The Velvet Horn is one of those rare unknown novels that lies in the dust of recent antiquity ignored by all except those who have to read it in class at the University of the South. The Horn is Lytle's master work. One feels reading it, that all the author's work and talent gelled in this book.
Like Faulkner, and other contemporaries, Lytle strives to embody a rural voice and language from a bygone period in this story, but unlike Faulkner, he is not willfully obtuse. While the language is dense and extremely poetic, one finds it is also carefully economic. Lytle doesn't waste anything. The construction of this book is immaculate.
The story centers around a boy becoming a man and grappling with his family history and the apparent suicide of his father. All of this is set in the years just following the defeat of the south in the civil war in a remote reigon of Tennessee.
While the story is ,on one hand, classically southern gothic, deeper themes of christ like sacrifice and redemption give the novel powerful scope and feeling. This remains one of a few books that I keep returning to because some pages and passages are so rich as to astonish and they continue to open up vistas that only literature can bring.

The story of a family with dark secrets. I read the book several years ago and I will always remember it as one of the best books I ever read. If Oprah had had her book club in the late 1980's, she would have selected it. I sorry I can't give specifics on the book since my copy is still being shared with friends

After using many other products to improve my vocabulary, I have found nothing more efficient or valuable than Verbal Power. It teaches you all the root words so that if you are encountered by words you've never seen, you can still figure out the meaning of the words. Unlike many other methods, Verbal Power gives you something to hang on to--the root words. The words I have learned from other systems are easy to forget because there is nothing hang on to. Verbal power has been extremely helpful preparing for the SATs and I'd recommend to anyone.

My son needed to improve his vocabulary, and was lucky enough to be shown this book by a school friend. We were impressed by the book's format, and the way in which words are grouped based on their roots. My son found this method to be of much greater benefit than the usual unrelated lists of words common in other SAT preparation books.

+'s This is an excellent book for the one that has an inkling
of what VHDL is about.
There is a lot of detail of language definition and how the
language came about.
This author is very good at explaining a point.

-'s There is very little in this reference concerning non-
synthesisable code AND why can't folks index books? I would
really like to buy a book that I didn't have to re-read to
revisit a particular detail, L

I am an EE but spent most of my career programming in C. This book is an excellent tutorial, beginning with the basics and gradually covering the more complex aspects of VHDL. It clearly explains the difference between sequential (traditional) programming and concurrent programming--both are used in VHDL. It also clearly defines the differences between the modelling stage (not covered in detail) and the design stage (Register Transfer Level - which is covered in great detail). Finally, he explains how to set up a test bench. Within 2 months of reading this book, other engineers were coming to me for advice. I literally wore out the binding!

A.J. Downing set the style for country suburban Victorian Cottages and gardens along the Hudson River in the 1830's and 1840's. All of his "cottages" featured fireplaces and architecturally important chimneys, usually with decorative chimney tops. Borrowing from painting and fine arts, Downing had definite opinions about color and appropriate use of materials. Provocative and interesting reading this book of cottage and garden plans and sketches is well worth reading. He set a standard for early Victorian architecture. - Jim Buckley

"Victorian Cottage Residences" is a comprehensive book of twenty-something floor plans, mostly of Victorian houses (obviously) both large and small. For those into landscaping as well, this book is doubly wonderful; otherwise the advice on the apple trees is probably better skipped. However, for anyone who's even remotely interested in old homes or houses in general, this is a fantastic book to check out.

As a professional designer and instructor, I have to learn new applications all the time. These training CDs are the very best way to get up to production speed quickly. The QuickTime Movie tutorials make it easy to go back and review any lesson and skip around to the topics that interest me most. The Painter CD is a real winner - I highly recommend it!

Awesome! - Three thumbs up. I am an Adobe instructor and digital graphics professional. This CD is the easiest way to learn the program. It is clear, evenly paced and leaves nothing out. Unlike training videos, the CD is interactive giving you total access to any feature of the program you need to learn quickly. Each lesson is a short movie that can be stopped and started so you can go back and forth to review. You can also have the lesson AND the program open simultaneously, allowing you to switch back and forth to practice. It is the best training source there is. I require all my students to buy the CD as their text for the semester. If you really want to learn the program quickly and efficiently; this is the only choice.

This ia a truly masterful work on a person British Columbians recently selected as their person of the century.

Mitchell has done a top notch job in recounting the life and times of W.A.C., using the medium of a biography to relate the growth and development of a region. This is even more remarkable given the disfavour that biographies of white, male politicians have fallen into in the past few decades as a historical means of recounting the past.

Mitchell relies heavily on personal interviews he conducted with Bennett in the last years of his life, along with those of the many individuals involved with this first Socred regime. The only fault I can personally site with this book is that it might be too sympathetic, a point Mitchell even alludes too!

There is not much that this book misses out on. It starts literally at the beginning with W.A.C.'s start in New Brunswick, the move to Alberta and the starting of the first hradware strore, and then the final move to the Okanagan where Bennett was to become involved in politics, leading a rather obscure existence (with a few failures along the way) before he finally bolted from the coalition government to start Social Credit in the early 1950s - a move which was decidely different than the grassroots movement of Social Credit in Alberta. Social Credit in B.C. would always be a top-down movement.

Regardless, this is an excellent piece of work and does much to shed some light on the political history of a province whose historiography has been woefully inadaquete in this area.

With the ascention of the technocrat Bill Bennett to the premier's office, one may indeed wonder if the age of populism in B.C. and across Canada is over. David Mitchell provides a masterful picture of one of Canada's great politicans; a man in the exclusive company of past politicans like Bill Aberhart, Diefenbaker, Mitch Hepburn, and Joey Smallwood. The difference between Bennett and these others is the amount of success in their political careers. Mitchell also guides readers through the time of expansion, "The Rise of BC," accomplishments that were largly due to the efforts of it's premier. Mitchell states that when Bennett finally passed away in 1978, BC was, for the first time in a quarter of a century, on it's own. He's right. BC has always lacked strong premiers to lead the province since Bennett. The book is a beautiful journey through Bennett's life, his times, and the province he moulded in his image. Anyone wishing to understand BC politics and BC in general need to first understand the man who defined both, and Mitchell does an exceptionally good job of doing so.

My GrandAunt Betty owns and operates a "Used-Book Store" and she came accross this little beauty of a book. She apparently thought that it looked sweet and inspirational(she didn't read the inside). Anyway, she gave it to my cousin Kim(musician/singer) as a present a few months ago for her birthday and sure as the probability of a hangover after drinking tequila all night, my cousin immediately looked for the dose of reality that corresponds with her birthday. It said, "your over thirty and you will probably never be a rockstar!" Needless to say Kim now hates the bastards who wrote the book but she still thinks they're funny.

This Book brings so much laughter to everyone I share it with...cynical, clever and oh so painfully true..there daily "meditations" will have you in stitches!!

If you're a medical person who has ever spent much time working in a hospital (and you still have a soul), you will appreciate this book. You will laugh, you will cry...you will think about the day-to-day routine in a new light again. The lyrical imagery is amazing. Steinmetz had somehow combined the outsider/insider viewpoint of hospital life, in a way that helps combat burnout and cynacism. I'm an ER doc with 20+ years of experience.

I really enjoyed Andrew Steinmetz's book, Wardlife. I usually shy away from books dealing with the medical field because, being in medical school, the majority of my day is spent in the hospital, and I like to use my free time to read about things other than "work." But, when I was home on Christmas break, I found my mother reading it, and I picked it up.

Wardlife is a compilation of events Mr. Steinmetz experienced while working as a unit coordinator in a hospital. Rich with description, the writing style varies from poetry, to meditation, to dialoque, but all accurately portray the feelings and thoughts that travel through your mind when you're in the hospital. His dark humor when writing of feelings of happiness, of despair, of not knowing how to handle situations, and of frustrations with the system permeate the text, and made me feel at times he was writing about where I work.

But, what made this book great to me was its inclusion of events that happen in the hospital outside the focus of illness, the things that make the hospital its own little world. Including things like take-out delivery men, interactions between medical and non-medical staff, and the families that "move-in", bringing in and adapting their everyday routines to the hospital, accurately describe what it is like to "live" in the hospital and become a piece of its world.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the hospital world, and how it affects the people that work there.

Just what we needed. Perfect for teaching children.

A good dictionary will enable you to understand a word without having to look up alot of other ones in the process. This is a good dictionary for all ages.

I'm the author of a novel about a Jewish mother whose lesbian daughter wants a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony, so when I came on this true life account of a gay Jewish wedding, I had to read it. I was drawn to it also because I have a gay child myself, and am active in Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), an organization which offers support, education and advocacy for equal rights. I've seen even the most "accepting" parents draw back in dismay when their son or daughter desired a same-sex wedding ceremony.

As the book description notes, this story of one such wedding is told from four different viewpoints, the two halves of the gay couple, Douglas Wythe and Andrew Merling, and Andrew's parents, Roslyn and Sheldon Merling. Though the four viewpoints are presented as a dialog, alternating with one another, the narrative is blended into a coherent whole by a skilled editorial hand.

The Merlings consider themselves accepting of their gay children. (Andrew's older brother is also gay.) Roslyn, a social worker, helped found a synagogue-affiliated support group for parents of gays and lesbians. And Sheldon states over and over that he has no objection to a small, private "commitment ceremony" between Andrew and Doug. It's the vision of a big public affair that takes him aback. That, and the fact that both Doug and Andrew want to be married under a chuppah (canopy), an essential part of all Jewish weddings, and follow the other traditions that mark a Jewish wedding ceremony. Most of all, Sheldon adds, he wants to avoid having whatever ceremony is held turn into a political statement.

By the day of the wedding, it is clear to the other three, if not to Sheldon himself, that this is impossible. Like any other wedding, a wedding between a same-sex couple is a personal affirmation of love and commitment. But dignifying same-sex ceremonies with the term wedding, as opposed to commitment ceremony or holy union, seems upsetting to both homophobes and to those who believe themselves to be free of prejudice. This account by Doug, Andrew and Andrew's parents is both honest and moving as they describe both the conflicts that arise between them and their own internal struggles with the vestiges of homophobia and of concern with their wider community's reaction. Nor are these limited to the parents, as both young men describe their own struggles with self-acceptance. (As an example of the latter, the two decide against dancing with each other in a "first dance" at their wedding reception.)

With the aid of an understanding family therapist, both generations gain a greater understanding of the other's viewpoint. The parents overcome their initial shock to reach the point of walking their son down the aisle together (another Jewish tradition). It is this emotional journey that is the heart and strength of this book. So it's not giving anything away to say that yes, Andrew and Doug do have the blowout wedding of their dreams. Or to add that the somewhat scandalized congregation at their wedding gains a new appreciation both of their love for one another and of the rightness of their having a wedding to celebrate it. (As members of a close-knit Jewish community, Sheldon and Roslyn attended the weddings of the children of their many friends, and were obliged to return the favor with their own invitations to Andrew's ceremony.)

Toward the end of the book, Doug writes that when gay people are "not expending energy on hiding the fact, every moment is potentially political." This account underscores not only that fact, but the costs of being less than totally honest. One of the most poignant stories in the book for me was when Doug writes a letter to his parents, formally "coming out" to them. As he had brought Andrew home for several holiday dinners, he assumed that his parents understood that he was gay, without his ever having put it in words before. As it turns out, both his mother and father had separately made this assumption, but each, fearing the other could not bear to know it, had kept it to themselves, creating an unnecessary wall of silence in their marriage. It would seem (as PFLAG stresses in support groups) that honesty is not only the best cure for homophobia, but for strengthening family relationships as well.

I recommend this book wholeheartedly. About the only criticism I can make is that it would have been nice to have a few photos of the wedding, rather than just painting the elegant setting with words.

That's the ongoing question that confronts two of the authors of this fresh and insightful book as they progress through their plans to be married. The issue, of course, is that these same authors, Doug and Andrew, happen to be two gay men trying to pull off a wedding in a society that either doesn't recognize or simply doesn't know what to make of same-sex marriage. From the point they decide to become engaged, to the night of their wedding, Doug and Andrew find themselves constantly confronted by family and friends (including gay friends) who can't understand why they feel a need to have a wedding or what they are trying to prove by having one.

What makes this book such a good read is that it it is formatted as a dialogue between Doug, Andrew, and Andrew's conservative Jewish parents, Roslyn and Sheldon. The story is told from these four points of view, each often offering conflicting or significantly different interpretations of the same events leading up to Doug and Andrew's wedding. It is this approach that enables the book to be more than a simple advocacy of gay marriage -- by enabling the reader to see through the eyes of people on different sides of this issue, the book shows the many emotional and oftentimes humorous effects such a decision can have on a family. Ultimately, a compelling read that reinforces faith in the strength and love that one often finds in the best of families in the toughest of situations.