Nine year old Cora Lee and her Uncle Frank always go fishing at Coot Pond in Arizona. But those darn coots (birds) are scaring the fish away. Plus, this might be the last time she ever gets to go fishing with her uncle. Then, Uncle Frank tells her the story of "Putnam and Pennyroyal," two grebes who have social differences but have two things in common: they want to get out, and they love to dive. As the story nears its end, Cora Lee wonders if Putnam or her Uncle Frank will ever change and it is up to her to end the story - the way it should be.

I loved this story so much, I devoured it in two days. It's creative sense of humor and adventure kept me reading. Patrick Jennings is an excellent writer. In our Book Club and in my class, we discuss his books. If you've ever read FAITH AND THE ELECTRIC DOGS or FAITH AND THE ROCKET CAT, then you'll love PUTNAM AND PENNYROYAL.

Reading and elementary teachers alike will embrace Reading on Language & Literacy: Essays in Honor of Jeanne Chall. It is a well organized collection of essays that encompass the history of teaching reading, the research that has informed teaching practices, and how these practices are implemented. Jeanne Chall has had two major roles in the field of reading. She has been an active researcher and has been the inspiration behind the work of others. This book is an excellent testimony to her prominent role in the field of education. The first essay, "The Legacy of the Dartmouth Seminar" documents the historical significance that this seminar had in the field of literacy and education in the United States and the English speaking countries of the world. Through the hard work and efforts of the participants and those who valued their work, reading and literacy education as we know it today evolved. The second essay describes the Boston University and Chelsea Public School partnership. The authors describe the extensive collaboration between both faculties. The result was a co-teaching model using Title I and classroom teachers. Literacy instruction, classroom organization and literacy assessment were the principles that guided their work and research on these principles informed their instruction. In the third essay Wood Smethurst, Ed.D. describes how students who wish to succeed but don't in traditional high schools meet success at the Ben Franklin Academy. Mandatory work study programs and individualized mastery approaches are integral parts of the school's curriculum which is taught in a family-like atmosphere. Students are encouraged to make their own choices and take responsibility for their learning. Most of the students make dramatic gains. The fourth essay is a history of the teaching of reading. The teaching of letters, phonetics, phonemes, whole word, whole language and a combination of words, explicit systematic phonetic instruction and literature are explored. This is followed by an essay authored by Jeanne Paratore and Joy Turpie. They invite the reader into Joy's first grade classroom to view and see the merits of her literacy program which incorporates a flexible grouping model. This model enables her to meet the needs of individual readers. The sixth essay is devoted to the basics of reading: word identification, word meaning, and reading comprehension. The differences and similarities of teaching young children, adolescents and adults to read are addressed. The correlation between reading and listening ability is also clearly stated. This essay is followed by Lillian R. Putnam, Ed.D.'s research that measured the ability to make story predictions by four year olds, kindergartners and first graders. The value of using prediction when teaching reading is known. Children who have been read to make better story-ending predictions when they later read the same stories on their own because they are more aware of story elements. After conducting her study she recommends that the skill be practiced with kindergartners and first graders but not taught to four year olds. The eighth essay explores low income children, their language and connectives and their use in reading and writing. The study found that low income children, no matter what their ability, appeared to use a small number of connectives in their writing. The implications from this study are the need for vocabulary development, practice with the use of connectives and more practice reading and composing. Steven Stahl, Ph.D. discusses teaching children with reading problems how to recognize words. His essay is divided into three parts: the assumption that there is a need for special programs and curricular adaptations for these students; a review of the research concerning the need for special programs for teaching phonics; and a review of the effects of the University of Georgia's "not phonics" approach. He suggests a focused, systematic approach to phonics with repeated and assisted readings. His technique, called supported contextual reading, involves reading material to the student above his instructional level. Then through echo and repeated readings the child masters the material. He has documented dramatic results. This essay is followed by Edward Fry, Ph.D.. He collapsed many years worth of work into several pages. His "tool box for reading" is very useful. He offers many practical tips and tools for reading teachers of all experiences. The next few essays deal with assessment of reading abilities. The first one documents research concerning a deficit in naming speed and its implications for teaching and assessing reading. The researchers question suggest the importance of a double deficit in reading and naming speed. Research in other languages has substantiated this. The breakthroughs in neuroscience have a great impact on the teaching and assessment of reading. This is followed by assessing with trial lessons. One of the merits is that it offers insight into the level that a child can attain with guided assistance. The essays examine the importance of all the areas of reading, the age, the developmental level of the student, and the assessment instruments. From there Sandra Stotsky, Ph.D., examines the language in multicultural basals. She questions the worth of such language when teaching children to read in the English language. The vocabulary and story elements found in these basals are not challenging and the difficulty does not increase at a constant level. Thelast essay is a history of the English language and the first English language dictionary, a fitting way to end this book. This book is a compilation of the reading research that has occurred since the Dartmouth conference. The authors have explained how reading theory has evolved and how informed instruction has been implemented into the classroom. This book is a fine tribute to Jeanne Chall.

In Representation and Reality, Putnam begins with Aristotle's definition of "mental", Quine's idea of the corporate nature of theories, and weaves a philosophic record that is stunningly reminiscent of Martha Stewart's new handbook of hors d'oeurves. Yes, the jig is up: what Putnam is really after here is to define what exactly makes a good cream puff and his argument is complete with a lemma that weighs the pros and cons of custard vs. whipped cream filling. Modern analytic philosophy is really a boring topic and one isn't surprised that Putnam really avoids such issues as whether or not language is a game with rules or really a television program that will soon be cancelled if ratings don't go up. This is what Putnam sees as the influence of the environment on the meaning of words and the the meaning of "meaning" (it's not spoiling the plot to tell you that "meaning" is also a word that is used in the English language; however, when I've asked people who only speak Mandarin Chinese if they know the meaning of "meaning", they usually just give me a blank look. Obviously this is a topic that needs to be ironed out). Yet, it isn't until the last chapter that Putman throws down the gauntlet, spills the beans, and reveals that his whole philosophic endeavor, or journey, is one vast voyage to discover the perfect guacamole dip (his idea of adding Ketalar as well as lime will no doubt raise a few eyebrows, but, let me assure you, I've mixed up a batch and it's very tasty). Finally, his critique of Fodor, while well-intentioned, is sure to remain incomprehesible to the vast majority of nonphilosophers who are certain that their brain is really a soft substance inside their skull that thinks and is conscious, and is not, as Fodor argues, a pilfered pack of cigarettes deftly taken from a fast food store when the clerk wasn't looking. While you need to know a lot about contemporary analytic philosophy to understand this book, you need to know very little of this same subject to leave it alone. Brilliant!

Suspenseful, beautifully written, splendid character portrayals. One of the best descriptions of Paris I have ever read - it's magical! Don't miss this book!

This book -- comprising Putnam's Dewey Lectures at Columbia University, and his Royce Lectures given at Brown -- is a tremendously engaging tour d'horizon of contemporary epistemology and philosophy of mind. Putnam, at the top of his profession for over three decades, remains a powerful and acute thinker, and 'The Threefold Cord' is full of insightful observations, and clear arguments, displaying the growing influence on Putnam's work of both the American Pragmatists, and of the later Wittgenstein.

I have been preparing lectures on stress management and came upon the work of the authors' Use of Time Project which has tracked Americans expenditures of time over decades. This book has caused me to re-think all of my assumptions, and fits in beautifully with some of the brand new books coming out in the wellness field, including Dean Ornish's Love and Survival: The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy and Paul Pearsall's The Pleasure Prescription: To Love, To Work and To Play. Time for Life shows, in methodical yet eloquent thoroughness, that the sense of hurry sickness and time famine is illusory and unnecessary: we in fact have ENOUGH time and money to be happy, yet we think we do not. The final chapter is worth the price of the book: called Brother, can you spare some time? it points out that the pace of life is a political issue, and that the commercialization of leisure can be critiqued and questioned, that while most of us lead lives of unbelievable privilege, happiness eludes us. This does not have to be the case. This is a scholarly book, yet accessible to the lay reader, particularly if you skip around some. The cross cultural stuff is fascinating (eg., Japanese people work longer hours yet don't feel the time famine like Americans do.) It is well worth the careful reading this important topic warrants. I am indebted to Mr. Robinson and Godbey for this expression of their life's work. I am deeply grateful, in fact.

I havnt red the book so i cant answer if i liked it

Virgil's Aeneid: Interpretation and Influence by Michael C.J. Putnam (Can't Amazon maintain the paragraphing and formatting I give this review? It looks terrible the way your program jams my careful prose into one long paragraph.) It is fairly certain that Latin scholars urged Professor Putnam to collect his essays into an anthology so future students and scholars could have ready access to his indispensable work. I will never be a scholar, but I am a lifelong student, and am immensely glad for Putnam's contribution to my understanding of the Aeneid. With the exception of one essay written for this volume, all essays in Virgil's Aeneid: Interpretation and Influence (1995) were published in various journals between 1970 and 1992. It would take hours just to prowl library aisles to find the indexed journals and cart them to photocopy machines. Yes, some details in individual essays are repetitive, but even the redundancies are useful: No one who reads these pages will ever forget Anchises, father of Aeneas, from the depths of Hades, urging his Romanus son to spare the suppliant, war down the proud. That moment, writes Putnam, is the ethical center of the poem, a center that comes terrifyingly apart in the closing line when Aeneas forgets (if he ever heard) all that his father tried to teach him. He brings his sword down on the defeated, wounded Turnus, who has raised his arm as suppliant, clearly visible to all who observe. Yes, readers can understand the human emotion involved: Aeneas hesitates, then sees the belt worn by Pallas, son of Evander, youthful ally for whom he had a deep if ambiguous personal affection. But this was a moment of profound possibility for a much larger good, witnessed by other defeated Latins on whom Aeneas would now call to build a new nation. How eagerly could they now serve this invader Aeneas who so mercilessly slaughtered their leader? And how carefully the poet had to craft this unfolding war, to suggest to his own Emperor Augustus that Roman leaders had deeply failed the empire by indulging so many avoidable civil wars, most often for some petty personal motive. Putnam helps me see subtleties I could never have imagined despite multiple readings of the Aeneid, and despite decades of meditating Greek and Roman myths. His discussion of the Daedalus myth as outlined in Book 6 is stunning, a revelation of meaning where I had read carelessly, thinking the poet was just dallying to display his learning. Oh, no; in the Aeneid every word truly counts. And in Putnam's essays too; he supports each conclusion with precise details, as trifles in ponds ever expanding. The teacher from Providence and Brown University often includes just how many times a certain word appears-not only in the Aeneid, but in the Georgics and Eclogues too-and carefully illustrates just how this word circles back to give ever-increasing light. My deepest reasons for valuing the Aeneid reside in Book 3.706-9, wherein I finally found full acceptance of the fatherly burden: an acceptance that transcends memories deemed good, or less than good. Regardless, Putnam's work helps me see beyond the personal to the supranational. "Power corrupts, poetry cleanses," John F. Kennedy said in his tribute to Robert Frost. Beyond doubt, knowledge of the Aeneid can still guide world leaders through the furies of our own times. Keith Fahey PO Box 16462 Encino, California 91416 818-996-5298 EpiBound@aol.com

This book is an overdue shaft of light on the life and work of an artist who not only displayed intense emotions in a style skimming the edge of representation, but who also scaled the conceptual depths of what constituted painting, writing and sculpture. Admirers of Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Johns, early Pop Art, Katz, and the New Image and Neo-Expressionists of the seventies and eighties will marvel at seeing all but Duchamp antedated by many years. Though a close friend of Avery and Rothko, familiar with the Abstract Expressionists, Putnam somehow was left standing at the gate. The only regret is the limited coverage of his long marriage to his more famous wife, Consuelo Kanaga, a pioneering photographer. If you distrust the way history picks and chooses its favorites, this is the book to place on the shelf next to Avery, whose best paintings look tame next to Wallace Putnam's, and Rothko, who seemed mired in one overly serious mode for too many years. Putnam was inventive, spiritual, humorous, and a survivor.

This is a grown-up novel which works on several levels. There is the actual content of the public lectures delivered by Professor Elliot Hawkins. Then there is the mob-like response of lecture's audience. And, of course, there are the relationships of the characters of the novel proper. And each of these strands demonstrates something disturbingly base and fragile in various strata of human life: death, sexual relations, social interaction. What Allen Wheelis has accomplished here is no mean feat - in a sense he has successfully turned Freud's great, dark book "Civilization and its Discontents" into a novel. As in all his work, Wheelis offers no comfort to the reader - he pushes one's nose up against reality. But strangely, this has an enlivening, not a depressing, effect. (I also highly recommend Wheelis's memoir, "The Listener".)