Twins, Susan & Christine Pratt, spend their Christmas vacation with their grandparents in Vermont. They soon learn that someone is embezzling money from the local children's hospital. The twins become sleuths, investigating the hospital matter & end up trading identities again. This is another exciting adventure for younger kids, starring the unforgetable twins, Susan & Christine Pratt. Every child should be encouraged to read these books that expand the imagination & are delightful to read as well.

Both me and my wife have been reading this book regularly to understand our children better. It is both interesting and practical. What I like best about it is that its recommndations as to how to raise children are mostly based on experience and research, not on anyone's opinions.

And one more thing: my two-year-old daughter LOVES the pictures inside!

VERY WELL WRITTEN,(ALTHOUGH A TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH I BELIEVE).EXCITING. IT WOULD EVEN MAKE A GREAT MOVIE! THE COINCIDENCES WORK LIKE A DICKENS NOVEL. THE STORY WORKS WELL EVEN THOUGH I HAVE NOT AS YET READ "THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM", WHICH THIS IS A SEQUEL TO.

This book contains 104 Children's Sermons that use props to engage the children. These props are designed in such a way to make the children active rather than passive participants. There are two sermons provided for each Sunday in Cycle C of the Revised Common Lectionary, one based on the Gospel Lesson and one based on the Epistle. There is a Scripture index in the back. I am a United Methodist Pastor and a graduate of Yale Divinity School and Oral Robert's University.

This is a wonderful planning tool for your Christmas.
This book will help you have the kind of celebrations that we all dream of, but never seem able to acheive.
Krisann, writes with clarity, and from experience.
The book is laid out is a very user friendly approach.
An organizied way to fill your year with the joy and wonder of the holiday season.

This book was dangerously excellent in which Bruce Blair clearley stated that De-Alerting is the right way to prevent an accidental nuclear launch. This book presented historical information and greaquotes for any policy debater.De-Alerting should be taken seriousley and this book states why.

Africa is not cursed with a supernatural phenomena or aura of failure in development and growth; this belief is a travesty, since failure all waters down to human error, nothing more. Indifferent and corrupt leaders have played such a nasty role in their countries' demise (with help from varying colonial legacies), with Zimbabwe being a contemporary example of this kind of demise. Some six million Zimbabwean civilians are in danger of starving to death by the end of 2002. A Catholic Bishop in the country has admitted that the economy is in tatters and completely bankrupt because of the government's incompetence and mismanagement. Foreign investment is shying away from the country because of its horrific blight of corruption and social anarchy, with government mobs running affairs and intimidating any slivers of opposition, real or imagined. Thanks to Robert Mugabe, the country's xenophobic, racist despot, Zimbabwe is now a pariah state, teetering on the edge of an uncertain abyss.

It was not always this way, writes journalist David Blair (who for a twenty-nine year-old has seen more than what others have seen in an entire lifetime). His book is an exhaustive recounting of the contemporary history and situation in Zimbabwe, beginning around January 2000, when Mugabe attempted to change the country's constitution to suit his agenda, and the country refused, throwing him his first political defeat since 1980. His book, along with another by Martin Meredith, serves as the only two recent works about the country. While Meredith is more concerned with the historical pattern of power accumulation at the hands of Mugabe, as well as keeping Mugabe as the focal point in his work (it is also largely a biography), Blair is more concerned with the present. His first two chapters are historical, albeit brief, providing background to Mugabe's life, past brutality and ideas as to how he ticks. The rest deals with the years 2000-2001, written in a first-person narrative because he was present as a journalist for the British "Daily Telegraph" paper until he was forced to leave the country in mid-2001 (as part of a wholesale crackdown on independent, foreign journalists by Mugabe and his ruling Zanu-PF party).

Blair has much to recount about the regime's brutality and determination to keep in power, irrespective of the crucial human and financial costs. Important foreign aid that should have gone to lawful and equitable land reform and development instead would go to a Mugabe family mansion, or perhaps a new Mercedes-Benz, or perhaps to keep Zimbabwe's forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo (in itself an ambiguous decision, since those profiting from the Congo's diamond riches were all Zanu-PF people). Blair argues that Mugabe amounts to nothing more than a corrupt, aging despot whose sole intention is to keep in power; everything that he has done has been aimed toward this 'vision.'

The ironic comparisons between Robert Mugabe and Ian Smith, the last white ruler of what was then called Rhodesia, are striking, since both were bitter enemies, yet have both unwittingly complimented one another. Mugabe has been no different from Smith - racism, xenophobia, brutal suppression of opposition, and more were traits of both leaders. Says Blair: "Neither should have been allowed anywhere near running a country. Smith's true station in life was, perhaps, treasurer of a provincial rugby club. Mugabe would have made an excellent junior lecturer at the Revolutionary University of Havana. It was their country's enduring tragedy that these men were given such power" (p. 244).

On a final note, Blair writes that Smith's UDI from the UK in 1965 and resulting rule was ultimately self-defeating. It remains to be seen if Mugabe's rule will end as Smith's did; his rule has already ingrained lots of self-defeat for everyone and everything in Zimbabwe. Who knows what the future still holds? If Mugabe has followed in the footsteps of his predecessor up to now, who is to say that he won't follow through all the way to the bitter end?

Living daily with chronic illness, with the loss of everything familiar, with pain, with the unpredictability of the future, one can become despairing and hopeless. This outstanding book directs one's attention towards a way of living with illness that brings meaning and joy back into one's life. The message of the book has greater meaning because the author speaks from his own pain, and with grace and honesty, shares his own journey back to a life he can embrace. I hope to use the material in this brilliant book in working with groups of people living with chronic illness. Anyone living with illness needs the messages of hope and transformation in this book.

Susan & Christine Pratt take a vacation on Seagull Island. Both twins decide to get summer jobs on the island to help pay for college. The summer is filled with mystery as the twins find out someone is polluting the local beach. Things continue to trouble the girls when Christine meets a mysterious stranger at the ice cream parlor where where she works, and Susan takes a babysitting job in a mansion with a forbidden wing. The twins switch places to solve each mystery. This is a great book which teaches kids to stand up for what is right and it is told in such a delightful way that they will want to read it again and again.

I had never heard of the author or the book when I picked up a British edition at a used bookstore. I had hoped that anyone writing a novel on Orwell would possess Orwell's virtues of directness, frankness, and lucidity while offering up some ideas. Caute succeeds on all fronts, and in some matters of technique he is clearly Orwell's superior. He also has a sense of humor and his characters - including Orwell himself - are more nuanced than any Orwell character.

The book's story is about Orwell researching Animal Farm. He finds the book's narrator - a boy named Alex - hanging on at the family farm after his Mum and Dad have both abandoned it. There are pigs and other animals whose names will be familiar to the reader. Alex fills us in on his contributions to both Animal Farm and 1984 and his continuing relationship with Orwell. The last page of Alex's narrative contains a surprise which is perhaps intended to show that - as Orwell says in the novel - Orwell is often wrong.

Caute himself has written 8 other novels and 10 non-fiction books, including several on the left, communism and fellow travellers.