October 2012 | Hanover Evening Sun

The Wizard of Sun City: The Strange True Story of Charles Hatfield, the Rainmaker Who Drowned a City's Dreams Review

Average Reviews:(More customer reviews)The cover of this book, line drawings of flood victims anxiously retreating in the advance of a wall of water, foretell the ultimate result of the efforts of professional rainmakers Paul and Charles Hatfield. What lies between the covers is a very fascinating tale, almost an inversion of the Pied Piper...

Maude (1883-1993): She Grew Up With the Country Review

Average Reviews:(More customer reviews)Maude is not only a beautifully written tribute to a remarkable woman, but a wonderful chonicle of our country's growth towards maturity. Author Mardo Williams' newspaper background is apparent: He has a unique ability to mix important and meaningul historical details with the entertaining vignettes...

The Kalevala: Epic of the Finnish People Review

Average Reviews:(More customer reviews)Friberg does a good job of translating the Kalevala into a readable English form. The Kalevala is a collection of 'Runos' or poems that were sung by storytellers. Friberg's translation is of the spirit of the stories. Some translations have tried to translate both the verse and the story making both...

American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle Review

Average Reviews:(More customer reviews)I just finished reading all 821 pages of this book (no pictures), and am very proud of myself for having done so. This reference book chronicles Musical Theatre in America, show-by-show, starting in 1757 (!) and reaching all the way to 2000. Paragraphs are given for each show and can be found in chronological...

War with Mexico: America's Reporters Cover the Battlefront (Modern War Studies) Review

Average Reviews:(More customer reviews)Journalists embedded with U.S. troops attacking on foreign soil; uncensored news from the front reaches citizens before official Washington; news reports with a political or social slant, glorifying events to a red, white and blue hue. Sound familiar? Is it Vietnam, Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan? Nope. It...

Zen Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets) Review

Average Reviews:(More customer reviews)This collection of poems from various authors captures, for me anyway, the spirit of zen being. They have a immediacy which touches you directly transporting you by their power, to the situation or place they describe. Reading them is an act of meditation in so far as it directs the mind to a place of...

My First Tractor: Stories of Farmers and Their First Love Review

Average Reviews:(More customer reviews)What a wonderful book! I have no farming background but I found the various stories of the fond memories of the authors' first tractors fascinating and heart warming. There seemed to always be some regret about the move from horse to tractor power but mostly there was an appreciation of the ability to...

Child of Dandelions Review

Average Reviews:(More customer reviews)Wow. Highly recommended. My grade 7 and 8 students were thoroughly engaged with this book. One of them was so inspired that she is visiting Africa this summer with her family. A very rich story that illustrates a historical period that has been completely overlooked in the West. It is especially successful...

Seed to Seed: The Secret Life of Plants Review

Average Reviews:(More customer reviews)You know about writer's block, the frightening state of an author who just cannot come up with another idea about which to write. Nicholas Harberd had researcher's block. He had done plenty of work as a laboratory scientist, working out the biochemical mechanisms of some very basic capabilities of growth...

Orphan of the Sun Review

Average Reviews:(More customer reviews)This is a story - a mystery - told from the point of view of an adolescent girl. There are all the best parts of any teenage girl book: growing awareness of self, growing awareness of romance, growing awareness of the world. There are people who, in the words of GWB, misunderestimate Meryt. Meryt is...

Fever Dream Review

Average Reviews:(More customer reviews)After pre-ordering the book on kindle, I read the book in one sitting. I must say that Preston-Child are showing some love back to Prendergast series after the last couple of mis-haps ( yes, wheel of darkness quite ruined the series for me ). This book gets basic elements right and tells a compelling...

T. S. Eliot (Lives & Legacies (Oxford)) Review

Average Reviews:(More customer reviews)For an installment in an Oxford University Press series called "Lives and Legacies", T. S. ELIOT contains surprisingly little about Eliot's life and it discusses his legacy even less. What it is is an intelligent and scholarly, yet readable, overview of Eliot's writings, principally his poetry. If, like...

The Concord Quartet: Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and the Friendship That Freed the American Mind Review

Average Reviews:(More customer reviews)This book is a nice overview of the lives of four key authors who spent most of their time in Concord, Massachusetts: Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. These men helped craft and define the course of true American literature through their essays, poetry,...

Growing Up True: Lessons from a Western Boyhood Review

Average Reviews:(More customer reviews)Craig Barnes has crafted a beautiful, evocative book. This vivid reminiscence of family life in the rural West explains--better than any general work I have read--the beliefs and values and personal strengths that enabled the so-called "greatest generation" to surmount the challenges presented by the...

The New Westminster Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship Review

Average Reviews:(More customer reviews)From preface: New Westminster Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship by Paul Bradshaw (Westminster John Knox Press) Although this dictionary is very obviously closely related to the Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship edited by J. G. Davies (SCM Press, London 1972, 2nd ed. 1986), it is not merely a further...

Eerie Archives, Vol. 2 Review

Average Reviews:(More customer reviews)It's eerie...but my copy of this book arrived with the cover embossment done upside down. Even so, the inside is intact and complete. I just flipped the dust cover and you can't tell the difference. I have purchased the first three of the Creepy Archives as well as Volume 1 of the Eerie Archives (all...

A Short History of the Honey Bee: Humans, Flowers, and Bees in the Eternal Chase for Honey Review

Average Reviews:(More customer reviews)Timber Press has published a wide variety of quality book on plants and related areas. This clearly is a related area. It is a book by someone who really loves bees, a compliment. It has wonderful photographs and a delightful flow of the story of the author's dealings with this creatures.However, it...