The author does a good job addressing the many different native peoples of North America in this book, but I was disappointed by the lack of pictures. You'd think she could have at least put a sketch in with each tribal description. No one who goes into this book without already knowing what these clothing articles look like is going to come out of this book with a mental impression of what an outfit from any given tribe might have looked like. It's still an interesting reference and I'm glad to have it, but I can't recommend it for schools.

For anyone fascinated by the customs and dress of the American Indians, this book is a rich reference. The adaptation of materials found in nature along with the practicality of clothing in different regions provides interesting reading for hours. Anyone who thinks all Indians dressed alike in drab buckskins or adorned themselves or wore their hair alike needs to read about the skill and beauty involved in making their wonderful clothing and jewelry. It would be nice to see more photos and some color pictures, but it is still a great book! My only disappointment is in the choice of the word "costume" in the title. Go to any Pow Wow and you'll see today's Indians cringe at that term as it implies dressing up as something they are not. "Regalia" is their preferred term for their outfits. I recommend this book.

This book is the best general guide I've ever seen to the different costume practices of each major North American Indian tribal group. The book has only two significant drawbacks for the general reader: not enough illustrations (though many are rare photographs almost 100 years old) and unclear chronology. All tribes' costume changed after European contact and such contact occurred at different times for different areas; these factors can make it challenging to pick the relevant information from the text. However, I still learned a lot from this book.

Josephine Oakly is opinionated, hard headed and intends to have her way regardless of who gets in her path. She is the heir of her grandfather's museum of art and is determined to insure that his artistic heritage continues. After all, only he understood what is good art and passed this quality down to his grand-daughter. What could those minions who staff the museum know about art?

Enter into the intrigue and politics of an art museum and its warring factions who intend to overwhelm each other at any cost. Josephine is at the center of the conflict with her grand-father's staff and won't give an inch. A young man named Baily (Josephine's cousin) comes to the museum for emotional and spiritual solace only to find turmoil. He has his own demons to face from being wounded both physically and psychologically in the war (World War II). Will this war of artistic control make or break this young man as he attempts to come to terms with himself and his relationship with Josephine?

Booth Tarkington has given us a tale with untold possibilities as a man looks through the image of a selfish woman and finds far more than what he bargained for. Baily is intrigued and repeled by his cousin who is his opposite in temperament. He must decide what he must do if he intends to become a whole man.

The story was enjoyable but dragged on at times. Josephine's portrayal was at times too negative to the point of almost being unbelievable. You find yourself wondering what could Baily possibly see in such a woman? This is not one of Tarkington's best works but you get a taste of the intrigue and manipulations of people who think that they're superior to others. You are also given the pleasure of seeing beyond the images people portray.

A novel set in the middle of WW2 about a lieutenant returning from the South Pacific who is wounded and shell-shocked. To recover, his colonel instructs him to become an assistant curator at his grand father's art museum.

There he meets the strong-willed, controlling, and virulent Josephine, a distant cousin of his. Nobody much cares about her as she is very domineering and unscrupulous, yet she does have a good side about her and she is very beautiful. Recently jilted by her finance, our lieutenant, figuring his life is worthless, offers to marry his cousin so she can save face.

Through their brief courtship, he regains his strength and his will to live. In the end he puts Josephine in her place but he has fallen in love with her. However, he will not marry her until she changes. They exchange words and he returns to the front with a dramatic ending.

This was engaging book, but at times it could be long-winded and a little hard to follow. However, it was interesting and enjoyed reading it. The "Image of Josephine" title came about in that the lieutenant knew what he was getting in Josephine -- that there was nothing hidden, where as most everyone else hides their faults.

This has to be my favorite book ever. I love the way Booth Tarkington portrays the human emotion and spirit on the page. Josephine is a wonderful character and the ending of this book is fantastic. What is even more fantastic, however, is how he so capable of writing that makes you actually wish you were there watching the story play out. You will laugh and cry, but most of all you will absolutely love this story. I highly recommend it to all readers.

I have to think that this book was a cop-out. The premise, excellent: we die for real when we are forgotten. The novel starts in a very promising way. A recent widower cannot seem to enjoy life anymore. His wife's mother is going through similar grief. While it would have been fascinating to see how these two people struggled through their pain, the author sticks a "play" in the middle of the novel to explore her theory of how oblivion equals true death. The space dedicated to that pseudo-play would have been better utilized showing how the two main characters recover (or not) from their grief and how Hart's theory proves to be valid (or not).

I still think Josephine Hart is an excellent writer, and recommend Sin as proof. This book did not do it for me.

Oblivion is the story of how a family (namely mother and husband) is coping with the death of a woman. At least, part of the story is. The middle half of this book is actually a play, written by a woman Andrew, the husband of the dead woman, is interviewing. Andrew goes to a reading of this play, which is made up of the monologues of dead people. The premise of the play is that it is not when people die that they disappear, rather that when we stop remembering them is when they slip into oblivion

If any author should have the prose to deal with subjects like death, love and oblivion, it is Josephine Hart. But reading this book is like listening to discordant music that you think you are meant to like - you try to find something in this to enjoy, but realise by the end that it was just annoying, and trying too hard to be clever. The play in the middle of the book simply does not work. There are no characters in this book that you can truly empathise with. The writing is spare, but not elegant, as in other Hart books (Damage is an example that comes to mind). Rather, every sentence feels like a stilted, over-written construction.

I don't expect to enjoy a book to like it, but when that is the case, I do want what I read to move me. Oblivion, despite the fascinating topic and previously proven skill of the author, did not move me in the slightest. It was simply a very boring book.

the opening and closing chapters of this book were beautiful and chilling. but the large middle section of a play-within-the-book was less satisfying... which i suppose means it worked.

Yet in a way, I don't think much more could have been said in Johnson's novel. The story of a period in the life of a family of farmers in the Depression era raises some interesting questions on life and the reasons for why things happen the way they do. Often lonely and sad in its tone, Johnson still tries to instill in her narrator a sense of not hope, but not despair either. It's an interesting work but not one of my favorites.

One of the great experiences of my life was reading this book for the first time. It breaks my heart that English teachers are wasting time on second tier works, or repeating the same novels each year for decades, when there is a work of exquisite literary beauty full of strange and ambivalent revelations languishing and underappreciated. Please, if you are an English teacher, read it and recognize its perfection. Three sisters... a dirt farm... the depression... language that shimmers before your eyes on every page. Introduce this American masterwork back into the high school literary canon!

Everyone I ask about this book has never heard of it. I am flabbergasted on why noone has ever read Now in November! This piece of work is beautiful, enchanting and most of all in tune with the human condition. It goes beyond the usual depiction of the dust bowl era and portrays what it means to yearn for knowledge and seek out pleasure when it is cruely restricted. This novel completely deserves a Pulitzer Prize just for the poetic language alone. Josephine Johnson, girl you should be proud!!!

Don't buy this book if you want to help a toddler cope with stomach aches brought on through no fault of his or her own. This story is about Clifford and friends pigging out and making themselves sick--probably a useful message for kids, but not particularly well done. My grandchild, 2 years old, adores Clifford, but in my opinion these books are not terribly well written. I'm sticking like honey to Pooh for life's little lessons.

I almost always prefer book versions to their TV counterparts, but it's not true in this case. The "Tummy Trouble" TV episode of Clifford is one of my daughter's favorites, so it was disappointing the get the book and discover that lots of the story had been left out, i.e. Mr. Bleakman's fence and the dogs trying to clean mud from Clifford's backyard.

My 8-year old daughter was having trouble with her reading. It got to the point where she hated picking up a book, which distressed me greatly because I am a compulsive reader. However, she did love to watch the shows on PBS kids and when she spotted this book at a school book fair she was wild with excitement.

Originally I balked when she asked me to buy it. I thought it was below her grade level, but we bought it anyway and she enjoys it immensely! It is based on an actual episode form PBS and has a very good lesson built in as well. It reads easy, but is not boring.

What a pleasure it is to see her reading enthusiastically again. We now own several Clifford books, she has progressed to more difficult chapter books, and we are all reading happily ever after!

Don't deny your child something that can change them forever.

I really didn't care for this story. Tey is a good writer, and this book is superlative when it comes to characterizations, but the mystery(?) is less than exciting. Grant is wonderful, and here we see an urbane Grant who has to go to the country to follow up the disappearance of a young man that he had met once at a cocktail party. He follows all clues, and comes up empty (even to dragging the river twice), but once back at home in London after awhile, the pieces come together and he figures it out. The denouemnet is quite good in this book, but again, the book didn't excite me.

This is one of Josephine Tey's lesser known mysteries. "Daughter of Time" and "The Franchise Affiar" are, perhaps better known. This novel is in the Inspector Grant series and concerns the disappearance of a young man whom Grant had met briefly at a party.

The writing and atmosphere of this novel are both excellent. Unlike some other Tey novels, I enjoyed this one more for the characters and setting, rather than plotting. Tey has a fine ear for dialogue and humor and Grant is a pleasure to go detecting with.

This attempt at a novel is unbelievably bad! The writer may have some promise, but desperately needs to hone her writing skills before foisting another book onto readers.(I note from the inside-cover blurb that she has written children's books; perhaps she is better suited to that.) I am utterly amazed that "Monday's Child", a story with such poorly conceived characters and jumpy, unbelievable plot development ever got past an agent, let alone an editor. Most of the characters are so ineptly drawn that they never became "real" for me. There are logic-defying leaps and turns in the plot, unrealistic dialogue, and a story line(as such) which became less and less believable as I read on....hoping it would get better. It didn't.

I find it difficult to believe that I read the same book as the reviewer above. I thought the dialogue was snappy and terrific, the characters warm and interesting, and the plotting smooth and believable. All told, a great read. I look forward to her next novel.

MONDAY'S CHILD is a terrific first suspense novel by Jody Carr. Ms. Carr takes "ordinary" people and places them in extraordinary situations. The characters are so real and complicated that you will feel as if you are experiencing their ordeals with them.

I look forward to Ms. Carr's next novel, LOST AND FOUND, due in March 2001. Bravo, Ms. Carr!

This book could probably be shortened to 100 pages max.

There are TOO many pictures/tables in the book that have nothing to do with the text and the pictures/tables aren't even explained.

This book lacks organization.

Was not what I expected. Only a handful of sentences helped me understand how we arrived at the modern alphabet from pictograms (pictures that represent words)

If you want a book that explains the evolution of written language from pre-history, this is NOT the book for you!

Is it just me who thinks this whole concept of 'archaeography' in the last chapter is utterly ridiculous?! Surely the way a word is spelt alphabetically has nothing to do with its meaning and etymology?!

As for the rest of the book, it's a nice overall intro into the origins of the alphabet -not too technical and yet combines a lot of research.

I found the ideas presented in this book very interesting, however I was dissappointed to see too many "decorative" images more than details. It provides very general information about the roots of each letter and how they evovled in time, but it does not go into too much detail. I believe those who have done some reading on the subject of alphabet and its roots may find this book elementary. I also thought that there were too many graphics that did not relate to the book.

Josephine Tey is often touted as a Thinking Man's Mystery Writer, a more literary version of such contemporaries as Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. This is the first of her books that I've read, and she was indeed a splendid writer. But the mark of any good mystery author (as far as I'm concerned) is the ability to dazzle the audience with the denouement, usually at the hands of the brilliant amateur or professional sleuth who's trying to solve the case. Tey's Detective Grant seems remarkably able at the start of the book to pull together loose strands of information and reach those impressive conclusions that readers expect from fictional detectives. But the actual solution of the whodunit is literally handed to him (by a minor character who simply confesses out of the blue) and is due neither to his brains nor his instincts. It comes, in fact, at a time in the story when Grant is absolutely stuck and has no idea what to do next. By this time he's made as many mistakes and ignored as many important clues as he's followed. Perhaps this was Tey's way of showing us the fallibility and humaness of the police, but is that what we want in our fictional sleuths? Give me someone omniscient like Poirot or Peter Wimsey any day.

Reading this book in context is the key. It's a first book and it was written in 1929 (before the crash). Yes, the language is of a different place and time. Some of it is awkward for a modern ear (the "foreigner" phrase in particular). Still, I enjoy being transported to a different world once in awhile and reading writing from that time is different than when a modern writer writes of history.

The plotting on this is pretty simple - finite number of suspects and such. The ending came a little bit too much from left field for my taste.

Bottom line - an adequate first effort. Don't judge Tey on the basis of this book -- later books are much better.

I read, this my first Tey mystery, because all mystery afficiondos should at least sample her writing. She is famous in the mystery world, and you need to read her in order to determine how we got to where we did with mystery writing. I enjoyed the story. She certainly puts enough twists and turns in her plots. The book is somewhat dated (it was written in 1929) after all, but she has a lot of talent. I liked Inspector Grant even though he really didn't solve this puzzler, but it was fun following him around in his quest for the killer. This is a rather unique format for a "locked room" mystery since the victim was stabbed outside in a theatre queue, but it appeared that no one had the opportunity to do the deed. I want to continue to read the rest of her books. She writes fairly complex stories.

I read constantly and seldom have I encountered a more repellent group of characters. I had to read the entire book for a book club (or I would have tossed it away after 50 pages), and found myself hoping for a plague, a nuclear holocaust, anything to remove such repulsive people. Vain, apathetic, stupid, cruel, selfish...it's difficult to care about a book when you despise ALMOST all of the characters. Even Iris had her moments of cruelty. I wonder why the author created them and hope they're not based on real people. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone.

i loved this book, especially the characterization of Alice. She makes me feel normal, with her strange outbursts and feelings. She's a woman who goes by omens, including what's carved by strangers' fingernails on a frozen package of chicken. She strangely salivates as she picks at her daughter's head for scalp buildup. This isn't all what the story's about, but i just couldn't put the book down. Josephine makes each of the three characters a star for one chapter, so you can really get inside their heads and receive information that the other characters don't know. It's about hope and despair and human relationships, the darkness of marriage and the light at the end of it. I loved how Alice follows Claire around, almost stalking her that way, like the wife does with the other woman. i like how she smokes just as it gets dark, when she feels the most despair. i really related to alice. i think josephine is a very gifted writer.