spines of ice, and a rainbow appeared, its northern pole planted in the willows of a neighbor's cow pasture. I could see impossible distances in every direction; up the valley to La Zorra, down the crooked Valleciros, up the canada behind Vigil's store - as if I could see around corners."

All through these reflections are little personal musings:

"What is it about the presence of parents that makes us feel something less than alive, when they're the ones responsible for bringing us here in the first place?"

About dreams and water: "To wake in the dark and peel off the skin of your dream: to go out in the dark in the wet yard where drops of water hang from the asparagus berries and the night sounds are swamp sounds, sounds of water. And this our dry land smells like water and the creek runs brown."

And about work: "Ulceration of the spirit. It seems that when I have a job, my life becomes the job and not much else. There is no true rest and no true work until it's over."

"...we have made our joy depend on our work, and having come this far, we can't renounce it, can't be free from it, but only look for freedom in it."

"When I stand outside watching the clouds and the birds, I'm doing my work. These things need to be studied and praised, at least reported on."

And report he does. The title of the book comes from a quote by Malcolm Lowry, "You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building a nest in your hair."

This is a beautiful little gem of a book with lovely paintings, anecdotes and musings - the kind of book to keep by your bed and pick up and read at random. It's also a book to read all the way through from the beginning - more than once. In a word - delight. Five stars - easy.

pamhan99@aol.com

This book illustrates Josephson effect clearly and completely. Hard to find better one on this field. Only that the price is as high as its value.

During the 2nd WW, I spent a good deal of time selling newspapers in the days before vending machines took over. I now live in Huntsville, Al. so thought I should read something by this author,who is best known for "Rocket Boys." However,when I came across this title, I decided to go with U-boats. It was a subject which had great news exposure in the papers I sold . Well I never realized how close the sea war really was to our shores in the early going. This is an well documented account of Nazi sub activity which was apparently kept quiet at the time. As a matter of fact there are so many accounts of ship sinkings that I almost gave up reading Torpedo Junction; rather like having to endure a losing football team for several seasons. This all changes at about p.200 when Hickman proceeds to give a most exciting account of a battle twixt the 'Icarus'(coast guard cutter) and U-352 which was the first German submarine sunk by our side . If you are interested in this aspect of the war which was a critical effort in which we were losing badly, this is your book. For those who like their desert first, start on p 200 of the paperback edition. If you are a "senior" like me get the nore expensive edition with larger type!

this book is for you. Homer Hickam is an exceptional writer and a great researcher. This true story reads like an exciting adventure novel. It focuses on the tiny coast guard cutters that fought the German U-boats that attacked the American east coast during World War II. Thoroughly documented, the reader will be introduced to a huge, bloody battle that took place just off American shores (including the Gulf coast). This is the same Homer Hickam who wrote October Sky and The Coalwood Way. He actually dived on the U-boat wrecks and the freighters and tankers he writes about. Highly recommended for the World War II buff or if you just like adventure books. Every bit as good as The Perfect Storm. It reminded me of that book.

The only dry part to this book I saw was a necessary review of World War II U-boat activities up to December 1941. After that, with the arrival of the U-boats off New York and then the bloody carnage off Hatteras, this book is a gripping, bloody true tale of American and British courage on the high seas against a determined German onslaught of the American coast. Read it for knowledge and for its fascinating personal stories of seamen at battle. You'll feel like you've also rode on the deck of the little coast guard cutters as they battle the U-boats and, at the end, you'll never forget the unsung heroes who fought and died so close to our shores.