Linda Greenlaw landed the mother of all catches with her first book, The Hungry Ocean. Unfortunately, her subsequent work will always be compared with that initial gripping tale of longline swordfishing. As with her second book, The Lobster Chronicles, this new compendium of fishing tales, in All Fisherman Are Liars (AFAL) she provides an enjoyable, entertaining read, but nothing to compare to the can't-put-it-down original novel.

AFAL is an assemblage of perhaps a dozen good stories from fisherman of their time at sea. Far and away the most dramatic is the tale of David Marks, caught in a Caribbean hurricane in chapter four. The trouble is we don't get enough to fully satisfy; this one 'Shackleton-esque' story might have made an excellent novel itself. As with some of the other tales, it begins too fast and ends too soon.

Greenlaw uses a one-night gathering in Portland, Maine's Dry Dock Bar as a device to hold the stories together. Ostensibly she has a lunch date with old friend Alden Leeman, a salty ex-boss and longtime fishing friend, with whom she hopes to have a serious discussion about his health and impending retirement. Lunch turns into a continuous run of sea yarns from Linda, Alden and various other close friends in their fishing community. The clothesline on which she hangs the stories droops after a few chapters with the sogginess of her meeting's premise: her concern for Alden's health grows repetitive. We just want the next story, please.

Still, she brings color to her characters and the stories she has collected. Readers of her previous books will recognize some of the characters and boats. And the "Bar Snacks" with which she separates the chapters, feed us with amusing tidbits and observations, for instance, "Fibs and Exaggerations of Crew Members." An enjoyable summer read. Keep writing Linda.

A Good Year is the first I've read by Peter Mayle. I did not know that it had been headed to Hollywood, but one certainly suspects it. The book reads like a screenplay. Colorful characters, enchanting settings and whimsical plotline set up perfectly for a 110 minute trip to southern France on the big screen. After sailing through a very light 287 pages, I feel I've been 'en vacances.'

Descending upon the tiny village of Saint Pons for the summer are: Max Skinner, our hero who has been tossed out of his financial job in London, but immediately inherits a house with vineyard, Le Griffon, in Provence; Christie, a Californian cousin with a possible claim to the beautiful property; and Charlie, brother-in-law and money lender to Max. They join the locals: Monsieur Rousseau, caretaker to the vineyard; Fanny, a temptingly beautiful restaurant owner; Nathalie Auzet, the fashionable local notary; and Madame Passepartout, the matronly housekeeper and village gossip.

The storyline bounces from meal to meal, as nothing happens unless accompanied by sausages, paté, tarte aux pommes, pastis, marc and plenty of red wine. Meals at the village café, at the restaurant, at Le Griffon, and most magnificently at the Rousseau home are described in succulent detail. Evidently, someone is getting wealthy from mysteriously grown grapevines at the far, dusty edge of the property, and therein lies the plot. An ex-advertising executive, Mayle pokes good fun at the culture of wine marketing.

Further coloring the screenplay are the budding romances and the ultimate question of will Max make Le Griffon his home and livelihood. Hardly suspenseful, but what summer vacation is?

Political intrigue, high-tech science, oceanography, special-ops teams, AND a meteorite with proof of extraterrestrial life! Wow! This tale has it all.

In a presidential election year, the incumbent and his challenger duel over the role of NASA. Suddenly, NASA finds the Holy Grail, a meteorite with proof positive of extra terrestrial life forms! How convenient for the President who has backed NASA. But he keeps it quiet for a week, while he brings in a team of civilian scientists who can confirm the find. Among them, Rachel Sexton, daughter of the President's opponent in November, and also Michael Tolland, the Hollywood version of Jacques Cousteau. Their findings are conclusive...or are they? Enter killer special-operations teams. Someone is in big trouble soon! And to top it all off, the suspense takes shape on top of a mountain of ice high in the Arctic ocean. OK, so it's a little far-fetched that NASA would go to such extremes to save itself, or even that a US Senator knows how to operate a copy machine, but isn't that why we buy these paperbacks...to suspend our disbelief for a few hours?

A super page-turner on the order of the Da Vinci code, Deception Point puts a little ice in your summer reading. Take it to the shore...there is even a nod to "Jaws" in it that will keep you on your beach blanket.

I was disappointed in Tom Perrotta's writing. Purportedly a fictional expose of our crass American suburban culture, "Little Children" turns out to be little more than a 350 page soap opera. It begins in the hotbed of suburbia, at a playground with a handful of yuppie mothers, and so the book holds great promise. Perrotta introduces us to some characters we all can recognize instantly. Frat boy Todd, spandex-clad Mary Ann, practical careerist Kathy, newly retired and bored-at-home Jean, and intellectually under-challenged Sarah cope with various problems and uncooperative spouses. Then there are the characters that add color to the gray suburban landscape: Ronnie the child-molester, Larry the ex-cop on a vendetta, and Richard the web fantasy surfer.

Unfortunately the book drags these characters through a much too lengthy and predictable melodrama. Larry harasses Ronnie, Sarah makes a move on Todd, Kathy tries to save her marriage...the novel turns away from what could have been a good satire about suburbia and instead drones on like a dime-store romance. Who will end up with whom in the end? Who cares?

This book would have been much better had Perrotta concentrated on his characters more intently. They hold such promise. Instead they end up flat, shallow stereotypes who move through a lame plot.

Parker's writing leaves me stone cold. This is the first Robert Parker novel I've read, and it did not impress. The writing is flat, arch at times, and a plot twist toward the end of the book...uhhh, did we forget one? This is a boring march through two cases: (1) the gang-rape of an underage high-schooler and (2) a serial killing couple who kill for the thrill. Neither case has much dimension or plot, and worse, they are highly predictible. Then we throw in the love-life storyline of the Jesse Stone, our protaganist, police chief. He struggles to reconcile with his ex-wife and to keep off the bottle. This is creative writing? Sorry, Parker fans...<yawn>.

Not exactly Herbert Warren Wind here. Rick Reilly's attempt at a humorous peek at life on the other side of the ropes falls well short of the green. Of the twelve chapters, each detailing time spent carrying the bag of a celebrity, only two or three are of any interest. The highlights of the book perhaps include the stories on blind golfer Bob Andrew, crippled Casey Martin, and David Duval - with a glimpse of the family tragedy that colors his game. And in all fairness, I learned a bit more about the LPGA. Yet the constant snickering about the idiosyncracies, different biology, and lifestyle preferences of women pros were consistent with the bulk of this book: written for an audience in a third grade bathroom.

We learn for instance that the author gets a first hand glimpse of why John Daly is nicknamed "Long John", and that Brad Faxon's caddy measures yardage "You got 189 plus OJ" (meaning 2 for two murders,) or "It's 201 plus Anna (Kournikova, a perfect 10)." We're subjected to a discussion with self-help mystic Deepak Chopra that describes how to keep cool or hot on the golf course. Naturally, the answer involves a bodily aperture below the belt. Even worse, we endure Reilly's retelling of Bob Newhart's old jokes. As you might suspect, Reilly's poor delivery leaves the reader wishing he or she just found the old Newhart albums on [...].

Beyond the premise that a rookie caddy might have a truly difficult time keeping pace with professional golfers the yuks are pretty dull. Reilly's self-deprecating jokes about dropping clubs, spilling bags, and misreading yardages grows old fast. After the first few pages, we get it.

The chapter on (famous?) gambler Dewey Tomko and his high-roller friends is mind-bogglingly offensive. Even if the reader is OK with cliché-filled banter out of a cheap dime-store detective novel ("Dewey, if you're bluffin', I'll kill you, etc.,") most golfers and sportsmen would find these lowlife bettors a black spot on a pretty good game. Is it a thrill to learn about Michael Jordan and others losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on golf bets? For that matter, why not throw in a chapter on steroid use for laughs?

All in all, this scatology is pretty much straight out of the locker room, and not one in which you'd care to spend much time.

Not exactly Herbert Warren Wind here. Rick Reilly's attempt at a humorous peek at life on the other side of the ropes falls well short of the green. Of the twelve chapters, each detailing time spent carrying the bag of a celebrity, perhaps only two or three are of any interest. If there are any highlights of this book perhaps they include the stories on blind golfer Bob Andrews, crippled Casey Martin, and David Duval - with a glimpse of the family tragedy that colors his game. And in all fairness, I did learn a bit more about the LPGA. Yet the constant snickering about the idiosyncracies, different biology, and lifestyle preferences of women pros were consistent with the bulk of this book: written for an audience in a third grade bathroom.

We learn for instance that the author gets a first hand glimpse of why John Daly is nicknamed "Long John", and that Brad Faxon's caddy measures yardage in a unique way: "You got 189 plus O.J. (meaning 2 for two murders,) or "It's 201 plus Anna (Kournikova, a perfect 10)." We're subjected to a discussion with self-help mystic Deepak Chopra who describes how to keep cool or hot on the golf course. Naturally, the answer involves a bodily aperture below the belt. Ha-ha. Even worse, we endure Reilly's retelling of Bob Newhart's old jokes. As you might suspect, Reilly's poor delivery leaves the reader wishing he or she just found the old Newhart albums on eBay.

Beyond the premise that a rookie caddy might have a truly difficult time keeping pace with professional golfers the yuks are pretty dull. Reilly's self-deprecating jokes about dropping clubs, spilling bags, and misreading yardages grows old fast. After the first few pages, we get it.

The chapter on (famous?) gambler Dewey Tomko and his high-roller friends is mind-bogglingly offensive. Even if the reader is OK with cliché-filled banter out of a cheap dime-store detective novel ("Dewey, if you're bluffin', I'll kill you, etc.,") most golfers and sportsmen would find these lowlife bettors a black spot on a pretty good game. Is it a thrill to learn about Michael Jordon and others losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on golf bets? For that matter, why not throw in a chapter on steroid use for laughs?

All in all, this scatology is pretty much straight out of the locker room, and not one in which you'd care to spend much time.

The Last Juror is not John Grisham's finest work. Missing are the compelling contemporary issues, high throttled suspense, and all around passions that pervade early novels such as A Time to Kill, The Chamber, The Firm, or even The Runaway Jury. The Last Juror is at least 100 pages too long for its plotline, and its ending is evident long before the final pages.

The book starts fast: the story of a grisly rape and murder, and subsequent trial make for some page-turning. A jury is presented with the classic question: life in prison or the death sentence? Hardly suspenseful, for the deliberations (not at all sketched by Grisham) come only halfway through the novel, and the book jacket has all but given the ensuing plot away anyway. So the reader trudges through the next decade of the novel's storyline, year by boring year. Ostensibly, the narrator, owner of the local newspaper in the small Mississippi town (same setting as A Time to Kill) must fill us in on every detail of life that happens between this first trial and the ultimate (hey, no surprise here at all...) parole of the threatening killer. Every column, obituary, advertisement ever published by narrator's paper, The Ford County Times, is chronicled. Grisham drags us through the young man's haberdashery conversion, his social life (quite dull), his religious research (gee, there are a lot of enthusiastic Christian churches in the Bible Belt, no kidding?), and his eating and sleeping habits. By the time the protagonist has built up his business, we feel we, too, have earned shares in the venture.

We don't really delve back into any real action until the final sixty pages of the book. OK, again no surprises (it's on the book jacket): someone is killing the jurors who originally convicted our parolee. Even then, there is little suspense. We have the list of jurors, we are waiting for the killings and final resolution.

Grisham could have done much better with the topic of parole injustice, and he certainly missed the boat on this one. This book should have been released during the Willie Horton days of Dukakis v. Bush. It might have held more interest.

I borrowed my copy of "One Up On Wall Street" from a friend who is a longtime professional equities investor. He received this gift as recommended reading from a veteran investment analyst he knows. While Peter Lynch has written an easily comprehendible advice book on common stock investing - very much written in layman's terms and without emphasis on industry jargon - the principles he puts forth are fundamental and worth reviewing by anyone, amateur or pro.

Within the 300 pages of this book, Lynch outlines a useful rubric against which all stock selections might be measured. His stocks fall into six categories: Slow Growers, Stalwarts, Cyclicals, Fast Growers, Turnarounds and Asset Plays. Screening, buying and selling advice are outlined for each of these six flavors, although nothing revolutionary (eg., Sell a slow grower when the dividend is unattractive.) He delivers a wealth of the basic analytical tools (well, more like rules of thumb) for stock research, explaining price earnings ratios, the import of tax loss carry-forwards, goodwill accounting, inventories, and other basics of P&L statements and Balance Sheets. It's a pocket guide financial course for those who may have slept through Accounting 101.

Lynch urges stock pickers to do their homework, and suggests the regimen of a "Two Minute" drill, whereby an investor can recite a brief monologue of reasons for selecting a security: Reasons for selection, what the company needs to do to succeed, and pitfalls that stand in the way. Obviously, this is not a book for the technicians or chartists. Nor even speculators, as Lynch reminds the reader that his "ten-baggers" or "forty-baggers" all come as a result of having held at least three to four years.

Quite a bit of the book carries a populist bent. There is plenty of advice to pay more heed to what's happening in the local shopping mall than to investment brokers ("oxymorons"), and to avoid stocks with exotic names or that may have been whispered to be hot. Of course, we've all been aware of this, and we're all wealthy and drinking daiquiris on the beach now, right?

In sum, it is worth the investment of the few hours it takes to swallow this information. At worst, it is an entertaining look at some high-fliers the former Magellan manager scored with, but at the very least it serves as reminder that basics need to be followed, and nothing works as well as solid research, good discipline and old fashioned hard work.

I have been a catechist, teaching elementary school age children for over four years. I use this book extensively in my sessions with the kids, because they listen...intently. Rather than many dumbed-down, Disneyesque versions of children's Bibles that I have seen, and rather than the somewhat lame materials offered by our church, the Children's Illustrated Bible connects with kids. It does not insult their intelligence, but enhances it. The rich liturgies of the Old and New Testaments are brought to life with vivid portraiture and detailed factual explanation. Want to know more about life in the Middle East in biblical times? It's there. Want to know what type of wood might have been used in the Ark? Or what mountain range Ararat belongs to?

My students, ages 5-9, are harsh critics. When something isn't real, or interesting, or meaningful, they simply turn off. Too many of the standard cut, color and paste exercises last five minutes with them. But when I pull this book out to read the wonderful stories of Noah, Moses, the Flight from Egypt, Jesus calming the sea, and so forth - the kids listen with mouths agape. They strain their necks to see the beautiful illustrations and pictures.

This Bible is an excellent gift for god-children, for nieces and nephews, for your kids. Even if you are not religious, your kids will benefit deeply from hearing and reading the wonderful tales of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and step up their cultural literacy significantly.