I purchased this book having no idea what to expect and was more than pleasantly surprised. Mathew Thomas Baker writes eloquently, expressing every image and thought with just the right amount of detail. I would highly recommend reading this book and anxiously await any future publications from this extremely talented author.

Thank you Matt - what a wonderful book you have written. I too personally know Matt, and our common interest of reading is how we met. He is the member of a local book group that I attend. We were all blessed and honored to share in having Matt's book be our selection this past month...because it is not too often we get to probe the mind of the author behind the work.

We all had so many learning and interesting thoughts from the reading and sharing - and I encourage everyone to get this book and share with family and friends...

(And, as Philip had to learn that even with eyes we do not always see - and from Oliver the lessons may be hidden in the process of art - and for Silva the travels may not end in this lifetime)... may we each walk our paths to enrichment and sight.

This is a book I will always read and re-read and cherish...bless you Matt...and a kiss to Owen... Love, Marsha :)

I must begin this review with the disclaimer that the author is my dear friend, and I was prepared to love this book, in fact I have been waiting years for him to finish it. Disclaimer aside, I have read "The Art of Confession" through three times, and found it far exceeded my expectations. Mr. Baker is a consumate storyteller, and this story has all the elements - love, loss, sadness, friendship, mystery, surprise - a poignancy that brought me to tears each reading, and an ending exquisite in its tenderness and truth. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I am truly hoping for a sequel.

This was a wonderful book! It is a simple story about a little girl coping with the absence of her father during WWII. The secrets she learns about the world around her can help us all to appreciate life and its many blessings! The pictures make this the perfect read aloud book! I hope you enjoy this book as much as my class did!

Our family loved this book. The story is simple, but poignant. A young girl learns about the world during World War 2 while staying with her grandparents. The illustrations are delightful-catch grandma's face in the mirror when the kids get a scolding! Dad comes home at the end of the story, it has a sweet little ending to it. I give it 5 stars!

IThis book is about a 4 year old girl whose father goes goes off to fight in World War II. While he is gone, Janie's cousin teaches her a lesson about perception and how things appear small the farther away that they are. When Janie's father comes home 2 years later, she echoes this lesson in his ear when he iis holding his daughter and comments on how big she has gotten. She says she was small when he was far away, and now that he is close, she seems big. This is a heartwarming and touching book, and what I especially loved were the beautiful watercolor illustrations that reflect the setting and time period of the story. I highly recommend recommend this story for children of many ages.

This book was pretty good, but it wasn't what I expected. I've had a boyfriend so I guess maybe that's why, but this is great for a pre-teen who doesn't have much "boy expierence" It tells you straight out that that looks aren't the only thing that get you a boyfriend. That is very sound advice.

I liked this book because I had never had a boyfriend before, and it showed me how to snag a lover and not look like a fool while at it!

This book is about principles every young woman should at least KNOW about. I picked it up thinkin, "Ha Ha, another book telling girls that they need males to validate their existence." I opened it up and found a book dedicated to making girls feel great about themselves for who they are and NOT about NEEDING to have a boyfriend. There's too much in society today that says that girls need men to make them important. It's about time someone stood up for individuality and self-respect in young women. I am 18 and TIRED of having everyone tell me that boys and fashion are the most important things in a young girl's life. THANK YOU CAMY BAKER for making a difference in young minds and restoring my for hope an intelligent society.

As an editor at The New York Times, I have seen how even the best and smartest reporting benefits from careful organization and precise writing. This book shows how to do it, in terms that speak to young writers, veteran journalists or anyone who wants to communicate with authority and engage readers with lively prose driven by facts.

Newsthinking by Bob Baker is aimed at journalists, and certainly they will get more benefit out of it than they would from a
4 year college course. But even more important, the advice here is essential for EVERY type of writer, not just journalists.
Baker teaches us how to see things from the READER's viewpoint, how to hold their interest, how to make your material a "must-read". This shouldn't even be called a "textbook". It is the polar opposite: it's lively, fun, and totally unpretentious.If you have any aspirations of being any kind of writer, this book will give you the edge you need to succeed. It did for me.

A comment from a former Los Angeles Times writer who has had the benefit of Baker's insights firsthand. This is a unique book whose author is known to insiders as both a top writer and the staff member the Los Angeles Times selected to help their top writers get even better. Baker is an author who realizes that good journalism isn't as just about stylebooks and grammar and accuracy, but also about identifying the core of real stories and how to extract strands of fact, quotes, and style on deadline and weave them together fast. it's helpful for future purchasers to know that this isn't a teacherly book, but someone who backs his recommendations with a real life understanding of how newsrooms move. how many other journalism textbook writers have their own rock bands?

Asked to give my opinion on this book by a reader of these reviews, I obtained the book and "read" it. There really is very little to read....more magazine copy to titillate and keep the romp through these photos of contemporary pop icons rolling. Actually, once past the fact that this is not a serious message book or startle book or pretentiously arty book, this is a fun collection of stars having a campy hoot of a time. The photography isn't always that great, but the mood is. Definitely fluff category stuff, but fun at that!

Celebrities are often treated in photographs like gods and goddesses, beyond the pale and untouchable. The poses, postures, costumes, and compositions here are often just the opposite of what you would expect. As such, they reward your sense of humor and give you new dimensions of these personalities. The photographs are extremely well done in large sizes and are excellently reproduced. Top photographers like Mark Seliger, Isabel Snyder, and David LaChappelle provide most of the images.

I would particularly like to praise the design and composition work done on facing photographs. These are brilliantly complementary to each other, and enhance the combined experience enormously. I particularly commend the images of Julianne Moore licking a sabre-like knife next to Anthony Edwards with a Bowie knife, and Chris Farley and David Spender seeming to look at one another in adjacent photographs.

The unexpected comes in many forms. The book opens with Jennifer Aniston bare in black and white, yet coyly covered by her own body in the relevant strategic locations. Men pose in typical female "cheesecake" situations, with wetted-down shirts. There's cross-dressing galore. Drew Carey appears as a lion. With helpers and costumes, you get angels and devils. Tippi Hedron uses a snake like a feather boa. Nick Nolte echoes a famous photo pose often used by female stars of the 40's. Madonna plays with a fake mustache.

There are a few humorous essays, but they are almost beside the point. The images are the thing here. Seeing is believing . . . differently.

I found Leonardo di Caprio's face in the context of crowds and friends to be especially interesting. Other great face photos included Emma Thompson and Jack Nicholson.

Some of the photographs are hilariously . . . well, outgrageous. My favorite is Kirstie Alley with two pink balloons held up to her chest like, well, you know what. She pulls on the knot on one of them.

To appreciate the work in this great volume, I suggest you get out a Polaroid camera and practice mugging with a friend or family member to see what you can do to create your own versions of the unexpected.

Use the outrageous to get in touch with what you normally keep submerged.

I wrote a review about the first US magazine photo book, CRAZYSEXYCOOL, so I thought I'd better write one for this one too. :)

Like the first book, I bought this book not only for the awesome photographs but for autograph collecting purposes also.

The photo of Richard Gere in this one makes up for the microscopic one of him in the first book.

They put alot more new actors and actresses in this one which is cool (Giovanni Ribisi, Parker Posey, Katie Holmes).

My favorite male shot would be Benjamin Bratt.

My favorite female shot would be the 2 pager of Sarah Michelle Geller (something about fishnet stockings on a beautiful woman).

A little overdone on the Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman shots, but overall an excellent celebrity photo book.

Nicholson Baker's semi-demented account of his Updike fascination begins from perhaps the slimmest premise a writer ever attempted to build a book upon. He admits that he hasn't even read most, or even half of Updike's work all the way through, and yet he can't help measuring his achievement against Updike's. Which, when you look at the imposing bulk of Updike's work against the handful of slender volumes that is Baker's, seems fair enough, at least if you think quantity is a virtue.

Yet Baker writes so well, not just about the nuances of his quasi-Oedipal relation to Updike, but about Stuff Generally, that we keep reading. When he says that a particularly sarky remark of Samuel Johnson's "merited a shout and a thigh slap", the economy of that phrases reassures us about his own talent; likewise his description of a hamburger as "substantial, tiered, sweet and meaty" makes you want to go out and chow down straight away. This is not only about Updike - although it's very good on Updike - but chiefly about Baker, and his own determination to wring poetry out of the everyday.

Perhaps Baker's real direction, if the manic momentum of "U and I" is anything to go by, is more towards the torrential worry of a Thomas Bernhard than the Olympian repose of an Updike. I only began to read Updike years after I'd read this book, and I find him a bit of a let-down. But Baker has gone on to do some entertaining things with sex, some excellent essays and a kid's book. He has demons far more volatile than Updike's; I think he should let them roam a little more freely.

This eccentrically gripping book will remind you of every all-night college bull session you ever participated in. Baker's increasingly discursive rants about Updike reveal more about the present author than the Great Man, of course. Keep this book in mind the next time you read a really annoying review of an author you admire. It's just some poor slob trying to justify his existence. And that's the real point of this memoir, of course; we all make our own solipsistic uses of other people. If we are lucky, we grow out of it and get some objectivity. In the meantime laugh along with Baker AND DON'T TAKE LITERARY POLITICS SO SERIOUSLY!

Baker has a gift for writing very funny pieces about subjects that are usually dry and serious. Nominally about John Updike, U and I is mostly concerned with how young writers are influenced by the "tradition" of past writers. He's anxious, for instance, about "The Anxiety of Influence." Has Harold Bloom covered the same ground already? Baker doesn't know, because he hasn't read Bloom, and now refuses to do so, for fear that the book will "take me over, remove the urgency I feel about what I'm recording here." His vague ideas of Bloom's argument have come second hand. "Book reviews, not books, being the principal engines of change in the history of thought." That doesn't stop him wildly speculating about what Bloom would say, and then sheepishly confessing to some of the books that have directly influenced his own work in progress, such as Exly's A Fan's Notes and Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot.

John Updike, in an interview that appeared in Salon, praised the book himself. "It has done me a favor, that book, because it's a book like few others. It's an act of homage, isn't it? He's a good writer, and he brings to that book all of his curious precision, that strange Bakeresque precision."

Zero Point has all the elements a grand science fiction thriller should have. A scoundrel who is capable and maybe not as bad as he thinks he is, a heroine who isn't just another pretty face, suspense, mystery, ACTION, and an Artificial Intelligence driven ship with personality plus! This is a well written book that grabs you right from the start. The action doesn't stop until the ending which seemed rather abrupt and sudden. Zero Point would be the great start of a series with unlimited possiblities. The author takes one turn that, should this turn into a series, needs to be corrected regarding main character's ship. All in all this was an excellent book and great read!!!

I greatly enjoyed Zero Point. Great characters and plotline, with an excellent beginning and middle. The ending isn't really an ending. It's like the author ran out of space. Still an excellent book however.

Strong characters, suspense, betrayal and intrigue set against a backdrop of alien races, human star colonies and incredible technology. I couldn't put this one down, and hope it's just the first of many!

I have to say this: I just don't like her style. She likes to do very cluttered things using multiple types of embroidery, and I think many of her examples and projects are quite hideous.

I was hoping for more of a primer on silk ribbon embroidery. And while there is a useful section of reference stitches, and a nice beginning section on the history of silk ribbon embroidery & necessary supplies... I wish there was more technique and less projects.

Unfortunately, Ms. Montano's other books which seem to be stitch dictionaries only have small sections of silk ribbon embroidery stitches & no technique section.

Unfortunately, this is the best beginner book out there that I have run across thus far -- but to be sure I would dump this book in a heartbeat if I came across a good primer/reference book.

In a nutshell: why would someone take such a beautiful technique and make such ugly things? The projects verge from overly country to bizzarely overadorned.

I loved this book because it included ideas on how to use silk embroidery in a modern way rather the victorian way. The works "Zane Gray Trail" and "The Desert Garden" are not in that fussy Victorian tradition.

Surely the best book on Silk Ribbon Embroidery available. The materials needed, each embroidery knot shown with a line drawing, projects galore, including brooches, ring bearers pillow, heart picture frame, heart pendents,beautiful sewing cases bedecked with silken roses, and more. Judith visits with well known silk ribbon embroiderers in New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, each tells their design secrets.A wonderful section on the Australian photo transfer process for putting your favorite photos on fabric so you can embroider a garden around them

A fair sequel to the excellent "The Night Inside". Baker's writing is clear yet poetic and her books very distant from the usual rehashed vampire tales (bad vampire/good vampire/unhappy vampire). Her vampires are fresh and interesting and their unlives and experiences draw you deep into their stories. The relationship between Ardeth and Rozokov is highly erotic, interesting, and never laughable. As characters they have a reality because they feel the losses, fears and hurts that we all feel and they ultimately make the vampire creations of other authors appear stale. This is a must-have for readers who want something fresh and distinctive with lots of chilling moments but also want to like their vampires.

This book is the sequel to the author's previous novel "the night inside". This book is not as 'dramatic' as the first novel. Instead it explores the 'practical' aspects of Ardeth's and Dimitri's adaption as vampires in the modern world.

In this book we are also introduced to a very old Japanese Vampire, who took centries to work out that he was not only a 'deamon' as there are no vampires in Japanese mythology to guide him.

The Japanese section of this book gives it a lyrical quality, while the Canadian sections with Ardith and Dimitri bring it into the modern world.

This book is easy to read, and enjoyable. It's more an exploration into relationships than a 'horror' novel - but then who would want their life to be a horror story all the time?, even if you were a vampire.

I'm not a big fan of horror fiction in general, but this novel seduced me into the vampire genre. I would really like to see more of her books. Her vampires maybe immortal, but they are also very human in their emotions and their reactions to each other.

The book is written as a children's story about a very nasty little boy. It is grotesquely funny through most of its short length, although it slips into being mostly gross in the last few pages. I could mentally hear most of it in Tom Baker's voice.

This is by no means the best work that Tom Baker is capable of. He has an entertaining prose style and is very eccentric in both his language and his story ideas. The problem here is with the story. It is basically a very silly chain of events taking place within a few minutes. In itself that is not a bad idea, but it does have the feel of something that was knocked out in an afternoon. This was written by Tom following his success with his autobiography (perhaps a greater work of fiction!) with Faber & Faber. You'll like it if you like Tom himself, Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, or Edward Lear. Even better is the talking book, read by Tom himself - who can resist that velvety voice?!

Written by Doctor Who himself, this small book spins the tale of a violent, evil young boy who hates everything that he sees. It starts with his first instances of violence, and continues on until he meets fate.

The book is funny, to say the least. Dry British humor keeps the pace going, and for anyone familiar with Tom Baker, you can almost hear him narrating the book as you read it. I would love to see a cartoon made out of this!