detectives

Forensic Science Detective's Toolkit
$49.95
Develop observation and problem-solving skills using the same equipment and techniques as real detectives. Kids get in-depth with 17 experiments that show how to locate and handle evidence, test for counterfeit currency, analyze hair and soil samples, secure fingerprints and footprints and create a crime scene report complete with sketches.

Detective Hat & Pipe
$3.99
...you can't beat the price of this set. My mystery-loving daughter is thrilled with it! She even wears the hat as a fashion statement sometimes, and gets many compliments on it! I don't see it as an educational toy, exactly, but she did learn that the hat is a deerstalker and the pipe is a calabash pipe! Those are pretty good vocabulary words for an eight-year-old.

The Savage Detectives: A Novel
$15.00
Every so often you come upon a book that you can only diminish the more you try to explain what it's about. "The Savage Detectives" is such a book. Ostensibly it's about a couple of wild young poets who revive an old literary movement and go in search of its forebears. Ultimately they grow older, become increasingly disillusioned, never attain their once-lofty aspirations, heading straight for neglect and oblivion...and yet through everything they still hold on to a belief--a faith, if you will--in poetry and revolution.

Okay, that's, in a nutshell, what the novel is "about."

But the experience of reading "The Savage Detectives" is one that cannot be described in words other than those Bolano himself used to create this passionate and poetic adventure of heart, mind, and soul. This is a book that follows two characters--through the eyes of a dozen or so other characters--who take literature seriously, as a matter of life and death, not as a mere pastime, not as simple entertainment. If you don't share something of the same conviction, you're likely not to get the point of this novel; actually, you're likely to conclude that there isn't any point to it at all.

This is a novel that cannot be contained, nor can it contain itself. If it's difficult to say precisely what it's about, that's in good part because it's about everything--about life and death, about love and art, about beauty and squalor, corruption and violence, humanity and inhumanity. "The Savage Detectives" has the tone and authority of a summing up of all that Bolano had seen and thought in his abbreviated life--a message he was desperate to get down, if not in the most symmetrical of forms, than in a far more honest, if messy, explosion of urgency.

This novel throbs with life and intensity--it manages to be both unbearably sad and irresistibly inspiring. Bolano writes as if he's running only a step or two in front of the burning fuse, which, as it turns out, he was. In the end, though, we all share the same fate. And it seems a good part of Bolano's intent to get us to realize, viscerally, as his fictional "visceral realist" poets do, that time is short and the world is big. Let's live while we can.

It's tempting to call "The Savage Detectives" the best book I've read all year, but such an assertion would no doubt be suspect because of the fact that it's the most recent book I've read. It is, however, at the very least, among the best books I've read in this or any year.

Take the negative reviews of "The Savage Detectives" under advisement. So many of them complain precisely about those things that make this novel so unique and so powerful. Like his even more ambitious "2666," "The Savage Detectives" simply isn't everyone's favorite slice of pie. There are people, after all, who hate coconut custard. Go figure.

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency)
$13.95
The book came in excellent comdition. i just love this whole series by the author.
I plan on purchasing the rest very soon.