One of Foster's poorer efforts.
938836
Sadly pedestrian writing. Normally I like Foster's work but it really lacked emotion. If you go back and read his "The Tar-Aiym Krang" or even "Splinter of the Mind's Eye" they are significantly superior in writing quality. Really felt phoned in.
1463664
Rosemary Wells is one of my favorite authors--she is a funny and gifted storyteller.  My daughter and I have loved her Max and Ruby stories, above all.  However, this book I am wary of as the life and work of Mary Breckinridge, which I have researched as a historian, are not things to be whitewashed.  In order to create her domain in Appalachian Kentucky, Mary visited with traditional midwives and then wrote reports describing them as largely dangerous, dirty, unskilled in order to make the case for the establishment of the Frontier Nursing Service.  She had no solid data that midwives, though no doubt a mixed group like any other, were in reality "dangerous" and, in fact, to this day no scholar has been able to prove that nurse-midwives provided better care than traditional midwives in the region.  Many other factors have contributed to a reduction in infant and maternal mortalities.  Her lack of solid data in the end, however, didn't matter as she had the authority and connections as a women of wealth and privilege to get the political and financial backing for FNS.  To raise funds, she told wealthy donors that she was saving babies of "pure stock."  This sale pitch worked well for her as this was a time when many feared "race suicide" and desperately wanted more "white" babies to be born.  Breckinridge's racism was also made powerful in her lifelong efforts to barring Black nurse-midwives from membership in the profession's national organization.
299830
Possibly a mildly interesting story but not well written
The author should stick to what she obviously does best and that is caring for foster children
1368034
Value of this novel is to awaken us to the mess State Foster Care is in. It begins slow. Her similies reflect a middle school students' attempts at writing them. Her metaphors are much better; in fact, for me, her metaphors are great 99% of the time. A great read all round. A significant disappointment is the way the novel treats the after age 18 of her life: childish, obvious, illogical, and dissatisfying, and the method has been used by too many authors way too many times by the commom romance paperbacks - which, by the way, more than a few times the novel reads like these kinds of Enquirer romance stories. I recommend the novel for its treatment of foster care. I will not read her second novel, though. Her novel, for me, is like many murder mysteries, more fun as a film. The author teaches a writing course at a university. I hope it is a beginning course. To say that love is love only when one proves it by lifting the knife to plunge it into your own breast is not love, for me. There is not a God nor a person who is available to stop the suicide all in the name of love. The person who requires this proof is good for romance paperbacks.
2373139
Putting On The Dog is the second installment of the Reigning Cats and Dogs series by Cynthia Baxter. It features Dr. Jessica Popper, a veterinarian turned amateur sleuth.

Dr. Popper stands in for a fellow vet at a charity dog show where she gets to hobnob with some of Hollywood's finest and not so finest. It's during this time that the death of a sleazy celebrity photography happens and even thought its been ruled an accident, Jessica thinks it was murder and decides to investigate .

I read the first installment and thought it was ok, but wasn't crazy about the main character. I decided to read the second in hopes that there was some improvement. Fortunately for me, I found the story this time around to be better than in the first book. Unfortunately though, the same cannot be said for Dr. Popper. I seriously have grown to dislike this woman. She is selfish, pushy, and childish. She uses her friends and seems willing to sacrifice her love life and her career all to investigate the murder of someone she didn't even know. I'm thinking the books would be much better if she wasn't in them.
190890
I enjoyed the acting of Foster and others but her love interest and religious exploration in the movie I  consider distracting.
29362
It was a copy of the original, and not a very good one at that.
1136965
It's a sad story we already know. Ben Foster is scary excellent as he who will not be named, and most of the acting is quite good. The narrative jumps awkwardly, however, introduces characters that have almost nothing to add to the plot (e.g. Kristin Armstrong), then crawls interminably through tortured and shallow examinations of the moral issues. It's a story that could have soared by examining humans' need for entertainment and heroes, but clipped its own wings with one man's tawdry lust for adulation.
2414638
Newark, NJ has a billion dollar budget for its school system, presumably enough to provide a wonderful, even lavish education for its children. However, all sides agree that the Newark schools are uniformly terrible, and that the kids are graduating with a sub-par education (and that's not counting the children who drop out, which is inexcusable these days!)  This story is a cautionary tale about what happens when competing groups, all presumably well-meaning, try to reform a huge public school system.

I was terribly saddened for the children of Newark, especially those kids that need a bit of extra help, but aren't the two standard deviations from normal, which is what is necessary to achieve an IEP. A child with an IEP is considered special needs, and by law, must have his/her education adjusted to allow the child to work at grade level. It also means that the school system in the child's community gets a larger piece of that billion dollar budget, but a child who simply needs extra help isn't entitled to extra money. Thus, those children are often ignored.

As I read the book I began to get the strong feeling that a good many of the employees of the Newark School System looked at what they do as a job with all its attendant headaches, rather than the mission of preparing our children for the future. If you go to your school with the point of view that this is merely a way to endure the next six hours, rather than the opportunity to change the future, you're far less likely to do a good job.

It was so sad, and just allowing reformers to make changes without examining all the consequences isn't the answer. I wish I knew what is, but finding that answer is imperative if these children are to succeed in an increasingly competitive world.
1852332
The first Holly Bush novel I ever read was ROMANCING OLIVE.  I liked it a lot.  That led me to a few others that I didn't like all that much.  This Train Station story was being offered at a bargain price so I thought to give Bush books another shot. Well, now I know.  Holly Bush and I aren't a good fit.  It seems that OLIVE was the only exception.

This book has good bones.  The story, unfortunately underdeveloped, could have been excellent, perhaps if written with a lighter touch and a tad more care and talent.  Instead almost everyone here was an exaggerated caricature and the story was predictable and exasperating.  For example, how unkind and mean-spirited can one family be?  Based on the Crawford family here, the answer is limitless unkindness and meanness.  And how stupid and spineless can one heroine be?  Based on Julia here, the answer is limitless spinelessness and stupidity.

The hero was 90% OK except for his one big moment of failure.  The mistaken identity and subsequent wrong couples paired at the beginning was not used to any advantage, the city girl acclimating to country life was underdeveloped, and, frankly speaking, I didn't like anyone in the Crawford family, including the heroine.  The hero deserved someone with more sense and more spine.

In summary, this was a disappointing read.  Not well developed, with exasperating behavior of some characters, repetition of events that kept the story from flowing nicely, and with an unpolished writing style that did not appeal to me.
896297
This is more of the same tired, emotional diatribe that has made Fuller Torrey a hit with the many families whose members have been failed by the mental health system. But not for the reasons he cites.  An absence of adequate resources that make care easily accessible and managed is the major problem with the mental health system today. Difficult problems that beg for clear solutions are used by Torrey to fashion an attack on those who work to make the system accountable and keep the excesses of certain professionals in check. He also is very loose with his facts. For example, at p 170, conflating federal funding of legal services or protection and advocacy with state funded and constitutionally mandated public defenders is just factually wrong, and legally wrong headed.
3730569
This poorly written "book" is actually the lament of one member of a family that has been scheming for decades to take over a much-loved farm where a large family grew up in the 1940s and 1950s. The dubious plan of these schemers became evident over the past decade as they began to thwart access of extended family to the farm and then sued a co-owning sister to take the family farm away from her. As solid evidence was uncovered showing this plan took root in the 1970s after the death of the family patriarch, other members of the family stood up to the conspirators and prevailed in legal battle after legal battle all the way to two recent Idaho Supreme Court cases (Pandrea v. Barrett, 369 P.3d 943 (2016) and Thornton v. Pandrea, Idaho Supreme Court Docket No. 42332, 2016 Opinion No. 103). As a result of the continuous filing of frivolous lawsuits, the courts of the state of Idaho have now declared the mother of the author (Mary Pandrea - see attached photo of white-haired grumpy looking woman) a vexatious litigant, preventing her from bringing more senseless pro se lawsuits. At the end of their rope and out of options after these just rulings and the imposition of sanctions and legal fees against the perpetrators, Pandrea, in desperation writes his defamatory "book" in which he slanders not only the victors but also the attorneys and judges involved in the cases, and even the justices of the Idaho Supreme Court. His writing is so poor and muddled, however, it is difficult to trod through it. It's great for a laugh, though! Enjoy (if you can stand it).
1562179
I wanted so hard to like this book, but it was just too sad. I don't know anything about the welfare system, much less the foster care system in the UK and how it works, but if this book is anything to go by, I'd say that system badly needs an overhaul. This book is about an orphan who was born into that system. Taken from her institutionalized biological mother at birth, efforts to have her adopted were unsuccessful as she is soon described/tagged as someone with "violent" tendencies, instead of an orphan trying to get away from successively bad foster parents. The system's efforts to get her placed resulted in a late-age adoption by a prostitute single mom. I didn't know that was even possible, especially as the adoption process here in the US is pretty stringent. Molded by the one person who was her moral compass, Anais spirals slowly out of control, especially when her new mom is murdered a few years after she is adopted, pushing Anais back into the system where she now knows she's in it for the rest of her young life--what is called a "lifer--until she turns 18 and the state has to turn her loose. Anais expects she'll go to jail soon after she turns 18 because of who she has turned out to be, but there's a strong force in her that doesn't want to. She is put into the Panopticon where she can stay until she's 18 if she's got good behavior. She dreams of escaping it all, the Panopticon (a residence for orphans in their teens), the drugs, Scotland in general where she's already labeled as a social welfare kid with all its apparently bad connotations for people of that country, including the lack of good future prospects and the expectation that these kids are unable to better themselves either through studying or good behavior.  No matter what they do, their society has already judged them and found them lacking, including the police who apparently aren't ready to give any of these kids the benefit of the doubt when they get into fights. This book is well worth reading, if only to see Anais eventually rise above her lot and finally exert a superhuman effort to finally escape her situation.  If this is what Scotland's child social services (or the UK's in general) looks like, then I salute Jenni Fagan for having the guts to expose the truth about it and not mince any details about what happens to these poor kids. Let's hope someone in their country takes notice.

I rated the book 4 stars only because of too much sexually charged language, the slangs and cursings, and it being classified as a young adult novel. If it had been classified as a book for readers over 18, I would have rated it 5 stars only because then the audience would be in a better position to appreciate it and the message Fagan is trying to send out.  For it to be a YA novel with that kind of language, young adult readers will only be wanting to read it on the surface for the graphic sex and sexual language and the drugs and seemingly youthful rebellion in it, and they will most likely marvel at how kids in the UK are "allowed" such freedom as to have all that without getting caught--instead of truly appreciating it as a work of literature that addresses the inhumanity of the social welfare system and the rebellion of kids within that system against it, as well as their efforts to survive and form bonds with each other no matter how frail or easily broken they are. Other than that, this is a very mature, bitterly realistic book that should be read if only to understand the plight and psychology of orphans.
358715
This movie was a great disappointment. To begin with it was a poor effort at reducing the six part mini-series to a less than two hour movie. The actors were bland, their parts underacted, their effort very lacking. The chronology of the events was disjointed, the story line weakly developed and the significant events underpinning the plot were lacking. The character Connie was not depicted well, we thought, especially considering the significance of her observations. Nor was the description of Ricky Tarrs' experiences well explicated. These two characters contribution to the story is the foundation of the investigation of the mole.
No, one can not expect to reproduce in two hours what was successfully done in six, but it would have been better to leave this screenplay on the shelf.
If one had not seen the mini-series, one would be lost to the significance of the true story as LeCarre had written it.
3605225
Sherrie Eldridge means well: she wants to help adoptive parents do a better job of parenting their adoptive children. But Eldridge has written a deeply-flawed book that cannot be relied upon regarding either its descriptions or prescriptions.

The first problem is that Eldridge makes sweeping statements about how adoptees feel and what adoptees need from their adoptive parents without, however, supporting her claims with any scientific research, either her own or others. On reading the many claims Eldridge makes in her book, I kept wanting to ask: how do you know this? She never tells us.

At most, Eldridge offers annecdotes from her own experience and that of other adoptees. But we have no way of knowing whether these experiences fairly  represent the experiences of most adoptees; whether they were selected because they support Eldridge's views; or whether, in talking with other adoptees, Eldridge "found" just what she was looking for.

Another problem is the absence of any serious comparative perspective: how, for example, do non-adopted children experience and cope with the loss of a parent? Or, let's consider a major theme in Eldridge's writing: the idea that all adoptees suffer a loss that must be grieved because, having lived for nine months in her birth mother's womb, adoption removes the infant from the only environment she has known. Well, birth does that to all of us: we all are expelled from the Eden of our mothers' wombs; all of us are cut off from our pre-natal environment.

If the pre-natal experience is as important as Eldridge wants us to believe, then the "loss" involved in being born should be universal. It thus becomes essential to understand the effects of that experience and to distinguish them from the effects of adoption as such. Eldridge fails to address this issue.

I'll conclude with a much smaller example. One that, however, illustrates the problem I had trusting Eldridge's judgment and reliability. One of the works included in her bibliography is "The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales" by Bruno Bettleheim, whom Eldridge identifies as "German author Bruno Bettelheim" (p. 75), and, subsequently, as "renowned  psychologist and author Bruno Bettelheim" (p. 77).

What's wrong with this? First, Bettelheim was born and educated in Austria, not Germany. Second, he did all his work in the United States (and so might be described as American), to which he came in 1939 as a Jewish refugee from Nazism (so that simply calling him "German," even if he had been born there, would have been misleading). Third, Bettelheim's reputation as a psychologist was exploded at least two years before Eldridge published her book: a widely-reviewed biography by Richard Pollak ("The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim"), exposed him as a fraud.

That Eldridge cannot properly identify Bettelheim and that she relies on someone so discredited substantially undermines my confidence in her knowledge and judgment.
141299
1 of the stories was good.  4 were weak efforts.
2819605
Even by this films own admission there are unscrupulous breeders in business. Since the organizations that should be monitoring this industry for humane & ethical standards before certifying dogs & the facilities they are bred in are doing such a poor job, it is painfully obvious that animal welfare organizations are desperately needed to ensure dogs are maintained & sold to the public in the highest standards. The breeder, featured in this film as a target of false accusations, places blame for substandard practices of veterinary attention on someone else within the community who stole his dogs for backyard breeding. Maybe that is the truth or maybe he is actually the guilty one. Either way, until there are better laws & practices regulating this industry it is very hard to know for sure if a breeding facility is really caring for the dogs or if they are only concerned with their profits (which veterinary care & well maintained facilities eat into). Regardless the people who funded this film, Protect The Harvest, have their own agenda for making this film & I strongly encourage you to research this company before buying into what they are trying to sell you with this film.