Fun and useful!

I *love* this book. I bought it because of a recommendation by another reader and it's everything they promised. It had me in fits of laughter and I started using the idioms immediately because the pictures and the explanations show you the circumstances where the idiom is appropriate. I surprised the French speakers I know by my sudden use of apt figurative language. It really is fun to be able to use these sayings. The cartoons are amusing and each one is followed by a dialogue where the saying is used so you can see how it will fit into a conversation. I couldn't stop using them but luckily the people I was addressing were tolerant and highly amused.

There are 101 idioms with cartoons, followed by a dialogue or a description. At the back are translations of the dialogues and a list of the idioms in alphabetical order and by key images. So, if you know you want to something to do with 'dogs' for example, you can look up dog and find the idioms associated with that image.

I can't recommend this highly enough. It helps you practise your French without even realising that's what you are doing. I'm intending to order the proverbs as well! it is a real bargain. It was worth that just for the laughter it brought.

Feed Their Minds

It is amazing just how often we under-estimate the young mind’s hunger for knowledge and their ability to understand. My 4 year old son is vey curious about the world around him, everything from planets to electricity.

We now read the ’stories’in this book on a daily basis and he always insists on ’just one more’. It is easy to read with complementary graphics and is therefore a great way to introduce them to facts. I would strongly recommend it for parents who find themselves providing information to their children.

The Ideal book for any student or teacher

This book is a fantastic book for anyone studying or anyone interested in psychology. It helps find the meanings to many complex words used in psychology,etc. Coming from a student of psychology i have found this book very helpful for essay work. This book has helped me find new words and the layout is easy to read and easy to find any key words

US Edition beware...

I also bought both the Antique and Collectables Guide as a pressie for my Father's birthday and both were the US Editions! So annoying that he didnt get his pressie and i've had to send them back. Can't find the UK editions...

Wow

Wow! What a fantastic resource. I'm using the encyclopedia to interpret my dreams but I'm also reading it like a book subject by subject and am learning so much about the wonderful world of dreams. I shall treasure this book for many, many years to come.

EVERYTHING you wanted to know about Star Wars (and probably more than you need to)

As I already own a lot of Star Wars books it now takes something pretty special to entice me to purchase something new - most SW-related topics have been exhaustively covered & even though I never thought I'd say it - I'm pretty much"all-Star-Wars'ed-out". That said, this"ultimate" edition looked a pretty neat addition to my collection and at around £10 looked good-value-for-money. What with it also being a DK release ,you always know you will get a quality product. Whether it be a travel book, film/tv tie-in or kids book - they're a quality publisher.

This particular book is a total study of EVERYTHING Star Wars, from the history of the universe, the events featured in the 6 films, the expanded universe (books, comics, games, etc) behind-the-scenes stuff & also pages dedictaed to the fans, the toys, it's success, etc. I'd find it hard to lay out the sheer volume of info contained in this book but Ryder Windham does so extremely well. It's beautifully laid out, full of great pictures, sketches & photo's and the accompanying text will be of interest whether you're a young fan or die-hard geek.

I wasn't sure whether to award the book 4 or 5 Stars simply because it's a topic that's so dear to my heart but eventually decided that you simply couldn't cram more into 160 pages for a RRP £15 & gave it top marks. Great purchase for any young fan or to simply add to the collection.

Very good but it is a little fragile

This book really is a joy. Every Marvelite who gets one will love it. It contains lots of stuff that old time fans will possibly already know about but this is the first time I have seem so many photos of Marvel and Timely staff members in one book. This book is as much about the company as it is the characters and is all the better for that. I love all the reproduction pencil sketches, stamps and cards etc they are very realistic replicas. As a Brit we never really got chance to see any of those things in real life so to actually hold them in my hand is a bit of a thrill. I feel this book will mostly appeal to older comic fans between the ages of 30 and 50 looking for a bit of nostalgia rather than small boys or young fans of superhero films and cartoons. I would go so far as to say that this book is actually due to the ring binding to fragile to handle for any child under 10 (it needs to be handled with a lot of care and only opened on a flat surface. Because of this I almost dropped a star in my rating and I would have given this book four stars. Since it has been discounted so heavily by Amazon though (at the time of writing this) It now has to in my opinion have the full five.

Good background information

My kids (8 and 5 year old) enjoy playing with Bionicles and have seen a couple of the films on DVD. It was difficult to follow how all the various characters were connected, that is until we got the encyclopedia. Now the whole Bionicle world makes a lot more sense and the kids enjoy playing with Bionicles even more, and creating their own stories around the"Mask of Life".

Excellent and comprehensive when it wants to be

Portrayed by some, including somewhat understandably the publishers, as 'the world's greatest cookery encyclopedia' this is a book which can justifiably try to claim that title. Whether it would win that title is debatable but it's certainly a strong candidate. It's excellent when it chooses to cover a subject but not comprehensive and not for the novice cook.

Cookery is just too large a subject to cover in a single volume so it's unreasonably to expect any single volume work to be encyclopedic so there are understandable gaps in Larousse's coverage of it's subject. This won't teach you how to cook from scratch, despite containing descriptions of many cooking techniques and recipes, but this is a reference work. This is the book you turn to after you've learned the basics of how to cook.

If you have reached that point of being confident in the kitchen and want to get more from what you've learned so far this is a book for you. If you're a gastronome and want a reference to tell you more about the background of what you're eating then this is for you. If you're just learning to cook and are looking for one book to cover everything then you're probably better off with Delia.

For those who do want this as a reference then remember it is excellent but not comprehensive. When it chooses to cover a subject it is very good but what it chooses to cover is a bit random, for example the entry on croissants describes their history, the basic process to make them and gives half a dozen different recipes and variations but the entry for danish pastry rattles off a quick one paragraph description and mentions nothing more. Also the indexing is a bit disorganised so there is an entry for black pudding but nothing for white pudding, on the other hand though it has entries for boudin blanc but not boudin noir! The gaps in its coverage reflect its slightly francophile emphasis but the indexing is just one of those things that mean without a little food knowledge, in that case knowing that boudin noir and black pudding are pretty much the same thing, this won't be that useful.

This has a home in my kitchen as it sits among thirty or forty other cook books. If I was to just have three or four on the shelf then it wouldn't be one of those books but it is worth the money once you are buying you second or third set of cookbooks.

Recycled Ben Elton

Reads like a Ben Elton stand-up routine from the 80s and yes, it does manage to get the term"Thatcherite" in there.
This could be on the list of amusing stocking-filler type books but it's left wing bias gets tedious after a while and generally it reads like a poor attempt at"Grumpy Old Men" or"Clarkson".
Having said that, there are one or two uses of the"C" word that made me laugh :)

Dissappointed

I had hoped for a wide variety catalog of things to do, so I was dissappointed to find only a few ideas in the book, and that they didn't leave a lot of room for fantasy. Thin content blown up to be something big.

Superb little book

This is a great little book. You get the feeling that the author has either kept the species written about, or has paid attention to other veteran keepers. It's one of those books you look to keep on the coffee table; it's a joy to browse through.

Well worth the money.

Cannot be recommended highly enough

I bought the Oxford First Encyclopedia for my six-and-a-half year old daughter for Christmas 2005. It has been the one present that she has consistently and continually gone back to over this year, so I'm buying one for her cousin!

The wording has been well thought out and is just right for kids of around six to about ten or eleven, so the encyclopedia certainly has shelf life. Simple subjects are made interesting and difficult subjects are well explained through the use of some very stylish illustrations, photographs and diagrams.

The book has been very supportive as it covers many of the subjects taught under the national curriculum at the ages I mention above. It's also a good, solid hardback, so it has survived the school bag for nearly a year.

High recommended.

Animals of the world at your fingertips!

This is the ideal book for all those youngsters out there that love animals! It gives reference to animals from all over the world and there habitat and feeding requirements! It also gives info on there behaviour and ability to camoflage themseves. The great thing about this book is it's ability to find the animal your looking for easily with it's A to Z format. Give this book to any animal lover and they will be reading for hours! The info you can find out about the animal kingdom from this Encyclopedia is outstanding. But then it is published by Dorling Kindersley! My friends daughter has this book and has read nothing since! She is inspired especially by the excellent photography.With clear, colourful pictures of the animals, you can't help but read up about the animals! When you do, the information also lives up to your expectations. This is an ideal book to find out almost everything you need to know about animals from little birds to big elephants and a lot more! This book is also perfect for topics at school concerning animals. The Teachers will be impressed by there wealth of information on a particular species! So, over all a particularly excellent Encyclopedia that you just shouldn't be without!

When Money Isn't Enough

Mr. Wallace has produced a great read that is interesting from a historical prospective while it harpoons the very wealthy whose pursuit of money is no longer satisfying. Nope, these folks have to pursue a type of collectable that they cannot have any provenance for, which experts in the field can only hope to guess at what the bottle contains. Wine that is a century younger than the bottle on the book cover might at best be"recognizable as wine", unless of course it has become an ingredient for salad dressing.

The central charlatan in this tale is a master at exploiting the wishes of collectors and even the experts that should know better. Or perhaps that do know better and just let their own egos persuade them that in spite of zero evidence the product is real, and worse, valid sources that explain there is nothing to suggest the wine's legitimacy, never slow down. On with the auction!

The book is not just about human nature and its dimmer moments, there is a great deal of information on wine production, wine history and enough wine tasting descriptions for the most avid connoisseur. Or if you find the whole field a bit pretentious and tedious you might still be entertained by the likes of what follows"the art of drinking the very oldest rarities required an extra degree of connoisseurship-almost a kind of necrophilia".

I look forward to many more from the pen of Mr. Wallace. This is a very good offering that should find a wide audience whether you are an avid wine drinker or you feel the 18th Amendment was a great idea.