Ford Reviews

Of all the stories my father read to me as a child, this was my favorite. Its endearing story of self-discovery is timeless, and not to mention quite humorous for a six year old boy. It reminds me of a time far less complicated and will thus always hold a special place of affection for me. This was the Catcher in the Rye of my Elementary years. I would highly recommend this to anyone with children looking for quite simply a flat out good story to read them that they will enjoy.

The Breman Town Musicians is a simple story that involves setting goals and team work. It has two things that children love, music and animals. What a combination!

As a 17 year childcare veteran, I highly recommmend this book. Kids today can use all the inspiration they can get. A great way to learn is to read. I read this book to my daughter when she was a child. Now I am getting a new copy for my grand daughter.

I would have started with the first of the series, but was unable to find it (since I was away from the Northwest at the time), so I settled with book three. This story is perfect - believable characters, interesting plotline, the best dialogue I think i've ever read - weaved flawlessly into one very funny book.

Best of all G. M. Ford knows his city well and taps into some of its eccentricities well, which is a special treat for Northwesterners. After reading "Skid Road" by Murray Morgen, I would say that Leo Waterman's father is based off of Vic Meyers, a historic Seattle politician whose real campaigns were outrageously funny in their own right, which is just one little tidbit that gives a sense of realism and authority to the surroundings.

If you haven't read the first two Leo Waterman mysteries, then you should. G.M. Ford has created a cast as confused and convoluted as his own name. He keeps you laughing without pushing it too far, creates great tension, and manages to get Leo through another crises once again (relatively) unscathed. Once you read this one, you'll want to go back and catch-up with the first two.

I found a Paperback copy of this book in a S/H bookshop. It was Published in 1958 and since then (judging by its condition ) it had never been read. It caught my eye due to my interest in Mountaineering I spent 10 years Climbing all over the world including a lot of time in Nepal)and the Tibet/Nepal part of the world. For any one who wants a birds eye view of the Modern history of Tibet and how it came to be as it is today the first half of this book is excellent. It is also very easy to read and follow. The second Half after Robert Ford was Captured by the Chinese is it seems to me a very Honest account of how he saw his own experiences. There is no Hype pomp or self agrandiosment. just the straight forward telling of a story which makes this book so much better than a memoires type of book.

A book that should be repinted and marketed.

this book was on my shelf for a few years until i went to see "seven years in tibet", the brad pitt movie based on heinrich harrar's book and experiences. ford and harrar were two of the maybe four westerners in tibet just prior to (and in ford's case during) the chinese takeover. ford's account of the months leading to the fall of tibet are fascinating, but even more gripping is the story that follows - he is imprisoned by the chinese and held for years, while the red army tried to get him to confess his crimes. after several years, when they felt his reeducation wasn't going quickly enough, they taught him chinese. it's an amazing tale by an amazing man. well worth it.

This book will allow you to take your mustang apart and put it back together. It's only limitations are: the electronics section should be more extensive, there should be part numbers with every item, factory paint colors, emissions could use some more detail, etc. But overall, this is a great book for the 1979-88 mustang, because we all spend at least a few hours a month doing maintenence to keep them from falling apart.

I found the answers to each and every problem. This is a very good manua

I fix my car often and have a few books about it, but none come close to the depth that Chiltons puts into their books. First I do have the Haynes repair guide, but it has very few pictures and does not explain in detail about how to remove some parts of your car. If you need to buy a repair manual for your car then buy Chiltons.

everyone should read this book, if you ever plan to do the work on your own car. so the car dealers won,t rip you off!!

Yes, the story is excellent, if I do so say myself, but I don't recommend that anyone buy the iUniverse / Author's Guild edition. The photos didn't hold up well in the reproduction, and instead of "bleeding" off the edge of the paper they're set with a one-inch margin, so what was a 7x10 inch book comes out to magazine size.

Far better to buy a second-hand copy of the New Hampshire Publishing hardcover or softcover editor.

-- Dan Ford

I own this book in hardcover and I think it is great that it is available again in paperback. The author hikes through the White Mountains of New Hampshire and across into Maine. But more than a journal of his mini-expedition this is a glancing history of the Whites. Excellent! But the politically correct should take heed because the year is 1975 and the author among other things is a (gasp!) cigarette smoker. Let's hope that he has since reformed!

Good photographs taken along the way. Highly recommended.

What an amazing woman! I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Jeanne Foster, and it brought back many memories of my early years in the "north country" before I retired and moved to Florida. The authors winter here in Venice, and they have given many interesting talks in the area about Foster and her famous friends, displaying diaries, actual letters to Foster from people like Ford Madox Ford and Ezra Pound, and drawings of her by William Butler Yeats's father. Recommended for lovers of biography and great stories.

This book is a great story of a truly "American" woman who was a friend to the world or at least to the world of artists,writers, and politicians. The biography has everything to keep a reader reading: beauty, poetry, intrigue, sex, passion mysticism, and sweetness. I wish I could have known this person called Jeanne Robert Foster.

Katie Ford's "Deposition" is a work of immediate beauty and pain that heralds an important new voice in poetry. In its exploration of faith and its absence, and of commitment and detachment, and of the ways by which the human body falls in and out of the numen's range, it establishes a model of question and response and punctuating silence that is as provocative as it is illuminating. These are wonderful poems. Rarely have I had so much occasion to look up from the page and see the world in sharper focus. Read this book and be unsettled and everything isn't going to be okay and this too is how to move forward.

Deposition is a collection of free-verse poetry by Katie Ford who in her potent and powerful verse expresses death, the human soul, and the inevitably difficulties of coping both with minute yet all-encompassing challenges. The brief, succinct, and evocative verse brings forward turbulent emotion in this exceptionally well-wrought and highly recommended collection. Last Breath With Belief In It: They blindfolded her put her in the closet for a month/they didn't want her dead grass pulled out they wanted her to believe//grass thickening a field once or twice dark month they had her/sit with them long wooden table why stray why desire and light came//through the torn robe over her eyes out of which birds were cut of which/hoods she listened into the night long into the closet she even thought blessing//even thought grace towards her she began to trust they had faith and truth/years pass ocean and winds and moons pass she is cold she pulls she opens//her closet any morning sees the dark corner she could crawl into its/over now but I beseech thee help her stop believing//help me sometimes I want back in.

I liked this book because it shows there are still some economists who can write clearly about issues in the real world without geting bogged down in jargon or hung up on abstract theories. This is not a casual read, but the analysis and writing are very clear and accessable to any intelligent person who might be interested in world hunger, food security or food trade issues. It was also nice to see a university press willing to include photos taken by Sebastiao Salgado, who I think is the world's gretest living photographer.

As a student of international health policy, I found this book contributed greatly to developing my own perspective on the plight of global hunger and the issues surrounding food security policy. It was an interesting read, easy to comprehend, and very well written. I recommend it not only to students, but anyone with a desire to become more aware of the important issues regarding the world's hunger. 5 stars!

"Listening," "Learning to See" and "Finding a Voice," Eudora Welty entitled the three chapters of her autobiography "One Writer's Beginnings," the concluding entry in this collection, one of the two Library of America compilations dedicated to her work. And while these may be steps that most writers will undergo at some point, Welty's compact autobiography is notable both because it allows a rare glimpse into the celebrated writer's otherwise fiercely protected private life and it illustrates the roots from which sprang such extraordinary protagonists as "The Ponder Heart"'s Edna Earle and Daniel Ponder, Miss Eckhart and the Morgana families in "The Golden Apples" and, of course, the anti-heroes of her Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Optimist's Daughter," Judge McKelva, his second wife Fay and (most importantly) his daughter Laurel.

A native and - with minimal exceptions - lifelong resident of Jackson, Mississippi, Welty received her first introduction to storytelling as a listener; and early on, learned to sharpen her ears not only to a story's contents but also to its narrator and its protagonists' individual nature: "[T]here [never was] a line read that I didn't hear," and "any room ... at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to," she notes in "One Writer's Beginnings," adding that the discovery that all those stories had been written by someone, not come into existence of their own, not only surprised but also severely disappointed her. Equally importantly, family visits to relatives brought out the born observer in her; each trip providing its own lessons and revelations, each a story onto itself - the seed from which later grew the literary creations collected in this compilation and its companion volume. At the same time, her father's interest in technology introduced her to photography as a means of capturing visual impressions, one moment at a time; and when traveling around Mississippi as an agent for a state agency (her first job) she learned to use that camera as "a hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know" and discovered that "to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was [then] the greatest need I had" ("One Writer's Beginnings:" Not surprisingly, her photography was published in several collections which have found much acclaim of their own.)

Thus, from early childhood on, Eudora Welty not only had a keen sense of the world around her but also, of words as such: of their existence as much as the interrelation between their sound, physical appearance and the things they stand for. Encouraged by her mother, a teacher, and over her father's worries (he considered fiction writing an occupation of dubitable financial promise and, worse, inferior to fact because it was "not true") Welty embarked on a writer's path which would lead her to award-winning heights and to a reputation as one of the South's finest writers, with as abounding as obvious comparisons to fellow Mississippian William Faulkner in particular; a literary debt she acknowledged when she wrote that "his work, though it can't increase in itself, increases us" and "[w]hat is written in the South from now on is going to be taken into account by Faulkner's work" ("Must the Novelist Crusade?", 1965). The Library of America dedicated two volumes to her work; one containing her novels, the other - this one - her short stories, essays (some, like her autobiography, based on a series of lectures) and her autobiography.

An approach that Welty developed early on was to consider the publication of her stories in periodicals merely a step towards each story's final shape, and she generally revised her stories before including them in collections. This compilation brings together all her short stories in the versions intended to be final by Welty herself: the 1941 edition of "A Curtain of Green and Other Stories" (her first short story collection), the 1943 edition of "The Wide Net and Other Stories" and the 1949 edition of "The Golden Apples" - each collection suffered substantial editorial revisions in subsequent publications. Included are also two stand-alone short stories ("Where is This Voice Coming From?" and "The Demonstrators"), the first one inspired by the 1963 murder of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers and revised by Welty over the telephone after having been accepted by "The New Yorker," to avoid a potentially prejudicial effect of its original ending on the then-impending trial.

A keen observer, Welty was also a writer endowed with a sharp sense of humor and satire, and with the gift to brilliantly use location, localisms, accents, patterns of speech and customs to make a point. Not a single word is wasted: "Marrying must have been some of his showing off - like man never married at all till *he* flung in," we're told about King MacLain in the opening story of "The Golden Apples," "Shower of Gold." And you don't have to learn anything more about the man, do you? Equally as instructive on Welty's writing are the eight essays included in this collection, all taken from the 1978 compilation "The Eye of the Story" and dealing with particular aspects of her own fiction as much as, more generally, with "Place in Fiction" (1954) and the fiction writer's role ("Writing and Analyzing a Story," originally published in 1955 under the title "How I Write" and substantially revised for its inclusion in "The Eye of the Story" and "Must the Novelist Crusade?").

"There is no explanation outside fiction for what its writer is learning to do," Eudora Welty maintained in "Writing and Analyzing a Story;" explaining that each story references only the writer's vision at the moment of the creation of that story, and the creative process itself: nothing that can be "mapped and plotted" but a product taking shape in the process of creation itself, giving each story a unique identity of its own. And while her fiction, alas, can no longer grow any more than Faulkner's, she has left us enough of those unique creations to cherish for a long time to come.

At the time of her death, Eudora Welty was widely regarded as America's single greatest living author. Although she produced several critically acclaimed novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER, Welty achieved her greatest fame through mastery of that most difficult of all literary forms, the short story.

Welty's skill with short stories is amazing, for she possessed a talent that combined a remarkable ear for the spoken word, meticulous observation of physical world, and the truly mysterious ability to slip almost effortlessly into the very marrow of the characters she depicts. Her comic stories are perhaps best known to the public in general, but she is equally at home with provocative and unsettling material, and although her tales are most often firmly rooted in America's deep south they have a sense of humanity that transcends the limitations of purely regional literature.

In addition to stories previously collected under the titles A CURTAIN OF GREEN, THE WIDE NET, THE GOLDEN APPLES, and THE BRIDE OF THE INNISFALLEN, this Library of America publication also includes the independently published stories "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" and "The Demonstrators," nine selected essays, and Welty's memoir ONE WRITER'S BEGINNINGS. A chronology of Welty's life up to 1996, textual notes, and general notes (including Katherine Anne Porter's introduction for A CURTAIN OF GREEN) are also included. This book (and its Library of America) companion, EUDORA WELTY: COMPLETE NOVELS) are essentials for any one who admires Welty's work and wishes to possess it in handy, collected form; those who have had limited exposure to Welty's work, however, might be better served by smaller collections.