(0 star review)

Happened across this book in the library, and I thought I'd put in a few words against it, since it's doubtless highly recommended among books to help kids "cope" with alcoholism in the family; that is, if your idea of teaching children to cope is training them to accept their fate, bury it in euphemism, and move on from one depressing day of abuse to another in the shadow of what this book seeks to excuse as a sickness.

The father in this book is typically horrendous, lying and near-abusing his daughter, yet the non-alcoholic mother insists on keeping her child in this situation, breaking down in tears rather than offering a beacon of safety in what must be the poor child's hopeless world.

True, this book is realistic. Yet I cannot imagine any parent or counsellor offering it to a child, since it doesn't offer any real advice besides
a) alcoholism is something to be ashamed of (the girl says she used to not have anyone she could talk to about her father, but now her mother has one friend she CAN confide in)
b) feel free to get out for an evening of fun before returning to the same bad situation.

Yuck, yuck and double-yuck. I'm all for building a body of fiction to help kids cope with issues, but this is a nasty addition to the bunch and could destroy more than a few already-fragile kids...

A girl and her mother deal with the father's drinking during Christmas. The father builds his daughter a beautiful handmade sled, but is then too drunk to keep his promise to go sledding with her. Mother and daughter take theri Christmas turkey to the home of an older woman who is a recovering alcoholic. This woman provides them with a safe haven of understanding and acceptance. She acknowleges the hurt, but encourages the child to find ways to be happy even while her father continues to drink.

The story could help the child of an alcoholic understand that it is not the child's fault.

At the back of the book is information and a phone number for Alanon.

Carol E. Watkins, M.D.

This book was terrible, ther was no exitement or nothin'.

I may be "too old" for this book, but I thought it was great!! Sure, there wasn't much in the way of a story line, but the pop-up pictures were awsome!! Go buy it!!

The poem, "Song of Myself", by Walt Whitman is heavily laced with Marxism. In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx called for the abolition of private property. In doing so, Marx hoped to eliminate the selfish nature of capitalism, which he believed caused people to become greedy. By setting up a communal system, society could rid itself of material competition. Whitman too illustrates this principle in the poem by stating, "Every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you."
Marx also reacted against the social and religious morals prevalent in society, Whitman agrees by affirming, "No standard above men and women, or apart from them. No more modest than immodest" as well as, "If I worship one thing more than another, it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it." Both of these men contribute to the belief that people sin only as a result of standards placed upon them from external factors. If society were to eliminate these factors such as morality and religion, the "naturally good" person would have no reason to sin.
The most important belief that Marx adhered to was a future revolution in which the oppressed overthrow their oppressors. Whitman labels the oppressed "forbidden voices" and states that "Through me forbidden voices; Voice of sexes and lusts-voices veil'd, and I remove the veil." By removing the blinding veil, the oppressed can see their oppression and revolt against oppressors.

As with so much of Stephen Mitchell's work, the most important thing is to know what it is before you buy it. It may be exactly what you want, or it may be just the opposite; there's usually not much room in between.

In the present case, Mitchell has done something that some readers might consider pretty hubristic and perhaps even sacrilegious: he has produced an edited version of Walt Whitman's great "Song of Myself" that corresponds to no published version whatsoever.

How? Well, he started with the original (1855) edition of the poem, and then considered _every single change_ Whitman ever made in the poem clear up to his death in 1892. If Mitchell thought the change improved the poem, he left it in; if not, not. The result, for obvious reasons, is a "Song of Myself" that Whitman himself never actually wrote.

That's _not_ necessarily a bad thing. I respect Mitchell's taste and judgment, and I happen to agree with him that some of Whitman's later alterations made the poem worse. In fact I think Mitchell's edition is extremely fine.

But some readers may be looking for a version of "Song of Myself" that reflects Whitman's taste and judgment rather than Mitchell's. So let the buyer be aware.

At any rate I share Mitchell's high estimation of this poem and I'm happy that he's published his edition of it. Whitman belongs with Emerson and Thoreau on a shortlist of great American sages; this single poem is a large part of the reason why.

This book might be helpful if you either: 1) Bought the Digi-battle card game and didn't quite understand all the rules. 2) Are thinking about getting into the game and are wondering what it involves. 3) Want a lot of cool pictures of Digimon cards.

There are some useful tables in this book, like which cards you need to play to get to the next level in different situations, but they completely ignore all the cards in the booster decks.

The sad thing is that after a few chapters, the book jumps off talking about the TV series, the animated series cards, and completely ignores the game.

A nice introduction to the game, and the checklist is extremely cool, but if you're already a player and looking to enhance your skills, this is not the book for you.

Whitman Coin Folders, the industry standard in coin housing, offers another solid coin folder designed to house Eisenhower Dollars from 1971-1978 and Susan B. Anthony Dollars from 1979-1981. Be warned, that the book does not include the latest information on the 1999 release of the Anthony dollars, however, there is space in the book to write them in.

While I enjoyed the selections of Whitman's poetry, and the speaker's voice, I thought the background music was a little overpowering and repetitive. Good use of rain and water sound effects. Overall a good experience, and a pleasant introduction to Whitman's poetry.

This book takes the facts and theories surrounding the Whitman Massacre and re-creates the events through the eyes of one of the tribal members. Even though it may not be historically accurate, it encourages the reader to look at the full story from all perspectives. Short, sweet, and though-provoking!

Prospective buyers of this "reset from the original 1855 edition" may want to take note of the following statement by the editor (p.5): "I have kept the editing of this 1855 first to a minimum. Some spellings...have been modernized, and Whitman's language, though remarkably nonsexist for his time has been humanized where appropriate (i.e. human or person substituted for man when the context clearly indicates no sexual reference is intended). Humanist personal pronouns (hu, hus, hum, pronounced who, whose, whom) have been substituted in cases where distinction of gender is ambiguous, irrelevant or misleading." Following these editorial principles we find (p.28): "A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child?...I do not know what it is anymore than hu." "The Original Leaves of Grass"? Caveat emptor. This one didn't.

Brown's The Power of Sympathy is a strange set of letters that form a strange world where sentimentality is outrageously rampant and its characters drawn in flat, lifeless tones. The main story (although that's a hard definition to give to anything in this jumble) is that of Harriot and Harrington, who fall in love. The correspondence that makes up the novel is mainly between Harrington and his friend Worthy - Harriot has one of the smallest roles in the story. Other seduction stories are told, all of them a little ridiculous. In one instance, a woman is tricked into a man's carriage, and her faithful, loving fiance immediately despairs and drowns himself in the river. Other men of the village track down the carriage and bring her back, but the man who apparantly loved her gave up all hope when she lost her innocence. What a bleak tale. This novel of morality is actually very shallow, enforcing and reinforcing one idea only: that of the sin of being seduced or seducing. Of course, Brown wrote for a female audience, so it can perhaps be assumed that the only sin they really needed to worry about was losing their virtue. And of the ten main characters in all the seduction stories in Sympathy (there are five separate seductions, I think), 6 do not survive to the end. According to Brown, the wages of sin are most definitely death.
These characters are either so boring or so over the top emotional that I found it hard to draw a good lesson from any of it. At the end, when tragedy has struck, Harrinton sends a series of distraut letters to Worthy, each one saying, in effect, "I'm going to kill myself." Worthy's somewhat delayed response is a dismal attempt to save the life of his friend. "Our prison grows familiar," Worthy tells Harrinton, "there is not one but finds his partiality for his dungeon increase...how few are they who are hardy enough to break their prison?" That's not a very good attempt to keep a grieving man from taking his life, and that last part almost seems like Worthy is egging Harrington on, saying, "c'mon, chicken, I bet you WON'T kill yourself, you aren't hardy enough!"

The Coquette - this is a far more interesting tale, starting out with a sort of anti-heroine in Eliza Wharton. She does enjoy society, and seems to have her heart in the right place, but is easily and repeatedly misled by the novel's rake, one Major Sanford. The story gets muddled as it tries to fictionalize a true account of Elizabeth Whitman, who bore an illegitimate child and died shortly after. The introduction by Carla Mulford gives us some information on the real woman, and it seems pretty clear that Whitman fully encouraged the love affair that led to her ultimate ruin. Foster attempts to make Eliza Wharton into a fully sympathetic character - Wharton denies to everyone that Sanford wishes ill for her, and seems never to notice (until too late) that he does not have good intentions. The effort to reconcile the real Whitman, 37 and completely in control of her (mis)conduct with the completely guileless woman who elicits pity from even the hardest heart does not quite work, and leaves a mysterious chasm.
All of Eliza's friends, her mother, her rejected ex-fiance, warn her about the intentions of Sanford. The fact that Eliza still believes he is a good man means that she is either completely oblivious, or pretending not to know his true colors so that she has an excuse to remain in his company. I think that Foster probably did not intend the second character to come across, but I think THAT Eliza would have been more compelling than the one we are given. What an interesting tale that would have been...sort of another Shamela. But, especially when compared to Brown's "Sympathy," "The Coquette" is really an interesting morality tale. Eliza, before descending into pure imbecility, makes a lot of compelling arguments for her freedom and her desire to remain as she was in society, which her society would not tolerate.

This book was very discriptive and gave important information on the women that started the Women's Movement and how they succeeded in their efforts to get the movement to where it is now.