This book is very good if you like animal stories alot. You have to know alot about coyotes and there habitat though. It was the best book that I ever read.The book was about a boy who found some coyoyes that had no mother. The boy kept the pups and eventualy he had a zoo full of animals. I won't tell you the rest of the story! Bye!!!

An excellent book for all teachers and people who work with children. This book will be useful in the classroom. Excellent Christmas gift for young and old.

The Danish monk Saxo lived from about 1150 to after 1216. His erudition and command of Latin got him appointed as scribe to the archbishop of Lund (site of Copenhagen), during which time he wrote the sixteen books of the Gesta Danorum. This 'Deeds of the Danes' stands proudly beside Gregory's History of the Franks, the Venerable Bede's History of the English Church and Nation, and the other medieval histories of the European nations. Even more important, it stands beside the Eddas as a main source for scholars of Germanic mythology.

This two volume edition, books one through nine, is translated by Peter Fisher and edited by H. R. Ellis-Davidson, eminent scholar and Grand-Dame of Nordic Scholarship. A scholar's sorce book to be sure, one volume text, the other notes and bibliography, this translation is, unlike earlier translations, very readable.

That out of the way, who should buy this work and why?

Saxo was indeed a man of God, but in his breast throbbed the heart of the Germanic/Nordic warrior-aristocracy in its truest form. The modern reader senses that, on occasion, he may have forgotten both his vows and that he was working for the archbishop.

Book one begins in mythological pre-time with a legendary account of a King Dan, possibly of Greek (Danai) origin , who saved the Danes from the Emperor Augustus. Book nine ends with the life and times of the historical King Gorm III, shortly before Saxo's own time.

Dan's progeny, their retinues and adversaries, include the widest range of boldest heroes, most dastardly scoundrels, moralists, deviants, and about any other type imaginable. Perhaps the best known of these figures is the Amleth (book 3), who feigns madness in order to visit vengeance on the uncle who murdered his father and became his step-father. This material came to Shakespeare by way of a contemporary French author.

One of my personal favorites has to be Starkather, whom Saxo presents to us with some license, but in a most remarkable way.

Starkather, according to the somewhat garbled report, has been condemned by Thor to live three lifetimes, each separated by an act of treachery or betrayal. Books six and seven tell of the old hero during his last lifetime and his long overdue death. He comes on as a leftover from a previous, more heroic time, before the Danish royalty had succumbed to the decadent, courtly (French via 'Teuton') mannerisms that had swept over Saxo's Europe. "Frothi was succeeded by his son, Ingel ... (who)abandoned the patterns of his forbears and surrendered himself wholly to the baits of wanton extravagance. At variance with all that was good and upright, he grasped at vice instead of sound morality, severed the cords of restraint, neglected a sovereign's duties and became a vile slave to riotous living." Further, "(h)is idea of greatness was to collect fatteners of fowls, scullions, frying-pans, all kinds of factories for the palate and various connoisseurs in the art of roasting and spicing meats." A true warrior-king, we learn later, should be pleased to eat his rancid meat uncooked with his troops in the field. Ingel's main vice is, of course, that he hasn't avenged the death of his father.

We read about Starkather's agreeing to stand by a Prince Helgi, who has agreed to meet nine adversaries on the field the day after his wedding night. Starkather stands guard by the bridal chamber. At dawn he finds Helgi slumbering peacefully in the arms of his bride. Reluctant to awaken the prince, he rides out onto the snow-covered plain to meet the opponents. When the nine find him he is covered with snow up to his shoulder blades, apparently half naked because he had removed his cloak to pluck fleas. They ask him if he wants to take them on individually or all together. "Whenever a sorry pack of curs snarls at me ... I usually send them scampering off all together, not one by one." Spaghetti-western script writers, look and learn!

The old Starkather dispatches all nine, but not before he is wounded so severely that his innards are hanging out. A man on a cart stops to tend to the badly bloodied hero. When the latter learns that the man is a bailiff, "he was not content with rejecting him, but crushed him with abuse." Two more passersby stop, but are also rejected when our hero learns that the first has married a maidservant and is currently engaged in the process of buying her freedom. Be helped by one who has "accepted a slave's embrace"? The second, a slave herself, is sent "home (to) offer her teats to her squalling daughter, for he considered it utterly degrading to accept relief from a wretch of the lowest order."

Finally a farmer's son comes by in a wagon. His interview reveals that he has "a praiseworthy calling, in which folk sought their subsistence by a trade of honest labour and certainly realised no profit unless it were gained the sweat of their brows." How can you not love this guy?

Starkather's tirades are easily recognizable as Saxo's own scorn and derision, hurled at the courtly decadence of his contemporary Danish aristocracy.

This translation was first published in 1979 but has been unavailable in the American market for most of the past two decades. Buy this book and read it! We need more of these authentic histories.

These stories of young women and married matrons getting into a tight spot and often having to accept punishment and humiliation as well as an unexpected approach to their behinds, have humor as well as sexiness to recommend them. The mail order bride of an elderly headmaster has to accept a caning from his teen-aged son. A haughty businesswoman organising a birthday party for her son at a cinema is forced to strip in the next door auditorium. A mother-in-law is punished when a series of compromising photographs lands her in the woods and naked in the hands of her despised son-in-law. For the connoisseur of a girl being "forced" to not say no, and take a good deal of pleasure in her pain, these tales are consistently surprising as well as saucy.

The Seekers

I rate this book five stars. I liked this book because it kept me wanting to read it, it was very suspenseful. I also liked it because it was like a love story and I like love stories. This was a very unique book. Not many books have the same theme as The Seekers, but one book I know is Titanic, the Long Night. It was a love story and a journey to the New World, which then was called New York. This story was very different form others I have read. I like that, it means that it doesn't copy other themes and has a mind of it's own. IT has a plot whish will make you want to read it over and over again. It is not only fictional, but historical too. It talks about the hardships that the people on the journey have to the New World and what they had to face when they got there. I recommend this book to anyone who loves romantic and adventure stories. It will make you want t read it, not like those fake books that are not suspenseful. It's short but very adventurous. I had fun reading it. This book makes you think how committed you are to your love ones. The people in this book care about each other very much, for example Edward is so committed to his love one Rebecca, that he goes all the way to the New World just to be with her. But also there is men in the story who loves adventure, but also can be caring. This book should be read, I recommend it.

Ellis, a devout Roman Catholic herself, presents an outstanding essay on the modern Roman Catholic Church and its deviations from orthodoxy and sense. It is a gentle, loving but stern rebuke of modernism and relativism that has engulfed her church.

G.K. Chesterton said that "a...rational army would run away" and this book shows, better than any other that I have read, why it should and why, so often, it doesn't. In a field that includes Keegan's 'Face Of Battle' this is high praise.

Focusing on the experiences of the ordinary Western Allied soldier during the Second World War Ellis discusses the circumstances affecting the lives of the front line soldier from recruitment through training and combat to his eventual fate.

Ellis examines the detail of what was actually happening to the individual Tommy or GI, using many first hand accounts and an appropriate admixture of statistics, without ever becoming heavy going or gratuitously gory. Where there are blood and tears they are there because that is how it was. This approach enables a number of popular myths about the war to be examined in a clearer light. His comparison of the experiences of members of the rifle companies of an infantry battalion during the Second World War with his predecessor of 1914-18 is especially illuminating as is his analysis of what actually keeps soldiers fighting.

I found the book impossible to stop reading and was left with a feeling of great sadness, profound respect for individuals who kept going in circumstances that I personally would find overwhelming and a greater understanding of the mechanics of war that tend to sink below the magnification of many conventional military histories. If you have any interest in the subject matter at all, or possibly in the reaction of ordinary people to extraordinary circumstances, you should read 'The Sharp End'.

This book helps to shine a light on the murky world of dating. With compelling biblical principles and sometimes humorous stories, Ellis provides a practical guide to spiritual discernment. Particularly interesting to me(as a woman) was the male perspective that Ellis gives. The book is easy to read and addresses the subjects most pertinent to the topic, providing Scripture to back up the concepts. This would be a great book for a young ladies' Bible Study group, or for personal edification. You will no doubt recognize yourself and the men you know in the illustrations (I did)!

In "Silent Witnesses," Jacqueline Ellis shows the flip-side of the Depression. Working class lives, all too often been depicted in sentimental blacks and whites, are here given a full range of expression. Rage, resentment, and even revolution become part of the equation. Through clear and often entertaining language, Ellis shows how these "negative" impulses were purposefully squelched in official government representations of working class women. To suppress the threat, the government denied its existance. I don't think I'll ever be able to look at Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" the same again. This is the best kind of book -- one that makes you see the world differently after you read it.

The Silly Mind: Learning To Take Life "More Or Less" Seriously lucidly and humorously describes how we crate our own emotional disturbances -- and how we can deliberate and cogently undisturb ourselves. The Silly Mind will help the reader know how ideas are created, how emotional disturbances occur, how certain ideas create certain disturbed emotions, how to tell the difference between helpful and harmful ideas, how to use certain techniques to change disturbed feelings, how to act against these acquired harmful beliefs -- viewing oneself and the world with more tolerance and less rancor. The Silly Mind is a superbly presented and highly recommended contribution to any self-help, self-improvement reading list and reference collection.