I love the oatmeal hotcake recipe in this book. The ingredients can be difficult to find. It does offer alot of veg-friendly meals (which is important to me). The bonus here ... it's meat-free but still with good protein. It does offer menu options and lots of helpful tips ... basic first aid, even natural remedies. It's very much a helpful cookbook with detailed instructions on preparation, including a good list of camp cooking needs. I recommend this, particularly for health conscious eaters and vegetarians.

Tired of oatmeal for breakfast, gorp for lunch, and Ramen noodles for dinner? Tired of buying those expensive dehydrated meals that turn out like soggy cardboard? This book might just save you from the trail food blahs. It is full of interesting, ususual foods such as crab a la king and polenta cakes. The recipes are simple and trail smart (a few do require weighty canned foods, though, and a few strike me as a bit too time-consuming to be very practical). This cookbook is mostly meat-free, except for a few seafood dishes. If you want dishes with meat, you might want to take a look at the cookbook put out by the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). A final word of warning: some ingredients can be hard to find. In putting them together, I have made trips to Middle Eastern and Asian groceries, health food stores, and backpacking stores, not to mention many of the large supermarkets in my area. Still, I have to say that the results were worth the running around.

Having tried these recipes both at home and on the trail, I am very pleased. Well flavored, very generous serving sizes using natural foods that are easily packed and prepared on site. Recipes are usuable for regular one pot cooking, bakepacker cooking and other styles that tease your tastebuds and fill your tummy. Great for backpacking, sea kayaking, canoeing,and for guided trips.

Great Book !! I use this book in an educational setting. Very colorful, children love the pictures. Very easy to expand upon with different ages! Lends itself very easily to reviewing different skills - identifying colors, object use/function, object characteristics.

Big Bird describes a different object on each page and asks readers to guess what he is referring to.

My toddler loves this book, not only for the colors, but also because it's fun to identify the other pictures on each page.

If your child is a Big Bird fan and you'd like to teach him/her about colors in a fun way, try this book!

I took a class from Dr. Cooke as an undergraduate, when I was working on a degree in theology and religious studies. Having interacted with Cooke in the classroom, I have more respect for the ideas he presents in this text. As a young well educated Catholic I did not initially find Cooke's ideas to be that interesting. However, understanding Cooke's own background and coming to appreciate his experience in the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church enabled me to more fully appreciate this text.

This book is great...just great reading. I'll tell all of my friends about it. Reading this book gave me a new understanding of what life is all about. What sacraments are all about. Thank you Mr. Cooke.

"Lively characters in a leisurely read, with a subtle plot and succulent setting. Excellent!" ~ Jillian Dagg, Author of Racing Hearts, Avalon Books

Cheryl Cooke Harrington has an incredibly fantastic way with words! Of course, you might too, if you took the admonishment to "write what you know" so seriously that you'd learn to pilot a Cessna in order to write about flying!

I purchased this book in the early 1980's, thus the last President mentioned is Ronald Reagan. The text is appropriate for children, comprehensive but not overly so. What makes Atlas of the Presidents special to me is the Electoral College map of each Presidential election. It breaks out which state voted for whom and which candidate had support in certain areas of the country. Although each Electoral College map of the country is given small attention in the book, they all reflect the historical attitudes of our nation. As the back of the book, it contains a table showing comparative data of each President, and John Kennedy advice to young people seeking the Presidency in the future.

I have used the Cooke text in teaching electronics math for a few years now. The treatment is thorough if a bit technical. If you want a good math book without electronics theory look elsewhere. The electronics is rigorous but the book is a good companion to Grob's Basis Electronics.

Great book!!! My first copy has worn out from so much use!! I use this book in an educational setting. Useful for identifying colors, object use and functions, recognizing object characteristics. Very easy to expand upon with several age groups.

When you have a detective novel that starts off with the characters arguing about the believability of detective stories, you know you're in for a self-conscious take on the genre. Many of these sorts of parodies and satires fall flat because they either fail to include an interesting mystery or they've obviously been written by someone who doesn't really know or even like the genre.

Leo Bruce's "Case for Three Detectives" doesn't fail, and for two reasons: 1) Its pastiche of three famous detectives -- Lord Simon Plimsoll (aka Lord Peter Wimsey), Monsieur Amer Picon (aka Hercule Poirot) and Monsignor Smith (aka Father Brown) -- is very funny and very clever, and 2) the author obviously loves the genre and respects its conventions even as he pokes fun at them.

There's a fourth detective involved in this case -- the local police official, Sgt. Beef. Beef represents the seemingly slow-witted officer who always jumps to conclusions in Golden Age whodunnits and is always shown up at the end by the brilliant amateur sleuth. In "Case for Three Detectives," however, the beer-drinking, darts-playing, unpretentious Beef gets some revenge for his literary type, as he gets to show up the three geniuses through use of plain ol' common sense.

With four detectives in this book, you get four different solutions to the crime, all based on the same facts. Each solution is ingenious, in its own way -- although only one can be correct, of course.

There are a lot of inside jokes waiting for readers of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and G.K. Chesterson, and for these readers I give this book four stars. You folks will really get a kick out of this novel on more than one level. Bruce does a wonderful job capturing the voices, attitudes and styles of all three famous detectives.

For those of you who don't like the old-style "puzzle" mysteries, though, and prefer the more modern style of psychological intrigue and suspense, you might not enjoy this book quite as much. I will say, however, that it reads like a shot (you can easily finish it in one sitting) and so the time investment isn't too great, even if you're not too familiar with the mystery style of the 1920s and '30s.

For those of you who miss the Golden Age writers, this book will be a real treat.

(One complaint -- the copyediting of this edition is, well, pretty bad. There are a lot of typos. If you're really bugged by this sort of thing, this edition might distract you a bit. I don't think they're the type of errors that actually slow you up while reading, so they didn't bother me much and thus didn't affect my four-star rating. Your call, though.)

This book has quickly become a favorite at my house. I have a daycare and they love to watch the clothes spin. We have to make sure all the pieces are put away when finished; but, this book has been a lot of fun.

This is a big board book showing Cookie Monster mix, bake, and of course, eat, a batch of cookies. My son likes the song "C is for Cookie" so he likes this book, and its size gives it some novelty value. On the downside it has minimal text, consisting of non-imaginative sentences, and the illustrations don't change much from page to page; it also doesn't help that Cookie's kitchen is depicted in washed-out pastel colours. (And I always thought that Cookie's cookies were chocolate-chip, but according to this book, they are raisins.)