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Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful & Useful
Review: An ingenious dictionary that will help you learn to describe shapes, colors, animals, landscape, people, and more. If you've ever been stumped for the precise term to describe what you're observing or imagining, this book may be the one you need. How many words can express "grayish blue"? What adjective will define an animal with a weak sense of smell? What do you call a projecting lower jaw? How many ways can you say that something is egg-shaped? You'll find the answers here. As examples of how to use the book's terminology, there are hundreds of descriptive passages from English-language writers, including such diverse authors as Dickens, Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, Melville, Zane Grey, Mary Shelley, Norman Mailer, Alice Walker, Darwin, John McPhee, Daphne du Maurier, Nabokov, etc. etc.
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Summary: Technical: Utterly Lacking in Creative Invention
Review: How about this for the sole entry under "having turned in feet: pigeon-toed"? The entire volume is filled with inanities of this type. One would have to be pretty low on the vocabulary food chain to be incapable of readily summoning to mind almost any of the synonyms listed in this book. Also, the quotations sacrifice the sublime for the politically correct, and are therefore equally lacking in excellence. Don't buy it unless you are in the lower 20% of the populace in verbal facility, for you will be wasting your money.
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Summary: Technical: Utterly Lacking in Creative Invention
Review: How about this for the sole entry under "having turned in feet: pigeon-toed"? The entire volume is filled with inanities of this type. One would have to be pretty low on the vocabulary food chain to be incapable of readily summoning to mind almost any of the synonyms listed in this book. Also, the quotations sacrifice the sublime for the politically correct, and are therefore equally lacking in excellence. Don't buy it unless you are in the lower 20% of the populace in verbal facility, for you will be wasting your money.
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Summary: Purely physical
Review: Lots of fun and useful for physical descriptions of animal, vegetable and mineral. Not appropriate for writers looking for inspiration in abstracts, emotions or thought.
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Summary: Ummm...the best writer's resource...
Review: No book will ever come close to helping you think of those anoying little things you sometimes forget when writing. I heard even Stephen King has a copy on his shelf.Felecia
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Summary: A Must for Writers
Review: One of the best reference works I've come across. This book will give you almost every word from colors, to shapes, to patterns, to terrain, to architecture, to colors, to textures--all of which is supplemented with excellent examples ranging from the classics to such modern writers as Nicholson Baker, proving that not only does Mr. Grambs have good taste, but that he's well read as well.
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Summary: Better then a Thesaurus--By Far
Review: The reason I like this reference so much is that if I don't find exactly what I'm looking for, I may very well find something I like better. Further, this is the kind of reference you can actually read. Open this book to any chapter (segment) on, say, "hair." You'll find several quotes about "hair" that are entertaining and may stir your own creative juices before you even get to the part that lists adjectives for all kinds of-- ahem-- tresses, locks, strands, shocks, hanks, coils, tendrils, curls, ringlets or swirls...As you can see, this offering gives an author an idea of how the best might have handled the same problem she faces. Many are mightily amusing.
If you don't just keep reading instead of handling the problem at hand, you might eventually find adjectives for some 96 possible "hair situations" and one of them will likely be exactly what you need.
There are usually several descriptive words under each entry. So for "oiled hair" you will find, "greased, slicked, slick, pomaded , brilliantined, plastered, pasted." You can choose one, let one speak to you so you can come up with a simile or metaphor, or move on down the list to see if there's something more to your liking. When I get into a writing snit, it's often this book to my rescue. Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of "This is the Place"
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Summary: A must have on every writers' shelf
Review: This book is very comprehensive on its contents, arranged in a very easy to use manner. In particular, I find the excerpts taken from various novels very useful. It is very important to find the right word to describe something, but how to lace the word into a sentence is also important too. For example, under the section describing face shapes, excerpts are taken from novels to show how published authors describe face shapes of their characters, thus giving ideas on writing styles.
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Summary: Excellent reference, though slightly outlandish content
Review: This is a synonym-finder on steroids, a great idea. The main advantage is an expanded word-useage demonstration (compared to a regular thesaurus), which gives a much better feel for context and slight semantical differences between otherwise synonymous terms. I've found this book very helpful, and I've quickly grown used to consulting it nearly every time I write anything; it sits on my table, dog-eared and with a multitude of post-it notes sticking out of it. A couple of wishes for the future, though: first, some of the suggested options there are too far out, using them will mean forcing a dictionary in the hand of your prospective reader. Not necessarily a flaw though, just be selective, aware of context and target audience of your writing. Now, a real flaw: no index. Truly, a book of this kind must have an index, after all, sometimes you even know the word you're after but need an extra usage check, finding it w/o an index is a task more onerous than I'd like; sticky notes can be used as a palliative, but why make it necessary in the first place? Another obvious wish is for the author to produce a computerized version -- nothing fancy, just like any searchable dictionary on CD, or, perhaps simply this very same book in the electronic form with hyperlinks will do. All in all, a tasty and worthwhile little book; recommended.
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Summary: a useful book, but not perfect
Review: This is a very useful book, containing brief excerpts from literary works on the left-hand pages, and lists of words broken down in categories on the right. It is interesting both to read - the excerpts are all excellent examples of descriptive writing - and to find the right word. However, I don't give it 5 stars because it has no index. To find a word, you need to look first to the chapter (main categories) then read through all the sub-categories.
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