I loved every moment of this book -- gorgeous pictures, great text, small houses -- seeing as how I live in a pretty small house myself. My only gripe with the book is that it seems that many, if not most, of the houses are summer houses or guest houses -- not everyday, we really live in a house this small houses. Oh well, can't be perfect -- it's still a gorgeous book that serves as inspiration every day.

This is wierd and funny little book. It's told in a silly, 1st-grade reader tone and makes fun of the people who live in Flordia.

Good Judgment is supposedly for the experienced dog person who is thinking of becoming a show judge. I think that's the wrong audience - a judge-wannabe should already know what this book has to say. The book is actually quite appropriate for the newcomer to showing. It provides good explanations about what the judge is doing and why, and how a show ring is managed - things the exhibitor needs to understand. There are good illustrations of examining a dog's conformation. I found the anatomy drawings very helpful, along with the pictures comparing proper and incorrect movement. Overall, this is a useful book that gave me some pointers on how to evaluate and show a dog and provided me a better understanding of what a judge is doing and thinking.

A current topic, "green" architecture has a broad, reasonable definition in this book. One often thinks of green house books as full of solar and straw bale houses of middling design (whatever the sensitivity of the construction). The book categorizes several ways buildings can be green, and shows a variety of houses with designs as (or more) innovative as their green techniques. The photographs are well done, and of (for the most part) really good-looking houses. I think the "Lakeside Residence," "Howard House," and "Low Compound" are especially memorable. A good book for those interested in current, contemporary architecture as well as green architecture.

This book briefly covers Korea's religious history from prehistory until the present. It's an interesting story because Korea has always been a unique society: in the ancient past it bred unusual forms of Buddhism; then it was the most Confucian society in history; today it is the only country in Asia to really embrace Protestant Christianity, while at the same time interesting syncretic religions emerge and the shamanist traditions continue.

Grayson gives the most important facts and a few interpretations about each of these phenomena; but the book is too brief to go into any depth on any matter. It's a good first book on Korean history and religion, but I constantly wanted to know more than he was telling me. Like me, you'll probably want deeper books after this fine introduction.

Finally a book about how to be love rather than how to get love! Oh the difference. Instead of looking to significant others to make us feel complete, whole, and happy, we learn how to do this by ourselves for ourselves. 10 powerful ideas for becoming a more loving being are offered. Even more importantly, Mindful Loving teaches how to respond to life's challenges by thinking in a different way. This sounds like a small shift, but it's a major change in life perception.

Because spirituality and psychotherapy are perfectly blended, Mindful Loving should be required reading for every psychotherapist, every psychologist, every minister, or for anyone involved in talk therapy of any kind. Other books tend to use spirituality to support psychology, where spiritual principles are adapted, modified, or eliminated to make the point. This book is the other way around where psychology supports spirituality. The uncompromising nature of Mindful Loving makes it refreshing to read.

The only caution is that this is a very intellectual and heavy book which may not appeal to all. Also, Grayson could not resist including the predictable list of how love "should be." All in all, however, Mindful Loving is an excellent explanation of love with something of use for everyone. This book is rated 8 on a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high) by the spiritual reviewer. This unusually high rating designates Mindful Loving as "a classic."

I could barely put this book down. It pieces together the events in a celebrated libel action brought in England in 1891. What is at stake? Simply a gentelman's honour, which may not mean much these days. However, for me the whole book was a gripping if sad commentary on human nature and personal motivation, further magnified by the English class system. The plaintiff in the case, a highly decorated soldier, has been accused of cheating in an illegal game of cards. Was he or wasn't he? He simply wishes to clear his name, but other issues are in play - notably that his friend, the Prince of Wales and heir to the English throne, was also (scandalously) playing. The authors skillfully piece together the events of the weekend of the fateful card games before carefully examining the subsequent trial, including brilliant cross examinations, revelations of prejudice among the witnesses and apparent prejudice on the part of England's most senior judge. Why should anybody care about all of this upper class cheek slapping? Perhaps because it contains parallels in today's world at every turn, from the desire of society's lever-pushers to supress a scandal to the way in which people run for cover once the lid is blown off. You don't need to be a lawyer or a historian to read and enjoy this book. It is extremely well researched and written. In fact the only thing I didn't like was the jury's verdict........

These days, biographies seem to be reaching new extremes at both ends of the "length spectrum." At the long end we have all those exhaustive multi-volume essays on political figures and the literary life; at the short end has stood the compact line of Penguin Brief Lives books that cover everyone from Saint Augustine to Elvis Presley.

Now comes Overlook Press with the second entry in its Overlook Brief Lives series --- thin volumes loaded with pictures and text not much longer than an ambitious New Yorker profile. The first of these dealt with Samuel Beckett. Now comes a similar effort, devoted to Vladimir Nabokov and written by Jane Grayson, a British academic and Nabokov specialist.

Nabokov, who died in 1977 at the age of 78, makes a fascinating subject. Most general readers remember him best as the author of LOLITA, that literary sensation of the late 1950s whose title has become a lower-case noun in our dictionaries. But Nabokov also wrote several other estimable novels too, in addition to many short stories, poems, essays, translations and literary criticism (much of it in The New Yorker). He was also an expert on butterflies, a master chess player, the constructor of the first Russian crossword puzzle and the translator of ALICE IN WONDERLAND into Russian.

He inherited a fortune and a vast estate at the age of 17, but was forced to leave Russia because of his father's political activities at the time of the 1917 revolution. He matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge (England) and lived and wrote in Germany until the advent of Hitler. This forced him to seek a livelihood in the U.S., where he practically had to start his life over again --- both personally and professionally.

LOLITA was published in Paris in 1955 but was greeted "in silence," until Graham Greene singled it out for high praise in a London newspaper. Publication in America three years later gained Nabokov instant notoriety on this side of the Atlantic. His tale of sexual predator ...was condemned as highfalutin pornography. I was so they did not print it.

Nabokov returned to Europe in 1958 and lived out his life in Switzerland. The biggest event during this time was a sulfurous literary feud with Edmund Wilson, who had been a close friend during his years in America.

Jane Grayson covers all of this ground quickly and efficiently in this short biography. Understandably there is little development of themes or in-depth literary criticism here, but the basic facts are laid out concisely. She stresses Nabokov's aloofness from political action and his butterfly-like agility in crossing borders between languages, literary styles and nations alike. Her own style is eminently readable and obvious errors are few (she places the rise of McCarthyism in the "late 1940s" although it did not begin until 1950 and a picture caption tells us that Boris Pasternak was "pressurized" into refusing the Nobel Prize for Literature). The pictures are mostly interesting, though there are a few that are only vaguely relevant to Nabokov's career.

Vladimir Nabokov was a colorful character, a brilliant teacher and a masterful writer in two languages. LOLITA put him on the literary map, but his other novels (PNIN, PALE FIRE, ADA) are worth reading too. If this little book leads more readers to them, it will have served a useful purpose.

--- Reviewed by Robert Finn

This book is an English translation of Behringer's most important study "Hexenverfolgung in Bayern. Volksmagie, Glaubenseifer und Staatsräson in der Frühen Neuzeit", published in Germany 1987 (3. verbesserter Auflage 1997). In this southern part of Germany 900 witches were executed, and many more tried for witchcraft, between 1560 and 1730. Behringer finds that most trials occurred during years of particular dearth and famine. One of his conclusions is that every major persecution in this part of Germany was rooted in agrarian crisis. His book should be read by anybody who only knows about witch-trials from English-speaking countries. There are almost 500 fascinating pages in his book.

I found this book at a garage sale for $1. It's a nice collection of stories by a young writer in the 1970s. Some of the pop culture references are dated, but if you substitute today's current TV celebrities, it shows you nothing much changes. Much of the book is funny, although the stories that are insightful portraits of women probably ring the most true. The book has a lot of energy but sometimes it runs out of gas and you lose your patience with the author's corny jokes -- i.e., the Jewish grandmother who says one grandson is a doctor and the other is "in medicine" (he lives in "Medicine, Wisconsin").