In this book, a little girl explains her moods and why she feels that way, all in rhymes. The girl feels alternately silly, joyful, or cranky, and a lot of other moods as well. The situations that put her in these moods are quite believable and real, like learning that she will have sibling, or tattling on a friend. The book is not scary, and the story is engaging. It has about 550 words.

This is a pleasant bed time book for animal lovers. All the animals are going to sleep, the lamb, the cat, and even the bee. The text rhymes, and the pictures are fun. The book is short (about 250 words).

This is a cute story about Olivia, a pig who leads an ordinary preschooler's life. She brushes her teeth, goes to the beach, visits a museum, and even earns a time out. The pictures are attention getting with their unique use of color. Olivia ends her day by listening to a bedtime story, making the book a good wind down before bed. The book has about 250 words.

This is a cute book about sheep doing winter activities on Christmas day. The number of sheep gradually decrease as they each end up in a snow bank, until the last sheep left standing rescues them all and they return safely home. It's a good Christmas story without any moralizing. It's also a fun winter counting book with a bit of humor and no scary parts. Altogether, the book has about 200 words.

This book is a pure marketing book for Moon Pies. It even includes a coupon for Moon Pies in the back. The story itself is quite engaging. It describes a boy who travels to outer space to get his Moon Pies. He even pacifies a monster on Mars with a Moon Pie. The entire book is dedicated to increasing the readerï¿s desire to purchase and eat Moon Pies- -completely despicable. The author is not content to simply market Moon Pies; he also suggests that Moon Pies are preferable to nutritious foods like Brussels sprouts and beans. If you would like to see your child join the ranks of the morbidly obese, for heaven sakes, buy this book. And thereï¿s an Oreo counting book youï¿d probably like as well.

One day while he was playing, William finds a dinosaur egg in the back yard. He brings it home and the egg hatches, so William gets to play with the little baby dinosaur. But it isn't long before the dinosaur grows into a big baby dinosaur and it can't hide anymore. The adults discover the dinosaur and lock it up in a cage, where it is very unhappy. But William manages to set it free again. The book is not scary, but it's a bit on the long side (about 850 words), so it might be appropriate for older kids rather than younger ones.

This book features 26 short riddles where the key words are never named explicitly. Instead, they are described with rhyming pictures and shown in the pictures. Some of the clues are obvious, and others will cause even adults to pause and think a bit. The blurb on the cover says "Each letter has a poem. Every poem has a clue. The answers are in the back." There are no scary parts in the book. The book has about 600 words.

This book contains a collection of animal poems. The sources of the poems are quite varied, from Emily Dickinson, to the Bible, to Japanese haikus. All sorts of animals are featured, from fireflies to hippopotami. There are no scary bits, and the pictures are great. At the end of the book is an index of the animals and a table of contents by first lines to help you find your favorite poems. The book has about 2900 words.

This is a cute story about a spider who drops in on a farm. All the farm animals greet her and invite her to play. But the spider spends the day building her web instead. The book is fun and informative, and not at all scary. The pages are doubled so they are easy to turn, but be careful, because inquisitive little fingers may reach inside the pages and rip them. The book has about 350 words.

This book is the story behind the people responsible for taking care of waste removal in New York City. The book begins with a chapter that traces the infamous woeful journey of the Mobro, the garbage barge that could not find a home. The main text of the book is divided into 4 sections: Engineering Reform (public health in Europe and America in the mid-1800s, early NYC contracts for gathering bones and organic matter in the mid-1800s), Expanding Opportunities (contracts for Central Park, elevated railways, the Brooklyn Ash incinerator), Public Work (roads and rails, bridges and tunnels, parks and parkways, ports and airports, all covering the 1930s to 1940s), and Landscape Sculpture (Rachel Carson, DDT, dioxins and incinerators, landfills, transfer stations, and NIMBYs). The book concludes with a chapter on the "Pew Yew Choo-Choo", a Mobro-like train that looked in vain for a place to unload. The book is amply illustrated with black and white photographs and drawings. At the end of the book are 90 pages of documentary notes, but presumably to strengthen the narrative of the text, they are not linked directly to the main text with endnote numbers.

The subtitle of the book,"Garbage of the New York the last two hundred years", is a very inaccurate guide to the book's actual contents. The book isn't about garbage, but about the people who wanted the garbage contracts over the years, and the politics involved with getting the contracts. Actually, the book also doesn't focus particularly strongly on garbage contracts either, since quite a few pages or even chapters are devoted to the contracts for other infrastructure projects, like Central Park and public transit systems. Many of these other projects do have a loose connection with garbage, in the sense that some of them depended on garbage for fill (such as LaGuardia Airport), but others seem to be included only because they involved some of the same people who were also vying for the garbage contracts. In any case, the book can hardly claim to cover the last two hundred years, since the text begins in the 1840s.

I picked up this book because I was interested in learning more about how one of the largest cities in the country has dealt with its garbage over the years. There was no description at all of early garbage disposal arrangements in NYC before the 1840s. I did learn how dead animals and bones were boiled for grease in the mid-1800s, and there was limited discussion of incinerators, as well as some information about landfills and shipping garbage out of town. But a few clues in the book lead to me to believe there was more to be said about garbage. For example, at one point, Miller mentions a NYC law that required all buildings with more than 12 residential units to have their incinerators. Does this mean that there was some sort of responsibility or expectation for garbage to be dealt with at the point of disposal? Was this a wide-spread practice? For how long? To write a comprehensive history of garbage in NYC, Miller might have put more focus on questions such as these, and a bit less on issues that are only marginally, if at all, related to garbage.