I bought this book many years ago when I first discovered I had diabetes. It has been a god send. I use it as my bible. You forget from time to time and it is the best reference book I know of. In fact my daughter just became aware that she also has this disease and I purchased her a copy of this book. She agrees with me. It has helped her as well.

Diabetes Mellitus: A Practical Handbook is an excellent book. I would highly recommend it for newly diagnosed diabetes patients as well as diabetics who are "old timers" at this disease. The food exchange lists are simply fantastic as they are divided into "lean meat" with serving portions, "medium fat exchange", and "high-fat meat" with serving portion sizes. The vegetable choices, fruit choices, bread/starch choices. All of this makes life a little more easier when you are suddenly faced with a new way of eating. The sample meal plans are wonderful too. This book should be on the reference list of all physicians who have or will have diabetic patients. The book is written in a clear and easy format and it is simple to understand. I would also recommend it for the younger adolescent diabetic.

This book has easy to read tables and lists of blood sugar levels and information about foods that diabetics can eat, and how they affect sugar levels. I definately recommend this book to others with diabetes and/or diabetic family members.

Beth's Story is about a young girl named Beth March. When Beth and her sisters find out that there Marmee and Father are going to New York for business, but when the four March sisters find out that one of them can go to New York, Amy is the youngest and says that she sould go, for she will not get to go to New York as Marmee said, she would like to go now. But then the troble starts, Jo says that Beth sould go and so does Meg, Amy was not so willing to let Beth have her vote, but Beth went to New York and there she meat Mr. Lincoln, they had a very nice little chat, and when Beth got home and back to school, she was asked to tell the class about her vist to New York. She let her meeting with Mr. Lincoln slip, and so Amy was left out of everything. The whole class did not belive the simple old Beth March had met Mr. Lincoln. The next night and for the whole week Amy would not talk to Beth. I will not give away the ending so I must stop here. This is a very good book, and I hope you will read it.

This book review is by: Lindsay Tanguay

This book is simply wonderful and the best story in the "Portraits of Little Women" series. I couldn't put this book down and read it in four hours! Beth's Story is very well written and filled with emotion and fun. I could understand and relate to it because once I was in a situation like Beth's. A must read!

This is a cool new series about the Little Women when they are 10 years old. This one is about Beth and her trip to New York City where she meets Abraham Lincoln. The other books were cool, too. I can't wait for the new ones, MEG MAKES A FRIEND and BETH MAKES A FRIEND.

For the Java generalist who is serious about knowing the details of the language, I'd say there are three books that stand out from the crowd: to learn Java, read The Java Programming Language, by Gosling, et al; to thoroughly understand every nuance of the lanaguage, read The Java Language Specification, available at the Java website or in printed form; and while you're somewhere between learning and mastering the language, read Java Rules.

Java Rules methodically steps you through every aspect of the core language, referring to the specification here, a comment from Bloch or some other Java luminary there. If you're looking for an introdution to Java, this book is not for you. If you've been writing Java code for awhile and ask questions like, "I wonder how the floating point types *really* work?", then this book is absolutely for you.

In addition to the core language and a few fundamental types like String and Date, the author does go into a good deal of detail when discussing the collections framework, and his treatment of the subject is as good as any I've seen.

I hope this book catches on, it certainly deserves to.

The author has taken the Java Language Specification and other sources and organized, expanded on, and refined them in a such a way that it becomes a much easier task for any Java programmer to learn about all the nitty gritty details of Java. This is without a doubt the best book I've seen on explaining the intricacies of Java. It is obvious that the author has spent a great deal of time and effort to produce a book as well written this one. Highly recommended to anyone seriously interested in learning Java at a deeper level.

Great book! The level of detail is fantastic. The only complaint I have is the scope. The cover mentions other "volumes" but there is nothing about their availability either in the book or on the Addison-Wesley site.

As always, this collection of Dunn's is enlightening and rewarding. He's our best living American poet...

Local Visitations is a selection of free-verse poetry by Pulitzer prize-winner Stephen Dunn. Elegant and brief, these poems study the foibles of heroes who are only human. The Animals of America: The animals have come down from the hills/and through the forests and across the prairies./They are American animals, and carry with them/a history of their slaughter. There's not one/who doesn't sleep with an eye open.//Our of necessity the small have banded/with the large, the large with the large/of different species. When dark comes/they form an enormous circle.//It's all, after years of night-whispers/and long-range cries, coming together.//To make a new world the American animals/know there must be sacrifices. Every evening/a prayer is said for the spies who've volunteered/to be petted in the houses of the enemy./"They are savages," one reported,/"Let no one be fooled by their capacity for loving."

Opening with a playful and vivid poem, "Bowl Of Fruit" that, as always with Stephen Dunn, weaves its way confidently from bananas and oranges to yet another poignant and sincere statement on desire, Dunn's 12th book of poems revises familiar themes with an eye more towards celebration than despair.

Dunn hints of a Blake gone fiendish in lines such as "But surely by now you've come to realize/there is no worm, only this bowl of fruit/made of words, only these seductions." For a second, at least, the famed "invisible worm" of Blake's "The Sick Rose" is kept at bay in favor of the world's fleeting but "seductive" pleasures; a rather drastic change of tone from the almost ceaseless morbidity that characterized Dunn's previous volume, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Different Hours.

However, Dunn is hardly about to recant much of his past 11 collections of warnings in verse against the illusion of happiness, as in the wickedly enjambed poem, "Circular": "a belief in happiness bred/despair, though despair could be assuaged/by belief, which required faith . . . and best to have music/to sweeten a sadness, underscore joy."

Despite Dunn's urge towards life's morose truths, though, images of a modern-day Sisyphus daring a smile in the midst of his punishment, "a smile so inward it cannot be seen," and notions such as "at the bottom of depression, says James Hollis/is some meaningful task waiting to be found" suggest that Local Visitations is a kind of reconciliation with the harrowing blues of Different Hours.

If Different Hours advised against desire's inevitably painful temptations, many poems in Local Visitations transcend caution and despair in favor of delight and wonder. "The problem is how to look intelligent/with our mouths agape/how to be delighted, not stupefied/when the caterpillar shrugs and becomes a butterfly," Dunn avers in "Knowledge." If life's grander pleasures fail us, perhaps we might turn, instead, to its smaller joys. If the human being is doomed to fallibility, perhaps we might learn "how to love amid the encroachments," as Dunn suggests in his uniquely poignant plainspokenness.

But if, after so many books of thwarted longing, Dunn's observations on "how boring sorrows are" is not enough of a refreshment to his seasoned readers, then the playful, imaginative and engaging section of poems in which he escorts a cadre of famous authors through the landscape of his Native New Jersey serves as a remarkable new dimension to Dunn's distinctive and persistent voice.

"Because the famous usually have little to say/to each other after the first paeans of praise," Dunn explains, "the poet thought that for their own sakes/he'd have them live in separate towns." Pivoting off of this introductory poem, Dunn leaps into a succession of poems with titles such as "Chekhov in Port Republic," "Charlotte Bronte in Leeds Point," "George Eliot in Beach Haven," and "Twain in Atlantic City."

With his imagination tuned to a fever pitch, these particular poems read like short stories in verse, brimful of ideas, wit and confidence, guaranteeing the well-versed reader's pleasure. "Occasionally the weak survive/because the god that doesn't exist/wants to give us something to misinterpret/That's what Crane was thinking as he washed up on Longport Beach," Dunn narrates in "Stephen Crane in Longport."

While Dunn's playfulness here is more indicative of the work of Billy Collins or Deborah Garrison, still his voice maintains its gravity and cunning as he delves beneath the hearts of his subjects, revealing the alienation that burdened the young, brilliant Stephen Crane: "It's pointless, Crane wanted to say/wherever you're all going/but he knew they'd think he was lying/or maybe not even hear him."

Though a familiar tinge of helplessness enervates the book's tendency towards an awareness of the world's smaller, more manageable delights, it does not overwhelm or sour Dunn's attempt to emerge from the smolder and ruin of Different Hours. Local Visitations is likely one of Dunn's boldest and brightest books, suggesting that the resignation pervading Different Hours is only a temporary waiting room for those whose eyes are fixed on that "meaningful task waiting to be found."

I also read this book in Middle School, and it stuck with me. My town library also had the book, and I have read it probably 25 times. I have since moved, and was surprised to see that my big city doesn't have the book! I have told my children this story so many times, and they desperately wish to read it. The author has written a wonderfully detailed description of the sounds of Vietnam and the small boy nursing a soldier back to health. I tell my kids I will make them monkey broth when the are sick. It will teach the reader something new, and touch their heart with it's pure devotion.

In the early seventies I found this book on the shelf at my elementary school. I was intrigued by the cover and therefore read the book. Twenty five some years later, I still remember this book as if I just read it yesterday.

John, our neighbor,returned from Vietnam in 1972. In my 12 year old mind, John seemed very strange, quiet and always nervous since returning. Reading this book helped me, as a child, and to this day, understand some of the emotional stress the "troops" went through. A very easy to read book for "Vietnam beginners" who want to learn the emotional and physical horror of this war.

I honestly believe this book helped gear my mind towards a military career. It was very instrumental in my desire to assist the soldiers who fought in Vietnam. I have had the fortune of participating in two successful investigative and recovery missions of MIA's, one to Vietnam (1997) and one LAOS (1999).

Please read if possible!!!!!

I first read The Man in the Box when I was in sixth grade, and read it again many times while in elementary school. It is a very tender story about a Vietnamese boy who comes to the rescue of an abused Green Beret who is being tortured in a box just large enough to hold him. The young boy's father was killed in a similar manner by the Viet Cong, and he was compelled by his father's spirit to help the American, though it would cost him everything he had. Very heartbreaking story of compassion and friendship between a young boy and the tortured man who asks him if he would like to go to America and become his son. Reading this book brought me face to face with the horror of Vietnam for the first time.

I'm so glad I can get this book over Amazon.Com. I never bought this book, but I have read it cover-to-cover many times in bookstores. I'm was too law-abiding to steal it, and I'd be embarrassed to admit I actually bought the thing.

Anyway, the book went out of print and I never saw it again and I rued the fact I never bought it. But joy! Here it is on Amazon.Com! I'm not letting it get away this time. I'll tell anyone who asks I shoplifted it.

This book totally had my number, it's very funny to see how she had pegged my lifestyle; or how I conformed to the book before reading it. I especially enjoyed "The Goatee through History"

I remember when Sarah Dunn was hanging out in slacker coffee shops in Philly, like the Last Drop, writing this book. Now's she's moved on up to NYC and is writing for Michael J. Fox's Spin City TV show. Not a bad career move. But Sarah, be assured, the slackers are still slacking in your old haunts. This book, with its chaotic layout and graphics, its entertaining prose, and nail-on-the-head insights is a must for Generation X navel-gazers. My kid sister and I bookend this group (I'm 30, she's 20) and Sarah's book made for a great gift for the l'il shrimp. Every generation needs a field guide; Sarah's is ours.

I think the 'Official Slacker Handbook' is a great expression of today's generation by Sarah Dunn.Lots of humor in it & an idea of the lifestyle of today's generation;mostly in their twenties or even teens.I personally recommend that EVERY library stocks at least one copy of 'The Official Slacker Handbook'.It's one book you either love,hate or as the author,Sarah puts it,love to hate.

This will make you laugh, cry, and your spine tingle!! Isn't that what poetry is supposed to do? Isn't that what ALL art should do? "Judith With the Head of Holofernes" is worth the price of this slim but power-packed volume. Read that poem and you'll know why this young poet won the same prize as Oscar Wilde.

This first collection is disarming because it does not particularly mean to be. It never affects stylistic pretensions, cutesy avant-garde tricks, or the hip irony of many young intellectuals' of our generation's first works. He's an actor and writes about his experiences with grace and honesty that belie the fact that this is a first volume - they seem to come out of someone wiser than his 27 years! He writes using traditional forms, using their constraints in liberating ways, writing with depth about the 'speeding apart of things'... Antony Dunn is extremely talented but no dilettante - this fellow polymath gives his work a hearty recommendation!

I admit firstly that he's my brother, and OK I get a few name checks along the way in this book, but that aside there still remains the unflinching fact that this is powerful transcendent stuff.

As we grew up I mocked him unmercilessly for his arty nature, poetry being the quickest way for any kid to make a laughing stock of himself, but he's the first to admit that his early stuff was pants.

I hate most poetry - I find most of it trite, self-regarding, obvious or just plain camp. But the interest here is in the way images are taken and are given meaning way beyond what they would be in the hands of an ordinary poet. I have as much difficulty as the OUP cover writers obviously did in trying to sum up this fine art, but I can say simply that this collection is filled with a youth and wonder that is fiery and all-embracing in its zest and passion, but with an assured competence and a control and a sensitivity to put every word in its place and to never use two words where one will do.

I think you should buy it, and I think you should keep an eye out for the next one too

I read about 30 books a year and consider "Pink Cadillac" one of the two or three best novels (of any genre) that I've read in the last half-decade.

Author Dunn cuts through the sickeningly-sweet nostalgia to which rock's first decade has been reduced, and paints a warts-and-all portrait of Eisenhower-era Memphis: the racism and segregation, the subjugation of women, the predatory practices of the music business, the even more predatory practices of the ruling class, and--on the positive side--the energy and exuberance that made early rock 'n' roll and those who created it something truly special.

Dunn also does an excellent job of capturing the music historian's obsessive/compulsive thinking and behavior--a frame of mind that has motivated people such as I to spend our lives researching and writing scholarly treatises on what the people who created the music often disdainfully refer to as "those old things."

"Pink Cadillac" grabbed me from its opening paragraph and still hasn't let me go, some 24 hours after I finished it. Even if you don't like '50s rock 'n' roll, it won't keep you from enjoying this book. And for we who love the music of that period, Dunn's novel serves both as a triumph and as a sad reminder that good novels about rock 'n' roll have been few and far between.

Robert Dunn has given us a bittersweet story that perfectly captures a time when rhythm and blues was giving birth to rock and roll. A modern day record collector/entrepreneur, grief-sticken by his wife's sudden death, is on a healing quest to find a legendary single. He is convinced that "Pink Cadillac" is the greatest song never heard, a disc that may or may not have been recorded by a rag tag group of musical pioneers in the mid-fifties. Through flashback, the reader discovers the secret of the song, and why its origins have been kept hidden nearly half a century. The colorful characters that populate the story are in and of themselves worth the ride. Thomas "Bearcat" Jackson is a particularly vital and heartbreaking character as penned by Dunn. Bearcat is a brilliant self-taught bluesman and record man, imprisoned and haunted by the Jim Crow era into which he was born. Much to the dismay of his long time musical partners, Bearcat hooks up with two young white kids, creating a new sort of sound with their "Pink Cadillac." But was this magical tune ever actually put to wax? And what dreadful price did Bearcat and his friends pay for daring to make such music together? With "guest stars" such as Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips and Elvis himself (who provided the Cadillac the song is named for), this is a rollicking ride that will be a great read for novices and diehard music fans alike.

Pink Cadillac's author, Robert Dunn, knows the stuff of Memphis '55/56 -- the days of blues descending and rock rising, the roadhouses, radio stations, deejays, unscrupulous record label owners and the power of the mojo. He's taken that knowledge and transformed it into a riveting novel. I found myself reading late into the night, needing to know how Thomas 'Bearcat' Jackson's record producing career had been destroyed -- why blues singer Sonesta Clarke loved, but couldn't live with Bearcat -- if Dell Dellaplane's powerful father would smash his son's dreams by bringing down Bearcat's roadhouse -- if Daisy Holliday would ever come to her senses, forsake lounge singing in Buffalo, NY and return to Memphis. Most of all, I couldn't put the book down until the truth of the record -- Pink Cadillac -- was revealed. Had it actually ever been recorded? If so, why did it live in legend alone? Did it hold the answer to a mystery that might've been best left unsolved? Buy this book. Once you begin reading, you won't want to put it down.

The wisdom of this teacher comes from Being in That space, not from books, not from learning, not from hearsay. As a result, this collection of "answers" can pierce us as no other. It takes us right to That Place. So much so, that I dare you to try to read more than 4 pages at one sitting. If you want to get tossed into your soul, read this book.

before settling down on his meditation pillow, sri nisargadatta majaraj was a cigarette salesman.

This book comes as the first of three books edited by Jean Dunn. The next are two books, Prior to Consciousness, and Consciousness and the Absolute. All three books are set up as interviews between seekers from all over the world asking questions to Nisargadatta about issues relating to the nature of being. In Nisargadatta's clear and simple language he strips away all false notions and lays before the questioner the Real, ever present, and without attribute, nature of the Self. It is a rare experience to read the conversations of a fully awakened individual, and soak up the wisdom that is present on every page and imbued in every sentence. A finer book on the simple truth that every one IS, that which they are seeking is extremely hard to come by. His words are tremendously powerful, You Are the Absolute, beyond time and space and without attributes. The wisdom within this book will plant a seed that will sprout and bring with it the nature of what you are, beyond all notions or conception.

I loved this book. Just as I loved all the others in its series. I hope there will be more! It was incredibly funny but also made you think. I'm a Christain, and I could relate to a lot of what goes on in this book.

This series, by far, the funniest Christian fiction books currently on the market. They are told from the perspective of the average struggle-by-struggle Christian who is just in the game of survival, but to still have some fun. Roy Maynard has some definite journalistic talent, but I only wish I could either contact him by e-mail, or encourage him to keep writing. All of my friends that I've lent these books to have responded very positively. They are very easy to read, and keep the reader turning pages. I laughed throughout the entire book, not just because I'm also a Christian journalist, but because I believe humor needs to be intertwined more in fiction