Barbara RobinsonŐs The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is one of my top ten favorite childrenŐs novels of all time. ItŐs one of the funniest and at the same time most moving books ever written.

Unfortunately, the magic that was in the first book just doesnŐt carry over to this sequel. The same characters are here. The Herdmans are still the kind of uncivilized kids that make parents and teachers (and even less rowdy kids) squirm. Beth, the narrator, is still the kind of sweet, observant girl who fits in with others but is open enough to find the good in those who donŐt fit in. But it just doesnŐt come together here. The HerdmansŐ antics arenŐt as funny as they were in the first book (a few, in fact, are simply recycled from the first book). And if youŐve read The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, where Beth comes to see the good in the seemingly irredeemable Imogene Herdman, it seems odd that in the new book sheŐs back to viewing Imogene as a monster. What happened to the insight she gained at the end of the last book?

The book has a few funny moments. ItŐs not dreadful. But after The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, it is certainly a disappointment.

This book is basically a twist on the story of King Midas and the Golden Touch. In this case, though, it isnÕt gold that the main character, John Midas, loves, but chocolate. When John receives a "gift" of the ability to turn everything he touches to chocolate, it turns out to be more of a curse than a gift. Having his breakfast bacon and eggs turn into chocolate seems wonderful, but when he gets thirsty and canÕt get a simple (non-chocolate flavored) drink of water, he begins to understand the need for variety.

I donÕt know many children who have an overpowering love of gold, but just about every child can identify with a boy whose desire for chocolate knows no bounds, and so this story is just a natural grabber for elementary school-age children.

You might expect a book with a message (eat a variety of healthy foods) to be moralistic, even a little dull, but this book is nothing like that. The plot is absorbing, much of it is laugh-out-loud funny, and the characters are all well-drawn and interesting.

The Chocolate Touch is a real charmer.

This is a heartbreakingly painful book to read. It took me almost a month to get through it because I simply couldnŐt stand to read more than a small bit at a time. Yes, there are heroes and heroines here -- people who strove again and again to save victims of genocide. But if youŐre anything like me, when you finish "A Problem From Hell" you will know far more about how monstrously human beings can behave than you want to believe. "Evil" seems too mild a word to describe it. And you will also see what in some ways is even worse -- the ease with which "good" people can ignore mass murder.

Nevertheless, as difficult as it is to read, this is an important, extremely well-researched, and clearly and concisely-written book, and IŐd recommend it highly (even urgently) to anyone who has an interest in American foreign policy. And even those who think they don't.

At the end of World War II, the world swore that "never again" would we stand by while millions were slaughtered. Samantha Power deals with selected post-war examples of times when the world failed to live up to that promise -- in Cambodia, Iraq, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, it would be easy to add several more to her list. In fact, sheŐs been criticized -- from both the right and left -- for some examples she left out of the analysis. However, I feel strongly that her focus on the four late twentieth century genocides makes this a better book than it otherwise would have been. The limited number of examples allows Power to explore deeply both the differences and the similarities between these genocides.

The differences are important because so often that is what both the press and the government focus on. We misinterpreted the genocide in Cambodia because the Khmer Rouge was not murdering members of an ethnic group, but political and class enemies. Saddam Hussein targeted an ethnic group -- the Kurds -- but the Kurds were rebelling against the government at that time, so it was possible to view the situation as more an overly harsh attempt to put down a rebellion than as a genocide.

But, as Power shows, focusing on how each example was different from the Holocaust was less a misunderstanding than it was an excuse for inaction. There are plenty of other excuses. We canŐt be sure if the victimsŐ stories are accurate. We see the victims fight back and think they are just as guilty as the perpetrators. We are worried that acting may create more problems than it solves. But mostly it just comes down to this: most Americans are not very interested in what goes on outside our country and no politician has ever been voted out of office for failing to intervene abroad. Under those circumstances, only the best and the bravest will stand up.

And intervention does not necessarily mean military intervention (although that certainly canŐt be ruled out). One of the most interesting conclusions of PowerŐs book is that the world is hampered in responding to signs of genocide because we think that noticing that it is taking place will require us to act militarily. Not wanting to go to war, we pretend that the genocide is not taking place. But, as Power quite convincingly argues, there are many indications that by taking early strong stands against a country murdering its own citizens, we can stop it. When we refuse to even condemn the killing, we only encourage the thugs in power to go farther.

This book raises issues that as citizens and moral human beings we all should be grappling with.

I've recently started reading the Little House books to my seven-year-old daughter and I'm thrilled to discover that I love them just as much now as I did when I was her age. There are a lot of reasons for that. Laura Ingalls Wilder was a wonderful writer. She's simple and always crystal clear, but at the same time, she uses so much detail and has such a great sense of the rhythm of language that her writing is beautifully poetic and always a joy to read aloud. And the characters, of course, are among the most beautifully drawn characters in literature: the feisty Laura who has such a hard time doing what she's supposed to do, her frustratingly perfect sister Mary, her strict but kind parents. Even the animals in the book come across as interesting characters. No matter how tired I am in the evening, I always look forward to getting out Little House and reading a chapter or two.

Those were the things I loved about it as a child, and still love now. But as an adult I've also come to appreciate how quintessentially American this book is. It's the kind of book that makes you think about our heritage, and makes you proud to be American. In these books, Laura and her family keep facing hardships and meeting them head on. When necessary, they pick themselves up and move on to a new place, starting from scratch. They don't expect anything from anybody, and yet they care about their community and their neighbors. You often hear the words "pioneer spirit" used to describe America's best values, but after you read Little House that's not an empty phrase. You, and the child you read it to, understand it in your heart.

I'm a huge fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder and fondly remember reading the Little House books when I was a child. I've just started reading the series to my 7-year-old daughter, though, and while she loved Little House on the Prairie, she was far less fond of this one. In fact, although she's usually a good listener, I found her attention constantly wandering as we read this book.

And in all honesty, I could understand why. Laura Ingalls Wilder is without a doubt one of the best children's writers who ever lived, but I think she had barely begun to show her enormous talent when she wrote this book. Although there are wonderful little snippets of family life, and a few hints of the conflicts between the feisty Laura and her more reserved and perfect sister Mary, the truth is, there isn't much of a plot here. And Mrs. Wilder goes on for page after page describing how bullets were made, or butter churned. There are probably children who find that fascinating, God bless them, but my daughter was just bored by it.

I don't think this is a BAD book, but Little House on the Prairie is so much better, so much more interesting that I think if you want to read the series to a young child, that's the place to start, even though this is the first book in the series. This is a book for children who have already fallen in love with Laura and her wonderful family.

Darin Strauss has written a daring novel, dealing with the lives of the famous "Siamese Twins" who performed in circus shows in the mid-nineteenth century.

The very idea of conjoined twins still has the power to make most people uncomfortable. You can't help but picture yourself in their place -- never having any privacy, and surely never having a sense of yourself as a unique individual. The greatest strength of this novel is that Strauss quickly gets the reader past seeing Chang and Eng as oddities and into a view of them as individuals. Eng, the narrator, and more intellectual and emotionally reserved of the two, longs to be separated from his crude, sensual, hard-drinking, and spotlight-loving brother. At times he despises his brother and believes they share nothing but their physical link. He finally realizes however, that he owes all the excitement, and even love, in his life to his more adventurous brother. As much as he wants to be separate, he recognizes that his brother is as much an emotional as a physical part of him.

Strauss brings Chang and Eng to life by making the reader realize that their struggle -- the need to be separate and the need to share lives with others -- is nothing more than an extreme manifestation of a dilemma all of us face. We are all both free individuals and members of communities, and there is often a conflict between those two aspects of our lives. The fact that the twins lived in North Carolina at the time of the Civil War adds a further dimension to this idea. Eng identifies very strongly with the Southern cause, the desire to be separate from the union. Clearly it becomes, for him, a metaphor for his own desires.

My only quibble with the novel is that at times the metaphor of separation and union gets a little heavy-handed. Eng simply reminds us a few too many times about what the cause of secession means to him, and that draws some attention away from the characters and story. But overall, this is a really fine first novel.

Bernard Lewis's book is alternately fascinating and frustrating. If you come to it expecting either a history of the relationship between the Islamic and Western worlds, or an analysis of their relationship in recent decades, you will be disappointed. The book consists, rather, of essays dealing with various issues in Islamic-Western relations, such as problems in translating Arabic texts into European languages, the idea of country and patriotism in the Islamic world, and disputes between scholars of Middle Eastern studies.

Despite the somewhat esoteric topics, however, the book is not just for scholars. Lewis's breadth of knowledge, and a writing style much more interesting than that of most academics, makes this book intriguing reading for almost anyone with an interest in Islam and the Middle East. I picked up many intriguing facts and anecdotes from the book.

But it's not perfect. For me, the problem in Bernard Lewis's approach is summed up in one of the book's first essays -- on Muslims living in non-Muslim countries. Lewis offers a fascinating study of what various Muslim scholars have said over the centuries about the theological implications of Muslims living under the laws of non-Muslims. Then he admits that the average Muslim probably has little or no knowledge of these theological debates and it is uncertain what effect these ideas have on how real people live their lives. He insists, though, that they must have some effect, and in any case, how can we find out any information about religious ideas except by listening to religious scholars? That's pretty much like saying that papal pronouncements are the only knowledge we can have of what Catholics think. Scholarly and theological debates are interesting, but how religious ideas effect people's lives is even more so -- and that area is not only beyond the scope of Lewis's work (which is understandable), but is something that he writes off as irrelevant and unknowable (which is absurd).

And for me, this limitation is a problem throughout the book. Lewis is a marvelous and almost always interesting scholar when he is discussing the history of ideas. But he repeatedly jumps to the conclusion that those ideas filter down to ordinary people's lives with little change. It would be far more interesting, and relevant to the general reader, I think, to see how those ideas play out in the real world.

This is one of the most intelligent and thought-provoking books I've ever read. The gist of Said's argument is that academic studies of the Muslim world are (like all academic studies) influenced by the culture that produces them. Because the first Westerners to study Islamic culture came from colonial powers, they tended to view things through colonialist, ethnocentric eyes. Although the United States has never had colonial ambitions in the Middle East, we've inherited many of those European attitudes. More importantly, because Middle Eastern studies in American universities lead so many people into careers as government consultants, or oil company employees (and because so much of the funding comes from government and oil companies), those studies usually do not focus on Muslim culture as something of interest and value in and of itself, but are concerned rather with how it relates to American power and business interests. We are not concerned, in other words, with how an institution in an Islamic country effects the local people, but only with whether it makes them more or less pro-American.

According to Said, American journalists, who tend not to know the languages, or much about the culture of the places they report from, rely on such slanted academic studies for their understanding of the Islamic world, and allow it to color almost everything they write. As a result, reporting from Islamic countries is not only shallow, but often filled with insults and ethnic slurs that no editor would accept if the reporter were writing about any other group of people.

I suppose the best way to judge a book like this is to test its thesis in the real world -- and even before I finished reading the whole thing, I realized how much more aware I was of the underlying bias and ethnocentrism in newspaper and magazine articles about the Middle East. I wasn't searching for that prejudice, but after reading Said, I could not miss the condescension in the articles, and the absence of positive articles. Most of all, I realized how very little information was actually contained in the articles I read. It's not just that Muslims are being slurred. As citizens, we're being cheated out of information we need to make informed decisions. This book should be required reading for every editor, every foreign correspondent, every commentator on foreign policy, and every American citizen.

This was one of my favorite books when I was a little girl. It's about an eight year old girl in 1707 who goes into the wilderness with her father to help build a new home for her family. Before she leaves, some children frighten her with stories about Indians who will capture her and eat her or chop off her head. As she travels with her father, Sarah Noble must conquer all her fears. Finally, in her new home, Sarah meets Indian children who frighten her at first, but turn out to be nice kids who become her friends.

I bought this book for my 6-year-old daughter recently, fearing it wouldn't hold up after all these decades. After all, I grew up with cowboy movie images of "savage" Indians, and felt Sarah's fear. But my daughter, like most children today, hasn't grown up with that racist garbage. She wouldn't understand why anyone would be afraid of Native Americans. That's a good thing, of course, but I suspected changed attitudes would take away a lot of the book's suspense.

But the book holds up better than I expected. My daughter recognized immediately that the children who teased Sarah at the beginning were just being mean and didn't know anything about Indians. That the Indian children turn out to be just like her didn't come as a surprise. But Sarah's journey to a new place, being in the woods with scary animal sounds, all living temporarily in a cave all seemed like real dangers to her. And so, even though some of the "message" of the book has become a little dated, the plot holds up well. My daughter and I both enjoyed the book.

This is such a sweet, gentle, loving little book.

It's about two brother toads, Morton and Warton, one very stodgy, and the other more of an adventurer. Warton, the braver brother, decides to go out into the snow (toads are supposed to hibernate in winter) to visit his aunt. Almost instantly he is plucked up by an owl who wants to eat him, but decides to save him for a week, to have as a special treat on his birthday. It turns out the owl is lonely and friendless and little by little he is won over by Warton's conversation and small acts of kindness.

On television and in movies, and even in many books, children are constantly exposed to the idea that violence is the solution to almost every problem. I love the fact that in this work, intelligence, kindness, and compassion solve Warton's dilemma.

If you have a child who is just developing enough of an attention span to sit through a chapter book, it's hard to beat this little gem. It's very short, for one thing -- under seventy pages -- which makes it great for restless five or six year olds. And it has just enough danger in it to have small children on the edge of their seats without being too scary. It's cute and funny, and it's message is a great blessing.

It also has lots of sequels, which is a big plus when you're trying to get kids interested in reading more. Unfortunately most of the other Warton and Morton books are out of print, but any reasonable library should have them.