"Second Half" by Susanna Chelton Sheehy - Book Review

Elden Publishing (2007)ISBN 9780978927110"Second Half" is the second novel in the "Second Half Trilogy" series. A third novel is on its way. In this novel, Jane is a sixty-year old woman who has never been married or had children. She has two wonderful best friends in her life. The story begins with Jane burning out in her career. She decides to start a magazine called, "Second Half." It is directed towards women who are over 45-years old. Jane has to deal with the stresses of starting a magazine. Her experiences with her employees also teach her some huge lessons.At this time, Jane also falls for a handsome widower named Gordon and she buys a dog. Gordon brings a spark of life into Jane's. Through Gordon's family, Jane discovers what she has been missing out on. She learns about both the good and the bad sides of having a large family and pets. When Jane first meets his family, "she felt like a drop of water in the ocean as a wave moved toward the shore." As time passes and she acclimates and feels accepted by them, "she still felt that way, but she belonged with that wave." Gordon also teaches her about what she has been missing out on sexually. At 60, she finally has a man that rocks her world.I loved this novel. I could really relate to it. What Jane was feeling at 60, I am feeling at 40. Her character gives me a feeling of hope in that it is never to let to start a new lease on life, nor it is too late to find the true love of your life. Jane's relationships in this story are very interesting and present some challenges. I enjoyed watching her grow through her experiences with them and the pets. Animal lovers will especially love reading about Jane's experiences with the animals. It definitely isn't easy for her to adapt to both the new family members and the animals but she knows that the hard work is worth it.Susanna Chelton Sheehy has written the perfect book to be given as a gift. "Second Half" is definitely one that a woman can curl up with and enjoy on a quiet afternoon. It is also an excellent choice for a women's reader group. dr seuss cat in hat quotes

"No Matter What" by Jordana Ryan - Book Review

Amira Press (2007)ISBN 9781934475041Reviewed by Paige Lovitt for Reader Views (5/07)Since age ten, Cassandra has had a difficult life. Leaving a candle burning in her home, her house burnt down and her parents died. Carrying the weight of blame and guilt at not having been the one to have died has affected all of Cassandra's relationships. During her early teens she began dating Brenden. At seventeen, she discovers that she is pregnant. She doesn't want to ruin Brenden's future or be a further burden on those who have taken her in, so she runs away. Trying to raise her daughter as a single parent is really rough. Cassandra finds herself engaging in risky, promiscuous behavior as an escape, yet she finds that it just makes her life worse.Four years after running away, Cassandra returns home to face the consequences of her decisions. She wants her daughter to have a good life and to know her father. Brenden and Cassandra have to struggle to get past the anger that he feels from her leaving him and not letting him know about his daughter. Cassandra has to deal with not feeling worthy of a man like Brenden. Other relationships also need healing."No Matter What" is a book about healing old wounds. Cassandra and Brenden both have to deal with serious consequences of actions that they have taken as a result of their grief from their past. Brenden's own mother abandoned him at age five. When Cassandra left him, he did everything he could to avoid being in a committed relationship. He hurt a lot of women with his actions. He too must heal now."No Matter What" is a very deep book. The characters have to deal with overcoming some very painful situations and emotions. This is the type of novel that you will want to read with your friends so that you can talk about it. It leads to a great deal of introspection and really makes you think about what it would be like to have faced everything that Cassandra has at such a young age. It is very hard to judge someone who has gone through so much. Enjoy this novel. dr seuss cat in hat history

Auction Profits Unleashed - The Secret to Profiting With E-books on EBay?

An e-book that shows you step by step how to generate profits on eBay by selling e-books is nothing new you might say, and you’d be right!You’ve probably heard that the world and his wife are selling 1 cent e-books on eBay and that the market is saturated and there’s no money in it – right again? Well sort of...If you are fed up with being sold massively hyped how-to e-books by people calling themselves experts and then finding that you haven’t made any money, consider this – the expert is probably making more money selling you and me the book than he is from actually working the system he sold to you in the book! So what has this got to do with making money selling books on eBay? Read on...Someone who produces an e-book and who actually walks the walk and talks the talk is a rare and beautiful thing.Step forward Lee McIntyre and take a bow.Not heard of him? Well that’s about to change…In his new book Auction Profits Unleashed he has come up with an innovative method for extracting every ounce of profit from your eBay book auctions.He shows you step-by-step how to achieve the same and here’s just a snippet of what is covered:
Using the traffic boosting power of Ebay - forget pay per click, free ads etc
Getting your customers to spend more than they thought they were going to
Building a super responsive list and selling to them over and over
Plus Lee works full-time as a teacher so he has built up his business in his spare time. So one of the beauties of this book is that he explains how to virtually automate this system so that you only need to spend ½ an hour to an hour each day on it once it is set up. And of course Lee explains exactly how to set it up.Auction Profits Unleashed [http://www.reviewit.info/auctionprofits.html] is written in a down-to-earth style that is easy to read, follow and duplicate.Perhaps you’ve tried selling e-books on Ebay in the past without success? Well this is a genuine step by step guide that I am sure will make you want to take another look and if you’ve never tried selling on Ebay then you will discover what you’ve been missing and how to go about getting it.Discover the cash machine on Ebay today Click Here [http://www.reviewit.info/auctionprofits.html] dr seuss cat in hat book

Arthur and George By Julian Barnes

George Edalji (that's Ay-dal-ji, by the way, since Parsee names are always stressed on the first syllable) is the son of a Staffordshire vicar of Indian origin and his Scottish wife. George is thus a half-cast, to use the language of his late-Victorian and Edwardian age. He's a diligent, if not too distinguished a scholar. He is uninterested in sport, is of small stature and doesn't see too well. He sleeps with his father behind a locked door, is in bed by 9:30, becomes a small town solicitor who develops an interest in train timetables and, by way of outlandish diversion, publishes a traveller's guide to railway law.Arthur Conan Doyle (later Sir Arthur) is born in Edinburgh, completes medical school and generally accomplishes whatever task he sets himself, including becoming a world famous writer. Despite the fact that he kills off his creation, the detective Sherlock Holmes, ostensibly to devote time to tasks of greater gravity, popular demand insists that he raise the character from the dead. He does this and proceeds to generate even greater success than before. He marries happily twice and pursues and interest in spiritualism, amongst other good causes.Perhaps because of who they are, the Edalji family become the butt of the campaign of poison pen letters. When they complain, all they accomplish is the focusing of further unwanted attentions on themselves. When a series of ripping attacks on animals remains unsolved, George, somehow, becomes the prime suspect. Convinced of his villainy, police, judicial system, expert witnesses, jury and press see him convicted of the crime and sent down for seven years. Good conduct sees him released after three.Sir Arthur wishes to do good and takes up George Edalji's case. He researches the facts, analyses the possibilities, tracks down neighbours and officials who have been involved. He creates an alternative explanation of events and presents it to officialdom, seeking a pardon and compensation for George, who by this time has transferred to London to start a new life. The two men meet and the incongruity of their assumed expectations of life are as irreconcilable as they are irrelevant to their joint focus on George's case. After official review, however, the Home Office Committee eventually concludes in an ambiguous manner. Edalji was convicted of the crime and the conviction is declared unsound; but crucially he is not declared innocent. He is therefore found not guilty but then not innocent either and so not worthy of compensation. When, years later, Sir Arthur dies and his associates stage a spiritualist gathering in his honour in the Royal Albert Hall, George is invited and attends, complete with binoculars lest he miss a detail of the proceedings. The illusion of the event draws him in and at one stage he feels himself to be the centre of attention, only to find that it is a near miss. Most of the detail refers to himself and his father, but the reality then points to another who is immediately identified.But, paradoxically, the quiet George Edalji and his Parsee (not Hindoo) father, Shapurji, were always the centre of attention simply by being who they were. Even Sir Arthur, the son's eventual champion, states this in one of his letters when he writes that it was perhaps inevitable that a dark-skinned clergyman taking a station in central England would attracts other's attention of a kind that would seek to undermine him, vilify him and attempt to oust him. The message is clear, that to be different from an assumed norm is to invite hatred, envy, discrimination and eventually ignominy. It is presented as a universal assumption, an unwritten element of universal common sense. Thus, as an intruder, the usual rules of justice will never pertain, a reality alluded to late in the book when George, scanning the Albert Memorial with his binoculars, discovers a statuesque embodiment of the concept of justice that is not wearing a blindfold.What is eventually so disturbing about Arthur and George, however, is the realisation that both characters are outsiders. George is set apart from his Staffordshire peers by his skin colour and perceived race. Arthur, however, lives no humdrum life. He attends private schools, qualifies as a doctor and then becomes an international celebrity by virtue of his writing. He takes up minority causes and identifies with them but, despite his obvious separateness from mainstream society, in his case his position is never interpreted as a threat or a handicap, obviously because the separateness of privilege has a different currency from the separateness of even relative poverty.Now an enduring memory of my own school history lessons was a textbook reproduction of a mid-Victorian cartoon of the universal pyramid of creation. It had God at the apex, immediately in touch via the saints with the Empress of India and then, layered beneath in widening courses were the gentry and aristocracy, the members of government and civil service, the professional classes and merchants. The working classes could perhaps temporarily ignore their poverty in the solace offered by knowing that they are a cut above members of all other races who, themselves, were just one up from the apes. It was not many more layers down to the low animals, most of which slithered or crawled. Arthur and George ostensibly tells us much about racism and racial discrimination in a society that was portrayed as the apex of a worldwide empire, a heavenly focus for aspiration. It also tells us about the power of presumption and has much to say very quietly and by suggestion about social class and its ability, especially in Britain, to legitimise difference as originality or eccentricity in some areas, differences which elsewhere would be threats. dr seuss book collection

Restless By William Boyd

In offering a review of a novel by William Boyd I could certainly be accused of bias. I would proudly plead guilty, since I regard him as one of just four or five British writers who are capable of constructing supreme works of fiction, written in a framework that is both informative and thought-provoking and all this set within a continuum of contemporary or historical events which themselves become re-interpreted by the fiction. In Restless, Boyd's latest novel, he has re-stated this ability and, if anything, written it larger via a smaller form.The historical element in Restless is supplied by the activities of an offshoot of World War Two intelligence. Ostensibly a private, dis-ownable initiative of a particular group, Boyd suggests that it formed an integral part of the British strategy, during the early part of the war, to force the United States to join the Allied effort. The fact, therefore, that it was undermined and subverted so that it perhaps aimed to achieve the opposite of its brief was probably par for the course when espionage meets its freelance counter, but the denouement is surprising and wholly credible.In front of this backdrop of fact meeting fiction, we have a landscape of human relationships. Ruth is a single mother in Oxford. She, herself, has had certain German connections, nay relations, hence the motherhood. She makes a living teaching English to foreign tutees, has several dubious visitors, dreams about completing an aging PhD and generally spends much of her time looking after a precocious five-year-old. And then her mother becomes someone quite unknown to her. The widow in the Oxfordshire retreat suddenly becomes part Russian, part English, with a French step-mother. She possessed several different identities before she became Mrs Gilmartin and most of these were fiction to provide cover for the others. How many of us, after all, can claim to have known our parents before they were parents?So, as Mrs Gilmartin the mother reveals to her daughter via instalments of an autobiography that she is really Eva Delectorskaya, recruited in Paris to conduct a campaign of wartime disinformation in the United States, the complications of life gradually attain the status of the mundane. Recruited, perhaps, because she was rootless and thus expendable, Eva proved herself intellectually and operationally superior to her manipulative managers and survived the posting that was supposed to achieve their subverted ends and, at the same time, erase her potential to supply evidence. Many years later, Eva, now Mrs Gilmartin, feels the need to get even, to expose the double or triple-cross for what it was and deliver at least a prod to the comfortable, self-congratulatory but traitorous British establishment that ran her. Daughter Ruth becomes the means.So one messy life tries to tie up its soggy ends via the actions of another who is apparently yet to attain the same depths of complication. And she succeeds. The fright is delivered. The memory that Eva, the mother, was fundamentally brighter than the upper class Brits who were trying to manipulate her is rekindled. Her training was perfect, but she went beyond it and the plan backfired, irrelevantly as it turned out because greater events intervened. But years later, Eva, Mrs Gilmartin, is still brighter than her boss and, through her daughter's efforts, she brings a special kind of justice to bear on the double-dealer who ruined, but also perhaps made her life.In characteristically humble terms, William Boyd reminds us at the end that we are all watched, all awaiting the cupboard to reveal its skeleton, but in our more mundane lives, it is unlikely to be as colourful an event as that which Eva Delectorskaya, Mrs Gilmartin, and her daughter Ruth uncover. seuss book collection sets cat hat

Prescription For Murder - The True Story of Mass Murderer Dr Harold Frederick Shipman - Book Review

What an extraordinary book this is, very well researched by Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie. It tells the story of the infamous mass murderer Doctor Harold Shipman, known to his "friends," as Fred.Doctor Shipman was tried and found guilty of fifteen murders in 1999. Latest research suggests he may well have killed 250 people, and possibly even more than that. That makes him Britain's worst known mass murderer and puts him right up there in the first division of evil. Most of his victims were elderly women. Trusting women. Vulnerable women. Only too keen to accept a "vitamin" injection from the friendly GP, or a "flu jab". It will do you good dear. Give you a tonic.The man had a fascination with morphine. He watched his own mother dying of cancer, helped by morphine. He developed a morphine habit of his own, and killed his victims using morphine, a particularly stupid method, seeing as morphine is so easily traceable. "Stupid", was favourite word of his. He considered himself above mere mortals and loved to belittle "stupid" underlings. That says a lot about the man. He avoided detection whenever possible by having the bodies cremated. For years no one thought to challenge him. You just don't think badly of the hard working family doctor, do you? At least people didn't, back then.This book published in 2000 refers to him as being on suicide watch in Manchester's Strangeways prison. What the writers didn't know at the time of course was that he would indeed commit suicide on the eve of his 58th birthday on 13th January 2004.I particularly liked the coverage of the early years, the sixties, as he was growing up and courting and marrying. Surely the roots of his crimes were growing there. And where exactly the writers obtained such detailed accounts I have no idea, but the resulting work is a monumental achievement. Excellent and poignant photographs too.For anyone studying crime, or the psychology of murderers, this book is an essential requirement. It isn't pretty and it isn't cheerful, but it is a compelling account of the tragic events that unfolded in Cheshire town of Hyde. Hyde will recover, the last sentence in the book. I will second that.ISBN: 0751529982By Brian Whittle & Jean Ritchie dr seuss cat in hat quotes

Book Review for The Scent of God, by Beryl Singleton Bissell

The Scent of God by Beryl Singleton Bissell is a work of fine art, reminiscent of a painting by Rubens or a haunting Saint-Saëns melody. The beautifully crafted memoir offers words that glisten like gems on each page. Lush imagery, redolent with heady scents and vibrant color, transports the reader to locales ranging from the sanctified to the exotic. Readers will savor every chapter of this alluring tale.The story begins in 1947 in Saddle River, New Jersey. Beryl, one of four siblings in a Catholic family, catalogs her mortal sins at an early age and is riddled with guilt when her mother serves meat on Friday or the family misses Mass. Her father's binges and the rage and panic his drinking elicits in her mother, cause Beryl to seek comfort in nature. With her siblings, she happily tramps through the lakeside woods - swimming, fishing, tobogganing, and exploring abandoned farmhouses. In sixth grade, Beryl begins attending a private boarding school run by Catholic nuns who teach her about a God of unconditional love. This knowledge calms and thrills the young girl, who longs for stability and acceptance.When Beryl is thirteen, her father's drinking causes him to lose his position as vice-president of a New York bank, but he is offered an alternate position in Puerto Rico. When the family relocates to the tropical island, Beryl draws inward, avoiding friends and life outside the home. Beryl's sister's popularity and her mother's critical harping about her weight increase her sense of displacement. Witnessing the drowning of a young boy, however, brings her face to face with her own mortality and the superficiality of earthly success. This new knowledge, in combination with a mystical experience of God's love and the breakup with her "first love" -- a handsome young Puerto Rican boy -- set her on a course toward a life of commitment to God whose love is eternal and unchanging.At the age of eighteen, and in spite of her parent's initial disapproval, Beryl enters the Monastery of Saint Clare in Bordentown, New Jersey. With visions of becoming a saint, she thrives on the simple goodness of the daily processes in the cloistered nunnery, enjoying working in the bakery, her daily prayers, and the quiet camaraderie of her sister nuns. Her experiences in the monastery are lovingly and honestly recounted, providing a rare glimpse into this life.Twelve years later, Beryl is deeply ensconced in the tranquility of the monastery when she receives the news that her father has taken ill, and that she needs to return home to assist her mother with his care. Returning to the island reawakens her senses."I woke that morning to the sound of waves crashing on the beach below, the pink and gold of the rising sun playing across my face. Despite my father's condition and my mother's frailty, I felt a wild surge of happiness. Eight floors below my window, a receding wave shimmered back toward an oncoming breaker, leaving a froth of bubbles to mark the edges of its ride. A solitary man jogged along the beach, the wet sand forming silvery halos around his footprints."In the course of caring for her father, and in the most delectable and surprising twist of this true story, Beryl meets Padre Vittorio, a handsome Italian priest who preaches at the local church of Saint Jorge. At first irritated by the man, Beryl slowly finds herself falling in love as she gets to know him better, igniting the most painful yet wondrous struggle of her life.It would spoil the story to reveal more. Suffice it to say that the segment of the book involving Vittorio is sensual and captivating, never offensive, and completely addictive. Be forewarned that The Scent of God will lodge in your heart and invade your dreams for years to come.Thankfully, the author is working on a sequel to The Scent of God. This reader anxiously awaits the next chapter in Beryl's delightful true-life saga. dr seuss cat in hat history