I read this book with a bunch of third graders, and they thought it was too easy. Then I read it with a group of first graders and I believed that it was at their reading level. It is a great book with a great story line, and I would recommend it to any first grade teacher.

I enjoyed this book, and do hope that Alison Giles will be producing another novel in the not too distant future. It was easy to read, and yet provided plenty of food for thought - I often paused to ponder my own relationships and to look at some of them in a different light. It will be particularly enjoyed by those who love to spend time in the English countryside - for those of us who don't often get the opportunity to wander down an English country lane, a book like this is the next best thing!

A very colourful book,quite similar to Richard Iversen's 'The Exotic Garden',except it's British.Ideal for the novice into exotic gardening,but doesn't really give any advanced info for established exoctists.I don't agree with what Will says about certain plants and their requirments,like eg.Cordyline australis needs to be brought indoors in winter for protection.It's a hardy plant in most of the UK(95%).I wish he would tell us more about growing cold hardy cacti and succulents outdoors all year round as he lives in a 'semi-arid' region of Britain.

I feel it is very useful since it contains a lot of exercise and solution. It can make me easily to understand and save the study time. The other point is that this book give me a very clear concepts in Fluid Mechanics.

I read this book, Smith if Wooten Major, quite a while ago, but i still remember a lot about it. It was a very good book, but some parts did not seem clear to me.
It is about a baker who puts a star in a cake. And when a child eats it that star appears on his forehead. Then they enter another world when they desire to. This tells sbout one person who gets the star and then who has to let it go so someone else can get it.
Right now it is the only J.R.R. Tolkien book i have read, but i am eager to read his book the Hobbit and the Lord of the Ring Trilogy and i will do so soon.

who is expecting a new sibling. Although not her favourite baby book, she does seem to enjoy the rhymes and beautiful bright pictures in this one. My husband found the line about the door to the tummy house being 'rather tight' somewhat amusing as well!

After being out of the superentendent side of the business for a few years this book brought me back up to speed. The text is well written and easy to understand. I recommend it highly for anyone who needs a book "just to be sure"!

The most recent English language biographical study of Wilhelm is The Last Kaiser: The Life of Wilhelm II by Giles MacDonogh (2001). MacDonogh seems to have set out deterministically to write something other than an "indictment" of Wilhelm. He asserts that historians have been unduly critical against the emperor for eighty years, which has prompted him to examine Wilhelm "in a light which, if not ridiculously positive, [is] at least a little more indulgent than that which as coloured attitudes in the past." (viii) While MacDonogh's study is not "ridiculously positive," it does tend to minimize Wilhelm's culpability for the various blunders historians commonly associate with his reign. While he concurs with other scholars of Wilhelmine Germany that the emperor was "a mass of contradictions," (1) MacDonogh also minimizes the Kaiser's documented anti-Semitism, and strongly implies that the "cases brought up against the emperor" such as the Kruger telegram (1896), the "Hun Speech" of 1900, and the Daily Telegraph Affair (1908), were handled "reasonable, and in some cases well" by the Kaiser. (7) This attempt to show that Wilhelm did not act maliciously, criminally or incompetently is what differentiates The Last Kaiser from its predecessors.
In MacDonogh's account of Wilhelm's wartime role, he reaches a familiar conclusion: "it would be impossible to make out that he played the role of 'Supreme Warlord' between 1914 and 1918." (3) He shows that Wilhelm "wavered over the preventive strike" long advocated by the General Staff, and "each time he looked in to the abyss he drew back in horror and countermanded" his generals' orders for such an attack. (9) This gives the kaiser too much of a benevolent, conscientious role for the time. MacDonogh portrays a Kaiser swept up with the emotions and events of August 1914, a leader who allowed himself to be carried into the war. By the first weeks of the conflict, "he had become increasingly peripheral." (367) This declension culminated in January 1917 with Bethmann Hollweg's removal at the insistence of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, at which point Wilhelm "was no more than a shadow emperor. No one listened to him." (391) Probably true.....
Despite showing far more sympathy toward his subject than other biographers of Wilhelm II have done, MacDonogh echoes many of their conclusions. "It is perhaps right that we condemn William," he suggests, "for if the First World War was not his undertaking, the finger of blames points over and over again to the failure of German diplomacy in which he tried so hard to play a positive role." (460) MacDonogh seems reluctant to assign Wilhelm much direct blame for the origins of the Great War or how it was conducted. On the contrary, most students of the last Hohenzollern ruler of Germany concur with the concise biographical entry in The Oxford Companion to Military History (2001): Kaiser Wilhelm II was "seduced by...nationalism and militarism," and came to discover that "leading a cavalry charge on maneuvers...is not the same thing as presiding over a beleaguered state engaged in total war." The last German Kaiser "lacked the strength of character and consistency of purpose which his role demanded, and if he cannot be blamed for leading Germany into war, he may be more justly censured for what one historian has called 'a childlike flight from reality' in the crisis of 1914."

I actually feel a little bit guilty giving this book only 3 stars! It is clear from the endnotes that Mr. MacDonogh did a prodigious amount of research, almost all of it in the primary German sources. There are many amusing and interesting bits and pieces.....little details concerning the way William dressed and ate; many clever and sarcastic comments about their contemporaraies made by William and Bismarck; a description of how William passed the time of day after he was forced to abdicate (he loved to chop wood, and at his first "home" in exile, Amerongen, he managed to chop up some 14,000 trees- giving away most of the wood to the poor). And even though it is interesting to read about many of these things, the end result is oddly unsatisfying. It is almost as though the author found lots of fascinating material, knew he had to include it, but couldn't turn everything into a coherent whole. Mr. MacDonogh quotes so many contrasting opinions that we are left with all of the following: William was an anti-Semite; William was not an anti-Semite; William was brilliant and could have been another Frederick The Great; William was lazy; William had boundless energy and was always traveling and making speeches; William was mentally unbalanced; William could have done more to prevent the slide into WWI; William's hands were tied by the military and by right-wing members of the government; William wanted an alliance with the British; no he didn't; William wanted an alliance with the Russians; no he didn't.....I think you get the idea! In the end, we are left with no clear picture of William as a person or as a ruler, nor are we left with a clear picture of what was going on in Germany in the crucial years leading up to 1914. Imagine that Georges Seurat started to paint a portrait of someone, but by the time the picture was finished it had mutated into a Jackson Pollock! That's probably the best description I could give you of how I felt by the end of this book...

The book is good because it examines one of the figures who was instrumental in shapping the 20th century. The author proves that he was very erratic with his forighn policy and his views on the world. The author also disproves the misconception that it was his imperial ambitions that led to the first World War and points out that it was the militarism of prussian aristocrats.

Never mind the film versions; the original unabridged Swiss Family Robinson is an exciting epic with a lot in it for the whole family.

Our third grade teacher read to us from this book every day and I could hardly wait for the next installment. Finally I got my own copy for a birthday gift, sat on the couch and read it cover to cover in one go. I still have this book, decades later.

From the opening, thrilling tempest scene to the very end and the "rescue", this book has plenty of action as well as creative solutions to problems. There is a lot of material for discussion, how the family solved problems, how they handled disagreements, adversity, disappointment, building of character.

This book definitely teaches values along with the adventure and the values are linked in such a way as to be an integral part of the story.

And Swiss Family Robinson is never boring. There is always an exciting new beast to be discovered, a new plant to use for food or clothing, a new machine or tool to be built, a new part of the island to explore. This is a wonderful book to read out loud to kids until they are old enough to enjoy reading it themselves. If you are bored with re-runs on TV, turn off the box and spend a half-hour or hour every evening reading this aloud. Everyone will have a great time, and kids who are read to, become readers themselves.

There's not many classic books that are more well known than "The Swiss Family Robinson." A Swiss family is stranded on an uninhabited island and there doesn't seem to be any rescues that are lingering around the corner for many years. Soon the family is taming tons of new pets, fighting off animals such as anacondas and lions, and learning how to basically survive off the land the best they can. The Robinson family must keep an eye out for danger while also starting a whole new way of life for themselves.

I thought "The Swiss Family Robinson" was a spectacular adventure/survival book. You can say that the book is pretty much a long diary that is kept by the father of the family of everything that happens to them on the island. The book I read did have many references to God unlike some of the abridged editions. The only thing I didn't like about "The Swiss Family Robinson" is that when the family starts collecting and taming many animals that they find on the island, it gets a little tough to keep up with all the animals' names, but that wasn't bad enough to take anything away from the book for me.

I recommend anybody who likes survival or adventure books, especially if you like reading the classics, to get "The Swiss Family Robinson." I would recommend getting an unabridged version of the book if you can so you won't miss a word.

But let's be clear right up front. My 5-star rating of this book applies only to the original unabridged version in Johann Wyss' own words. The modernized versions are watered down, time-wasters for word wusses.

When I was nine years old I spent months struggling through this book for the first time. The old style language made for rough going, but I persevered. In the end I was rewarded with more than a classic tale marvelously told; I discovered a love of books and earned self-respect for tackling a tough read.

If I was a teacher whose task it was to introduce students to classic literature, I would skip Dickens and use this book. Kids love adventure, animals, and action. Swiss Family Robinson has it all. It's really a thriller disguised as a literary classic. All book lovers should read this one at least once.

And please don't watch the Disney movie and claim you've "been there, did that" on this story. The movie is totally different and in no way compares.

Is this really how men see us? Almost without exception, the protagonists saw their female bodies as "other" and objectified them. They were either turned on by their bodies or disgusted by them. Only one author seemed to actually identify with the woman had had become, having the realization: "Hey! I'm still a human being! women are actually human beings!" Well, duh.

And a horrifying number of the authors actually idenfied as rapists.

This left me feeling depressed at the spiritual integrity of this intelligent group of men. Maybe I should work on becoming a lesbian.

I found this to be a highly literate collection of poems and essays. That is both the book's strength and its biggest weakness. On the one hand, the contributors are experienced, talented authors who know how to write. On the other, especially with the essays, there is less emphasis on story and plot than stories familiar to readers who frequent internet transgender literature sites. I kept waiting for one story that had a memorable character or plot twist. By the end, I was still waiting.

Despite what some other reviewers have written, this book does deal with the subject matter (the perspectives of male writers on the gender identity of women)-- and in most cases, it does so with a great deal of respect.

Upon receiving this book, I immediately threw out the cover art. ^_^ I was ready to read something a bit more thoughtful than the cover art implies, and I found the art to be a distraction. With that out of the way, I was able to enjoy some fascinating short stories and essays written by authors I have never encountered before.

I read this book over the course of several mornings, so I was able to muse upon the points raised in the more thoughtful stories. At the same time, I read Jack Chalker's "The Identity Matrix", which I discovered added depth to Ms. Giles' collection. Taken as a whole, I find that my experiences with these two books have expanded my awareness of the issues women must deal with in Western society. I believe that I learned some valuable lessons, particularly from the Brain Bouldrey story "Monster" and Rick Moody's offering. I name those two because they stand out in recent memory-- but almost all of the stories raised points worth pondering.

Of course, there were a few "brain candy" stories, too-- the ones that seemed to deal mostly with wish-fulfillment and sensual pleasures. But these stories only served to illustrate the points made by other writers in the book. ^_^ It became really obvious which writers were comfortable with exploring the concept of the feminine-- and which ones were more interested in women as objects. As the author notes in her foreword, the majority of the writers were very respectful and thoughtful in regard to feminine identity-- and, I would add, *without* disrespecting their own gender. That was one thing that made this book most enjoyable-- the writers really seemed to think before they wrote.

Overall, I would recommend this book as an enjoyable read and a good starting point for discussions of gender identity. I try to limit my collection of books (makes moving easier), but this is one book that I plan to keep for a while longer, as a source of "food for thought". For those who complained that it objectifies or disrespects women, I respectfully reply, "You get out of it what you put into it."