I have read all of the Nate Heller mysteries, and True Crime is the best of them. One of the most interesting touches to the series are the historical photographs showing the characters that Nate interacts with. True Crime is a good straightfoward read which draws you into the criminal world of Dillinger, Floyd, Barker, Karpis and others. The historical research appears to be excellent, (I'm no expert) and Collins fleshes out all of the characters satisfactorily. If you can, read True Detective first as it gives a good background to Nate Heller (and is a very good book as well).

The first time I heard Judy Collin's stirring voice was over the radio when her super hit "Both Sides Now" became an international crossover hit on the popular charts in 1968. Of course, at that point her career was really taking off, and by the time I was finishing my senior year the next summer, I had all of her albums and played them all into a scratchy oblivion. A good friend of mine had a super sound system, and he was so enamored of her "Who Knows Where The Time Goes?" he played it over and over again. Her voice and arrangements had such an intoxicating effect that one was drawn into the colorful dreamscapes she created with her autobiographical approach in many of the songs.

Magically, Ms. Collins has achieved the same sort of infectious hospitality in creating the same kind of watercolor representation of her remarkable and very purposeful personal life. This is an autobiography that not only tells all, but also does so in a way that places her actions in context, so one better understands how the aspects of her personal, professional, and civil life all merged and interacted. Judy appears to have considerable gifts as an author, which is no surprise to those of us familiar with her amazing prowess as a songwriter and lyricist. Her songs are quite literate and poetic, and the rhyme schemes and use of the language betray a native facility with expressing herself. Here too she often paints word pictures of real life situations and circumstances. I remember listening to her song "Martin" as I was about to leave the safety of graduate study for my first professional position, and recall her phrase "my life was moving fast by now" as describing not just her existential circumstances, but for most baby-boomers really grabbing life by the horns at long last.

Judy's career is legendary, starting off slowly as Judy hit the cafes and coffee houses in Fort Collins, Colorado while her husband finished his graduate studies at the local university. She gradually became quite adept at supporting them and their son Clark by increasingly drawing crowds and spreading her range of songs and venues for her soaring voice and intricate ability with an acoustic guitar. Yet even as she became more successful with her career, her marriage floundered. Soon, the career, which was taking wings and flying off on its own power, began to seductively call her toward distant gigs and national causes, such as civil rights and the growing protest against the war in Vietnam.

Once fame and success came her way, she quickly flowered into a virtual cottage industry of her own, propelled by a memorable succession of best-selling albums and sell-out tours, so that as her career began to peak in the early 1970s, Judy was looking to stretch her artistic wings and try for other ways to express herself. She appeared in several Broadway shows, and experimented with more traditional song forms and styles. Doing so gradually affected her audience, which seemed to want much more of the folk-rock style she had been so instrumental in popularizing. As a result, she was finally dropped by her label, Elektra, and has subsequently recorded on a number of independent labels. By the time of the book release, in the late 1990s, Judy had regained much of her audience base, and was both recording new work and working on the concert tour circuit once again, a kind of elder stateswoman for popular folk music who was more successful at sustaining this aspect of her career than either Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell, who had lost interest in popular music and was much more experimental I her recordings than Judy.

In the last decade Judy has also written a couple of novels, and seems content to dabble in different modes of expressing herself while enjoying the touring life as well. She is indeed a one of a kind woman who has gone through both heartache (having lost her only son to suicide not so long ago) and fantastic success as a singer, a songwriter, and a novelist. This is an exceptionally interesting and well-written autobiographical effort, and one that is open enough and honest enough to give the empathetic reader a chance to get to know Judy much more personally than one would expect. Enjoy!

This is a great little book. It tells the origins of 65 famous gospel songs as well as inspiring stories about the songwriters. There are no actual music scores or lyrics, but the song titles are all familiar tunes to Christian gospel lovers, young and old. When friends of Albert Burnley would hear his songs on the radio, they would call him and say, "Albert, turn your radio on." Soon, he wrote one of his best loved songs, "Turn Your Radio On"; and hence the title of this collection of stories. If you love gospel music, you will love this book. Stories are told about Andrae Crouch, Dottie Rambo, Bill and Gloria Gaither, George Beverly Shea, Rusty Goodman, just to mention a few. All the great gospel songwriters are here. Order now for youself or as a great gift. Lynn Rouse

Imaginative way for a young child to learn this tradional nursery rhyme and perhaps imagine their own stuffed toys in the adventure of retrieving the star.

there isn't much written on this subject but here you can find it all in one place!

I almost didn't read the whole book. The first story was pretty bad. But I decided to keep at it until I got to Nancy Picard's and Sharon McCrumb's stories. Two of my favorite authors. I'm glad I did, because the stories got progressively better. Not a great collection but fairly entertaining

Here at last is a look at how social change happens at the street level, literally. As her native South Africa struggled violently toward the end of apartheid, Susan Collin Marks was a peace committee volunteer on the streets of Cape Town area communities.

Most of the attention on South Africa in the early 1990s was focused on President DeKlerk and Nelson Mandela, but both men knew they could not build any lasting solution if the people were not ready. Through Marks, we learn what really happened on the local level, such as the police who had to learn a whole new way of law enforcement, and the bitter youths who slowly came to realize that talk could bring more change than chants and threats. Of course, this is no fairy tale--there are plenty of setbacks and brutalism along the way of this story. Yet as heartbreaking as the violence Marks relates is, she also reveals many quiet and refreshing successes. Indeed, no one was more surprised to discover the effectiveness of conflict resolution that the contestants themselves.

By the time the new constitution was in place, the people were ready to give it a fighting chance, instead of fighting. The ad- hoc resolutions effected by local peace workers like Marks bought time and space, and often something more -- aggrieved parties learning to forge their own nonviolent solutions. Given the very real possibility of the entire country otherwise exploding, that was no small achievement.

This book is really really great. Not that it is very interesting to read, mind. It's great in the sense that it provides you with just about any piece of info that you need to access about this complex disease.

"Why Different?: A Culture of Two Subjects," is a collection of interviews with Luce Irigaray. The book is edited by Irigaray and Sylvere Lotringer. Camille Collins is credited as primary translator, although there are a few sections that have others credited as translators.

The introduction by Irigaray (dated 1998) discusses the relationship of interviews to written texts. The interviews in this book generally discuss her own corpus of written texts.

Overall, I found this book very thought-provoking. Irigaray discusses feminism, mother-daughter relationships, language, and spirituality. Particularly fascinating are her observations on the "sexed" nature of language; this material reminds me somewhat of the debates over Black English. Also intriguing are her discourses on the significance of her other books' titles. She draws on an eclectic body of knowledge, citing Marguerite Yourcenar, Heidegger, Greek mythology, Marx, the life of Jesus, etc.

At times she strikes me as overly fixated on "sexual difference" as a "universal reality." Nevertheless, I still find the book intriguing and worthwhile.

I have been using this book for the past year to teach grade school students and adult sign. I have found that it is easy for both to use and the lessons easy to understand except I think they could use points about facial expressions and the deaf community.