julie a.

Funny and Personal

Revisado: 02-03-25

This book is one big rant of things that drive Randy crazy! It is funny and personal. There are also some amazing creative parts, like the biography of the letter A! I think listening to Randy read his book is much more entertaining than just reading it silently. It's great to have his unique voice to bring the book to life!

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Honest and hilarious!

Revisado: 09-25-24

Sarah Cooper is one of the most honest and vulnerable writers I've ever read, and I have an English degree. She is hysterically funny! She talks about things no one else talks about, and that makes the book incredibly relatable.

Self-deprecation is often funny, and Sarah takes it to a new level! She is obviously multi-talented, but makes herself seem very normal and down to earth. I root for her! The only other work of hers I have seen are the Trump lip syncs, but I think they are absolutely brilliant. I hope I can track down some of the other things that she has done. I never had a corporate job, but I'm looking forward to reading How to Succeed Without Hurting Men's Feelings!

Please keep writing, Sarah! You have a gift for it!

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A Book to be Read and Reread Throughout One's Lifetime

Revisado: 06-16-24

It's the Lord of the Rings! This book has been read by millions. And probably millions, like me, have read the books so many times we've lost count. But we never tire of it! To read the trilogy is to live it. To see the films is to look at something, and enjoy the scenery and other visual aspects. But to see the films is not to be a part of the fellowship or the individual journeys of the characters. To do this, we must read or listen to the story. Each book has so much depth and description that the films could never duplicate these essential elements. There just isn't time. Before seeing the films or after seeing the films, dive into the story and live it, as a reader or listener. Read or listen to the books in your own time and become a part of the story, step by step.

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Should be Mandatory Reading for Everyone

Revisado: 05-07-24

There are still many people in our world who believe that women are substandard in every way. It's more about grabbing power on every level than it is about gender. People oppress other people because of some characteristic-- gender, ethnicity, class-- so they can control everything. It's greed. But the more people who understand that anybody could be an important person, the better our society would function. This book would help anybody overcome misogyny or chauvinism. That's why it's so important to know that intellectual genius can occur in anyone regardless of their gender.

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Life of A Child Star

Revisado: 02-27-23

Forever Young by Hayley Mills

Like many girls growing up in the '60s, I was an enormous fan of Haley Mills and saw every film of hers that I was able to see. I was too young to see her 1st few films on the big screen, but I saw them released in episodes on the Wonderful World of Disney and have seen them many times since.

Haley knows how to tell a great story! Her recall of specific events and details is amazing, likely with the help of detailed journals. Her honesty and self debasement is charming and often so funny I frequently laughed out loud!

It's so surprising and humorous to hear her point of view as a child actor on those gorgeous sets working with hugely famous co–stars. She always treats them with high respect and plays down her own part in her films. But Haley never indulges in false modesty. She just tells the truth about what her life and her work was like during those years as a Disney child star.

Haley also writes about her personal life. Beyond being a child star, she writes about being a child. She writes about her relationships with her family and friends. She writes about her boarding school during the brief times she was able to return once her career started.

Her fans likely consisted mainly of girls , although The Parent Trap appealed to boys as well because the issues and difficulties of divorce are universal. Now her fans are fully grown adults and grandparents. I still adore the films and love to watch them. The part in The Parent Trap when Maureen O'Hara, as the mom, suddenly realizes that her daughter Susan is there with her, not having seen her for 12 years, always brings tears to my eyes. It does so even today. That's mainly from Maureen O'Hara's acting, but Haley Mills delivered her lines with a fierce realism. The the two of them are a Tour de Force in that scene!

In Haley Mills' autobiography, Haley tells stories that are very honest, very funny, extremely interesting, sometimes terribly embarrassing, very surprising in many parts, and entertaining from beginning to end! I'm so happy to have read it, and I recommend it to anyone.

It is the story of a girl who never planned on being an actress. She got her first role in the gritty film Tiger Bay, through her father's agent. Her performance in that film was a huge screen test, and when Walt Disney saw it, he forgot the 100 girls he had tested for Pollyanna because he knew he had found the girl he needed. And in only her 2nd film, Haley Mills was the STAR, the main actor. and in The Parent Trap, Haley literally works twice as hard as any of the actors in the film. She deserved her fame! It is an extraordinary story. I hope you will listen to her tell it. Like her films, I didn't want it to end.

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An Engaging and Entertaining Book!

Revisado: 01-31-23

Middlemarch is a portrait of men, women, and social issues of the early 19th century. George Elliott wrote with an intellectual, colorful, and knowledgeable style about the people in her fictitious village. Do not be daunted by the length. The book is engaging from the beginning to the end. The narrator, Maureen O'brien, makes it easy to determine who is speaking with the vast array of her vocal portrayals. I read this book in college and enjoyed it even more many decades later!

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Fact and Fiction

Revisado: 12-30-22

Fact and fiction are woven together in this engaging biography of Alf Wight AKA James Harriet the veterinarian. The author describes the stories and characters we are so familiar with in books , television, and films and then provides the factual realities. The narrator uses genuine sounding accents to quote the many sources used to get the information for this biography. The author describes Alf Wights's entire life from beginning to end with excellent pacing and fascinating accompanying stories, including answers to many questions we might have about Wight.

I highly recommend this book as it is both informative and entertaining. It describes Alf Wight's life with the love and cherishing we all feel for this most famous veterinarian in the world.

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Still Waiting

Revisado: 08-21-22

This is a fairly short book and worth listening to. It is a good summary of the projects and programs which have attempted to evaluate UFO reports over the past few decades. It's worth making a list of those projects and listening to the books that describe those in more detail.

This book also does a good job of summarizing how the government has been dismissing or ignoring the wealth of evidence of UFOs in our country and in other countries. It describes how there are huge discrepancies between the evidence and the reports and the conclusions that the government draws based on those reports.

The author has a great deal of optimism about full disclosure in 2020. Of course we didn't get that. We got covid instead. All this while Naval and Air Force pilots are chasing Tic Tacs all around our coastlines. And Naval captains don't know what to do about Tic Tacs staring them in the face so frequently. The government continues its strategy of ignoring everything, despite the abundance of evidence and sightings made by highly experienced members of the armed forces.

So, for the review of the projects over the decades, I give the book three stars out of five. But I think it's important to go back and read the books written by the people who made those reports, such as Edward Ruppelt. But one should also be aware that the government made him change the last few chapters of his book.

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Sting's Life by Sting

Revisado: 08-01-22

This is a book worth listening to. It's especially nice that he narrates it. I like autobiographies.

There are no major surprises with this story, but it's interesting. I like that he has had an education and can speak about the activities in his life with intelligence, and the musical accompaniments are well done.

I think the book is a little bit too short. I would have liked to have heard his thoughts on a few more subjects, especially his songs.

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Excellent History EXCEPT for the Last 3 Chapters

Revisado: 08-01-22

I'm going to address the last three chapters first. Ruppelt was forced to REWRITE these chapters to reflect the government's intent to deny the existence of anything in the atmosphere or beyond that could have come from another species in space. I got that information from another writer, Lieutenant Colonel Wendell Stevens, a colleague and contemporary of Ruppelt, who wrote the book UFO Chronicles: Aliens on Earth. In his book he recommends reading Rupplelt's book, keeping in mind that the last three chapters were rewritten to suit the government, not the science or the facts.

It's shocking how the tone of the last three chapters is so skeptical and even mocking, including nonsense reports of people talking with aliens. These tabloid accounts do not belong in a detailed and scientific report. They were included to delegitimize the report as a whole, something Ruppelt would not do unless he was forced or even threatened.

The first 15 chapters are an essential history of reports of objects in the sky, many of which were never identified. It is good to read the reports and see how many of the objects were proven to be planets or meteors or weather balloons, especially the giant skyhook balloons which can go over 80,000 ft. It's important to investigate reports of anything unusual in the sky.

Ruppelt's book is exhaustively scientific and fascinating. It is surprisingly funny at times, especially his sarcasm and irony! He wasn't trying to be funny. It was his exasperation of people who challenged the reports of qualified observers which had already dismissed simpler and earthly explanations. Many government officials would simply say the object was such and such, even after that idea had been disproved by experts in the fields of astronomy, meteorology, engineering, etc.

Of course, the government of the United States has shut down any investigations of UFOS (now called UAP'S, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), even with the Tic Tacs staring down our naval ships and Air Force jets. They exist across the globe and demonstrate properties we will never duplicate in our lifetimes. These objects have been seen, photographed, and videoed closely and irrefutably by members of the Navy and Air Force. These objects can travel at unbelievable speeds in the air, underwater, and in space. We don't even know if they are crewed. Members of the armed forces are beyond frustrated that the government will not acknowledge these alien crafts nor considered them a national security threat.

But there is another book which gets into the essential reasons. Lieutenant Commander Wendell Stevens wrote the book UFO Chronicles: Aliens on Earth. Based on his sober reports, I believe the US government has been working cooperatively with species from other planets for decades but doesn't want to share any information they have received from other species.
Simple greed: how earthly and how human.

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