Susanne Jerome

A personal account, told with feeling and verve, of the details of the fall of France, the Battle of Britan and the Battle of the Atlantic. The devil is in the details as is the delight when you read Churchill. As good as 1776.

You are there with Churchill as he asks the French generals in his poor French, "Where is your strategic reserve?", which the French might have used to counter the initial German end run around the Maginot Line. Duh, they had none(!)

you are by his side as he and his war cabinet plans to repel the invasion, which he increasingly feels will never take place. You are there as he and his cabinet make decisions about Greece, North Africa, and the French Navy, and deal with the various outcomes of those decisions.

A tour de force from an author who still deserves to be best selling. The spirit of the man comes through, which along with the spirit of Great Britain and America, will, one hopes, never die. Uh, a good read.

Makes a really good case for exercise for what ails you, with lots of up to date information. Fun listening worth the time. Is accessible without being condescending. worth listening and keeping

I credit Pimsleur for being able to test out of a Spanish class even though I had not worked with Pimsleur.for years. they introduce present, past, and perfect tenses by using model words in conversation. You are tested continually but so that you are very often right .. positive reinforcement very positive very nice. Every day I take my mp3 player for a walk.

An interesting version of the round up article. Lots of good information ... probably lots of questionable information. Interesting to listen to. It is a compendium of what scientists think right now about what one could do to sort of bail the brain out by making new brain cells faster than it can leak and sink.

the author repeats herself, and it is not clear from much of her evidence, that it is evidence for anything more than association. An increase in the chance of getting Alzheimer's is associated with eating more red meat. ... but is it a causal association, or do meat eaters also engage in other behaviors and dietary habits that increase the chance of Alzheimer's. If the association is not one of cause and effect then say eating less meat will not affect one's chances of getting the disease.

My favorite was the fact that problems with balance predate Alzheimer's by some years. But does it follow that practicing standing on one foot will heal your brain? Both the dementia and the bad balance may have the same cause.

When listening to this book, one should look for more than something like: "5000 women smoked more and remembered less." Often there is more .. animal experiments and direct observations of human brains before and after the beneficial or detrimental diet or behavior. One should look for these in addition to the association of a substance or behavior with the disease

One should google her references and even look at the clinical studies themselves if possible (They are usually way technical and choked with arcane acronyms... but worth the effort to see what the experimenters were really measuring and how..

I rarely buy any other fiction, and so was blessed to read this. Genre books often express the worst of contemporary vulgar in the sense of popular outlooks. They reflect their time the way 1930's fashons reflect their time. You put up with the banal parts for what's good about the story ... as you do with run of the mill TV.

This book is literature ... readable all night, non-putdownable, even rereadable. I leave the plot to the other reviewers. Her books are worthwhile in almost all ways, but are not easy on their heroes and heroines. Oh well, in the end life isn't. But fiction like this can be very easy on the reader who savors character and atmosphere all tied up in a compelling story.

Burke is a bit like Gabaldon. He is able to get away with murder figuratively and in his plots actually, and in octuplicate ( or more ). His prose is poetic and passionate. His plots and his characters are getting predictable,and he indulges in a bit in the pornography of violence. (Actually, a lot. But he gets away with it, as do his cops till it strains credulity.

His villains are all the rich or the poor who are uncannily (wicked) and ugly. They are his dark and stormy night. They look like monsters. In this book he throws the reader several curve balls though. Are the uglies as evil as they seem? Are the beautiful people beautiful indeed? Will Dave and his Womenfolk survive? Don't bet on it. This may be Burke's last Robicheaux book. Maybe it should be. Still his characters are originals, and his prose is fine to hear.

Dave is investigating the murders of several young women, very young women whom no one seems to care about since they were homeless, and/or black. Bad, powerful rich guys (any other kind in Burke's universe?) are behind it. Dave and his sidekick, are out to get them. If your really like Robicheaux you will hear this out to the end. If you are new to him, earlier Dave Robicheaux books might be better.

You ping and pong between the reporter and his FBI girl friend, at one end, and the scare crow, a particularly nasty serial killer. The killer is a computer wizard who can snoop on and reach out to hurt people using the internet in a rather disturbingly realistic way.

It is typical Connelly, and if you like Connelly, you will like this one.

You care about the characters in this story of a man caught in a web of other people's intrigues, and forced to act in the interest of a very nasty pair. the good guys are good folks. That's why you care. You care about the mystery. Nicely historical, the sights, sounds, smells, and almost the taste of the time and place.

I manufactured instances to listen

Want to learn Spanish? Use these tapes .. and a written grammer book. These engage you. You have to respond in Spanish; you get immediate feedback that stuffs your long term memory with words and phrases. I tested out of an intermediate Spanish class five years after listening to the Tapes. A great fluency builder. I am going through the advanced ones again and am surprised at how much I remember.

the author unifies his treatment of happiness, with some rather happy metaphors, viewing new psychological research in the perspective of ancient wisdom.

But in his treatment of hypocracy, he sounds rather silly, because he seems to deny the existance of good and evil. And almost in the next breath, he seems to say that judgementalism is , uh, dare we say "evil"?

None the less, it is an excellent book on how to be happy -- not going Buddist, and disengaging from the joys of life to avoid the sorrows, but rather choosing the right sorts of pleasures, the ones that one can look back on and feel good about.

The story is woven on the framework of the real story of a real woman, who was killed in washington d.C. during an affair with a congressman. It's a good read with some draw backs from this old Oregonian's point of view.

For one thing it is set in Portland OR, whose river, the Willamette the narrator pronounces not "wil LAM it" which is correct, but "william ETE".

Equally irritating is the fact that the protagonist does not even consider carrying a gun even though Oregon is a free state, allowing concealed carry.

Maybe it would take too long to get a permit ... something.

Although she worked in a building that had metal detectors, she could probably have parked her pistol with security, or left it locked in her car. Then she could have called for an escort to get herself to and from the building.

Well, if Hamlet had been able to make a decision, there would have been no play.

Still it is hard to identify with a character who is too silly, or too cowardly to arm herself, when being stalked.

The ladies do stand up against evil rather sanquinarily in the end as per formula. Well good for them and good for the book.