Reading Aloud Across the Curriculum: How to Build Bridges in Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Studies

Book Description

In Learning Under the Influence of Language and Literature, Lester Laminack and Reba Wadsworth demonstrated how to make the read - aloud a strong supporting structure for literacy learning across the day. Now with Reading Aloud Across the Curriculum they reveal how the read - aloud can strengthen students' abilities and achievement in other subject areas.

Reading Aloud Across the Curriculum is a practical guide to expanding your read - aloud instruction to accomplish literacy - based goals in four key subject areas - math, social studies, language arts, and science. You'll find strategic advice for planning thematic, content - driven units that use reading aloud to scaffold understanding and increase engagement. Beginning with smart ideas for introducing students to new content through picture books, Laminack and Wadsworth share ideas for assembling themed sets of children's literature that help kids use the predictable structures of the read - aloud to connect with new ideas. Then Reading - Aloud Across the Curriculum provides suggestions for helping students do research that extends the knowledge they've gotten from whole - class readings and build a bridge from literacy skills to content knowledge. Laminack and Wadsworth give you three specific units of study each for social studies, language arts, science, and even math - twelve units altogether. Each comes with dozens of recommended titles, over 400 in all!

Full of useful planning tips, classroom - tested strategies, and Laminack and Wadsworth's trademark enthusiasm for children's literature, Reading Aloud Across the Curriculum doesn't just pick up where its predecessor left off - it takes you and your students to whole new levels of cross - curricular engagement.

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beautiful
The Bridge Across Forever
A Love Story Unlike Any Other
for the dreamer in you..
Richard Bach will teach you how to fly...his way.

The Bridge Across Forever: A Lovestory
Richard Bach
Manufacturer: Dell
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback

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ASIN: 0440108268
Release Date: 1989-10-01

Amazon.com

Bestselling author Richard Bach explores the meaning of fate and soul mates in this modern-day fairytale based on his real-life relationship with actor Leslie Parrish. "This is a story about a knight who was dying, and the princess who saved his life," Bach writes in his opening greeting. "It's a story about beauty and beasts and spells and fortresses, about death-powers that seem and life-powers that are." Yes, it is all that, and more. On the earthly plane this is about the riveting love affair between two fully human people who are willing to explore time travel and other dimensions together even as they grapple with the earthly struggles of intimacy, commitment, smothering, and whose turn it is to cook. Their love affair and happy ending inspired many enthusiastic fans. Years later, some of these fans were devastated to discover that this match made in heaven didn't manage to stick (the couple are no longer together). But in an Amazon interview, Bach explains that lovers don't have to stay married forever to be lifetime soul mates. Read this as a lesson about love's enchantments and possibilities, but don't count on this book to keep you and your mate on the bridge across forever. --Gail Hudson

Book Description

If you've ever felt alone in a world of strangers, missing someone you've never met, you'll find a message from your love in The Bridge Across Forever.

Customer Reviews:

beautiful.......2007-10-07

I have read this book some 9 years ago. Lost my first copy, so ordered it again. Still love it.

The Bridge Across Forever.......2007-08-13

Most of us know the saying that we teach best what we most need to learn. With regard to many of the reviews I've read regarding this book,and others of his with the soulmate theme, many people would say this is true of Richard. But is that so? Didn't Richard advocate being true to one's self and one's feelings most? Even if the feelings weren't convenient or mainstream. And feelings change. Richard is self centered and I really don't think he ever tried to present himself as anything other than that - quite the opposite. He wrote what he felt and thought then- period. He didn't stay with the person he depicted as his soulmate because apparently his feelings and thoughts about the person and the relationship changed and I'll wager Leslie's did too. And in keeping with his philosophy he followed those feelings and thoughts and moved on. And Leslie, being the beautiful person that she is definitely deserves someone being with her who can deeply appreciate and love her and WANT TO BE THERE. Is Richard immature? I think so. But he is sure following his phiosophy of being true to one's self regardless of what I think or you think. I do admire that. And Leslie loved this brillant fickle man knowing he was a brillant fickle man changeable as the wind's direction. After all she must have been aware that he left a wife and 6 children. This being honest and "true" to one's own self can have a sharp edge to it even among soulmates. This outcome is not so foreign to the book's content. It's an interesting book,and the reaction to it is even more interesting. As for me, I believe there are soulmates but no life long guarantees.

A Love Story Unlike Any Other.......2007-08-12

It's not that mushy stuff!

It'a all about a man who actually finds his soulmate and how his soul recognizes her soul... It has a light philosophical content on the subject of souls reconnecting in the next life.

It's beautifully written. And it's a story that most of us dream about in our lifetime.

for the dreamer in you.........2007-05-10

be wary of the dreamer, for the dreamer will never change, never happy with what they have only wanting what they can't have..I used to be a big Richard Bach fan and read many of his books..when I first read this book it opened my eyes and heart to a 'soulmate' and the concept of one day finding the person who was meant for you..nothing lasts forever and I'm sad to read what happened to Leslie and Richard but it's hard to judge another until you've walked in their shoes..so for the shining ray of light that this book once gave me..I still recommend it..I know because I've found my soulmate..but true perfect love does exist..it just takes alot of work, compromise and forgiveness..and keep striving..

Richard Bach will teach you how to fly...his way........2007-04-04

"The Bridge Across Forever" is a reality show brought to you in the form of a book and a writer's determined effort to provide hope to the hopeless and to teach you never to stop believing in magic. The premise of the book is wonderful, unfortunately it picks up on a very high note and quickly spirals into self-absorbed prose that almost comes across as a self-help book as opposed to a novel. For that reason and for the smug all-knowing elusive character that is Richard Bach at different stages of his life, I give this book four stars.

This is a story about a man named Richard Bach. He is a passionate pilot and a brilliant writer and a lost soul searching for his ever-elusive soul mate. He is stubborn and uncompromising and abandoned in his ways. He moves like a nomad allowing his desires to act as his compass and his airplanes to follow quick suit. His quest to find a soul mate that fits his unyielding mold and is the perfect combination of a handful of women is almost his unconscious means of running away from commitment. He possesses all the tell-tale traits and almost throws away the best thing that ever happened to him as his phobia attempts to wreak havoc and play the role of disruption.

The story is essentially very real - creating a place in the real world for fantasy and magic. I was drawn from the very first page --- "We think, sometimes, there's not a dragon left. Not one brave knight, not a single princess gliding through secret forests, enchanting deer and butterflies with her smile." Such is life today. Only these mystical characters appear in our lives in disguised forms. Reading about Richard's life and his quest to find his soul mate was actually more enjoyable before he actually did find her...but only because the book suddenly dove into a somewhat excruciating philosophy lesson given by Richard's many alter ego's and Leslie's know-it-all attitude and unending series of metaphors and life lessons on love.

The story could have had far more impact without dragging on as it did. If I had to sum up the book into one major learning it would be as follows: perfection is not a constant. It is a moving target and a relative term that takes on a different shape and form for every person. In simple terms, the moral of the story is: don't compromise and don't lose faith. Stay true to who you are, let fate take its course and abandon all thoughts of perfection...it is an unachievable superlative, always trumped by the moving cogs of life. Destiny will find you where you least expect it to. Just be. And your heart and mind will soar.

Bridge Across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory

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Original and Poetic comparison of Chinese & Jewish memory

Bridge Across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory
Vera Schwarcz
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Asia | History | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0300066147

Book Description

The daughter of Holocaust survivors, China scholar Vera Schwarcz explores the meaning of cultural memory in the vastly different Chinese and Jewish traditions. She finds a bridge between the two civilizations-a shared commitment to the transmission of remembrance and to witnessing to the significance of the past-and brings to life the struggles of Chinese and Jewish survivors who managed to preserve the continuity of their long traditions.

Customer Reviews:

Original and Poetic comparison of Chinese & Jewish memory.......1998-09-08

No, this is not about the strength of Chinese cuisine in the American Jewish community. It is about memory and metaphor. How do Jews and Chinese preserve and transmit their cultures. Should we begin to speak of Judeo-Confucian values rather than Judeo-Christian? What did Chinese culture do without the wrath of the god-inspired prophets? This is an original, thoughtful, poetic study from Wesleyan Professor of East Asian Studies Vera Schwarcz. In October 1979, Schwarcz, the daughter of Transylvanian Holocaust survivors, was studying in Beijing. It was Yom Kippur. Inside her dorm room, she was fasting and reading Wiesel's Les Chants des Morte." Outside, the authorities were closing the Democracy Wall. She was struck by the way both Jewish and Chinese cultures act to preserve and transmit fragments of cultural memories, in light of the powers that attempt to eradicate them, namely the Shoah and the Cultural Revolution. Amnesia is a relief from recollection. But both Jewish (if I forget thee..) and Chinese (If you lose the past, the will easily crumbles) cultures reward people for remembrance. This book enlightened me to the Judeo-Confucian tradition; the rabbi and the scholar; Halakha and Li; Rabbi Hillel and Confucius' disciple Mencius; the role of the Jewish prophets; and the lack of the socially just god in China with which one could fight imperial power. Did you know that the metaphoric poetry of Yehudah Amichai is used in China to remember Tiananmen Square? How do the concept of gesher (bridge) and kesher (tying knot) in the Midrash and Bratslaver-Hasidism compare to qiaoliang (bridge) and ren (endurance) and the writings of Yeng Shen? What can be learned from the midrash on god blessing Adam and Eve with the gift of amnesia and the Chinese tale of Old Lady Meng's Soup, which is a broth of amnesia? These are just a few of the questions she explores. I found this book fascinating.

Across the Bridge of Sighs: More Venetian Stories

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a slice of Venetian life
Venetian bon bons
Very pale picture of a colorful city.
Wonderfully enchanting
This should not be missed...

Across the Bridge of Sighs: More Venetian Stories
Jane Turner Rylands
Manufacturer: Pantheon
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0375423419
Release Date: 2005-11-22

Book Description

In these twelve wry, captivating stories, Jane Turner Rylands returns with more tales about the mysterious day-to-day life of Venetians, in which the conflicting forces of progress and tradition are very much at odds.

Once again we become insiders, let in on the attitudes and habits of characters from all strata of Venetian society—from very different backgrounds and neighborhoods—in one of the world’s most unknowable cities. Rylands makes us understand the subtle hierarchies of this Byzantine society with all its robust snobberies. The unique quirks, petty rivalries, and jealousies that lie just beneath the city’s elegant veneer are brilliantly observed.

Unforgettable characters from Rylands’s first collection make return appearances in several stories, and many new figures are introduced. An unscrupulous former race-car driver unveils a plan to save Venice; a fiendish son plans an aphrodisiac dinner; superstition and a possible curse add to a family’s very contemporary troubles over the restoration of their ancient palazzo, where a struggle ensues between decline and change.

As always with Rylands’s stories, we are easily drawn into this sophisticated but ultimately small-town world, and we come to understand the eccentricities of its citizens and the fragility of their future. In Across the Bridge of Sighs, Jane Turner Rylands evokes the poignant and lively world of one of our most cherished cities with all the power of a master storyteller.

Customer Reviews:

a slice of Venetian life.......2007-06-24

I disagree with the reviewer who said this book didn't bring Venice to life (although there is seemingly nothing about the Bridge of Sighs). First, these are short stories, not a Donna Leon mystery or the Great American-Italian novel. You have to be in the mood for short stories, I think, but if so and they are well written, you have a good read. Second, the stories center around the same people in the same neighborhood, who know each other, are related to one another, know each other's business and personal affairs, etc. Right away this makes the stories more real than a collection of detached tales that have nothing to do with each other. Finally, I haven't been to Venice (would love to go) but I've read a lot about it and these stories seem in agreement with works of other authors. It's good to remember that if you live in a place, New York, London, Paris, Venice, you get a different "feel" for it than does a person who comes for a week for shopping, sightseeing, eating in the best restuarants, going to the theatre. Real life is much the same everywhere in some ways. There is Countess Giulia shlepping her groceries off the bus from the mainland onto a boat to get home. There is Severino living with his parents and paying room and board at 29, probably because life in the city is expensive. A lot of the characters are rich people, I assume that the author knows a lot of rich people. But you get a good dose of reality too. All the small specialty shops going out of business thanks to the big box stores and supermarkets on the mainland. I felt the author gave us a look beyond the romance and the tourist attractions. I intend to find her first book and read it.

Venetian bon bons.......2007-05-08

I must admit that I'm a sucker for Venice, having been there on my honeymoon. The marriage failed but my love of the city remains. This book brings back the sights, sounds and smells of Venice . It is a quick read with its interconnected stories tied to the restoration of a palazzo. I do intend to read the author's first set of stories as well. I can hear the bells now.....

Very pale picture of a colorful city........2006-05-16

Where is the passion, the color and the life ? These bland stories paint a very pale picture of Venice - the city and people are never brought clearly to life. This book was a big disappointment for me.

Wonderfully enchanting.......2006-04-17

Ever since I read Venetian Stories I've been awaiting a sequel with all of the anticipation of a ten-year-old J.K.R. fan. Thank you, Mrs. Rylands, for not disappointing. I savored this book for over a week, trying to carefully digest each vignette before it slipped into the intertwined mass of the whole. Except for being short-changed at every turn, Venice is the best place on earth, and Mrs. Rylands' book only add to the richness that tourists are hard-pressed to appreciate. Bravo!

This should not be missed..........2006-04-07

KIRKUS REVIEWS, September 1, 2005:
"The author of Venetian Stories (2003) returns with another enchanting tribute to la Serenissima.
An American who has lived in Venice for more than 30 years, Rylands writes with the simplicity--the apparent transparency--of someone experiencing a world in translation, but she is a singularly perceptive outsider, and her portrait of Venice is finely nuanced. She conveys whole life stories in a few lovel sentences, and she reveals all the charming truths buried within small, inconspicuous encounters. Characters flit through the collection, sometimes in a starring role, sometimes mentioned in passing--just like in life. "Restoration" -- a story of love, fate, and a crumbling palazzo--balances the vicissitudes of reality with fairy-tale undertones, and "Vocation" offers a similar mix of the provident and the pragmatic. "Design" is a sharply hilarious but not unkind portrait of new money triumphant. "Fortune" is a priceless little comedy of manners, a gem that would sine in any setting. Indeed, each entry in this volume stands on its own as a well-crafted and entertaining work of short fiction, but it's only in viewing the collection as a whole that one appreciates the grand scope of Rylands's project. With these subtly intertwined stories, she offers both a telling vision of Venice's current state of entrophy and a carefully hopeful glimpse of its future. Many of the characters in these stories leave Venice, but a few of them return. Foreigners and arrivistes are ejected, but some are embraced. Considered altogether, these stories suggest that the past can only survive when it's married to the future, and that the real wonder of Venice is not its network of canals but its community of people--noble, flawed, loving, spiteful, sad, gracious, interdependent, and wholly human.
Elegant, worldly-wise and as captivating as the city it celebrates."
This says it all.

Turkish Dynamics: Bridge across Troubled Lands (The Middle East in Focus)

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Turkish Dynamics: Bridge across Troubled Lands (The Middle East in Focus)
Ersin Kalaycioglu
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Turkey | Asia | History | Subjects | Books

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Challenges to Peace in the Middle East

ASIN: 1403962790
Release Date: 2005-10-20

Book Description

Turkey is a pivotal state whose domestic political, economic, and social developments have important implications across the globe. Here a leading Turkish political scientist enhances understanding of the interactions of liberal democracy with longstanding cultural cleavages along secular-religious lines, ethnicity, and social class. This work focuses on how the process of urbanization and industrialization has led to social mobilization and population movements from villages into the cities and how competition to control the state and its networks of patronage has made politics contentious and fragmented. Intertwined with Turkey's domestic political and economic dynamics are the influences of relations, including tensions, with important external actors.

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the opening of eyes long closed!
Gestalt addresses culture

The Bridge: Dialogues across Cultures

Manufacturer: Gestalt Institute Press, Metairie, La.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Product Description

Many would agree that today we live in a turbulent world where dialogue across the globe is essential, where cross0communication is an ever increasing and fundamental need on our planet now more than ever before. By adoping a Gestalt multi-cultural focus, a group of 23 eminent Gestaltists have investigated some of the human troubles that are of convern to many of us. They have steped forward to write about their own experiences working in foriegn lands and their attempts to help heal the ills that exist between sociieties and to offer readers ways of doing the same.

Customer Reviews:

the opening of eyes long closed!.......2006-03-30

do you remember the first time that you popped on a pair of reading glasses ? realizing that your natural sight was not all that you thought it was ! well, the bridge quickly shakes deep,long held views about a fusion of cultural issues.
see the world more clearly - read the bridge!

j.hartland ( managing director - blue chip co. )

Gestalt addresses culture.......2006-03-28

Among the important themes of The Bridge are immigrant experiences, the psychological and cultural crisis points abundant in the acculturation process. The editor opens the book with a chapter focused on "making a difference," bridging through sharing, which she powerfully describes as, "being in mutual contact and bridging differences while acknowledging the unbridgeable." Later, she insists, "Fundamental to this process is the conviction that even though change is inevitable as a result of a dialogic meeting, one can still maintain what is fundamental to oneself. The starting point is that of meeting and allowing, as opposed to demanding and imposing change."

What does Gestalt bring to working with culture? The editor is clear: Gestalt views and observes differences, takes an interest in the way each culture configures the field, and strives to create enough common ground for bridges to be stretched across them. Far from being a purely theoretical concern, she offers her own cultural identity struggle and that of her clients as concrete examples of the uncertainties, pains and joys of steering ones identity through cultural storms.

Contributors to the volume are Gestalt therapists all, and, although the experiences of Jewishness and Israel are dominant for quite a few contributors, there is good diversity in the mix. The reader is introduced to a wide range of contexts in which Gestalt theory and practice are applied to therapy and social life.

Following the introduction are two important essays by Philip Lichtenberg and Gordon Wheeler that position culture within the Gestalt process. They give the reader both a theoretical and historical context for understanding Gestalt psychology and its terminology, making subsequent chapters more transparent for those unfamiliar with its principles and practices.

The Gestalt approach, in a sense, is counterfoil to those academic and scientific approaches to culture that seek to be as value free and detached as possible. Gestalt proposes work that is unashamedly value rich whether the values are traditional, religious, political or social. Moreover in relational contexts, even between therapist and client, cultural phenomena may become not only become ominous and threatening to others, but may also attack one's own cultural immune system unless surfaced and dealt with. This is true for the individual but as well for society and politics. Imposed assimilation deprives the assimilator as well as the assimilated. Imperialism, cultural or otherwise, ultimately denudes the emperor. Bloated patriotism destroys the community it was meant to sustain.

Section Two of The Bridge shows applications of Gestalt to bridging of social phenomena. The struggle for identity and belonging is a part of experiences as disparate as surviving the Holocaust, being a victim of HIV or finding motivation for one's studies. It may be about dealing with immigration and social change or with the generational differences between mothers and daughters in a new land or a new age. Often in these situations individualism puts people at cultural risk and the return to wholeness lies in reconnection with others. One discussion in Section Two addresses belonging in an educational counseling context-a Gestalt approach assists minority students seeking to establish a self-image coherent with full participation in educational opportunities. The final essay tells of creating belonging in the formation of an Israeli-Arab theatre group through personal narration and dialogue.

Section Three of the book shifts the focus to interpersonal bridge making. Being born a Cleveland Indians baseball fan myself, it jogged my emotional memory to read how the gift of baseball cap bearing the very red face of Chief Wahoo stimulated a painful but productive dialogue toward understanding racism. Here the play of figure and ground in Gestalt help us to understand how cultural difference in the ground may make all the difference to the meaning of the symbols we exchange and actions our well intended actions toward each other. Factors that have formed us, though not unrelated to the color of our skin, can run much deeper and make up a far greater part of our self-construct than we are likely to imagine.

The final essays address bridging in therapy. While the title suggests we might hear about how to professionally connect people and their values, the bridges talked about here are mainly between the therapist(s) and the client or client group. Again, engagement rather than detachment is a hallmark of the Gestalt process. It becomes very clear that the therapist's own dialogue with difference is as critical to the outcome of therapy as the dialogues that bring the client or the group to experience itself and transcend its boundaries in healing and creation. Accounts relate how elements of racial and religious background are brought into the foreground of the therapists' own crisis and dialogue. This stimulates change and growth that in turn nourishes the therapeutic sessions. There is no deus ex machina in Gestalt work. We bring who we are and what we have. It is this honest engagement with the other that often works miracles. Detachment only exists in the sense of knowing what feelings belong to whom.

The editor's epilogue sums up the collaborative discussion of the cultural used to create this book with the dictum, "experience trumps theory." This highlights the dilemma that the reader, especially if not a therapist but otherwise engaged in intercultural work must address and resolve in everyday practice. Experience is messy, and frequently interculturalists whose work may have healing potential but who don't see themselves as therapists would themselves avoid the messiness. Much of the time, we are brought to work in situations because our clients fear the messiness and expect us to clean it up or at least help them clean it up. This book reminds us that both in therapy as well as training and consulting, intercultural messiness, the proverbial "can of worms", holds the potential of it own reorganization if we are able to honor it and bring it to the foreground and speak of it as we experience it. We are not all therapists but we are all engaged in the dance of figure and ground.

The Bridge is neither a manual of techniques nor a collection of cultural information. Rather it is a book that challenges therapists and interculturalists alike by inviting us, in Gestalt terms, to dialog with the dialog it presents us with, in short to do our own work in order to work well with others.

High Steel: Building the Bridges Across San Francisco Bay

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High Steel: Building the Bridges Across San Francisco Bay
Richard H. Dillon
Manufacturer: Celestial Arts
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0890878595

Amazon.com

Two of San Francisco's most famous landmarks are the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, which connect the city with Marin County to the north and Oakland to the East. While Richard Dillon finds the Bay rather conventional-looking, he is unreserved in his admiration for the Golden Gate: "Its soaring grace actually enhances the beauty of its natural setting, something which man- made objects rarely do.... The largest work of art in history, dwarfing such an example of combined art-and-engineering as the Eiffel Tower, it is the greatest sculpture ever dreamed."

Book Description

Derek Mayfield, a 26 year-old black gay man, goes to Cancun, Mexico, to clock out of life for a while. Once there, he meets Rob, a nave, 16 year-old white boy who is just like the golden, all-American jocks of Dereks youth.

Derek strikes up a friendship with Rob and his younger brother Skeeter. The three become an inseparable trio for youthful summer adventure. But Derek also craves the touch of Robs smooth, innocent skin, even though Rob is straight-identified and underage.

Its a dilemma that threatens to ruin Dereks peaceful getaway. Its a week that will change the lives of Rob's family and Derek forever.

Inspired by a true story. From the author of the Lambda Literary Award nominated suspense thriller "Uprising".

Download Description

A friendship between a 26 year-old black gay man with HIV and two straight white teenage brothers leads to a summer vacation in Cancun, Mexico, that will change all their lives forever. A Lambda Literary Award finalist.

Customer Reviews:

just ..............EXCELLENT !.......2003-05-27

THIS IS *** NOT *** A CHEAP THRILL SEX BOOK!

With an overtone of "The Hardy Boys In The 21st Century"
this book delivers an enthralling story with character
development focusing on teen and adult sexuality. I really
read in fear of coming to the final pages: losing the good friends,
conversations, and stories it provided.

Life lessons and advice are abundant here, some reminding me
of sources of wisdom like Ann Rand, Alcoholics Anomyous, The Tao,
and many many more, refined by real experience centered on,
but not limited to, sex.

It's smooth, easy, laid back, reflective reading; and I'm going to look into
more of this author's works!

WARNING: IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A CHEAP ORGASMIC
THRILL . . . THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR YOU.

FOR THOSE WITH A MIND . . . ENJOY!

Great.......2000-11-09

I found that this book address issues dealing with inter racial dating and under age relationship very well. It was written very well.

Great.......2000-11-09

I found that this book address issues dealing with inter racial dating and under age relationship very well. It was written very well.

Not "Death In Venice" but "Life In Cancun (and beyond)".......2000-11-07

This is a beautiful, meaningful story, so sensitively handled and honestly revealed, that portrays the life-giving strength of love that can cross diverse gaps: black and white, old and young, straight and gay, physically "pure" and HIV "adulterated".

Recently testing positive for HIV, 26-year-old artist Derek Mayfield, a gay black man, takes a vacation in Cancun to give himself time to reassess his commitment to his life and its purpose. While there, he encounters and falls in love with Rob Velarde, a beautiful 16-year-old white "god" who was also vacationing there with his younger brother, Skeeter, and his divorced mother, Roberta. Rob was the embodiment of all that Derek had spent a lifetime desiring and wanting to create undying love with--yet here ten years his junior and still an under-age child under the control of his parents. Instead of just keeping his distance and obsessively observing this "Tadzio" from afar, Derek steps right into Rob's life and the life of his family, creating a multi-layered relationship of friendship and love that would mutually affect and benefit all of them for the rest of their lives.

Author Randy Boyd with his perfect writing does not flinch in his honesty about the definite sexual appeal of a youth like Rob, and the turmoil of desire versus responsibility that a man like Derek can undergo. But in genuinely taking Rob into his heart, Derek is also nurturing in this incubator his own precious, surviving Self, and in his presentation of the reality and example of his generous and decent character to the two relentlessly curious and open boys, and, ultimately, to their mother, he is also, himself, becoming aware of his own infinite value. It is not only Derek's ability to enjoy and absorb the youthful vibrancy of Rob and Skeeter, but also in his willingness to give of himself to their benefit that he has achieved what he wanted to find in Cancun.

The story also deals with the extreme hunger of loneliness and separation that exists in even the most golden of lives, and how what is the true perversion that comes from the combination of youth with adult is not the danger that an adult's sexual attraction could distort the psyche of the youth, but that the genuine love that youthful innocence craves is blocked by other adults who have already been distorted by their fears. This novel sets to right again the reaching and arcing path of love that links what otherwise would be separated by a turbulent and ferocious ocean.

I highly recommend this book to anyone with an open heart and I am eager to read it again so that once more I can fully experience the beauty, compassion, and great fun that was Cancun with Derek, Rob, and Skeeter.

An exploration of friendship.......2000-08-29

While on vacation in Cancun, Derek, a gay black man with HIV, befriends two teenaged straight white boys. The story centers on the building of the friendship between them, with Derek's coming out to them as gay and as HIV+ and with Derek's intense attraction to one of the two boys. Boyd eloquently portrays the struggles of Derek coming to terms with his unrequited desire for the oldest boy, and the sometimes wavering effects of time and distance on a friendship. He does succumb to gooey sentimentality towards the end, but it doesn't take away from the grace of the novel.

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The covered bridge book for everyone

Covered Bridges Across North America
Joseph Conwil
Manufacturer: MBI
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Architecture | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books

Historic Preservation | Architecture | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0760318220

Book Description

Joseph Conwil. This engaging historical chronology of covered bridges past and present and located across the United States celebrates a quickly vanishing touchstone of rural Americana.

Customer Reviews:

The covered bridge book for everyone.......2004-10-03

From a novice to a person loving covered bridges,this book has something for everyone. And the book is beautifully done in color. Quite a bargin for the price.

Average customer rating:

Rage Across the Amazon (Werewolf)
William Spencer-Hale
Manufacturer: White Wolf Pub
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Fantasy | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1565040619

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