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Customer Reviews (2)

Coffee with Isaac Newton
This book is written by a well-known science communicator. The book has 140 small pages plus an index, with reasonable size print. It is thus not a detailed scientific biography, but in my view Coffee with Isaac Newton does convey the essential features of Newton's character extremely well. There are some useful insights in Newton's quarrels with other scientists and his religious views, with an amusing little twist on the final page. Altogether a good quick read!
W. P. PALMER

Coffee with Isaqc Newton
An interesting pretend interview with this late genius.He was probably more frank and cordial than the real Isaac Newton. ... Read more

Product Description
From one of the most beloved and bestselling authors in the English language, a vivid, nostalgic and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the middle of the United States in the middle of the last century. A book that delivers on the promise that it is “laugh-out-loud funny.”

Some say that the first hints that Bill Bryson was not of Planet Earth came from his discovery, at the age of six, of a woollen jersey of rare fineness. Across the moth-holed chest was a golden thunderbolt. It may have looked like an old college football sweater, but young Bryson knew better. It was obviously the Sacred Jersey of Zap, and proved that he had been placed with this innocuous family in the middle of America to fly, become invisible, shoot guns out of people’s hands from a distance, and wear his underpants over his jeans in the manner of Superman.

Bill Bryson’s first travel book opened with the immortal line, “I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.” In this hilarious new memoir, he travels back to explore the kid he once was and the weird and wonderful world of 1950s America. He modestly claims that this is a book about not very much: about being small and getting much larger slowly. But for the rest of us, it is a laugh-out-loud book that will speak volumes – especially to anyone who has ever been young.


From the Hardcover edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A great read!
This is a great read for anyone born in the 50's or a bit earlier. Nails it on the head! ... Read more

Product Description
In April, when blackthorn blossom clothes the hedgerows like a wedding veil, there sometimes comes a frost so severe that it seems as if the summer will never come. Country people call this a blackthorn winter. For Claudia Barron, arriving in the Dorset village of Court Barton that April, blackthorn winter seems like a metaphor for everything that has happened to her. Hiding from her previous life, she adopts an assumed name and applies for a job in the local school. But villages don't much like mysteries and secrets... ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

A better-than-usual English village story with likable characters
When my 21st century American life stresses me out, I turn to stories that take place in rural France, England or Ireland: Joanna Trollope, Rosamunde Pilcher, Jean Stubbs, Maeve Binchy - you get the idea. "Blackthorn Winter" sounded like just the ticket, and I was not disappointed. The background was a contemporary English village - something like the local in Trollope's "A Village Affair." Or, perhaps more accurately, it was an English village adjusting to change, mostly social. That always makes for some interesting dynamics. I liked the characters, and they were multi-dimensional. That matters to me. The plot was believable, and the writing was good. I couldn't wait to come home after work and delve back into it. That's the mark of a good book to me.

Deeply satisfying read!
Great human elements. Wish my small town could adapt some of Ms. Challis' well-developed empathy. Vivid, multigenerational characters are portrayed realistically. Her descriptions of local flora and fauna provide visions of thick hedges, stone walls, thickly-wooled sheep. Finished with a big smile and a cup of hot tea with milk - not a bad commendation for a summer-read in Georgia!

Great characters
I've run out of Maeve Binchy books and this was a great substitute!I love getting to know the characters in the little towns and this book entertains with just that.I am going to be buying more of Sarah Challis's books.

Blackthorn Winter
Enjoyed very much. Readers who are Rosemund Pilcher amd Marsha Willet fans will also like Sarah Challis'works.

Sarah Challis Weaves Endearing Characters Into Charming Village Tale
This was my first Sarah Challis novel and I found her delightful characters living in a charming English village completely captivating.Readers who are enchanted by Rosamunde Pilcher and Marcia Willett will find Challis to be an equally enjoyable writer to spend time with.

Claudia Barron has led a glitzy and glamorous life in London.Alas, her well-known husband has recently been splattered across the tabloids, convicted of fraud, and exposed as an adulterer.Humiliated, Claudia flees to an inconspicuous village and hopes to live anonymously and detached from fair-weather friends.Even though she changes her name, her reclusive behavior causes mumblings in the village and before she can say "no comment" she has been thrust into a cast of characters as endearing as any you would want to meet:Julia Durnford, her nosey parker neighbor who manages every detail of the village; Peter, Julia's milquetoast husband; their daughter Victoria who is feeling the pangs of being the left-out and lonely teenager at boarding school; Jena, the ten-year old gypsy who runs free; and Valerie, the semi-alcoholic neighbor to whom Claudia can reveal her secrets.Add to this mix, Claudia's visiting adult children:the lively Lila who flies in from New York and Jerome, the brooding son who returns from India with a secret too devastating to share.And finally, there are the two available men who catch Claudia's eye---will she succumb to the sexy and suave Anthony Brewer or be stabilized by Chris, the straightforward widower with four daughters?

Cozy and comforting, this is a most appealing novel I was sad to see end.
... Read more

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9 CDs read by Rob McQuay Collector's Edition in clamshell case. ... Read more

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One of the world’s most beloved and bestselling writers takes his ultimate journey -- into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer.

In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail -- well, most of it. In In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand -- and, if possible, answer -- the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.


From the Hardcover edition. ... Read more

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In this arresting first novel, Hallie Greaves comes home to Ohio one hot week in July. She hopes to help her mother who confines her life wholly to her bedroom. To enter her mother’s room, however, is to face her own disappointments and yearnings. At an impasse in her painting and her marriage, Hallie confronts questions of love, memory, and sorrow. Harriet Scott Chessman creates a luminous and sometimes disturbing world out of this Ohio landscape of mulberry trees and mowed lawns. The result is a moving portrait of the intricacies of marriage and friendship, and of the surprising possibilities for compassion and renewal. "Chessman’s language flows like a summer river ... a poetic and moving first novel." — Booklist ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Ohio Angels a superb debut
This is the beautiful FIRST novel (not second!) by the acclaimed author of Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper.Both Ohio Angels and Lydia Cassatt . . . center around questions of an artist's effort to understand and represent someone much loved.And in both, Chessman imagines what it's like to be on the other side of the canvas.I found this earlier story as intimate and moving as the second, and interesting in its use of fragments, each offering a different character's point of view.I recommend it to anyone who cherishes writing that lingers with you long after you come to the last word.

Expected better
This doesn't come up to the quality of Chessman's Lydia Cassatt Reads the Morning Paper.Although the story itself is interesting, there is too much jumping from one point of view to another to allow much development of any one character in such a short novel, and it felt fragmented to me, with an artificial ending.

About the emotional conflicts of two female friends
Ohio Angels is Harriet Scott Chessman's debut novel about the emotional conflicts of two female friends who have to balance their own talents and needs with the demands of family - whether caring for an aging, demanding mother or supporting a husband's career or abandoning one's own talents to look after children. Very strongly recommended for its thoughtful examination of conflicting pulls upon woman's life, Ohio Angels very clearly documents Chessman as an accomplished novelist with a particular gift for writing literate prose with a pronounced lyrical flair.

a pleasure to read; lyrical and smooth
I was lucky enough to be handed this book before a long train ride after a tiring day. I don't know why PW calls it "glum": yes, bad things happen to people. This book is about HOPE and REDEMPTION and second chances for wounded people.I don't want to give away the plot, but anyone who likes a great story told in moving language will enjoy this book. Not unlike the touching work of Kay Gibbons.Share it with a friend!

Lyrical novel explores mothering, love, and friendship.
In this fine first novel, Harriet Scott Chessman introduces the reader to two wonderful characters, Rose, mother of two, pregnant with a third child, and Hallie, thirty-seven, wanting a child. Rose lives in a small Ohio town,and has given up an academic career. She dreams of writing children'sbooks, while surrounded by the happy details of daily life with herdaughters.

Hallie, a painter, lives in New York, but engages again withher close friend when she returns to visit her parents in the Ohio townwhere she and Rose grew up. Across the small town lawns, porches, andsidewalks, fragrant with bloom and humid in the summer heat, Chessmanbuilds a delicate story.

In luminous prose, Chessman reveals the entwinedchildhoods and emotional preoccupations of these close friends. Thedescriptions of motherhood, birth, parenting, and loss are exquisite.

This short novel is wonderful summer reading,highly recommended forindividual readers and for book groups. ... Read more