I have read the book and I think it's a great training material for our teachers.

I'M NOT A ROMANCE READER. BUT THIS BOOK IS AN EXCEPTION. IT'S INTRIGUING, ROMANTIC IT HAS A LITTLE OF EVERYTHING. COULD NOT PUT IT DOWN ONCE I PICKED IT UP. I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW IF THERE'S A CONTINUATION TO THIS STORY.

Great book for beginners or on going Kwanzaa observers. Informative and clear on the seven principal days, symbols, recipes and sewing instructions to make your own African outfits. An valuable and creative resource book. A perfect storyteller resource book as well.

This book has intrigued me since I first read it over 10 years ago. She writes with such reality it made the book so believable. I wore out the copy of this book many years ago but continue to read it again and again. It is worth the search to find a copy. I am trying to find out if she wrote a sequal.

I first heard the band known as Jars of Clay back in college, the style of how their cords were played facinated me. So I decided to ask around and a number of people gave their own opinions on how it was done. Then I came across this book, a sign that I will soon get my story straight. This is one piece of material that I would definetly recommend.

Good basic one-handed reading. Clay does a very good job at sex scenes. If I have any complaint, it be that the stories are a bit longer and drawn out and don't finish' so soon....

Clay Jones' artistic style and quick wit are unmatched in his industry. I must have read this book a hundred times and will probably read it a hundred more. Awesome!

In the November 2000 issue of The Bloomsbury Review, in the "Gifts for Booklovers" section Lori D. Kranz wrote:

Her medium is clay, her inspiration the Galisteo Basin where she lives and works. Native New Mexican Priscilla Hoback makes what she calls "clay murals" or fired clay paintings. Hoback started out as a self -taught potter in Santa Fe, where she was born, and for many years created and sold functional pieces for the kitchen in her studio/shop on Canyon Road and at local craft fairs. In 1977, with her children gone to college, she yearned for a change, for a more peaceful life in the country, and so she bought a small, run-down ranch near Galisteo village, which she turned into a studio, a house, a garden, and a home for her horses, dogs, ducks, and chickens. In her meanderings through the basin valley, she became fascinated with its geology, wildlife, ancient petroglyphs, and abandoned mines-particularly clay mines. Her work grew in both size and inventiveness as she began to incorporate these influences, gathering raw materials from the land, experimenting with her own recipes, and firing them in a large kiln of her own making.

For her murals, Hoback uses the wet clay as her canvas, drawing images on it with her fingers, a pen, or a trowel. Then she brushes on pigments and creates texture by scraping away or building up layers of clay. Her imagery is of animals :horses, buffalo, deer, antelope, birds, and her favorite, bears. Before it has dried, she cuts the clay slab into smaller pieces and punches holes in them, which allows them to be screw-mounted on plywood for later hanging. Then comes what she considers the best part: the firing. Hoback sees kilns as "combinations of dragon, slave, and ancient god." The result of her efforts is a unique blend of ceramic art, painting, and installation art.

Living Clay is Hoback's story : her life, her process, her creations, her beautiful desert surroundings, all illustrated in full color. From an accomplisher potter she has become a singuar artist. "Hands ask, clay responds." she says. Her book is a testament to the beauty of what hands are capable of.

beautifully written, provokes thoughts of not only joy but gratitude, self examination and peace..."joy simplified".

Lucius D. Clay has the distinction-and it is not one in which he took any pride-of being the first four star general in the history of the U.S. Army never to have seen any combat. One might think that the career of a uniformed bureaucrat might have little interest, but such is hardly the case. Clay was a key figure in getting the U.S. Army mobilized during the Second World War. As military governor of Germany during the immediate postwar period, he was in the front lines of the early Cold War. In later years, he was a major force in the Eisenhower campaign of 1952 and a foreign policy advisor to several presidents on matters involving Germany and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Biographer Jean Edward Smith certainly has the expertise to tell the story of Clay's life. He edited Clay's papers, wrote an important history of Berlin during the Cold War, and had a series of long interviews with the general and his family.

The man that emerges is a paragon of virtue. Clay came from an influential family; he was a distant relative of the nineteenth century statesman Henry Clay and his father was a U.S. Senator from Georgia, but finances were tight. He attended West Point because it was free. Clay saw no combat in World War I and progress in his career during the interwar period was slow and frustrating like so many others who went on to have large commands during the war. During the conflict Clay's administrative and logistical talents earned him general's stars, but also kept him in Washington. He was willing to take a demotion to get a combat command, but the War Department would not let him go.

The bulk of the book focuses on the last four of his military career; the time he served as military governor of Germany. Clay recognized that the occupation and decisions about its future were political issues, he treated them as such, and insisted that his administration not be part of the normal Army command structure. He wanted, and got, direct access to Eisenhower, the supreme commander of allied forces, and the Secretary of War back in Washington. Clay was serious about establishing democracy in Germany and denazification efforts. He, however, maintained a distance from most German officials, not wanting anyone to be tagged as a collaborator. He also wanted to avoid a punitive peace settlement and made sure that Germany had a solid fiscal foundation upon which to base its economic recovery. Smith shows that the French, rather than the Soviets, were the biggest obstacles to him in these efforts. Clay ultimately ended reparations in Germany because of the amount of plunder headed west, not east. Although Clay was one of the last to give up on cooperation with the Soviets, he was one of the first to defend German liberties. He oversaw the Berlin airlift that preserved the freedom of the western half of the city.

After retiring from the Army, Clay became a corporate CEO, but refused to take a position with any company that did defense work. He was a foreign policy troubleshooter in the 1950s and 1960s, when the status of Berlin threatened to turn the Cold War into a real war. His trips to Berlin helped reassure the nervous population of American protection and support. Smith adopts Clay's position that President John F. Kennedy handled the German issue poorly and allowed the Soviets to divide Berlin, dooming thousands to life in a Communist state.

Smith has done an impressive job of letting Clay's personality and views comes through the text. Clay made this difficult, he left no collection of papers or letters for a biographer to use. Smith's solution to this problem was extensive research in the collections of many other individuals and interviews with the general and his family. At the end of each chapter, Smith includes excerpts from his interviews with Clay. These sections make Clay's views clear, but it also makes for redundant reading. Smith also has a tendency to exaggerate his subject's influence. He soft peddles his criticisms, and usually faults Clay for minor, trivial matters. Still, it is clear that Lucius D. Clay was a man of integrity and he type that Americans can be proud to have had serve in their government.