I used to be a "complete idiot" when it comes to baking, not anymore, thanks to this book. It explains many of the "how" s and "why"s of baking that used to puzzle me. Now, I can bake confidently and I bake about twice a week. My friends think I am a great baker!

This book is really great for a beginner. It gives you the foundation, the basic. But even now, after 3 years of baking, I still refer to this book when I try a new recipe and failed.

You said "what about the recipes"? Oh, they are good for beginners. Basic and simple recipes that a novice baker won't be afraid to try. They have one of the easiest yellow cake recipe I have ever seen, and another one for chocolate cake. I have tried some recipes (about 10) from this book and they all worked beautifully and tasted great. The "Wonderful Pear Tart" had many of my friends asking for the recipe, the chocolate cake which I frosted with chocolate frosting also in this book had my friend asking me if I had bought the cake form a restaurent! And they also have a nice and moist "Banana bread" recipe.

I recommend this book for absolute beginners. It is a good place to start.

Baking is easily the most mystifying and landmine fraught area of cooking for me. It is just plain difficult. BUT: _The Complete Idiot's Guide to Baking_ makes baking seem not only possible but fun. With patience and practice, you can bake. Unbelievable? I thought so, too. But, this book gives you the guts and sense of culinary adventure to try and try again.

No fact is too simple to be presented in this book. And, that's a good thing because baking often goes catastrophically wrong because of one tiny, simple error. This book is very reassuring to a beginning baker. And, it not only gives the hows but also some very interesting whys of baking -- information of interest to even seasoned cooks.

If you think that the scent of baking bread belongs only to great grandmas or bread machines, read this book. If you think warm, gooey, fresh cookies can only come out of a plastic wrapped tube, read this book. It will empower and educate you to bake.

Emily Bronte's poetry is wild and beautiful. Ranging between gentle melancholy to fierce pride, her poems successfully capture human emotion. Many of her poems are about, or written from the viewpoint of the inhabitants of, the fictional kingdom of Gondal. Although these are set in an imaginary land, the Gondal poems stand well alongside the more personal verse. This particular volume is valuable because it includes a description and history of the Gondal saga Emily and her sister Anne created. It is often hard, in other collections, to tell which is personal and which is fictional, but here the Gondal poems are listed. This is very useful to those who wish to study this creation of the Bronte imagination. Also useful is the the chronological order of the poems (as far as can be determined), which makes it easy to follow her development as a poet. I recommend it highly.

Few who read Emily Bronte's poems and magnificent novel, Wuthering Heights, can fail to be moved by the sheer power of her language and insight. Though her tragic early death robbed the world of countless literary treasures, EJB's poetry here provides plenty of beautiful poetry (some of it foreshadowing WH) for those who love her to enjoy and study. Read it and savor it.

This is a super book with great advice on negotiating a severance, and getting out there to hit the pavement running again. Its a shame to see such a great book out of print, but if you can find a copy, its worth the wait!

I couldn't have gotten through this difficult time without Koltnow's advise. The book helped me negotiate a severance package, update my resume and network into a GREAT new position. I even negotiated a better package then I had at my previous job. Thank you for writing this book. My new bible!

My son has always loved to cook and make his own concoctions (pickles, yoghurt and raw red peppers for a snack!). This is a great book to use with kids. Other suggestions are CLUELESS IN THE KITCHEN, great for teens. And for a fun look at Fannnie Farmer, who was so influential in American cooking, try FANNIE IN THE KITCHEN, a charming picture book about a young girl who learns to cook with Fannie Farmer. Delicious illustrations!

As I looked through many children's cookbooks, this is the only one that gives you a curriculum on where to start. Giving you basic recipes Children will need for their entire life. Having 4 Children of ages between 8-10, we found the recipes very clear, simple to make, and to the taste buds of young people. After one week of classes, the children had developed good habits and had a good understanding of basic cookery.

I really enjoyed this book. I have purchased copies to share with family and friends. I enjoyed the relationships that took place between the men and women. This book contained no sex, so my 13 year old daughter could read this book. I can't give enough praise to the authors of this book but, I will read this book every Christmas and it will remain on my shelf as one of my favorites.

I really enjoyed every one of the stories in this collection. I kept reading and re-reading "The Gift" by Emily Bradshaw. Another pregnant woman in a blizzard, but this time our heroine can't remember who she is or where she's from (and it's better off forgotten, anyway). But she changes the lives of the father and son who find her and she and her daughter charm their ways into a whole new life. I just loved it! "A Husband for Holly" by Jodi Thomas was enchanting! And Raine Cantrell's "A Time for Giving" was also a delight I read more than once.

I was a bit skeptical at first with this book but once I started it I could not put it down. It has such a strong story and Emily's personal journey to maintain her own faith while of adopting that of her husband is truly mesmerizing. Beautiful story. Powerful Dialogue. A must read.

"Love Conquers All" even the unbelieveable differences of marriage of two opposite cultures. All the believable problems do result between the American woman and the Moroccan man - she with naivete and he with sophistication. This unraveling occurs in the words of Emily's Diaries ending in the unbelievable when Emily in her estranged position of a round bolt in a square hole concludes that she has become accustomed to living in this different land and has also so desperately fallen in love with her Moroccan.

this was a wonderful novel,and if u have any interest in imperial russia you will be very interested in this book.

I adored this book! Emily is the last book in the Kirov saga, after Anna and Fleur, and in my opinion, the best of the trilogy. It takes place in the declining years of Imperial Russia, and the Revolution. If you liked Anna and Fleur, you'll love Emily!

THE EMILY DICKINSON HANDBOOK : Edited by Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbuchle, and Cristanne Miller. 480 pp. Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. ISBN 1-55849-169-4 (hbk.)

For anyone who is seriously interested in Emily Dickinson, this is a marvelous book that provides up-to-date information about her life and works, her letters and manuscripts, the cultural climate of her age, her reception and influence, and what is going on in current Dickinson scholarship.

The book's 22 essays have been distributed in eight sections : Introduction; Biography; Historical Context; The Manuscripts; The Letters; Dickinson's Poetics; Reception and Influence; New Directions in Dickinson Scholarship.

Although I've read many critical collections, several of which were devoted exclusively to Dickinson, I can't remember ever having been so impressed. Usually an anthology will hold one or two outstanding contributions, with the rest being humdrum and of little real interest, but here pretty well all of them are outstanding, and I found only one that struck me as being both pretentious and obscure.

I was especially impressed by Robert Weisbuch's brilliant 'Prisming Dickinson, or Gathering Paradise by Letting Go,' by Josef Raab's 'The Metapoetic Element in Dickinson,' by Martha Nell Smith's 'Dickinson's Manuscripts,' by Paul Crumbley's 'Dickinson's Dialogic Voice,' by Roland Hagenbuchle's 'Dickinson and Literary Theory,' and in fact by many others. So much so that this seems to me the single most valuable book on Dickinson that I've ever seen, and the one from which I've learned most and continue to learn. It really is that good.

The book is bound in a full strong cloth, stitched, beautifully printed on excellent strong smooth ivory-tinted paper, has clearly been designed to withstand the heavy use it will be getting, and is excellent value for money. No serious student of Emily Dickinson should be without it. Weisbuch's essay, serving as it does to provide one with a whole new way of understanding ED, is pretty well worth the price of the book itself.

So don't pass this one up! It's a gem!

If you are new to Dickinson studies, or if you simply want to read the most current thinking about the poems, The Emily Dickinson Handbook is a must. It contains essays on subjects ranging from the historical context of the poems to the poet's metapoetic sensibility. This text is also a wonderful introduction to the writings of the finest Dickinson scholars extant. Richard Sewall, Paul Crumbley, Christanne Miller, Sharon Cameron, Martha Nell Smith, and many other great thinkers offer the reader a glimpse into the realm of magic and poetry. If you love Emily Dickinson, do yourself a favor -- read this book.

EMILY DICKINSON SELECTED LETTERS. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. 364 pp. Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971. SBN674-25060-5 (hbk).

Emily Dickinson was a great letter writer, in all senses of the word. In fact one gets the impression that she actually preferred writing to people, than meeting and conversing with them, and for her the arrival of a letter was a great event. A letter was something she looked forward to with keen anticipation, and which she savored to the full whenever one arrived.

The present selection of letters represents only a small proportion of the letters Emily Dickinson actually wrote. She was an inveterate letter-writer, had many correspondents, and wrote thousands of letters. And people in those days collected letters just as today.

Unfortunately it was the custom, whenever anyone died, to make a bonfire of all of their correspondence, probably because of its personal and confidential nature. In this way thousands of pages of Emily Dickinson's writings have been lost to posterity, and we would know much more aboute the details of her day-to-day life, and be able to date her poems more accurately, if it hadn't been for this tragic loss.

Just how great the loss is may be gaged by taking a look at the way Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith have treated her letters in 'Open Me Carefully : Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson' (1998). Whereas Thomas Johnson prints all of ED's letters as straight prose, which of course leads us to read them as straight prose, Hart-Smith give us their particular letters as they actually appear in the original draft - not as continous lines of prose but as very short lines with numerous line breaks - in other words, as poetry.

It would seem that at least some of ED's 'letters' are not so much letters as 'letter-poems,' and when read as poems produce a remarkable range of effects that are lost when all line breaks are removed and the 'letter' is regularized as straight prose. The loss of her letters now begins to look much more serious, for there seems to be a growing feeling among readers that her letters were every bit as great an artistic achievement as her poems.

Given this, the present book becomes something that should interest all serious students of ED, although before reading it they might (if they haven't already) take at look at the Hart-Smith, and keep it in mind while reading the Johnson. One wonders how much poetry may be lurking unrecognized in the regularized lines of 'Emily Dickinson's Selected Letters.'

...

If you are, like me, an Emily Dickinson's great admirer you will be genuinely drawn into this book. Emily Dickinson has bewitched and perplexed everyone with her extremely profound poetry disguised in apparent simplicity. However, in her book of letters we uncover the woman (and not the author) behind her work, whose main assets were acute sensitivity and lovingness. This collection, unlike other books of the genre, such as Elizabeth Bishop's One Art or Keats's book of letters, do not reveal much of her poetry, as her mental struggle with the work, her intentions, or choice of words. Even so, the reader is allowed into her family relationships, into her care and love for her few friends, and above all into her deep-set feeling of solitude. Besides, throughout her letters she discloses her main existential concerns, which are inevitably reflected in her poems. This book makes it possible to discover the books she read and the ones that offered her the greatest pleasure. As the collection includes from her juvenile writings to her latest letters when already living in social "exile," they form a most engrossing reading, with the characteristics of an autobiography, without the intention by the author to write one. In her very words, "my letter as a bee, goes laden."

I loved this book very much. I really felt like I was standing there next to emily and Blount. How the author discribes Blount, he stole my heart.

Emily MacKenzie lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, in 1858, and helps run her family's inn. Lucy, Emily's best friend and adopted sister, is a free black who falls in love with the slave of a Southern family staying a the inn. Emily is in love with the family's son, Blount. Will Emily do what is right or sacrafice her beliefs for love?