Growing up in Shelby County, Indiana, the setting for the classic book and home of the annual Bears of Blue River Festival, this book has always held a special place in my heart. It was one of the first books I was ever read in school and as I got older, I found myself in many of the exact places that were used in the book, such as the Blowout Hole which is where the Fire Bear supposedly fell off the cliff and exploded.

The actual story is even more interesting. In that part of Indiana, there are many natural gas pockets deep in the ground. A settler had been burning brush and caused one of these pockets to explode, creating a deep hole (Blowout Hole) where the Flat Rock River and Conns Creek flow together. Both streams flowed backwards for a week, and the windows on houses were shattered for miles around. In fact, a childhood friend of mine lived in one of the nearby houses and it still exhibited a crack from foundation to roof from the mighty explosion. The tiny farming community even made the front page of the New York Times.

Anyways, just wanted to give you some background. If you're ever in the area, go visit the fields and streams south of Waldron, Indiana and your sure to see some of the settings in Majors' book. You'll probably come across a lot of Native American arrowheads and other artifacts as well--if you look close enough.

And if you haven't read the book, do so at once!!!

Back in 1973, my teacher would read this book to my first-grade class during "reading time." I liked the story soooooo much I asked my mom to order the book. She finally got it from Lazarus of all places and it was sent to our home in Danville, IN in hardback. The story and imagery are great (and sometimes scarrrrrryyyyyy!) I have lost that copy, but am now ordering a copy for my sons (ages 10 and 6) so that I can read to them the wonderful story of Balser and the ferocious bears of Blue River. What a treat for them! john marysville, oh

In 2001 my father age 82 mentioned this book as the only one he remembered his father reading to him as a young boy. I'm his son at age 59 and decided to get a library copy for us to read again. Dad doesn't read much anymore but he devoured the book which brought good memories back. I liked it as well because it gave me a family "connection" over 3 generations, and the book is also easy to read and good reading to boot. Our ancestors settled in Indiana in the 1830's and they lived next to the Flatrock River(in the book)Had to buy a copy for family keepsake

This book and "New Recipes from Amish Country" are, without a doubt, my most used, most read and most worn cookbooks in my library. These cookbooks are not only wonderful for their recipes, but also for just curling up on the couch with a cup of coffee to browse through. The pictures and stories are wonderful. Marcia Adams is one of my favorite cookbook authors on the market today. She knows what she's writing about and her books are incredibly enjoyable to go through, not to mention educational.

My favorite recipes out of Cooking from Quilt Country - Whole Wheat Bread (wonderfully easy and very delicious), Cinnamon Rolls (great icing!) and Potato Pancakes (I still haven't found a recipe that can match the flavor of this one)

This is a delightful book that offers interesting glimpses of the Amish lifestyle and preserves some wonderful recipes. I greatly enjoy the photos and anecdotes in this book, as well as the terrific recipes.

I make the Hot Water Pie Crust in nine-crust batches and freeze it (it freezes perfectly). It is the easiest pie crust recipe I've ever used and tastes just like Grandma's. We don't have pie often, due to its fat content, but when we do, this crust never fails.

The oven-fried chicken recipe is also a winner. Again, it has a lot of fat, but it's great for special occasions and company dinners.

Kudos to Marcia for ensuring that these treasured recipes aren't lost, and for providing a peek at a unique way of life.

This is the best cookbook I own. The recipes are relatively simple but also unique in a way. I especially like the vegetable dishes. I use this cookbook as a wedding present all the time. My wife makes the Amish apple pie and it is the best. Every New Years Day I make the cabbage rolls and they are outstanding. The crushed ginger snaps make it special. Men and women who cook should own this cookbook.

I do not know if Mr Banner's novel will eventually emerge as one of the finest works of fiction in the late 20th century. But it should. Its delights are in its details: no writer I know wields such an incredibly perceptive eye over American culture; Mr Banner shows an extraordinary, almost scary knowledge of all the wonderful and sad little things that make up the average American's everyday life. The Life I Lead is a great painting that's never been painted; a perfect film that's never been shot; a poem not yet set down. It captures so much that has yet to be properly articulated in American art, I can only hope that it someday receives the recognition it deserves.

Was it Flannery O'Conner who said "nothing human is alien to me?" In seeking to demystify (yet not forgive) pedophilia, Banner beautifully fulfills this most challenging of the fiction writer's credo. It took no small about of courage to write this novel. I applaud the writer and the publisher and find myself perhaps a bit sadder but also richer for having read Keith Banner's dramatic exploration.

Anyone looking for a sicko novel about a pervert should look elsewhere. Keith Banner has written a deeply perceptive novel that explores the baffling question of why a seemingly good man can be a pedophile. His characters are so vivid I found myself forgetting they didn't exist beyond the page. But the best reason for reading this book might be Banner's writing. The man can tell a tale, and he does it with a bone-edged poetry that at times had me catching my breath.

The book starts off by giving the reader a 'behind the scene' flavor of various animals and characters. I wondered about such a beginning at first but quickly found it was the first piece of a picture puzzle, well designed to go to the center of the table, allowing the reader to build the complete picture around it.

Ms. Maher creates a small community, peopled with interesting and sometimes amazing characters. Like a master weaver, she creates a ream of fabric from the lives of her characters, defined and colored by the ways they each touch the lives of others and defined by allowing them their differences. The final product is a colorful American Patchwork Quilt made up from the lives found in a small town.

I quickly came to feel I knew many of these characters and was pleasantly surprised and drawn to those who were outside my realm of experience. It would be easy for me to write, in detail, about the characters that became my favorites, but since I highly recommend this book, I will refrain from doing so in order that you, if you read the book, to choose your own favorites without my influence.

But I simply must mention one character, Nadja, a very unusual young lady who's start in life was rocky at best, and a thing of tragedy to many. But thanks to an older woman with no connection to the town or the people there, she was given a chance in life, all-be-it an unusual and interesting one.

I found much to enjoy between the pages of Heaven, Indiana - and little to criticize. As a result I heartily recommend it to everyone who has ever lived in a small town or wondered about life in a small town. Even if you simply enjoy a book that is well written with good characters, I think you'll enjoy this one.

This was a fabulous book that was very difficult to put down and remained swimming inside my head long after I finished it. Jan Maher has a wonderfully simple yet complex and poetic writing style that brings her fictional town to an incredibly familiar and surreal life. She takes the reader inside her story without judgement or pretension, but rather with a demure sort of narrative that simply allows her story to present itself. There are so many layers to this book, subtly hinted at in the writing and explored just enough for questions to remain... It can be enjoyed on the level of a personal story (in which you deeply care for the characters) as well as a sociological inquiry of sorts. It is certainly worth multiple readings. It is so very refreshing to read a book like this one. I highly recommend it!

And to think all these years, I thought Indiana was home only to a decent baseball team and lousy Chinese food! Instead, Jan Maher's little slice of "Heaven, Indiana" provides readers with a thought-provoking, deeply involving and utterly enjoyable reading experience, devoid of any of the affectations and contrivances found in many first novels. Ms. Maher beautifully captures the feel and rhythms of the Midwest, with clear, finely crafted prose and engaging characters who resonate long after the story is done.

For anyone who's ever lived (or loved) in a small town, the setting will ring familiar; and even city dwellers and suburbanites may find themselves half convinced that they, too, "remember" Heaven. But even beyond the richly textured setting, Maher gifts her readers with believable, multi-faceted characters facing real conflicts - all of which are seamlessly interwoven into a complex yet very readable tableau that is remarkably hard to put down.

Like comfort food, "Heaven, Indiana" leaves the reader well satisfied, and with the same sense of having consumed something of substance.

I love this book more than any others, and those thousands of others include: Anna Karenina, War and Peace, all of Michener (sorry James!), Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck. Even more than I loved Moby Dick. I believe that Raintree County is the greatest American Novel, and it would be hard to dissuade me. But you also have to read Shade of a Raintree when done, to keep the saga going

When averring that Raintree County is such a "Good" book, I find myself searching for words to accurately convey my meaning. The lyrical gift of Mr. Lockridge is "good," though not great as is the case with the brilliant Thomas Wolfe, the American novelist his writing most resembles. The story, complete with flashbacks, is engaging through all its over 1,000 pages. The philosophical sections are good as well, and the "Perfesser" Stiles is one of the most comically and wittily astute Menckenesque characters in all of American fiction.

One thing that I certainly do NOT mean by "good" is that the book is some sort of sentimental whitewash of American history and archetypal American characters. They are presented here in all their selfishness, avarice and mean-spiritedness. Yet, the novel ultimately has such a Whitmanesque all-embracing quality that these human traits dissolve into the rich tapestry of the story, which I found a page-turner despite its length.

Ultimately, the novel of which this book most reminds me is not an American, or even English, one at all. It is Tolstoy's War And Peace. These books both narrate the human capacity for evil and good, for love and hate, the chaos caused by the greatest war either of the two countries had fought at the time, the enduring value of friendship, all spread out over a vast panorama of intricate relations. In short, Raintree County is America's most epic novel: Not the greatest perhaps, but the most epic.

But there's something more: At one point in the book (p. 934 in my edition) Shawnessy reflects that, "A human life had a dimension that wasn't perfectly understood." Through reading this book, one somehow comes away with the feeling that one has at least brushed against the boundaries of this mysterious dimension.---No small feat, this.

On November 11, 1998 I wrote a review of Ross Lockridge's son's book: "In The Shade of the Raintree," that said much that could be added to advantage to my review of "Raintree County" itself.

Accordingly, I am doing a second review of "Raintree County." It is relevant in that it is also written in the light of several other reviews that followed mine and a couple that preceded it that had not been posted for some reason when I wrote my initial review. (I would love to think I was the catalyst for getting this remarkable book at least a little of the attention it deserves.) I am happy to see a near consensus in the reviews now appearing here about a couple of things: (1) that this book should be covered in Lit. Courses and (2) that it is indeed recognized by at least an elite, as that fabled literary phenomenon: "The Great American Novel."

I was and am immensely impressed by a writer like Ross Lockridge, Jr., who could craft a thousand plus page novel that is more of a lyric poem. Yet, at the time of its publication, some reviewers lightly passed it over as prolix or superficial, notably competing author Hamilton Basso, whose review, one suspects, might reveal that he'd have cut his arm off to be able to achieve Lockridge's pinnacle of word-use that sweeps our minds away like a Pied Piper demanding we follow him.

I followed this Pied Piper gladly, into a nostalgic tour of magical long gone years and fascinating people departed forever. Moreover, we were never far from the realization that those during the Civil War were raised to "give their last full measure of devotion," to the highest cause, preservation of "The Last Best Hope of Earth." We need to be rededicated to that cause today.

At some places in Lockridge's monumental tribute to America, in the hands of this genius, the cumulative effect transcended words, as only music can do. He tugged me into a wonderful, tragi-comic trance-like dream of pure thought where still lived a world of America's heritage. Ross Lockridge undoubtedly fathered that elusive thing: - The Great American Novel.

I thought as I read a son's account of his father and his work on this remarkable book that its history of creation should remind us it's time to take a second look and face the truth that we were granted a short stay among us of a literary angel, who bequeathed us a treasury of jewel-like words and images beyond price.

I wrote in my review of Larry Lockridge's remembrance that I would review its inspiration, the book Raintree Country itself, when I had time. I added: "In any case, I want to record my discovery of the conundrum of the book, Raintree Country, a mysterious message buried in its maps that no one I have ever encountered had noticed." I did that. Contrary to Ross Lockridge's deliberately (?) misleading words, we could look for Raintree Country on the Map and it 'would' be there.

Finally, I must say that the movie, like most, was - in my opinion - the usual uncomprehending travesty of story mangling and miscasting. Only Flash Perkins was properly cast, in my opinion. I don't think the producers had any more idea of what they had grandly muffed than a baby has of the consequence of throwing its bottle out of the crib. Maybe someday an English production company of the caliber that gave us "I Claudius," and "Lily" and "The First Churchills," will redo this classic.

This is just a great story with characters you will never forget and told with a genius for dialogue and place. An excellent debut novel. I couldn't put it down and at the end I didn't want it to end. Lopez captures perfectly the essence of life in the "Badlands" and South Philly -- and it was great to read a story set in a city that I know and love. Read this book; you won't regret it.

Being a kid myself, about Gabriel's age, I found this book absolutely riveting and couldn't put it down until the last page. Although I've never experienced the Philly scene, because I'm from a small town, I really felt the atmosphere of the danger and "survival of the fittest" there. Steve Lopez did an excellent job of communicating to the world the trap young kids can get caught in, where it starts out as fine, but then you keep getting deeper and deeper until you don't know how you got in the first play. The book is tough, yet soft, and I found myself crying at the end... it's a must read book!

Steve Lopez paints the most accurate picture of Philadelphia's Kensington section I have ever read. There is no way to candy-coat the truth, but you can depict it with truth, in hopes of bringing some sensativity to the issues. Lopez's portraits are tight and clear. If anyone reading this story is not moved by Ofelia Santoro's search for her son, night after night, I don't know what that person would be affected by. Equally compelling are all of the portrayals of the characters in the story. I, unfortuately, know many of the families of Kensington in circumstances like the Santoros-- and worse! This book is certainly Pulitzer material.

this is d 1st book from judith mcnaught that ive ever read....& trust me....it is SOOO good!! ive since been a huge fan of hers...but i got to admit this is by far her bes. in fact, it is THE best EVER....
at first, after seeing that it was about business, i kinda wasnt so interested, but i was wrong. the love n i mean LOVE (not just lust, but true all-consuming love) between Matt & Meredith was so touching, & their pain from the misunderstanding that Mer's dad caused will just tear your heart apart. but them making up was just blissful. but that's not all....then they find out that they're still married....ahhhh.....thats even better.
i just love it when Matthew said 'you have no idea just how much-i'd do for you' *sigh*
once you start....you'll totally get so entranced by the book (that you'll totally be able 2 relate to) that u just cant put it down... you'll just get so caught up with their lives & their feelings that it makes you sometimes wanna jump in & sort evryting out between the characters. sometimes it's hard to remember that they're just FICTIONAl characters cuz they seem so real. everything that's felt between matt & mer is just evrything you'll want in real life....true love
cheers to judith mcnaught....& may you write more books that'll take us to Paradise :))
P.S. the book Perfect (Paradise's supposed kinda sequel) is nothing compared to Paradise

Despite hearing good comments about Judith McNaught books, I have never read one before Paradise. The book was totally captivating, a real page turner! I wasn't really a romance novel reader before this book, but I became so completly absorbed into the lives of these two vivid, striking characters, that I can say I am now one of the converted. After reading this book I had to buy the next novel available by J.M. I haven't been let down yet, Whitney, My love was equally enjoyable! Paradise is definately fast-paced, with witty lines and two irresistible main characters. Meredith, was a capable heroine, but her character was also bolstered by her friend Lisa who adds a light-hearted frank air to the books atmosphere. There were some good plot twists, and brief distractions from the focus of the main characters to develop the other characters in the book. I found that interesting as the romance novels I had read before were completly centred and fixated on the main characters only using the others as bystanders or convenient devices to bring some issue to a climax. They were that and more. All in all it was a good read. More importantly was that each time I read it (5 times and counting) i found something fresh and new, to love about the storyline, or the charaters. Read the excerpt on this site, but don't draw any conclusions from the first few pages of the book, buy it and delve into the heart of it and discover the true gem that I found when I read it.

Paradise was the first book I read by Judith McNaught and I was glad to start off which such a winner. It is a complicated extremely well written book about two complex and challenging people with a long history. The book compells you to keep reading and is a page turner from the first chapter.

It is the story of Meredith and Matthew- two people who met as teens, married and separated due to a cruel misunderstanding. Both have spent the intervening years apart trying to forget and concentrate on their careers. Years later they meet up when Meredith discovers that their divorce was never finalized- and she has a new fiancee (parker)! The years have allowed meredith to grow up and has allowed matthew to become a wealthy and successful businessman. Both have their own misunderstandings about their youthful marriage and what drove them apart and matthew wants desperately to try to make things work again- despite thinking that Meredith had betrayed him earlier.

This book was heartwrenching and complex- making you cry and root for the characters. Even the secondary characters of parker, meredith's best friend and their parents are well written and interesting! A very worth while read!!

I always thought of myself as an informed flyer, but I was surprised to have my inherent trust of the FAA so profoundly shaken by this book. Stephen Fredrick combines his background as a pilot of the ATR series aircraft with a deep caring for the passengers & crew of the fatal flight of American Eagle 4184 to create a book that rivals many techno-thrillers. The book was published in 1996, and is a real cliff hanger since it came out before the legal settlement and crash investigation report were finally made public. The book got me so interested that I spent many hours searching the web pages to find out what decision the National Transportation Safety Board finally made concerning this airplane crash. I will certainly check to see if I am boarding an ATR whenever I fly in the future.

Fredrick's book is great, very well written. But he left out one very important thing. Airplane is the safest way to travel long distances. Statistics show that you would need to take a flight every day for 35,000 years before being assured of being in a fatal accident, and even then chances are that you would survive. Mr. Fredrick barely mentioned the good points of the F.A.A. and N.T.S.B., and even though I'm not exactly an American Airlines/Eagle fan, they are one of the safest airline operators in the world.

The book took a step by step aproach to the Roselawn disaster. It was very informative, and I couldn't put the book down. The author spoke through a pilot's perspective and let the reader feel every moment of the disaster. The details and aviation terms were explained fully by the author to let you understand them. The book explained why air safety is not at its upmost. I would recommend the book to anyone who wants to know the story of American Eagle 4184. It is a definite 10.

must read! action pack and you won't put this book down. just as good as the movies. one of my favorite books.

This book is funny and witty, and there is plenty of action. Indy still has his girlfriend from the last book, Indy and the philosopher's stone, so there isn't a lot of gross romance. The book is really fabulous, and everyone should read it!

This book was fabulous! It had that kinda'temple of Doom' twisted feel. with a chubby chinese man who eats human hearts, packs of wild man eating dogs, people who force Indy and his group of travelers to gulp down something a LOT worse than anything i could imagine...This book is just AWESOME! I think Max Mycoy is just the BEST Indiana Jones author out there. He catches the perfect qualities of Indy, and Marcus Brody. I more than definantly recomend this book. Although I think it was a notch lower than the Philosipher's Stone (A book that Lucas and Spielberg MUST make into a movie) This book deserves a perfect 5.

TREVOR