Lindbergh, a master at fantasy, proves that she is equally skilled at realistic fiction with this funny book. The main character is realistic, funny, and consistant. A definite winner, "Nobody's Orphan" will delight all mid-grade readers.

The Nurse's Manual of Laboratory and Diagnostic Tests is a great manual to have on the unit and at home. It gives complete descriptions of the tests, with helpful nursing considerations. I work in a hospital setting where many labs and tests are not done, so a reference like this one is invaluable.

The Orvis Guide to Shotgun Care and Maintenance is the first handbook written for the shotgun enthusiast on the subject of maintaining and caring for your gun. Lavishly illustrated, The Orvis Guide to Shotgun Care and Maintenance provides some of the most precise and complete information found anywhere on how to correctly care for your shotgun. If you own a shotgun you should buy this book. Even if your not new to the world of shotguns you should still get this book, it's a great addition to any shotgun enthusiast.

In "Plato's Cretan City", Glenn R. Morrow is able to clearly explain the meaning of Plato's ideal of a model society as laid down in Plato's "Laws". Morrow approaches the "Laws" as both a living document of reform and a philosophical inquiry into humankind's highest earthly duty.

A BIG HIT hit with my 8-year-old nephew. Very intersesting and more than a little scary. It doesn't shy away from blood or gore to get the facts out to the reader. I wouldn't give it to children under 8 as the scary factor is right up there with the Goosebumps movies! A definite page turner.

Sins are definitely out of fashion. The last time I came across the Seven Deadly Sins of Envy, Pride, Covetousness, Gluttony, Sloth, Lust and Anger, it was in a glossy Singaporean magazine for the trendy crowd. Under each of the headings it featured big cars, expensive condos, the current "IN"-nightspots, the newest restaurants, fashionable jewelry, designer clothes and so on. The word "sin" may have made monks and Victorians tremble; but we just shiver in anticipation of the latest thrill. Alain de Botton captures this change in attitude perfectly in his 5-page afterword: "[Today] our concerns are of a different order. We worry about whether we are cheerful or depressed, fulfilled or low in self-esteem. We worry about happiness, not sin and virtue."

"The Seven Deadly Sins" have originally been published in 1962 by The Sunday Times, and authors from England have written all seven contributions. The book does not rank the sins in any order (rankings are a very American obsession, and it seems the English have not been infected yet in the early sixties). However, it is very fitting for our democratic society to begin with ENVY, Angus Wilson's contribution, and to end the book with ANGER, W. H. Auden's contribution. Envy is the quintessential democratic "sin." Alain de Botton reflects that "envy comes from comparison and [...] the habit for everyone to compare themselves to everyone else is a particularly modern, democratic one." People envy only those who they feel themselves to be like: "There are few successes more unendurable than those of our closest friends [and] it follows that the more people we take to be our equals, the more we will be at risk of dissatisfaction." Which explains why a society of equals does not automatically lead to more happiness for its individual members. Anger is also a very democratic "sin" because anger tends to arise from a sense of entitlement: "We aren't overwhelmed by anger whenever we are denied an object we desire, only when we believe ourselves entitled to obtain it" (Alain de Botton). A sense of entitlement comes with democracy: we are not just in pursuit of happiness, we assume we are entitled to it.

Wedged between the highlights of Wilson's and Auden's articles are contributions by Edith Sitwell on PRIDE (a tongue-in-cheek confession to the "virtue" of pride), Cyril Connolly on COVETOUSNESS (a very funny short story about obsessive greed), Patrick Leigh-Fermor on GLUTTONY (an indigestible, rambling piece of writing - skip this part of the menu!), Evelyn Waugh on SLOTH ("Sloth is the condition in which a man is fully aware of the proper means of his salvation and refuses to take them," the state of rejecting the "spiritual good" which - in modern parlance - leads to depression, the contemporary cousin of sloth), and finally Christopher Sykes on LUST (a fine example of British common sense).

If we worry about happiness, not sin and virtue, why should we read about "The Seven Deadly Sins" at all? Why worry about the "good" when we can go out and have "fun" instead? The answer is: the "good" is about the value we attribute to our lives looking forward and looking back, the "fun" is just living it. In general, we are bad at "just living" or "living in the moment." but experts in reflecting on the past and planning for the future. It is a smart decision to build on our expertise and put some meaning into our lives to make looking back and forward more enjoyable. After all, the good life and the happy life are complementary, not mutually exclusive. Alain de Botton points it out just so well: "If we listen to pre-Christian philosophers, there is never a conflict between happiness and goodness. For Socrates, the sinful man is at the same time the miserable man, the good one the happy one. It's only with the arrival of Christianity that a conflict starts to appear and that, unwittingly, it starts to seem as though being good is dull and not likely to lead one to happiness, while sinfulness is bad, but actually rather fun."

Ever wonder where the myth of the stalwart Mountie, righting wrongs and doing good, came from? After reading this book, I am pretty sure it started with the Mounties themselves. When the Canadian government created the North-West Mounted Police to maintain law and order in the largely unsettled West, the call went out for "men of good character." It's clear that James Morrow Walsh was that and more.

This book, written by a former Mountie, follows Walsh's career and Sitting Bull's in parallel tracks. It's a story of deceit and betrayal, and also of honour and decency. The bond between Walsh and Sitting Bull was never broken, and is shown under the most unlikely circumstances. At the same time, the behaviour of the much-maligned Sioux people demonstrates the full injustice of what was done to them by the governments of both the United States and Canada.

There are times when one person, or a very few people, can make a difference just by their own personal qualities. When the NWMP were the only law in the Canadian West, interpreting it as justly and fairly as they knew how, men like Walsh did just that. It's a shame the governments in Ottawa and Washington didn't make more of an effort to do so, too.

Teddy Roosevelt, Rough Rider is interesting because it is a biography and history of Teddy Roosevelt as a child. He liked natural history and even stuffed the animals he caught himself - yuck! When he grew up and was president, he was involved in saving park and forest land and wildlife. Yellowstone Park was one of the parks he helped with. He had asthma but he wanted to build up his body to be strong, so he did a lot of sports like boxing and horseback riding. He liked to read and write books. A funny part of the story involved frogs, but you'll have to read it yourself to find out!

I first saw Gray Morrow's art in Creepy magazine in '66. He was one of their top artists, along with Frank Frazetta, Jack Davis, Al Williamson, Reed Crandall, and Angelo Torres. Some of Morrow's drawings and paintings from that era are reprinted here as well as much other work I had not seen. He was a better (and more versatile) artist than I realized, since his paintings for Creepy were not quite as powerful as Frazetta's at the time, but his career evidently took many turns, and he did a wide variety of work for comic, movies and advertising, eventually developing a polished, assured flair for snazzy, hip, dynamic renditions of pulp themes: spies, detectives, spacemen, cowboys, glamor girls, horror, fantasy and adventure. Large, vibrant color reproductions, interesting biographical info on the man and his contemporaries in '60s New York, make this book desirable for nostalgic baby boomers as well as aspiring commercial artists who want to gaze at great technique. Wish it had more pages, but at least they only show the good stuff.

I'm very much a fan of Saint-Exupéry. To be honest, I've found the Little Prince the least appealing of his works, and Wind, Sand, and Stars very definitely his best. I enjoyed this look behind the scenes, as it were, at his motivations, relations with his friends, and perhaps his less protected writings. He is apparently an inveterate rewriter, but I found his presumably less worked over letters equally appealing, with merits of their own.

I gave this only four stars because you should definitely read other books first, most notably Flight to Arras, written during the period covered by this book. But, and I hate to say this, I really did find his words on war, personal security, and what it means to be human to be very relevant after the terrorist attacks on the US. That part comes out more strongly here than in Flight to Arras.