This was not my favourite book of the series but I still loved it just the same. Rowling is such a great story teller. She had me yelling at umbridge for being so nasty. It doesn't get really exciting until about the last 2or3hundred pages. This book answers alot of unanswered ?'s and explains more about why snape is who he is. Someone dies and it is very sad. You find out why some people-when they die are ghosts and others are not. I have never written a review of a book before--don't want to ruin anything for those of you who haven't read it yet. It is so great how everything ties together so well from the first book-straight through.

The 5th Harry potter book is the best one I have yet read. The 5th Harry Potter book is a tale of a wizard who finds it hard to stay out of trouble. This book is full of happyness and sorrow. This is a very good story and you won't want to put it down untill you have read every page twice!!!!

My son loved Peter Rabbit as a preschooler and now my toddler daughter does also. I did not buy him many of the Beatrix Potter tales though and I wanted my daughter to have many of the stories in one book and this one has more than the Complete Tales....that is also listed. So I chose this one. I'm glad I did! This is a must for any child who just loves these characters. Each story is just as interesting and as cute as the one before it.

It was a good guide, but some bits of it were confusing for little kids. For others it worked well and was a great way to get Harry Potter taught in the classrom.

This is the most important book that Dennis Potter published. A novel, it prefigures much of the work of the late 1970s and 1980s, and acts as a bridge back to the impressive Son of Man.

It is a book of many layers, and later work such as Andrew Crumey's Music in a foreign language, and Pfitz, adopt a similar approach.

It has a disconcerting opening - a man at his psychiatrist announcing that he is a character in a novel. The multiple layers unravel from there. Having identified the central character (and having been told of the characteristics the reader realises he shares with Potter), the author intervenes and he stresses the differences between his lifestyle and that of the character. We then take a further step back and view the author in the third person.

The relationship between characters and their creator (very Pirandello), and between people and God, are themes Potter continued to revisit. We are here seeing the disintegration of a character, and Potter spares nothing in his portrayal of the breakdown.

There are passages in this book that are repeated in The Singing Detective (the view of sex quoted by Bill Paterson's pyschiatrist there is lifted verbatim from this novel). And, many of the themes of The Singing Detective and Blackeyes can be seen in this novel.

It is out of print, but if you are interested in Potter you must try to get hold of it.

It is a minor book, not brilliant, but it is the key to understanding Potter's later work (from Joe's Ark and Brimstone and Treacle onwards).

A review from NAPRA Review, May/June 2000 (Copyright: 2000, NAPRA Review)

This is a very forgiving book for those of use who "color outside the lines"! The description of high-performance people (perhaps more familiar as "over-achievers") identifies the difference between the wannabe and the can-do with a precision that's impressive. Covering many facets of goal-setting, Potter helps the reader understand how intuition works, the two kinds of motivation, what we do when we "get there," and plenty of foibles and traps we set to talk ourselves out of getting what we want. This is definitely a boo for "the rest of us," deftly explaining how much negativity exists in our cultural system: studying not to fail, working hard to not lose your job, etc. Once again we gain understanding of how much energy we spend avoiding rather than moving towards our goals, we are able to turn our lives around for the better. No doubt about it, achieving goals takes organization, discipline, and a lot of chutzpah, and this book is the fundamental aid to harnessing those valuable traits. -TJE

The first portion of the book gives alot helpful information that is necessay for anyone thinking of hiking in the Canadian Rockies--from the gear needed for the hike to the precautions that need to be taken with hazards related to hiking. The author does an excellent job of linking each hike in a particular area to the next one, so that a hiker could possibly continue on right into the next degree of difficulty--if one were so inclined, or had enough time and preparation. Each hike is covered in very good detail, including: distance one way, degree of difficulty, elevation change, highest elevation reached on the hike, and location of the tailhead. Many beautiful colored and black & white photos were also included. The one thing that I thought was a little bit lacking was the detail of the maps. Several hikes in each area were included on the same map, and sometimes it got somewhat cluttered looking on the map. Overall I would highly recommend this book to anyone who was just a beginner or to those who wanted to strike out on the next degree of difficulty--all the way up to scaling some of the taller peaks in the Lake Louise area.

I would rate this as a tie for the most interesting book on this phenomenon of those I have read so far. This book looks at the cultural and political timing that seems to have made Harry the irresistible darling of the literacy efforts in the UK and since in many respects those things are duplicated in the US, voila, Harry is irresistible there also.

This book is at the same time the least and the most "Melvillian" of all Melville's corpus. Melville wrote in Moby-Dick that "two thirds of the world revolve in darkness." This idea certaily holds true for most of Melville's works, but not Israel Potter. In this uncharacteristically light-hearted and crisply written rewriting of American history, Melville gives an early literary version of Woody Allen's film Zelig. The character Israel Potter is that same sort of insignificant historical non-entity who just happens to get caught up in incredibly significant historical moments. In his various wanderings Israel meets and becomes politically involved with a trio of the most important American patriots--Ben Franklin, John Paul Jones, and Ethan Allen. It is through these encounters that Melville subtlely (and sometimes not so subtlely) realizes his critical agenda and those darker themes that dominate so much of his other work begin to show themselves. In his portrayal of Franklin, Melville takes a bash at what he sees as the exemplar of American "genius"--the same American genius that ignored and misunderstood his most significant works and forced him into obscurity and poverty in his lifetime. Melville sees Franklin as representative of all that is wrong with the American character--he is parsimonious, small-minded, hard-headed, and morally hypocritical. In the other two historical figures, John Paul Jones and Ethan Allen, Melville finds redemption. In them he sees represented more of that European idea of genius, the manly half-savage/half-civilized genius of Thomas Carlyle. Like Queequeg in Moby-Dick who is described as "George Washington canabalistically rendered," Jones and Allen are wildmen in a civilized society, raging against the world as they utter their outrageous and at times incomprehensible truth. A fun yet undenialbly thought-provoking read. Enjoy

It is undoubted that any serious library of classic English humour will contain this title, for it would show complete lack of literary candour to be without this `bible of the intellect'.

[This] book illustrates the importance of media literacy and it explores the many levels of the media. I like this book mainly for its organization. Potter's thoughts are well thought out and are presented very clearly. The only problem is that he has so many thoughts that I often forget much of what I've read. As a result, I've had to read paragraphs over and over again in order to fully absorb all that I can from the book.

[By] what he teaches in the book, I have been able to see that some of the claims he makes are very weak. Either he contradicts himself or he offers little evidence for some profound ideas. Without even knowing it, the book itself has become part of the experiment in analyzing and reaching better understanding of the media.