Ich liebe ihren Gebrauch der Wörter zu beschreiben, was sie fühlt. Sie ist eine solche kluge Person. Gott segnt sie!

The author combines a great knowledge about the subject and the storyline is amazing. I read the book in one sitting and I was a changed person. Detail; she uses so much detail to describe the events that are happening. It makes you fell like you are there when it is all happening. God bless her. I really hope she writes another book and it would be great if the offered the book all over the world. Thanks for changing my life.

No matter where you're from, and no matter whether you refer to it as The Great Unpleasantness or the War of Northern Aggression or The War Between the States or The Civil War, if you were born in the United States, you grew up knowing about the war and knowing about Gettysburg. And I did. However, in spite of having had to memorize The Gettysburg Address in grammar school, I knew precious little about Gettysburg, and what I did know was probably inaccurate. Perhaps that was because the heart-breaking aspects of that battle are of such enormity as to be beyond my comprehension, having all the characteristics of sensational fiction.
But that battle, in that rural Pennsylvania town, did, indeed, take place. And "Summer Storm in Gettysburg", by Ann Brophy, took me by the hand to that country town ten years before it became noteworthy, then later, to those three tragic days that made its name synonymous with the best and the most horrific of the Civil War. I walked its streets, saw its neighborhoods, met its families and listened to the day-to-day concerns exchanged by its townspeople. and I joined some of its children, one of them a young Jennie Wade, off on a night-time adventure that would prove to be a painful tie that bound.
Ten years hence, Gettysburg, in the oppressive heat and humidity of early July, is the hapless site of trials beyond measure for both the town and the troops. Jennie Wade and her family experience the all-too familiar sadness of neighbor against neighbor and brother fighting brother. That said, it is the coping with the ordinary under extraordinary circumstances that shows the true mettle of Jennie and her family; the birth of Jennie's sister's baby, the care of her two younger brothers as well as the handicapped child of a neighbor, the finding and preparing of food from meal to meal, and the ignoring of her own safety to extend kindness to soldiers posted nearby.
In a fierce skirmish surrounding the Wade house, Jennie is killed by a stray bullet that enters her home. She is the only civilian killed during those terrible three days.
"Summer Storm in Gettysburg" is a novel, but it is a story that is historically sound, and is bound to give you new insight on the grief behind The Gettysburg Address.

We've read this book to our 1.5 year old twins since they were babies. It has become their favourite book, and if given a choice will be the book singled out.

It has a clear story line, peaks to a climax and finishes with a satisfying ending. The story is light hearted with lovely images to fill their heads with sweet dreams.

The rhyming verses captured their attention right from the time they were babies, rolling off the tongue easily and quickly enough to keep them spellbound. Nowadays, they also love identifying all the objects from the wonderful illustrations (the more you look, the more you find). All we have to do to get them into bed each night is to start chanting the verses (which we quickly learnt by heart) and they'll fly into bed ready for their book:
"We take the dogs down the wiggly track,
The wiggly track, the wiggly track,
One dog's white and the other dog's black,
On a summery Saturday morning.

Bad dogs, bad dogs chase the cat,
Chase the cat, chase the cat,
One dog's thin and the other dog's fat,
On a summery Saturday morning..." etc

Our twins give a running commentary both while the story is being read and when reading it alone, pointing to each thing that they know:
"dog, woof woof"
"cat, meow meow"
"bubba" (baby)
"du" (shoe)
"bla" (dirty feet in the mud)
"one, two,..." (counting the baby geese)

There's not many children's books that I'd recommend (there's a lot of poor ones out there) but this one I have no hesitation over.

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Margaret Mahy's latest story beautifully captures the simple joys of a group of four children and their two dogs as they head down to the beach on a summer's morning.

The format of the book is particularly effective with clear and bright double page illustrations ( by Selina Young) each with a quatrain of verse.

The story and pictures are enchantingly interlaced , with the rhythm and rhyme reminiscent of "Here we go 'round the Mulberry Bush".

All is not sweetness and light however. There is a showdown between the dogs and mother goose and her seven goslings. The annoyed geese chase our friends back up the hill before they even have a chance to play on the beach.

The moral of the story is .... if you want to walk in peace don't let your dogs chase the geese !

Mum takes the kids and the dogs down the track to the beach, past the man mowing his lawns and the woman hanging out the washing, just as you would on a summery Saturday morning in NZ. I love the rhyming and the repetition, and so does my daughter (aged 4. I can see why this book won the NZ Post Children's Book Award in 1999. The ultimate compliment comes from my daughter, who chooses this book again and again, for her own "reading aloud sessions" to selected lucky toys; she can recite each page off by heart. Everyone knows it's the parent who does the reading who needs to be won over since they're the one with the cash to buy books, and this one has definitely warmed my heart.

Colin Fletcher managed to escape civilization with a simple plan. He would walk the length of California, including the Mojave Desert. The Ranger in Death Valley worried a great deal about him, but Fletcher's knowledge and understanding of the environment kept him safe and alive. In fact he enjoyed the "walk". Colin Fletcher is an excellent writer and this book is, in my opinin, is one of his best. I think I have read them all. He notices and describes details in vivid language. The clouds, the wind, the color of the valley, the trout, even the beetles and spiders don't miss his eye or nose.
He also describes the details of his hardships and joys, equipment failures and successes. He makes you feel as if you are with him on the trip, and often you may wish you were there. Some very well composed pictures are included. The trip took exactly 6 months. In the end he says "Then I walked down through the trees toward the road that would take me back to San Francisco and everything the city now offered."

I recommend the book to anyone. It is a good story, great adventure, and written by an unusual person. (He would like being called "unusual", I think.)

This book will change your whole outlook on nature. Are you willing to spend the summer walking, alone, then come along for this journey into your thoughts.

It doesn't take long for the reader to get broken in along Fletcher's trail of adventure from the Mexican border of eastern California to the Oregon border. The author takes us along the Colorado trail following the river for a number of days until we spring for the Mohave desert. Fletcher had placed, before his hike, a number of strategic caches of water along his desert route. We are as anxious as he to get to the next cache, particularly as we approach Death Valley in early spring before the overwhelming heat sets in. His descriptions of desert flowers and rolling mounds of sand stretching to dark and spiney ridges rising from the valley floor compel us to make plans to visit Death Valley in the near future. We are relieved when we hop out of Death Valley into the Panamints and scrub forests of the lower Sierra. When we climb high into snow country, our eyes hurt in the glaring snow. But the chill of fourteen thousand feet is more than welcome after the hot Mohave sands. We walk along with Fletcher in the high Sierra to push our toe across the border and touch Oregon soil. We experience the heat, the rattlers, the desert poppies, the cool downsloping breezes from the high Sierra, and the icy waters of alpine streams by reading THE THOUSAND MILE SUMMER. Such a book is a rare treat for those of us seemingly locked into a time-pressure capsule of corporate work

"Touch My Heart in Summer" was such a wonderful devotional for me. I found myself taking a trip away from the daily cares of my life, and escaping to another place where I could rest and meditate on Jesus. This devotional reminded me that spending time to meditate on the written word is so essential in the life of a christian.

I had the opportunity to read this book at a women's retreat. I found it to be soothing, uplifting and beautiful. The meditations are short and easy to read, leaving the reader to search her own thoughts & emotions. It is a wonderful book to own and give to all the women in your life.

This is the most beautiful book-aesthetically and spiritually that I have had to use during my quiet times in a long time. Each page is like a new view of the world.

This book literally helped me make through many an evening after the death of a loved one. James Millers approach to comparing the seasons to grieving was so accurate. As your going through the Autumn of Grief you wonder if you will make it through to the Summer. You do, and this precious book will help to bring you to that bright Summer. The quotations written from other writers are placed strategically throughout the book and address the particular emotions being felt so beautifully. The emotions of grief can be very intense. This book helps you realize that you are not alone in your feelings, that they are normal. I have kept the original copy given to me; and have purchased several for others who have faced Grief. I can't recommend this book enough. It will be a tremendous assist as you go through this terribly LONELY time.

After the death of my husband, I was given this most excellent book. James Miller's experience as a Grief Counselor and Clergyman came through beautifully. I read and re-read the consoling pages. I cried grieving tears with the assurance that someone knew the depths of the tears and the groanings. Each season of grief is beautifully broken down. The book begins in Autumn and walks with you day by day until finally you have arrived at the summer of your grief.
Throughout the entire book, there are quotations from various writers that just seemed to express the turmoil of mind and emotions that grief causes.
I have given this book to many who have lost someone dear to them.
I know it will help so many work through Grief.

In a time of grief when so many books are so harsh this is a very soft, feel good book that makes you reflect on the good that is still in your life. It does not focus on what you "should" be doing or feeling, but rather gives you permission to grieve and to also move forward.

With the publication of Hal Lindsey's "The Late Great Planet Earth", everyone jumped on his bandwagon and spun off on the most useless fantasy and poor biblical scholarship on Revelation and have confused many. This book presents Revelation in the context as the people it was written to (the seven churches of Asia). If your understanding of Revelation would mean nothing to Christians in the first century then it is wrong. Get this book and get started with serious study of Revelation. It is simpler than you think.

Dr. Ray Summers was one of the most respected experts and scholars on the Biblical book of Revelation and a wonderful and challenging teacher. His book takes the strange book of Revelation and adds historical context to make understanding easier for the average reader. Much of the understanding of the book relates to the historical context the Jews faced in Roman times and the type of literature the book is. Dr. Summers examines many of the popular views on Revelation, breaks them down to the pros and cons and gives the pluses and minuses of each. The curious will find this fascinating and a whole new concept of the book opened to him. He will find it is not a scary book with strange symbols about the end of time but a book of hope that can apply to Christians everywhere in times of persecution. The apostle John is writing as a political prisoner and he's using a lot of coded language only Jews could fully understand. Dr. Summers unlocks a lot of the mystery and the code and you know what? We find things are not so mysterious after all if you can grasp the historical contest and type of literature.

This is an older little known "jewel" of a book. It is very well written and composed for the average person seeking to understand all the "mystery" of the book of Revelation. With all the present day abuse and mis-use of this important book, it is soothing to finally read a book that presents, in a very logical and unbiased manner, what God intended for us to understand. Ray removes all the "end-time mystery" and the extreme views being presented today and takes us back to an understandably wonderful message. What did God intend for the first century Christians, the first recipients, to understand? If the message doesn't help them, it can't be the correct message. Revelation doesn't have to be scarey or frightening. It's message is one of love and hope.

It will take some effort to get through the book. It's not presented as a storybook. It is presented in a logical orderly study fashion that with time, the scriptures, a note pad and prayer, the simplicity of the message can be realized. This is the only book I am aware of of this caliber.

The final message, "God 1: Satan 0", Game Over!

This is a book I found hard to put down. It describes one summer of a boy growing up on a Vermont farm in the thirties, when farmers still used horses, housewives canned all their food, and boys and girls walked to school. Lewis Hill tells of his boyhood with wry humor and vivid detail, and the reader is right there with him building shocks of hay with a pitchfork, chasing after the family's cats to keep them away from the mower, and wondering with almost unbearable excitement how to spend his thirty cents at the Barton Fair. This book is a wonderful companion to Mr. Hill's previous reminiscence of life on a Vermont farm: Fetched Up Yankee.

Many books about the past in rural areas fall into the trap of painting the past as a perfect time when all was right and good in the world. Hill spares us that disservice by showing us the real Vermont he grew up in. Along with the fun and adventure of youth are the day to day worries and hard work that helped to make life what it was.

The people are portrayed so well that you might well expect to met them if you were to go to his home town. Hill is also a master of building the story and wrapping the reader into it. He delivers the local dialect accurately and amazingly enough even the cadence of rural Vermont.

Like his FETCHED UP YANKEE this book isn't only entertaining it is a window into the past. Like Hill, I was raised in rural Vermont. Much of what he tells about had begun to go by the way when I was a child. Almost all of it has gone now. Sadly, in Vermont like the rest of the country, local culture has faded as the culture of the mass media grows. Read this book and have a view into another time in an America that is fast disappearing.

Lewis Hill grew up in the northern farm country of Vermont during the 1930s. The town of Greensboro, Vermont was then, as it is now, a mecca for vacationers from the cities who have own summer homes there and a fascinating mix of local Yankees, French Canadians and Scots who tilled the hard soil for a precarious living. Hill, a highly respected local historian, recounts in fascinating detail life in this hybrid New England community in the years that made up the heart of the depression before another World War changed life in Greensboro and America forever. Hill allows the reader to relive those days. YANKEE SUMMER is written in almost a lyrical manner that is great fun to read and hard to put down. This work is a "must" for any student of American history.

CDaniel Metraux, Mary Baldwin College, Staunton, VA 24401

Adalbert Stifter's INDIAN SUMMER is a remarkable novel. The book traces the maturing process of a young man from the Viennese merchant middle class whose parents' hard work and good management allow their only son to live a life of leisure if he chooses. What the adolescent hero chooses is to become a scientist, and the novel shows how he develops and finds his place in life. Already on a firm path because of his parents' influence, the turning point in Heinrich Drendorf's young life comes when he meets the mysterious owner of "the Rose House," an estate in the mountains in which everyone and everything lives in harmony with nature, respects the past, takes the best of what progress has to offer, and engages in meaningful work, even though the master of the Rose House is independently wealthy. In this atmosphere Heinrich both expands his world and focuses it at the same time, develops an aesthetic sense, finds his way as a scientist, and falls in love.

All of this happens in a setting of remarkable serenity, on the surface unchanging, but for some of the characters it is nearly the end of the road, a final flowering before the onset of winter. Some readers find it boring, but I find it incredibly calming to read. I come back to it again and again, and reading just a few pages brings my blood pressure down and makes me feel happy. It is an incredibly beautiful novel best suited to readers who are already middle-aged and willing to trade constant action for a slow, organic development.

Adalbert Stifter's novel "Indian Summer" must be one of the strangest books in world literature. Stifter seems to have tried to imagine an ideal life which is not disturbed by any outward trouble. So his hero Heinrich Drendorf, a merchant's son from Vienna, grows up happily. The book is about his friendship with an old man who has retired from politics and created an ideal little world on his country estate. Classicism is revered, but only from a distance: People have to wear felt slippers in order to preserve the precious marble floors. The two men spend their time making and preserving beautiful things and exploring the geography of the Alps.

Reading "Indian Summer" is a bit like meditating, the book draws you into an atmosphere of calm and beauty. Some people feel there is something uncanny about this world, and in the old man's case the reader finally finds out that this quiet life is just his Indian Summer after a youth of violent passions. Young Heinrich grows up without such disturbances, but can anyone really live so harmoniously? This is a book of immense daring, as Stifter tries to answer the question if happiness isn't a bit boring in the long run.

This is another in the American Girls series about Addy Walker, a ten-year-old African-American girl living in the America of 1865. With the war over, Trinity A.M.E. Church decides to hold a fair to raise money for those hurt or displaced. Addy's idea for the children to hold a puppet show and sell the puppets is warmly received, but everything looks gloomy when she and Sarah are partnered with Harriet. Everything depends on the girls working together, much more so then they realized, so the girls must come together to overcome.

The final chapter is an informative look at outdoor activities in 1865. This is another, wonderful book, well written, with a captivating storyline and great lessons. My daughter is an Addy fan, and so am I! This book is great!

Addy and Sarah are against Harriet even though they are workingtogether on a booth for the church fair that is raising money to helpblack slaves get to their families. But when the money is stolen, Addy and Harriet must work toghether to get it back. Addy also meets a surprise person in this book. Addy Saves The Day is one of my favorite American Girl books because it is fun and exciting to read and I definitely recommend it.

"Daddy's Girl" by Judith Arnold. Kevin Medina loves his one-year-old child Alix, but worries that he will lose custody of his beloved daughter. Court appointed Family Services worker Natalie Baines will make a recommendation to the court on who should raise Alex, but she wonders if she can remain neutral when she loves the father as much as his baby?

"Home, Hearth and Haley" by Muriel Jensen. Lawyer Bart Megrath left Florida to travel to colonial looking Maple Hill, Massachusetts to bail his friend's sister out of jail. However, he wonders who will bail out his heart as he falls in love with his volatile client, Haley Whitcomb.

"Temperature Rising" by Bobby Hutchinson. In Vancouver, most of the professional staff at St. Joseph's Hospital respect Dr. James Burke for his incredible trauma surgical talent, but try to avoid him anywhere outside the operating room, as tact is not his code word. However, chief operating official Melissa Clayton knows first hand about James' abrupt manner, but still cannot protect her heart from desiring the curmudgeon surgeon.

All three tales are powerful stories due to deep believable characters and engaging relationships that lead to enticing tales. Readers will relish this anthology that is a return to the "daddy school" and the ER wars of St. Joseph's as well as the opening gamut of a new miniseries.

Harriet Klausner

Harlequin Superromance celebrates two decades with ALL SUMMER LONG, a collection of three novellas by Judith Arnold, Muriel Jensen and Bobby Hutchinson. While unrelated, they are united in their presentation of conflict and romance.

"Daddy's Girl" by Judith Arnold: A child custody case brings Kevin Mdeina, one-year-old Alex and social worker Natalie Baines into a collision course. He fears every nuance, every subtlety, every implication of his words out of concern of what he might reveal to this woman who holds the power to influence the removal custody of his child, and because he's attracted to her. She holds her distance because he represents a conflict of interest when she must only concern herself with the child's best interest.

"Home, Hearth and Haley" by Muriel Jensen: When his best friend's sister lands in jail, lawyer Bart Megrath finds himself bailing Hellfire Haley Whitcomb out of jail. He's up to the task, however, despite the fact her last lawyer was carried out on a stretcher.

"Temperature Rising" by Bobby Hutchinson: Dr. James Burke understands the power of healing, but doesn't understand the power of the heart until he encounters hospital administrator Melissa Clayton. Melissa is just the woman to give James a lesson in bedside manners.

Characterized by strong characterizations emotional intensity, ALL SUMMER LONG presents three strong tales of romance. Jensen's novella launches the beginning of her Men of Maple Hill series, and Hutchinson's novella introduces her Temperature Rising series. This collection comes very highly recommended.