The stories are: Death of an Old Man, An African story, A Piece of Cake, Madame Rosette, Katina, Yesterday was Beautiful, They Shall not Grow, Beware of the Dog, Only This, and Someone Like You. These ten stories by the greatest of story tellers were all written in the 40's, and out of the experiences that the man himself had. This is definitely NOT Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory, but rather tales of the unexpected with WW2 aircraft and pilots. Roald was a pilot himself, and here the voice of painful experience comes through.
Set in the 1950s, The Gift by Danielle Steel is a touching novel about two separate families who meet and are changed by a special gift. It begins with the story of Tommy Whittaker and his family. They have a beautiful daughter named Annie, whose love changed the family into happiness and cheer. When her senseless death arises, the family is crushed; the loving marriage starts to unravel and Tommy begins to fend for himself, going out to eat by himself and rarely talking with his parents.
In this funny, all-too-human picture book, Mercer Mayer's famous Little Critter dreams of the day when he will be big enough to go to first grade, dial phone numbers by himself, camp out in the backyard, or walk to the corner store. By the end of his energetic daydreaming, Little Critter is so tired he has to go to bed. As he himself admits, "I'm not bigger yet." It's a fine and familiar catalogue of what young children yearn for.
The story, set in 1889, mainly consists of a London hydraulic engineer, Mr. Victor Hatherley, recounting strange happenings of the night before, first to Dr. Watson who dresses the stump where Mr. Hatherley's thumb has been cut off, and then to Sherlock Holmes himself. Hatherley is visited in his office by an odd, suspicious man who identifies himself as Colonel Lysander Stark. He offers Hatherley a job at a country house to examine a hydraulic press used, as Stark explains, to compress fuller's earth into bricks, but Stark warns Hatherley to hold his tongue about the lucrative job, which will apparently pay 50 guineas.
![IX The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb [UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOK WITH TEXT]](http://englishtips.org/uploads/posts/2012-05/1336001357_1174074427_sherlock.jpg "IX The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb [UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOK WITH TEXT]")
