"Predictable" might be a good word to summarize this book. "Repetitious" would be another. I thought, if Miss Abby tells one more person how much she wants to talk to somebody, I'll put the book down. Instead I found myself highlighting the instances, at least for a little while. There were many.

In related news, we learn (for the 50th time) that Eli doesn't talk at all, Obediah talks a lot, Laura Mabrey is helpful AND talkative, and Rosa Moon didn't talk before they hugged and became friends, but now she does. Thaddeus offers, within 3 sentences of their introduction, to talk to dear Miss Abby. Hooray!

Characterization is shallow. Plot - well, will she or won't she be able to talk to dear dependable Thad and find happiness? Let's guess.

It's grammatical, but beyond that hard to enjoy.

As an avid reader of Eugenia Price novels, I was very excited to read this novel. Unfortunately, I did not think that the Waiting Time held a candle to Price's previous works. I did not feel the strong connection to the characters in this book as I did with the characters in the St. Augustine trilogy or the Savannah quartet. Even at the end of the novel I did not feel that I truly knew the main character, Abby Banes. The story also did not flow as did Price's previous stories. It took too long for problems to be resolved and the love interest for Abby did not capture my heart as did Mark Browning in Savannah or David Fenwick in Maria. One can tell that this book was in fact the last effort of Ms. Price before she passed away in 1996. I will always read anything and eveything written by this brilliant woman, but if I were not such a big fan I would have been even more dissapopinted.

i have read almost everything she has written and each book has touch my heart. because of ms price i also have fallen love with her island an the people who lived there. this book like all the others is great. i visted the island in sept. its as peaceful as she said.

I'm a realist when it comes to human beings, holding no illusions about how cruel we can be. But after reading this book I wish I had not read it. Either I buy into Eisler's portrait of O'Keefe and Stieglitz -- which consistently paints them as self-centered persons who nearly qualify as anti-social personalities -- or I assume that Eisler's presentation borders on slander. Most of the content of the book appears to be there to justify the author's "psychological" conclusions about their personalities. This leads me to question what is actually driving the presentation -- the sources or Eisler's harsh theory about their personalities. There were so few instances where you would find an instance where they were presented in a favorable light that it leaves me wondering, "Were they this unredeemable, or is this a simplistic reduction that has not sufficiently presented the complex nature of their personalities?" Since this is the only book I've read about them, I have nothing to compare it to. Eisler could be dead on and fair. Frankly, I hope not.

An amazing insight into the lives of two of America's great artists of this century. Thanks to the fine research of the author and the fact that so many important people in the lives of O'Keeffe and Stieglitz corresponded by letter and, more importantly, saved the letters, we are able to share many moments in their personal and professional lives in NYC, at Lake George and in New Mexico. Their psychological development over time and the effect of that on their work and their relationship is fairly mind boggling. One problem, the author never really explains what it is about Stieglitz that makes O'Keeffe love him and keeps her tied to him.

I got this book as a gift. It is a little intimidating in size but is a fascinating look at the extraordinary flawed lives of these two individuals. It sounds cliche but it is very hard to put down. In part I think it has such an "inside" nature to it due to the prolific letter writers involved. Everyone wrote, and luckily seemed to save all their correspondence. The look at the New York Art world in the 1920's is such a bonus.

A great book!

I am an unabashed afficionado of barbecue, and in Georgia, barbecue is chopped pork, sliced pork, pulled pork and pork ribs; all cooked over hardwood coals. Cooking this way takes time and extra effort (low and slow), but by-golly, by the time the meat is done you have real barbecue, not some chain food restaurant that has a slick menu misnaming what they serve as barbecue.

"Genuine" barbecue "places" are unique in that they are often found in shacks, holes in the wall, road stands or occasionally big money restaurant buildings. But be suspicious of the big fancy restaurant looking places; chances are the old barbecue master probably died years ago and some 'entrepre-manure' grabbed the first person who came in and said "I know how to cook barbecue, you parboil it and smother it with bottled sauce." "You're hired." Lord have mercy . . .

Steve Storey, in the introduction, calls this book a directory, not a guide as the title states. It is a directory, kinda like the Yellow Pages is a directory. In this directory Steve Storey makes NO qualitative judgement on any of the barbecue served. At least he tells you that in the introduction. He states, "we decided to keep our opinions to ourselves and let you be the judge.". What this means is that out of hundreds of listings you are left on your own to select a place to visit, and hope you get lucky and pick a good one. So far I have found one true barbecue place (The Pig, Waycross, GA) and I have visited, and thus eaten, a lot of mediocre to fair barbecue. One place I visited in Dillard, Georgia had been sold and was being run by a Greek. Well, at least the salads were good.

Oh, yes I must not forget to tell you that finding the places listed in this "directory" can be down right challenging. Let me explain, first you pick a county, then you find the county on the master map, your county will have a region number, whereby you go to the region map and find the county's name, whereby you will find a group of numbers representing barbecue places (Atlanta/Fulton County has about 50 numbers). Finally you randomly pick a number from the county's list and go find that listing somewhere in the book (not by page). When you get there you will get rough directions on how to find the place. Good Luck. Make sure you call before you go. Three out of the five numbers in Atlanta that I called were out of business.

IF you want a true "guide" on barbecue in Georgia get "Barbecue on My Mind" by Trey Pope (see my review). Though it is dated (1991) it does list the 30 best places for barbecue in Georgia. What this book offers is a collection of addresses and brief descriptions of places that may, or may not, serve "genuine" barbecue. Conditionally Recommended, for those that want a directory.

Having visited several of the places mentioned in the guide, I find it to be VERY accurate and complete.

I chatted with some Georgia friends who have also visited personally several other spots and we all agree..If you want the full Tour Guide to the Georgia BBQ experience..THIS IS IT!!!

Being new to Georgia, and needing to fulfill my craving for the best BBQ in the land (sorry Alabama and Carolinas), I needed to find out where to go to get the best. This guide is what every Georgia BBQ novice needs.

Ok, so some other reviewers are complaining about the map. Big deal. While you're at it, order a road atlas too. Might come in handy for those days you are actually going someplace you don't know. I found it sort of interesting to learn Georgia geography with the map and restaurant listings in this book.

Maybe the book doesn't tell you about the quality of the BBQ, but reviews are so subjective anyhow. Make your own call after you visit and eat. Worked for me. What the book will give you is a list of what is available: pork, chicken, beef BBQ; Brunswick stew (a Georgia MUST!), and other sides. So at least before you go, you get the sense that you will be eating a full meal with all sorts of goodies, or just a BBQ sandwich.

I highly recommend the book for those who like a sense of adventure. Just pick a restaurant or two, and get in the car and go. Only you can decide which places deserve a repeat visit, but this BBQ guide will help. And on that note, you can't go wrong with Colonel Poole's in East Ellijay or Pappy Red's in Alpharetta.

I did not find this book any more helpful than the Charleston Area 2003 Official Visitors Guide that I ordered for free on the internet (I'd give you the url, but it's not allowed, so do a search). It did offer information on hotels, which the free guide did not. However, the free book gave more information on local events, tours, and sightseeing. This book is not worth the money, get the free one!

This little guide was very helpful in planing my trip to Savannah, Ga and Charleston, SC. Great companion to "The Best Little Map of Savannah, GA" and The Best Little Map of Charleston, SC", also, must haves for vactioning in these two cities.

This was a great portable guide for Savannah. We were only there for 3 days and we went to a number of the restaurants and sites listed. I had also bought Moon Guides' Savannah and Charleston book and it was not as well organized as this guide was. It fit perfect into my little bag also.

This book is the sequel to "Bright Captivity", which began the saga of Anne Couper Fraser, her marriage to John Fraser of England, and her years spent in London. This books opens with the return of the Frasers to St. Simons Island. If you are have read other Eugenia Price books, you will be re-acquainted with the McKays of Savannah, the Goulds of St. Simons and others. The Coupers were one of the noble families of the Georgia Coast in the mid-1800's. Anne's life is one of great love and great sorrow. I came to love her as a sister throughout the trilogy. Sometimes I wanted to shake her -- mostly I wanted to sit and have a long talk. You will also enjoy her relationship with her "Eve", whose devotion to Anne is complete. I highly recommend this book, and the entire Georgia Trilogy, to fans of Eugenia Price and anyone else who enjoys fiction based on real-life people from our past. I hated for the third book to end.

Without realizing the focus of the book, I found the beginning a bit depressing. Eugenia Price, though, showed the mercy of God toward those who mourn. Anne Couper Fraser is prepared through the grief of others to face her own personal tragedy. She grows in selflessness as the book progresses, gaining strength from God and learning to comfort others. Excellant read on the whole with information divulged through dialog, not lengthy thought sessions.

I found the love between Anne and John to be a thing of beauty and maybe something we don't know much about now-a-days. Devoted love that puts the other person first is not emphasized much in our new modern age! I would like to have seen John's struggle with slavery and/or the military come to some resolution but the scene of his death left me in tears. It reminded me to appreciate my own family members while they are here. I would have no problem at all recommending this book to anyone looking for a nice long novel to cuddle into a comfy chair with. Thanks Eugenia Price!

Repressed and bewildered parents, intemperate and rebellious children, exaggerated and hypocritical religiosity would seem to be fertile grounds for a satiric novel. "The School of Beauty and Charm" attempts to lampoon Southern middle-class lifestyle while investing its protagonist with an edgy restlessness. Sadly, Melanie Smith's debut novel has all the flavor of recycled cardboard and the creative crackle of soggy cereal. Cursed with a predictable plot, caricatured characters and cliched conflicts, "The School" limps along, begging readers to either put the novel, or themselves, out of misery.

Sumner presumably has much to criticize about the inch-deep devotion of Southern Baptists. Their hypocrisy, obsession with surface adherence to religious dogma and patent stupidity all receive ham-handed treatment through the character of Florida Peppers, the wife of the dreadfully dull middle-manager Henry and self-pitying mother of asthmatic Roderick and discontented Louise. In choppily sequential chapters, Florida struggles to give coherence to a family whose centrifugal forces far overwhelm her frustrated attempts to slather a Christian glue on her charges. She fails, of course, but her attempts, rather than appearing comically doomed, demonstrate the author's unwillingness to provide anything else than slapstick. There simply is not one instance where Florida appears human, merely confused and confounded by a world outstripping and overwhelming her Baptist unbringing and her devotion to the words of Jesus Christ.

Even more dreary is Sumner's depiction of the two men in the Peppers family. Henry is deferential and silent at home, hidden behind the pages of his Wall Street Journal in the morning and content with his nearly pathological adherence to routine. Roderick, sickly, insightful and withdrawn, never becomes anything other than a negative image from which his sister, Louise, develops.

In turn, Louise is unequivocally unbelievable. On one hand, she is fat, and in desperation, her mother sends her to a Jewish psychologist who embodies every pernicious stereotype either a mental health worker or Jew could embody. It comes as just a bit less than a surprise to discover that in the subsequent chapter Louise is a svelte sex kitten, just awaiting her immersion into the wonderful world of sex, which, of course, will happen after she bolts a charm-school girls' college for a flea-bag travelling circus. By this time, only the most devoted reader will have any concern at all as to what will happen to the eternally sour Louise.

Preposterous, unbelievable and unimaginative, "The School of Beauty and Charm" may sell itself as a spritely addition to a growing body of literature by Southern women writers who satirically analzye their region. Don't be deceived by the spin; this novel has all the beauty of pancake make-up and the charm of snakeoil salesmen.

Initially, I found this book quite charming indeed. The tale of the Peppers family was quirky (but realistic) and amusing. Once the book starts zeroing in on Louise and her downward spiral of self-destruction, it gets a little boring--another adolescent angst novel involving substance abuse. The thing is, it's never clear WHY Louise should have so much self-loathing. She comes from a loving family (with a neurotic mother, but who doesn't have one of those?) When her brother dies, her emotional problems increase, but there's not enought to convince me that she should remain so distraught for the rest of the story.

This book really jumps around, too, so there isn't a lot of character building. Louise's family is portrayed on a pretty superficial level--I guess they're all supposed to look ridiculous to make us better understand why Louise runs from them. Anway, I did truly enjoy about the first half; the second half loses momentum and the part where Louise wants to be a clown and runs off to join the circus is completely outlandish. But overall, I think it's worth sticking with this book because its good moments are certainly worthwhile.

Based on an interview I heard with the author on NPR, I expected the book to be a quirky comic romp about a Southern family. While the book seems to start out that way, it completely turns on you and becomes much more. More than any other author I've read recently, Melanie Sumner completely understands the mother-child relationship in America. In the relationship between Louise and her mother, I see almost every mother I have ever met. The extremeness of Louise Peppers' rebellion may seem like it comes out of left field as one reviewer noted. On closer inspection, however, it's a rebellion like many teenagers have experienced. Louise doesn't know why she does what she does - she just does it because she's a teenager and hasn't figured anything out yet. I would recommend this to any parent having a hard time coping with an unruly teenager and any teenager who feels chafed by their parents but doesn't quite know why.

As both an avid gardener and collector of gardening books, I bought this volume the moment I saw it listed. It is co-authored by Tom MacCubbin, the respected Orange County Urban Horticulturalist (where I live), and prolific author of horticultural information in Central Florida. The book attempts to cover the breadth of Florida landscape material in a little over 400 pages; with each plant given two pages, a lot of common plants are not even included. Queen Palm (Syagrus romanzoffianum), perhaps the second most used, widely adapted palm in our state is not even mentioned! In addition, color photos, though of exceptional quality, are small and clustered on a few pages in the center of the book. As even line drawings do not accompany the individual plant descriptions, this is a less-than-ideal arrangement. Also, although plants are divided into chapters based on their landscape usage, the plants themselves are presented alphabetically by their common names. I suppose this is useful for many, if not most, people, but it seems odd in a book of this type.

I found this book to be helpful in presenting a large overview of what will grow in my state - often a tricky place for transplanted gardeners! I'm no professional, but I am trying to find plants that are supposed to do well in my area instead of using plants with which I might be more familiar. I turned to the MacCubbin/Tasker book because it offered suggestions for all the "micro-climates" in my yard in addition to telling me whether or not something was better suited to areas more to my north or south. I have been able to use this book to plan my landscape using plants I never might have considered and I know they will thrive without extra fuss.

This is absolutely the best book ever for getting plant identifications. If you garden in Florida, this is a 'must have' book for reference.

Poor, good and brave General Francis Marion. A true american hero. What a hack job this book is. This book is actually about General Peter Horry, who served with Marion during our American Revolution and uses poor Marion as a backdrop to blow his (Horry's) egotistic horn. Some may accept the author Weems, use of flowery language as "the style of the times," but it is no more than silly platitudes towards Marion, that quickly become offensive as one realizes the real purpose was/is to build up Horry through association with the great Marion. Horry just isn't up to the compairson. This is not a book worthy of it's proported subject.

THIS BOOK IS ONE ONE THAT MAKES THE SWAMP FOX GLOW. ITS PREFACE ALLOWS THE READER TO SEE THAT IT WAS WRITTEN BY REV. WEEMS WHO HAS A VERY ROMANTIC VIEW OF THIS FINE REVOLUTIONARY OFFICER. IN THIS BOOK THE GENERAL CAN DO NO WRONG AND IS BASICALLY FLAWLESS. PLEASE NOTE THAT THE AUTHOR STARTED THE MYTHS ABOUT WASHINGTON NEVER BEING ABLE TO TELL A LIE AND CHOPPING DOWN THE CHERRY TREE. OVERALL, IT IS A FEEL GOOD BOOK THAT MAKES ONE ROOT FOR THE CONTINENTALS. THE ONLY NEGATIVE IS THAT THE BOOKS SCOPE IS TOO BROAD, AND DRIFTS FROM THE SWAMP FOX TO OTHER PLAYERS IN THE WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE

Written in 1824, the poetic descriptions are seldom found in todays authors. Captures the spirit of the times and causes one to cheer the heroics of the brave American soldiers. The citizens of the USA today owe such a debt to those who fought for our freedom, yet, we hardly hear a word about these times. Should be required reading in schools and universities.

I haven't read this book, but there was an excerpt alluding to this novel in Ann Rules true crime book Bitter Harvest. Apparently, this book inspired Deborah Green to murder her own children. Kind of gives you a pause, to wonder about what kind of material in this book could provoke a woman to murder?

To say this book inspired a murder is stretching reason and fact. In Daugherty's novel the so called murder--actually an act of desperation--the means of death is fire. Daugherty hardly invented fire! There is no way this book caused a murder.

A very good novel. Wonderful descriptions of Georgia swamp country. I recommend it.

Always swift-moving and sometimes terrifying, yet touched with small-town comedy and alert to all sorts of family subtleties, this novel offers piercing insights into today's deep South. Janice Daugharty knows all the hushed beauties of the piney woods on the Georgia-Florida border, and every last snake hiding in the leaves as well. Young love has rarely been so scary, or so strangely redemptive, as it is in "Necessary Lies." Everybody must start reading Janice Daugharty right now!

This book was a huge disappointment to me! I have a compulsion to finish every book I start but this one made that task very difficult! Jordan was such a pig headed jerk! And Amanda was such a coward! He practically turned her into a whore forcing her to marry him to help her family financially. I picked this book up at a garage sale and next summer I'll be selling it in mine. Janet, you've come a long way baby!

It is the first book that I've read by this author. I don't know what to think. The hero (?) acted like such a jerk throughout most of the book. He may have been the epitome of virility but he had no other redeemable qualities. It was often hinted that his cynical attitude was because of his childhood but the reader was never told what his childhood was like beyond the fact he was often ignored by his wealthy parents.

The heroine was somewhat more realistic in that she let her heart lead her into what seemed to be a one sided love affair. I say realistic because I have seen so many young women fall in love with men who they think will change their ways. I'm not saying that it is sensible.

But it's not realistic for him to change on the last page and the reader leave with the feeling of a "happy ever after".

Needless to say I am not going to keep this book to re-read at some later date.

Janet Dailey, as always did a great job in exposing the estacy of attraction. I found and read only the middle half of that book when I was sixteen years old, and was so captivated and hooked that I have been looking for that book ever since. Now in my forties I still can't get that book out of my thoughts. I Janet Dailey is a woman whom I feel is or has been in love and understands the beautiful and compelling feeling that God intended to be experienced between a man and a woman. It is a beautiful book.