Olga da Polga is a wonderful book from the creator of Paddington the Bear. It begins at the pet shop where Olga dreams of the world outside, and moves to her "house on legs" in the Sawdust family's garden. Along the way we meet the family she belongs to, her friends from their garden, and are entertained by both the tales about Olga, and the ones she creates for her friends. It's a low-key but charming book for those who love animals, and find humor in the little things they do. Children who favor the WWF,Yugio and Power Rangers will probably find the stories a bit tame, but my seven-year old son enjoyed the series of Olga books as much as I did when I was his age.

Olga da Polga was read to me at bedtime by my parents when I was about five. 25+ years later, I still remember Olga's antics and stories. As a child, I even went so far as to name my guinea pig "Olga da Polga". A super book for youngsters!

Olga da Polga is one of my favorite children's books. It is the delightful story of a mischievious guinea pig. Written from Olga's perspective, the reader gets quite a different view of the world. The story is light-hearted and sweet without being sappy. It is arranged in adventure-type stories ideal for short before-bed readings.

I read this book with my nieces (ages 8-10), and they adored it as much as I did when I was a child (and still do). They immediately asked for copies.

It makes you laugh out loud. Hail the apostles Bellingham! From Nigel, the rabbit - to Susan, the estranged wife - Looking at life through rose coloured glasses indeed.Why hasn't a daily picked this guy up? Bellingham, a man in love with his adopted city of San Francisco. Not a bit of underdone potato - as saterical writers tend to be. Curmundgeons have a hero - a passionate one at that.

WARNING: DO NOT BUY ONE COPY OF THIS BOOK! You will need at least two copies whether you buy it for yourself or for a gift. Don't think you can pick this up as a gift, browse through it to pick up the highlights and then pass it along, no, you're going to want your own copy. And if you do pick it up for yourself, you will undoubtedly add it to your Christmas gift list. It's a great book for anyone; they just have to have a sense of humor. What makes it a keepr, though, is Bellingham's jabs are as insightful as they are funny, his one-liners are as timeless as they are topical. His slice of life encounters with various celebrities give the reader a fun account of the media scene in everybody's favorite city by the Bay. I practically read this book in one sitting because I kept saying, "just one more chapter" (they're short). It's that kind of book, a pick up and read anywhere book, a great "airplane book", if you will. Check it out for chuckles.

"Bellingham by the Bay" is relaxing reading -- and entertaining. It's something I keep by the bed. I'm a retired English Lit teacher and when the world grows too serious, I keep returning to "Bellingham" for its good writing and witty, irreverent insights. At my age, laughter is a great elixir. Try it!

This review compares the Lonely Plantet Greece (4th Edition) with the Rough Guide Greece (8th edition). We spent 2.5 weeks in July, 2001 in Greece, our first visit, and these were our guide books.
A relucant 4 stars to each, and a slight preference for RG. We certainly found the books serviceable, and they gave us good ideas of where in Greece we wanted to go. But they were much less valuable in their listings for individual destinations. They were the least valuable compared to the other LP and RG travel books we've used (Portugal, Italy, Thailand, Tokyo).

As usual, they both overstate their hotel rankings which to me make sense only if you've been sleeping out on the beach from necessity, and now have finally scraped some money together for a room. An exagerration, but I've lost patience with gushing praise for facilities which are usually no better than serviceable and sometimes less than that. And, we're not into spending money on fancy accommodations. Occassionaly the books are on the money, but often not.

On the smaller islands RG usually had more accommodation listings, but occassionally LP did. There were at least two instances when LP had none, just saying that rooms were available.

The ferry schedules in the books, pretty much consistent between them, bore little relation to reality, even though we were there in the high season.

I want to complete with my usual gripe about these and other guide books: we don't know which restaurants and hotels were actually visited by the writers (and by which one) and when. To paraphrase from my review of RG Portugal:

LP is out front in saying that its reviewers do not stay at all the hotels or eat at all the restaurants they list. I would like it if the reviews would be initialized by the reviewers with the date. This would allow us to learn each reviewer's tastes and standards, not to mention seeing which places they actually visited.

One LP writer (not I think an author of this book) in discussing restaurants wrote: "As one of those LP writers I can tell you that it is not physically possible to eat even a 'little bit of a meal' in each of those restaurants :-) What we all tend to do is eat at a broad cross-section within the norms of natural eating times and visit the other restaurants and talk to the owner or even the diners if it can be done discretely. In the same vein we don't sleep at every hotel!"

Talk to the owners for your evaluation! Says it all.

Most of my friends often recommend the Lonely Planet books, especially for those of us who can't mortgage our homes for one-night stays in hotels listed by Frommer's and Fodor's guides. But I went with Rough Guide for my trip last summer to Greece, and while some of the maps weren't as detailed as they could might have been, most of the recommendations were spot on.

Many nightspots get renovated; names get changed, etc. That's something the editors can't really help with. But any restaurant or bar I went to (listed in the guide) was above-average, if not better than they claimed.

The historical data was also well-balanced; so you're not bored to tears with it, and yet it's detailed enough to keep you reading through it. Bonus marks for the great inclusion of the Greek music coverage (flawed, but excellent), and the price of the book is decent.

We just came back from a 3 weeks, modest-budget, partly backpacking, partly car-rental trip around Rhodes, Crete, and Peloponnese. We deliberately stayed off the beaten tracks as much as possible. We used this guide along with French "Guide du Routard" and Michelin guides. I picked this guide against the Lonely Planet one based on an excellent experience with the Corsica rough guide last year.

This Rough Guide was above all very practical -- it simply is amazingly detailed, and what's more, it's mostly right. The rooms , hotels, and restaurants suggested were spot on. Very few outdated entries.

This guide also includes much relevant background info on Greek history, politics, food, an so on. This made for a much more interesting trip.

The paper was very thin yet high quality, making this guide even more worth its space in my pack.

This is definitely not the guide for organized tours -- the authors make no secret of their disdain for package tourism and the spoiling it often brings. But, for the independent traveller, this is the best guide I have found in English or French.

My book club also read this one. While one cannot dispute that Annie Dillard is a wonderful craftsman of words and prose, I didn't feel that she exacted the necessary character attachments and drama for this to be a successful novel. Perhaps we would have been better served had she stayed with her forte: non-fiction.

On the plus side, I have not read a more beautiful or perfectly written final paragraph in recent memory, which endeared the book to me more so than it would have otherwise.

Reading a book rarely gets better than reading Annie Dillard. I often reread her nonfiction books. Her writing is insightful, poetic, and moves from page to page with a sustaining ring of truth.

Midway through "The Living," Dillard's main character, Clare, thinks to himself, "set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live." "The Living" is Dillard's only novel. It is set in the last fifty years of the 19th century, on the Washington coast, roughly twenty miles south of Canada. As Dillard's novel gradually unfolds, we witness her characters enduring the hardships of living and dying as they struggle out their interrelated lives deep in the unsettled Pacific Northwest. "Accidents happened," Dillard observes, "and human bodies were thin-skinned parcels out of which the force of life leaked at a prick . . .all deaths were accidental, or none was, for disease was just as random an accident as injury, and all die. None died prematurely, for death battened on only the living, and all of those, at any age" (pp. 150-51).

Dillard's characteristic attention to detail is evident on every page. Her novel includes salty rocks, sawdust, black snails, drizzling rain, dark, dripping trees, choirs of frogs, "the slushy sky," gulls, and the solitary, white summit of Mt. Baker "above the sky, higher than the clouds." At times the movement of the plot seems to slow to the point of no plot, but never to the point of stopping death, for "death was ready to take people, of any size, always, and so was the broad earth ready to receive them" (p. 156). Dillard's writing here is so real that it is hard to believe this novel is pure fiction. This is a 5-star book. I've given it four stars only when measured by most of Dillard's other books.

G. Merritt

This is a dreadful, exhausting book. But I've read it three times! Annie Dillard is an unflinching, straightforward writer who has a firm grasp on the strengths and frailties of human nature. She accurately captures the feel of NW Washington "high woods" and the people who settled the area. By the time you finish this novel you will not just feel like you know the characters, you'll feel like you're related to each one of them and have greived their passing. I highly recommend it to anyone who is from this area of the United States - you will recognize the landscape, the attitudes, and certainly the weather. A character states, after a looong spell of rain and overcast skies, "We live in a lidded pot."

This book introduces you to the Celtic world, by presenting a few Celtic myths. By no means is this an extensive covering of the rich Celtic mythology, but it is a nice introduction.

The book is illustrated throughout with illustrations from Celtic myths, artifacts, archaeological sites, Celtic manuscripts, etc. If you want a taste of the Celtic world and their myths, look for this book.

One good thing about this book is that it focuses on greek mythology and only on greek mythology and it doesn't stray far from it....unlike some other books. It covers the birth of the gods, stories of the heroes....but I find the stories of the heroes to be quite incomplete. For example, the Odyssey is a long story, but in order to save some space (for the author seemed to love putting up pictures from ancient jars and pots), the story has been trimmed up in order to fit only about two thirds of the real version. But other than that, it is satisfying, and even includes a rather complicated family tree, but if you don't mind about having pictures of naked headless statues staring up at you, then it is certainly worth buying.

Hi! this is another one of my favorite books. it is about a youg girl and her broter who are sent to live in the country durng world war two. this book does not talk about the outside war, but the personal war that carrie faces. she lives (presently) with a broher an sister, one of which is like a mouse, the outher like a lion. she makes frends, larns about crulitly, hadships, and fairnes. ths story is a wounderful book about the wounders and harships one has to go through.

This book was given to me (in 1973) when I was 11 by my favorite aunt. I kept meaning to read it, but never did. Thank goodness I found it in the attic. I enjoyed it very much. It may appeal to an adult more than a child, which is probably why I didn't read it when it was given to me.

I'd read Nina Bawden's "The Peppermint Pig" when I was in elementary school, but our library didn't have any other titles by her. The book listed all of Bawden's other titles, but I didn't get to read "Carrie's War" until I was in high school. It's a wonderful story, and a fascinating look into the world of one of the many children sent to stay in the rural British countryside during World War II.

It seems PC-based recording guide book rather than Logic Audio guide book. The writer spended 2/3 of book for basic concepts of effectors, system set-ups and basic mixing ways. Yes, it's a good book, but if you already have books about mix-down or recording, you may be able to do the same thing with the books and original manual book of Logic Audio - without spending money on this book.

This book is for those of you who have read the manual and are still just as confused as to how to unlock the full power of Logic Audio. It's like having a personal tutor sitting next to you talking you through the processes step by step in plain English. So if you're finding Logic more of a hinderence to your creativity than a tool for expressing it, then this book is exactly what you're looking for.

Excellent book! It should be included with any purchase of Logic Audio. Actually you should read this book before you even buy Logic Audio. It is full of information not just about the program, but computer systems and what kind of performance you can expect from different types of systems (great resource on CPU comparisons, hard drive performance, sound and MIDI interface choices). The book is clearly written, with excellent diagrams and screen shots to help you understand the functions of Logic Audio. Not as detailed as the owners manual, but 100 times more readable and understandable. It is the perfect companion to the official owners manual. After reading this book, I have a much better understanding of Logic Audio and can better follow the concepts presented in the owners manual. This book also includes a CD ROM with a great selection of utilities, plug-in's and other useful information. I was pulling my hair out, ready to give up on Logic Audio until I got this book, now I can run the program and have begun to take advantage of the vast features it offers. Get this book, you won't regret it.