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by Isabel Allende
ISBN: 0060175907
Binding/Media: Hardcover - 320 pages
Condition: Used: Like New
Comments: Sold with pride. Gently read copy in like new condition.
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Customer Reviews
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A marvelous, beautiful book...
Rating  (5)
Date: 2009-08-14
... that works well on several different levels. Starting with the presentation. I recently reviewed another book on the evolution of the cuisine in France, and the book's "presentation" was truly dreadful, and I docked one star simply for that; there were way too many errors that were easy to correct with just a bit more time. What a startling contrast this book is. There is the quality of the paper, for a book carrying a normal paperback price. The art work, and there are 43 pictures and photographs identified in the appendix, is simply arresting. As is suitable for an author originally from Chile, there is a heavy Latin American influence in the selections. You sense that hours may have been spent on the selection of just one of the paintings. The display technique for the pictures is appealing; with a small portion of the painting on an earlier page foreshadowing what will follow (no doubt there is an obscure Latin phrase for such a technique). Almost half the book is recipes, from "dear mom," Panchita's, and no, we won't complain to her. We are thereby given meaningful instructions so that we can go to the "laboratory" and test the efficacy of various aphrodisiacs.
Like many aphrodisiacs, there is some unique trigger that connected two synapses in my brain, between Isabel Allende, and Andrea Dworkin. Surely a unique coupling. No question Dworkin had a tough life, how much was self-inflicted is beside the point. Dworkin though focused on all the unpleasantness in male and female relationships, was light-years away from any eroticism, and died early. Allende could have focused on the unpleasant aspects of her life--being the niece who the Salvador Allende, who died in the CIA coup against the democratically elected government of Chile in 1973, on September 11th even. She was forced into exile, to Venezuela initially, carrying a small bag of dirt from her garden, her homeland, that she knew she might never see again. Yet she chose to celebrate the aspects that make life worth living, good food, and love.
And it is her writing that is the ultimate strength of this book. She is playful and witty, and certainly suggestive, coquettish even, and you feel confident she would not lead you down a path unrequited. In preparation for the book, she has read broadly from the world's literature, on the nexus between food and eroticism, and has spun some marvelous vignettes. It seems inappropriate to highlight a few, at the expense of the rest, but nonetheless, I particularly liked "A Night in Egypt," "Creatures of the Sea," and "Colomba in Nature."
There are so many numerous "takeaways," as those harried will say, including her quote of Oscar Wilde, that "love is a mutual misunderstanding." And how can one ever eat almonds again without thinking about Cybele?
A rich magnum of kudos to Allende. She wrote this book when she was 50, which she said was the beginning of the reflective age. Now she is 60, or a bit more, an age that the ancient Greeks considered appropriate for putting aside the matters of the flesh, and for concentrating on the philosophical problems of life. I suspect it will be one aspect of Greek wisdom that Allende will not assimilate, and that garlic, asparagus, eggplant, and so much more will continue to pass her lips.
Thanks for a most inspirational book.
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Luscious, scrumptious and, oh yeah, comforting...
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-09-22
John Updike once said that there are three great mysteries in life: sex, art, and religion. Isabel Allende has added food to that mysterious mix in a delightful way --- food is sexy and erotic and enticing in her book and is explored in a way that reminds one of lacy lingerie, seductive but mysterious at the same time. Allende, over fifty and still recovering from the painful loss of her daughter, writes boldly and bravely of how loss and all its pain is still concurrent with life's joys.
As a writer myself who has written both a cookbook and about the erotic lives of people over fifty, I found Allende's honesty, sensuality, and joy utterly luscious and also comforting in that even as we grow older we have our senses and can celebrate them as long as we allow ourselves to. This is a beautiful book with wonderful illustrations including the sexiest peaches you will ever see. The recipes are intriguing. But more than anything it is an affirmation that our senses have the power to heal us and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
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Life, Love, and Food
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-04-05
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
This collection of stories reads like an erotic cookbook of sorts. There's even a recipe section!
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One of my Absolute Favorite Books
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-03-20
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
This book weaves a beautiful tapestry of life, love and food. The information on the aphrodisiac ingredients is not very in depth but always accurate. And the prose reads as though it is tumbling straight from Allende's mouth. Although I have not cooked from the book, I love that she added a section of recipes.
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Food for thought and laugh
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-04-07
5 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
I have read "Paula" and there is no doubt that Isabel Allende is a talented writer. Her passionate tone seems to just find a way to your heart.
Aphrodite is acookbook erotic-style... truly inspires fun ideas for both food and foreplay. Great historic facts on spices, a collection of rather comical stories and the recipes are to die for.
If you are a hedonist. Get this!
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by Prill Boyle
ISBN: 1578601541
Binding/Media: Hardcover - 224 pages
Condition: Used: Very Good
Comments: Sold with pride and shipped with confirmation for US addresses. No publisher marks, no shelf wear, no writing. This book is an ex library copy in a very good condition. No library markings.
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Customer Reviews
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Faboulous Book
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-08-12
This is a fabulous, well written inspiring book. Everyone should read this book to see the hurdles that can be overcome by the human spirit and the goals that can be reached - even for late bloomers.
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Where am I? What's my name?
Rating  (1)
Date: 2007-09-08
3 out of 9 customers found this reveiw helpful
At the time of this review, Defying Gravity received no fewer than four stars from any reviewer! Am I living on a different planet? I read two stories. I read the second just to be sure the first wasn't the only badly written one in the book.
Without being specific (because I would end up being sarcastic), I found the writing cliche-ridden, saccharine, and uninspired. I'm not implying that the women depicted in the book led uninspired lives. I'm saying that the writing is uninspired. There's nothing in it that cuts to the bone. Nothing is said in a fresh, intuitive way.
This is the kind of stuff I used to read in the Ladies Section of the newspaper fifty years ago. It's writing with dimples, with mischievous eyes, wearing a pinafore.
I'd rather scrub floors than read this book.
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Inspirational and Heart-Warming
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-05-08
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
Prill Boyle has expertly woven stories of twelve inspirational women in Defying Gravity. This is a must-read for women who put their own hopes and dreams on the back burner while becoming wives, mothers, and caretakers.
Each story is short enough to read and digest in one sitting. It shows every woman it is never too late to pursue our dreams. I am anxiously awaiting Prill Boyle's next book!
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Good For Reading Aloud
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-02-05
3 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
In this eclectic collection of interviews and stories of "late blooming" women, the reader hears from across the spectrum about women who have pursued a dream, in spite of their age. Prill Boyle's writing style is friendly and the pages fly by, as she chronicles the juice she gets from her interviews. Between stories, her journal entries add perspective and sentiment as they serve to usher the reader between one person and the next. This book of true life tales is good for reading aloud.
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Women gain courage from their sisters
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-01-23
3 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
Prill's expert interviewing skills and honest writing gives us a glimpse behind women who are successful. Who would know the struggles they have had, the obstacles they climbed over? Here women with very different dreams - from being a doctor to a writer to a peace corps volunteers - chart in detail how they achieved them. We are left with a blueprints that give us guidance, but most of all the courage to live our own dream.
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by Robin McGraw
ISBN: 078521836X
Binding/Media: Hardcover - 240 pages
Condition: Used: Like New
Comments: Sold with pride. Gently read copy in like new condition.
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Customer Reviews
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A pleasant surprise
Rating  (4)
Date: 2010-04-06
In many ways I found this book a pleasant surprise. Robin McGraw, wife of "America's Therapist" Dr. Phil McGraw, writes her life story in simple, direct, and at times downright moving prose. She does not present her choices in life as the only valid ones a woman can make, which is good because not all women choose to become wives and mothers. She does present making conscious choices about life as something every woman can and should do, making it clear that she believes many women do not do this or even realize it is possible. I found it a fast and enjoyable read, and even though Robin's life and mine are quite different I learned from what she had to say. Worth the time I spent on it, and worth passing on to someone else, too.
--Reviewed by Nina M. Osier, author of "Love, Jimmy: A Maine Veteran's Longest Battle"
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Great Book
Rating (4)
Date: 2010-02-03
Some have said this is not a solid book. I think it might not be intellectually challenging, but it's thought provoquing. In order to enjoy this book may be you should approach it with the only expectation of reading about the life of a great woman, who has proven to be successful.
This is a book with lot of attitude. You have seen her on the Dr. Phil show, and sometimes you may wonder: "I'd like to talk to her and ask her some tips about life, love, mothering". I think this book offers that opportunity, it's like having a candid conversation with her. She opens her heart, she shares her choices, and challenges you to have a sheer determination, will, and faith in God.
By sharing her experiences, she stresses the importance to live true to your core values, to your dreams. If this book has been considered only as a biography, fine, reading biographies is very motivating and educational.
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Great book,
Rating (4)
Date: 2010-01-09
I loved this book. I have not read her new one, but really enjoyed this one.
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Very pleased
Rating (5)
Date: 2009-09-18
this book arrived very quickly. It was in great condition as stated. Over all I am very pleased & would purchase from this seller again in a heart beat. Thank you.
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Queen Robin's Privileged View of a Life That Revolves Around Her
Rating  (2)
Date: 2009-07-13
Robin McGraw is a very blessed woman and she lets you know it throughout this 2 and 1/2-star book, which is part autobiography, part marriage manual. It is written directly to the wives that watch her husband's TV show, and although she attempts to convince readers that she is just "one of them," it's very obvious that she views herself as Queen of her household, expecting Dr. Phil to cater to her every desire.
She has an odd way of revealing her childhood: she bluntly explains that her father was a drunk gambler and her mother was an enabler, yet Robin says nothing but positive things about these people, even when they are woken up in the middle of the night by men who won their furniture in another of her dad's drunken gambling streaks. She is putting a very positive spin on a very negative childhood, saying over and over that her parents "adored each other," yet she ignores the reality that her dad would fail to support the family and spend nights missing, while her mother refused to stand up to him or demand boundaries for the safety of the children.
Then Robin praises her mom for filing for divorce after the kids are all grown and gone! Why in the world did none of them confront the dad about his alcoholism long before then (including Dr. Phil, who was part of the family by that time)? It's beyond dysfunctional, but she spins everything positive.
That same spin enters her view of her own life and her marriage. She tries to show what a wonderful guy her husband is by saying that they agreed before they were married that he would do whatever she asked him to do--yet is that what a perfect marriage is all about? She claims she demanded there be no foul language from him--yet his show is filled with bad words every day and she is sitting in his audience. She lacks a lot of self-awareness and at times comes across as a hypocrite.
Worst is that she totally ignores some major issues dealing with their initial years together. As documented elsewhere, he had a first marriage that she pretty much ignores here, she doesn't mention his major business failings (where people claimed he took money from them), and he started dating her when she was extremely young, which she doesn't deal with as well (there are also very vague details about living arrangements in the three years they were dating). She is painting a picture here that is not an accurate reflection of their lives--it's more the fantasy version that she wants the public to see.
She also mentions a number of lies that she told him during their courtship, which were her way of manipulating him--but she excuses away as "a girl has to do what a girl has to do." It's disappointing that she doesn't take a moral stance or learn a moral lesson from her lies. Then when she tricks him into calling her two months after she broke up with him, they get engaged on their first night back together. It's not exactly a manual on the best way to snag a man.
Though it is put out by a Christian publisher there is very little spirituality in this book other than vague references to her being blessed by God. On one hand it's interesting that she says God brought the two of them together because Phil rarely mentions spirituality on his show, but on the other hand there is no way of knowing what their spirituality is beyond the "big Man in the sky" giving her everything she wants.
Still it is interesting to hear some of her stories and she does attempt to inspire women. It's a little too "female empowerment" and not enough about understanding how to be a better wife. The unintended result of reading the book is that by the end she has humanized her husband to make him seem much more dull and average than the twangy solution-spouting know-it-all we see on TV.
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by Mary Midgley
ISBN: 0415237327
Binding/Media: Hardcover - 240 pages
Condition: Used: Good
Comments: Sold with pride and shipped with confirmation for US addresses. Book in good condition with moderate reading wear. EX LIBRARY copy. Library markings present but no further markings or imperfections.
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Putting us back together again
Rating (4)
Date: 2008-07-02
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
From her lair in Newcastle upon Tyne, Mary Midgley has proven to be a redoubtably clear and lucid thinker, and a scourge of philosophical pretension (especially of the scientific determinism kind). She is a self styled philosophical plumber, ripping up the floorboards and investigating the bad smells that emerge from suspect philosophy that just doesn't cut it when applied to the complex world of actual existence.
In this book she takes aim at modern intellectual theories that try and split the material world into merely so many atomic particles. This leads, she contends, to strains of thought such as existentialism and selfish gene theories which underestimate the role that the consciousness plays, human striving, and a holistic interpretation of the place of humanity in nature's great cycle.
Midgely believes the main cause of this is an overemphasis on the sciences invading the spheres of thought which are the natural preserve of the humanities - such as poetry. She defends Keats against Richard Dawkins lament that he was trapped in a primitive romanticism and did not embrace the scientific understanding of the composition of the rainbow. Not so, she says. Imagination, awe, sensation are as real as the physical processes that create the rainbow. As she has said in another context, toothache is as real as a tooth.
I kept thinking of Michel Houellebecq's novel, Atomised, while reading this book. Houellebecq has become the only French author in a generation to find a foreign audience with his bitter alienated stories of deracinated characters who cannot find any pleasure in traditional family ways of living. Midgley tries to restore some of our holistic approach to life, an appreciation of our part in the grand scheme of existence, not just our mere billiard ball particle selves, our fleeting consciousness (described by Will Self in his novel My Idea of Fun as so many polystyrene chips) and tries to get back to a Bellovian sense of human existence as a great and marvellous thing.
The only weakness of this critique is what she makes of her conclusions when she arrives at them. She concludes the book with some pretty trite washy anti Thatcher bashing about the value of society and global warming. But even though she doesn't pursue her argument as much as I would have liked in constructing a viable mode of living in the modern world, I recommend this book as an excellent andidote to some of the more specious trendy philosophies pedalled by certain lauded modern thinkers that are read by lonely edgy young people eating pizza alone on dark evenings in their studio flats.
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the need for imagination
Rating (4)
Date: 2004-02-10
9 out of 9 customers found this reveiw helpful
Mary Midgley's book is mainly a critique of the relevance of atomism, that great legacy of the enlightenment that made us individuals and claimed that every aspect of the world could be reduced to collections of minute, interacting but passive particles. For her, like every viewpoint, this one perspective is built from its own very particular imagery, but while it produced great breakthroughs in some areas, it can't possibly describe all of the phenomena we perceive today. It has left us dangerously ill prepared to deal with the environmental and moral challenges we face three centuries after it first gained acceptance. A universal framework designed in the midst of religious oppression was bound to favor individual, self-contained, competing entities but how can it address the complexity we face in today's environmentally challenged, interrelated world?Midgley believes that different domains require distinct analytical frameworks and that atomism with its need for clearly quantifiable elemental particles is just one approach. It is not, for example, despite the valiant attempts of some, applicable to the consideration of culture or the study of history. Furthermore, by ignoring subjectivity all together, this singular viewpoint leaves no satisfactory place for consciousness or life in general, ideas that we all live by no matter how objective our beliefs. We are not passive automatons, self-contained slaves in an all-determining environment. Despite the now little believed notions of behaviorists, we're alive, distinct from any constituent atoms within us, part of a living earth and active participants in our own lives. My main disappointment with this work was not its effective exposition of the need to go beyond atomism and siblings but its shying away again and again from what that could mean, except for the brief description of the concept of Gaia and universal human rights that ended the book. I would have liked to hear more than allusions to the effective and thorough alternative to simplistic reduction, that grand approach that takes account of relationships and cooperation. Other methods get a mention too, those used in the study of history or literature but these too get short shrift. Given what dominates its pages, I think a better title may have been "the need for imagination" with a subtitle that stressed how obsolete the enlightenment's legacy now is. This book points to a need - it just doesn't go far enough in suggesting a solution. Finally, one reflection that no reader can avoid - she writes beautifully.
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"Mary" Philosophy
Rating (5)
Date: 2002-04-01
6 out of 9 customers found this reveiw helpful
Chief purpose of science is to explain things, make the world less of a black box. But should science be the only way to do this explanation? Should it also be the way we explain such non-physical entities as culture? Is art just an escapism from "cosmic hostility" and from Dawkins' selfish robots, are Shelly's unacknowledged legislators "entertaining self-deception" (John Cornwell: The Limitless Power of Science in _Nature's Imagination_)? What qualifies for science? Is Robert Graves' _Greek Myths_ not scientific, shall it be replaced by Memetics?How relevant in modern era it is to apply the extreme views (Lucretian atomism, Cartesian dualiaty) that were required to free us from the shackles of religion aeons ago? And are these views applicable to our daily life, life which is not made of atoms, quarks but of love, hate, home, office, pollution...? These questions are not ones that demand more "research" but ones that are indicative of what Mary calls conceptual emergencies. So when out of these emergencies scientists start claiming omnicompetence and give disturbing picture of human life and of this world, it is time to look at the thinking that governs scientists' (and philospohers') this view, and time to check if it is on the correct path. This, in short, what Mary's attempt is.
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