No comments about Grandma Ann.

3 comments about Spatzies and Brass BBs.

1. The author captures a sense of nostalgia that our country needs right now. In this day of immediate gratification, x-boxes, playstations, bazillion gigaherze whatevers, it is nice to be reminded that things were not always so fast and furious. The feeling of being close to the land and to your family and community is a welcome change from our daily grind. I would recommend this book to everyone. The author has a real talent for taking the reader back to a time when things were more simple and quiet. I can almost taste the hot chocolate... read the book to find out how it tastes.



2. Although, I grew up in South Dakota, I visited my grandparents in Kansas many summers and holidays. I have many memories of warm summer nights catching lightning bugs and just relaxing on the porch swing. This is an enjoyable story and I highly recommend it.



3. I had the pleasure of having Dr. Ohm as an instructor while attending Washburn University in Topeka. It wasn't until several years after I graduated that I ran into Dr. Ohm at a book signing. As the one reviewer stated - this is the type of book that people should read. It will slow you down (in a good way) - and let you smell the roses (as it were).
   
   The reader is transported back to a simpler time - before all the electronic gizmos that now seem to demand our time. The people are real. The places are real. And they are brought to us by a writer who lived it. I just can't get my head around the fact that Dr. Ohm was a kid at one time! Just as my kids cannot grasp that concept either.
   
   I do hope that he writes another book where the last one stopped. In these days, we could use it.

No comments about Gyuszika: Promises Kept: A Story of Survival Set in War-Torn Hungary.

1 comments about Faces of Faith: Reflections in a Rearview Mirror (Journeybook) (Journeybook).

1. David Fly is one of the great storytellers in this country -- and especially good in that the stories he tells are from his own life. In this book Fly tells the stories of his childhood in a way that connects with our own stories -- and helps his readers make the kinds of connections which matter.
   
   This is a wonderful book for private reading as well as for reading groups.

No comments about Run to the Rabbit Hutch.

1 comments about Pictures of Home: A Memoir of Family and City.

1. This is a tender narrative that provides uncommon insight into family life on Chicago's South Side during the second half of the twentieth century.
   
   The author uses a multi-generational trove of his family's photographs--pre-digital age and not all that well reproduced for publication--to kindle his memory. (As the book enters the home stretch, I thought Mr. Bukowski was losing sight of the photographs, to my disappointment).
   
   The author, to his credit, also has done some basic research, primarily in documents such as property deeds and death certificates. In doing so he illuminates forgotten details of his family's history.
   
   This is a book, on one level, about the dynamics and intricacies of family life from the author's birth to his father's death in 2000. The most powerful chapter is entitled "Dying." It should be read by every son and daughter who has lived through the inescapable process of a parent's final illness. Mr. Bukowski composes a narrative that is tender yet unvarnished (including intimate details that reveal his own humanity).
   
   On another level this is a rare book, in the first person, about the day-to-day meaning of homelife. It is about landscapes, the built environment, urbanism, and neighborhoods. Readers attain unaccustomed insight into life within the Bukowski family, both in its joys and its sorrows.
   
   "Pictures of Home" reminds me very much of "Colored People" by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in the plumbing of detailed autobiographical recollections achieved by the author as he narrated his own story.
   
   This is more than another Chicago book. "Pictures of Home" is a narrative about humanity through the prism of the Bukowski family.

No comments about Buddy the Rose.

1 comments about Dear Alfie.

1. This book was funny, sad and over all very enjoyable about about growing up in a great town when young boys were allowed to be young boys. The setting was Kenosha, Wisconsin and the time was the late 40's and early 1950's. The stories were great. I enjoyed the book and wish more people would understand the difference of growing up in 1940's and today. Dennis C. Jantzen

No comments about Drifting with the River Gods.

1 comments about Speaking Volumes: A Dublin Childhood.

1. "In this highly original genre-defying book, the author remember her childhood in Dublin in the 1930s and 1940s as a poor Protestant living among even poorer Catholics. She tells of her strange home in the gate lodge of Jonathan Swift's hospital for the insane, and of her increasingly strained relationship with her devoted but undemonstrative father. Reading was her salvation, and in novels like Jane Eyre, Hard Times and Anna Karenina she found her own inarticulate experience better understood and better expressed. Pithy, illuminating commentaries on the emotional truth of great literature alternate with chapters of strong personal memoir to make this unique book as universal in its reach as it is individual in its telling." (reviewed by Read Ireland Book Review
   Issue 119)