Books about Meanies from Amazon.com

Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose." When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras.

The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies's Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God. --Tim Appelo.
Price: $3.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Every young person will need this book at some time in his or her life! A parent-child resource book, How to Handle Bullies, Teasers and Other Meanies covers

*annoying name calling,
*vicious prejudice,
*explosive anger,
*dangerous situations, and
*causes of difficult behavior.

It contains more than twelve ways for melting meanness. It uses dozens of examples and practice exercises to teach a comic approach to handling cruelty. It shows young people how to put spiritual truths in to action. It gives parents, teachers, and counselors a method to help young people help themselves with an approach that goes far beyond assertiveness in its mastery of meanness..
Price: $4.62 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The antidote to Eats, Shoots and Leaves—an uproarious and very American language book for those who are tired of getting pulled over by the grammar police

What do suicidal pandas, doped-up rock stars, and a naked Pamela Anderson have in common? They’re all a heck of a lot more interesting than reading about predicate nominatives and hyphens. June Casagrande knows this and has invented a whole new twist on the grammar book. Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies is a laugh-out-loud funny collection of anecdotes and essays on grammar and punctuation, as well as hilarious critiques of the self-appointed language experts.

Chapters include:
• I’m Writing This While Naked—The Oh-So Steamy Predicate Nominative
• Semicolonoscopy—Colons, Semicolons, Dashes, and Other Probing Annoyances
• I’ll Take “I Feel Like a Moron” for $200, Alex—When to Put Punctuation Inside Quotation Marks
• Snobbery Up with Which You Should Not Put Up—Prepositions
• Is That a Dangler in Your Memo or Are You Just Glad to See Me?
• Hyphens—Life-Sucking, Mom-and-Apple-Pie-Hating, Mime-Loving, Nerd- Fight-Inciting Daggers of the Damned

Casagrande delivers practical and fun language lessons not found anywhere else, demystifying the subject and taking it back from the snobs. In short, it’s a grammar book people will actually want to read—just for the fun of it..
Price: $7.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $9.67 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The Complete Idiot's Guide(r) to Bike Maintenance and Repair provides recreational cyclists with the "do-it-yourself" means to maintain and service their own bikes without having to pay someone else to do the dirty work. Rather than spanning the entire field of bicycling, this book focuses on those things readers need to know in order to keep their bikes safe and trouble-free-- including, bike basics, workings, maintenance before and after riding, tools and accessories and common repairs.

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Price: $9.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This book has everything a weaver needs to know about weaving rag rugs, from basic information to drafts for 20 traditional two- and four-shaft patterns..
Price: $28.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]