This is one of the best casefile series books. Not only is it an introduction to the totally new high tech Hardy's, but a good look at their real lives & reactions to them. A real sense of family concern for one another adds to the book's attraction. Joe's guilt in betraying Iola, Fenton's anger in the boys for remaining in Bayport, Frank's concern for his brother, Chet's awkwardness around Joe following the explosion, Callie's tears in being tied up, these personal glimpses help it to be much mor

I loved this book because it was full of action. From the first page (which was one of the best parts!!) All the way to the end!

The Hardy Boys are so cool. The Hardy Boy's Ghost Stories is the best out of whole collection. The book gave me a hell of a scare.In my opinion The Walking Scarecrow is one of the best and most scariest stories ever written . I urge all readers to buy this book as it is so excellent. I think Franklin Dixion has out done himself with this marvellous novel.

This book has the best spine tingling stories ghost stories ever; I was sort of scared to go back to sleep after I finished a story. I recomend this book to anyone looking for a scream of a good time and a good scare!

Similar in content to The Nancy Drew Guide To Life, this book outdoes it both in size and quality. Oddly enough, although this is a picture cover (PC) book, it comes with a dustjacket bearing art identical to the cover! This short (less than 50 pages), inexpensive volume is illustrated with color reproductions of various original series covers and some black and white frontispiece illustrations. Divided into 7 chapters, The Hardy Boys' Guide To Life offers up advice gleaned from the pages of the stories themselves.
Originally this book was to be titled The Hardy Boys Swell Guide to Life, which is probably why the DJ description still uses the archaic word swell.
I enjoyed The Hardy Boys Guide to Life. It is a fun, quick read which should be in every Hardy Boys fan's collection

An attractively designed little book lavishly illustrated with the gripping dustjacket covers and frontispieces from the various titles in the Hardy Boys series. Its 44 pages are chockful of information, advice, and reflections from Frank and Joe Hardy for anyone who has set his ballcap on attaining health, wealth, and happiness. My favorite from Frank and Joe:

"You just can't rely on men who don't have a woman around the house to keep them straight."

Ah! ... too true!

At 7"x5" the book is just a tad too big to stuff in the back pocket of my weathered Levi's so I keep my copy in a cigar box on the coffee-stained dashboard of my rusty old pickup truck for ready reference in sticky situations.

One issue that I grapple with frequently is the difference between "art" and "illustration". In the world of fine art illustrators are generally looked on as an inferior breed by the critics. In his introduction to "Hardyware" David A. Hardy expresses his reproof at modern art's derision of anything beautiful or representational.

This got me thinking. If SF art is "mere illustration" as an art critic would say, what about all those historical paintings of heaven and hell, the last judgement and armageddon? Critics seem to love those.

But I digress. SF art does have its place, and it plays an important role. The main body of "Hardyware" gives us a glimpse of the possibilties that await us in the future. If things turn out properly and we don't destroy ourselves, our descendents will become great builders with the potential to conquer the stars. Most of the artwork in this collection is done in gouache and acrylic, although more recently the artist has turned to digital media.

We see visions of the past as well as the future. One of my favourite pieces is a scene from "The War of the Worlds". I remember seeing that image on a cover jacket when I was 12, although I didn't know who the artist was back then. The image of a dinosaur looking up at a descending asteroid is hauntingly grim.

I often think SF artists are underrated. Though they are often proved wrong, their visions provide a valuable contribution to the development of our civilization, giving inspiration to those who have the ability to make fantasy a reality.

This super book contains well over a hundred examples of the work of perhaps our best living space artist, along with a fascinating text full of insights into his thinking and his modus operandi.

This Wonderful Book, Highway Robbery, is Very Educational, and Very Entertaining!!! In This Wonderful Carmen Sandiego Mystery, Young ACME Detectives Maya, and Ben, go after Carmen, when She steals Interstate Eighty!!! Maya, and Ben team- up with an ACME Agent, Dusty Rhoads, since she knows all the back roads, and short cuts, she'll be the one that will drive them to Certain Places, where V.I.L.E. Activity has been suspected, and deduced, by Maya, and Ben!!! When Maya, and Ben start trailing Carmen's Agent, they not only learn a lot, Geography wise, but they also learn that the Agent loves weird attractions, like Frog Fantasies Museums, and Enigma Museums, where people once suspected that aliens had landed, and made a Museum with only alien- like- things, in it!!! Will Maya, and Ben catch Carmen Sandiego, this time?

This book was great. It was very well written.I highly reccomend this book to everybody that likes mysteries and action. It is definitely Franklin W. Dixon`s best yet!!!!

This is one of my favorite books of all time. I consider it in the top one percent of all books I have ever read. The sheer scope of this work makes me almost gasp with incredulity and amazement. To think that one man could have accomplished this is mind boggling. This is the eighth wonder of the world. From prehistory and until the late 1980s, this book covers politics, economics, science, and arts. McNeill's generalizations are wonderfully and cogently supported by facts at just the right places in the narrative. To produce a handbook of this scope that is also so pleasant to read is an incomparable achievement.

I'm not read for the titles "history of western civilization". In the future,I have to read above book and then write to my review. Have good happiness and health!

Fires, Fights, and Two Teenage Boys!
What do they have incoming? Well, you will soon find out if you read "Inferno of Fear" by Franklin W. Dixon. As Frank and Joe Hardy the main characters who play their role excellent from the beginning to the end of every book in the series. As the plot unfolds around their wilderness adventure through Alaska's Denali National Park they can sense another mystery approaching. The two-week trip then turns out to be much longer that they planed on. With a hike to a lookout of Mount McKinley turning explosive and the radiating heat with the ability to singe the hairs on the back of a persons neck in one second. Then burst into flames the other and start the 16th forest fire in a row from the past 3 months. Later you get to find out about helicopter crashes, smoke jumpers, and much, much, more. Even the sentence fluency is incredible with this story as it has the ability to paint pictures with the most common words that are used in everyday conversation. "Joe grabbed Alex under the water and surfaced with him in a swirl of blazing branches and splintered boards. The massive old evergreen hissed in the buckled wreckage of the dock." Pg. 11 That's only the beginning of the story and trust me it get better. With the suspense of the story taking you up and down over all a believe that once you pick it up, you have a hard time trying to find a stopping point that will not leave you hanging. As my self only was ably to find one point and read it in two pushes over two days. If you love mysteries and adventure do a twofer and put them together. The Hardy Boys is what you will come up with.

The Hardy Boys go to Denili Park in Alaska. Somebody keeps setting forest fires all over the park. The police think that the fires were set by paul, their trail leader. They know he is innocent.Jeff Rankin is also out to kill him with his gunmen because he thinks paul spoiled a businnes deal. The Hardy boys catch a smoke jumper causing the fires with bombs.Don't miss the rest of this story!

What I find most fascinating is how we can change during the course of our lives. The section "Personal Growth as Individuation" particulary intrigued me, especially the following: "[Individuation is a developmental process] that requires you to start dealing with your less-preferred functions (or what you might call your less conscious side) by midlife...in order to become more integrated and whole...As you go through life you find it is more functional to be able to use all aspects of the self to maximize your ability to handle a variety of situations and people." As we nudge our less-preferred functions out of the shadows and into the light, we may discover that we have blossomed into fuller selves.

My wife and I recently ventured into marriage counseling after a separation. Our counselor gave us this book to borrow after about the fourth session and after we had completed a myers briggs test. It has been by far the best resource we've seen. Lightbulbs are going off with every turn of the page. You have to read this book.

I guess I read this book when I was 14 or 15...though I would have thought I was younger, that was how old I was in 1981 when it was published. At any rate, I have very fond recollections of it, 20+ years later. Don't recall all the particulars, but a very engaging book about a young girl who sinks into the pages of a huge old book...each time emerging in the middle of a fresh adventure. Worth a read, or a re-read.

Who hasn't dreamed of stepping out of the boring reality of everyday life and into some wonderful fantasy world? In this delightful tale by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, that's exactly what young Jane Charlington does when she finds an enormous book in a supposedly haunted wing of her family's castle.

I read this book around age ten when my grandmother gave it to my sister for Christmas, finishing it in a couple of hours. My normal fare at that age was Tom Swift, and the presence of a female protagonist offered a breath of fresh air into the world of fantasy and adventure I lived in at the time. I highly recommend this book for both young boys and girls alike--there's adventure for all inside the magical book within this story.

F. Scott Fitzgerald may be remembered most often as the author of "The Great Gatsby", but during his lifetime, he earned most of his income by writing short stories for magazines. This compilation includes many of his earlier classics, all dealing with the same wealthy class of people that appear in his novels. "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" is a delightful tale about the lengths (literally) that girls will go to in order to fit in socially. "The Offshore Pirate" is a compelling and romantic story with an exciting and climactic ending. In addition, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz", a longer and quite famous story has a brilliant plot; a boy visits his wealthy friend's home, and while he enjoys himself immensely and even falls in love, he finds out that the visit may come at a hefty price. "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is a hilarious story about a man born looking like he is 70 years old, and looking progressively younger as he "ages", so that he eventually seems younger than his grandson. All in all, you cannot miss with any of his stories, and they make great evening reads - one a day will surely keep the doctor away!

Nostalgia has an inevitable foreshortening effect upon reputation. For most of us, Fitzgerald is the perenially young, perenially arch chronicler of the 1920s Jazz Age -- of bathtub gin, flappers, rumrunners and boats born ceaselessly back.

This collection of short stories does much to restore an unappreciated side of Fitzgerald the writer, most notably his willingness to experiment with technique, his almost existential grasp of human absurdity and his articulation of unease and pessimism about the possibilities of the American Dream.

The stories range widely in quality from precious parodies from his Princeton years ("Jemina") to profoundly moving glimpses of the human condition ("The Lees of Happiness"). Even the most insubstantial of the stories printed here are worth the read for, if nothing else, they show that even at his youngest and roughest, Fitzgerald had a keen grasp of voice and description and how to use it to breath life into wispy plot lines.

I take issue with some of the critical recommendations contained in Patrick O'Donnell's fine introduction to the collection. I did not, for instance, find "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" particularly impressive. I think the best stories are those that hew to a psychological theme prevalent in Fitzgerald's fiction and his adult life -- the dread of what comes after youth and a nostalgic fixation on youth as the best time in a person's life. The stories I liked most -- "The Lees of Happiness," "The Ice Palace," "The Cut Glass Bowl," "Benediction," "The Four Fists," "'O Russet Witch!'" -- all tackle this theme.

Many of the stories in this volume aren't profound, but are just a delightful read. I defy you, for instance, to read "The Camel's Back" without bursting out loud in laughter over its protagonist's gyrations and setbacks in quest of his true love.

There is a wistfulness at the center of Fitzgerald's prose and his life story that seems to have faded from our collective remembrance of him as a Great American Author. This volume does much to remind us of that winsome note and to remind us that Fitzgerald paid dearly for it in his personal life as it lit up his writing at the same time.