Liz wants to go to Switzeland for boarding school and Jessica tries to stop her. Jessica is worried she'll lose her best friend! What will happen? Meanwhile, Enid and Jeffrey make Liz a scrapbook and Liz thinks they're together because they spent a lot of time together making it. Puh-leeze! Liz is WAY too paranoid about that. Every single time she jumps to conclusions. After this book, I didn't like her anymore.

The Italian journalist/cartoonist/poet Giovanni Guareschi (1908-1968) is best known for his series of stories featuring "Don Camillo" and "Peppone," the priest and Communist mayor who spend the years following WWII locked in serio-comic battle for the souls of the people in their small village. But Guareschi wrote another series of stories, which (like the Don Camillo stories) were first published as a continuing magazine feature and later collected into books. This other series starred the author himself, along with stylized versions of his wife and children, in humorous accounts of middle-class Italian home life in the 1940's, 50's and 60's. Think Erma Bombeck or Dave Barry (or perhaps the more chronologically apt "Please Don't Eat the Daisies"), and you've got the idea.

"My Home, Sweet Home" is the second of the three collections of Guareschi family stories to be published in English. In it we meet Giovannino, mustachioed journalist who, when not working in Milan, is hapless head of a household which includes wife Margherita (a classic 50's sitcom housewife, forever confounding her more worldly husband with a subversive and lop-sided home-bred logic) and their children--serious Albertino and strong-willed Carlotta (aka "La Pasionaria"). The situations range from the slapstick (Giovannino learns that it hurts just as much to fall off of a brand-new, expensive ladder as the other kind) to the poignant (it's Pasionaria's first day of kindergarten, and her father isn't ready to let go). When indifferent cook Margherita decides to bake a birthday cake, the rest of the family steps in to "help." When the family is somehow saddled with a bogus 1000-lire note, they work in vain to unload it. And so on, all told with that light irony and deep humanity that make all of Guareschi's writing so appealing.

Here's one sitcom family I'd have loved to have seen on television.

Roy Blount Jr. writes a rambling account of growing up with his strong yet troubled mother -- a woman who despite an abusive upbringing herself managed to raise a son and a daughter with little help from a good but passive husband to be individuals with a strong sense of themselves. Blount is funny and he makes good points about the defensive nature of humor, the lurking self-loathing beneath the humorist. The only turnoff in this saga is that as a middle-aged man, Blount still is in rebellion against his mother for her guilt trips, so much so that he can't, it seems, "be sweet" to the women in his personal life whom he claims he has loved. Otherwise a good read for anyone intersted in family relationships and 1950s nostalgia.

Blount is a good writer and has an excellent sense of phrasing. Many of these essays are insightful and quiet funny but overall this memoir really needs some editing. It is too long and rambling and he continually looses sight of his own theme. The best essays aren't even about his past but his current situation as a "humorist." His travels to China and stints on talk shows are the best.

I was lucky enough to stumble across Roy Blount reading from this book in a Vermont bookstore. I bought it on the spot, telling him that it was the first one of his books that I had paid full price for. He thought this was pretty fun, the store employee sitting next to him didn't. This book is worth its full price.

Be Sweet in no way sets out to "make fun of the mother-son relationship". I suppose because Blount is such an irreverent goof-ball on the radio and in print, it seems fair to have that preconception. However, Blount has always let us know that some things are sacred and after you get a short way into this book you realize that family is one of them. He desperately does not want to cast aspersions on his own mother's character, but he has to acknowledge that she did drive him to distraction throughout his life.

There were several points in this book were Blount seems to be going off on a tangent. To be honest I began to wonder if he was just filling the space between the covers. Oh me of little faith! In the last third of the book I was progressively more amazed and impressed as I discovered that his seemingly unconnected threads were actually germane to the resolution of his mid-life psychic wrestling match with himself.

Bill Bryson's recent A Walk In the Woods similarly surprised me. I don't expect journalists to write deeply personal prose. Roy Blount beats Bryson hands down as far as the psychological depths that are plumbed and illuminated. If the presentation of the psychological dimension of things bores you or insults your sense of decorum, then don't read this Roy Blount book. If you want to know what is going on in the head of middle aged white Southern guys of above average emotional honesty, then this is a pretty good place to start.

It was well known that Tiger Stadium's last days would come in 1999 a few years ago, so it's hard to figure why the Detroit News couldn't put together a better book honoring one of the greatest baseball stadiums of all time. The photos are fine, but there is little to be desired in terms of text. I'm pretty sure the only text that is included at the beginning of the book actually is reprinted from past editions of their paper at the beginning of the 1999 baseball season. Boo to the Detroit News for failing miserably in its attempt to honor Tiger Stadium. I expected much better.

This is mostly photographs of the happenings at Detroit ball parks. There were several older parks before Tiger Stadium. Several of the ball players, such as Ty Cobb, Charlie Gehringer, and Al Kaline are in the write-ups. It even had a boxing match by Joe Louis and Bob Pastor at the stadium.

This book is great for a collection of lasting images of the stadium. It covers the long history with a number of beautiful shots. It is not the book to get for a history of the stadium because it only contains a few musings. There are some great books out there that detail the history of the stadium and for that information go there, but on a coffee table for the casual fan this is a good book.

It's interesting to compare this treatment of the subject with Neal Zimmerman's _At Work at Home,_ which I also read recently. While Zimmerman concentrates on creating "livable" working spaces at home, which are not always elaborate or expensive, either, Sweet seems to have a thing for cold, bare, "industrial" environments with square, hard-looking chairs, exposed rivets, and shiny metal gooseneck lamps. Is this a British design thing, I wonder? It's an interesting take, I suppose, but if I could afford a professional designer to set up my own office at home, I'd pick Zimmerman in a second.

I was extremely excited to receive this book and overwhelmingly disappointed upon receipt. ALL of the photos in the book, demonstrating the techniques described by the author, are faded, grainey, black and white pictures. They are too faded, in fact, to even make out what the author is attempting to show. Without the pictures, the written instructions can be very confusing to follow. Definitely not worth the price paid...

was anxious to receive this book to get started on on a profitable venture. I was EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTED. For the cost of the book, I was expecting at least a few color photographs. There were NONE. Instead the pictures in the book are very grainy, black and white shots, difficult to see. It is impossible to tell what the author is trying to demonstrate. In addition, there are no decent pictures to show you what the finished product should look like. I am extremely let down and and would not recommend paying more than $6.95 for this book, if that.