title: Peculiar Beauty: Three Centuries of Charmingly Absurd Advice
author: Bonnie Downing
description: This compilation of personal beauty advice dating from the late 1700s to today, though entertaining, fails to amount to anything greater than its superficial parts. Editor Downing gleans random bits from years of tracking what she calls an "underappreciated genre" and packages them into short chapters with witty titles like "Meat, Grease, and Booze" and "Near Death Experiences." In a slim introduction, she writes, "I hope you'll laugh out loud when you read suggestions to wash your hair in gasoline, or to add spinach leaves to the bathbut really, is any of it stranger than Botox?" From inspirational writing by familiar beauty icons like Elizabeth Taylor ("If you think a picture of me as Miss Lard will inspire you, go ahead and put it on your refrigerator") to vintage avowals by lesser-knowns ("We might as well admit there's a dash of hussy in all ladies"), readers are bombarded with the timeless notion that a woman's goal should be to look her best at all times and under all circumstances. But with few insightful cultural observations or historical explanations (one sidebar notes that the "raw food" fad dates to the 1800s; another tells the origin of Vaseline), this assemblage is little more than amusingexcept when it's just plain disturbing. Photos. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: With A Tangled Skien
  
  Book 3 of the Incarnations of Immortality
  
  **Piers Anthony** ****
  
  ****
  
  ****
  
  **Contents**
  
   _Chapter 1 - THE BONNIE BOY_
  
   _Chapter 2 - COLLEGE_
  
   _Chapter 3 - SHOOTING DEER_
  
   _Chapter 4 - CLOTHO_
  
   _Chapter 5 - VOID_
  
   _Chapter 6 - GENEALOGY_
  
   _Chapter 7 - CHANGES_
  
   _Chapter 8 - SECOND LOVE_
  
   _Chapter 9 - TWIN MOONS_
  
   _Chapter 10 - LACHESIS_
  
   _Chapter 11 - TANGLE_
  
   _Chapter 12 - BLOOD_
  
   _Chapter 13 - COUNTERPLOY_
  
   _Chapter 14 - BRIBE_
  
   _Chapter 15 - MAZE SQUARED_
  
   _Chapter 16 - ANSWERS_
  
   _AUTHOR'S NOTE_
  
    
  
   **Chapter 1 - THE BONNIE BOY**
  
  Niobe was the most beautiful young woman of her generation, with hair like
  buckwheat honey and eyes like the sky on a misty summer morning and a figure
  that was better imagined than described. But she had her trifling faults, such
  as an imperious nature fostered by the ability to use her beauty to get her
  own way, and she was of only average intellect. Also, though she did not know
  it, she had been marked for a m