thanx Waiting, I've got a response which looks like correct: it's apricot brown rot! Here is a link that might be useful: brown rot

If you were willing to comprise and get the American Cream instead of the Luce di Luna (and others were as well), it would not be that more expensive. Companies will charge what people are willing to pay. In addition to demand for material, pricing is also related to the availability of the material. Stone is a naturally mined material with a long lead time so just ordering more is not always the answer (we wish it was.) If everyone wants it there is not as much to go around and costs will be higher. Prices for different granite vary the same way prices for different quartzite vary. Though I don't know detail about the general demand for LDL, but I live in the Boston area and called at least 8 distributors and only found one lot of Luce di Luna in late winter this year. We decided on Super White in the end (which I have had mixed feedback on whether it is quartzite or granite.) We were able to find several different slabs to choose from, but it was still more expensive than other things (particularly in my case when I was asking for a specific slab.) Once you have your "one and only" slab you loss much negotiating power. I would suggest calling around to different fabricators to see if they have or can get Luce di Luna and letting them know you are getting competitive bids. Even if they are all sourcing form the same distributor you may be able to save some money on the fabrication side for those more interested in your business. Good luck.

Eureka!! I found the information! From an obit. in the Washington Post June 4, 2011 "Harry Bernstein, memoirist who wrote of childhood of deprivation, dies at 101 Harry Bernstein, who caused a literary sensation when he emerged from anonymity in his 90s to write two devastating memoirs that explored his childhood of squalor, abuse and anti-Semitism, died June 3 at his daughter's home in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was 101. The cause of death was not reported. "The Invisible Wall" drew favorable comparisons to Frank McCourt�s Pulitzer Prize-winning "Angela�s Ashes," about that author's hardscrabble upbringing in Ireland. Reviewing "The Invisible Wall" in the New York Times, William Grimes called it "a world of pain and prejudice, evoked in spare, restrained prose that brilliantly illuminates a time, a place and a family struggling valiantly to beat impossible odds." In "The Dream," Mr. Bernstein's follow-up memoir, he traced his family's move to Chicago in 1922. In reviews, critics described Mr. Bernstein as a storyteller of quiet, heartbreaking power. Author Juliet Wittman, writing in The Washington Post, said of "The Dream" that "beneath the poignant descriptions of places and times past, beneath the rising and falling patterns of these characters' lives, we hear at Wordsworth called "the still sad music of humanity." For much of his life, Mr. Bernstein's writing career was steady but unremarkable. He critiqued and summarized manuscripts for film studios in the 1930s and 1940s once giving thumbs down to Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" as "just another historical romance." Later, he edited trade magazines and continued to publish articles and short stories. In 1981, he wrote a novel, "The Smile," about a fashion model. It received little attention, although he joked that he knew it sold at least one copy because of a letter he received from a reader. When his memoirs were published, Mr. Bernstein faced some skepticism from critics who said he could not possibly recall entire conversations from his childhood. He insisted he did, as they had been seared into his brain with photographic clarity. As much as he tried to forget the past, Mr. Bernstein did not extinguish the burning hatred he said that he felt for his father, who made his mother's harsh life even worse. She died at 65 of malnutrition in an unheated tenement in the Bronx, N.Y. After her funeral, he never saw his father again. "He wept when she died. That's the only good thing I can say about him," Mr. Bernstein told USA Today. He dedicated "The Invisible Wall" to his mother, "who gave us so much and received so little. Can this book make up for it? Can anything?" � The Washington Post Company

lacey, the books by F J Macdonald are very gentle reads about his simple life growing up on a remote croft on Harris (it's worth looking it up on a map just to see how far it is from the centre of population). I remember he describes his Grandfather, the Kirk Elder, who lived in the 'town' of Tarbert, having the first flushing WC installed and soon wondering what had happened to the wonderful oyster harvest in the sea-loch. The price of progress! I think JFM must have been born at the end of WW1 or early '20's and his story takes him up to WW11 . . .hence the Lysander . . . He used to give talks on the BBC and when I read his work I could 'hear' his Highland lilt coming through. 'Scots' or 'Scottish' are fine. I don't think 'Scotch' is correct; it's a drink. I can't help you on your second request (unless it's Robert Louis Stevenson and the 'Kidnapped' stories) but the Abe books site below might jog your memory. Here is a link that might be useful: Some books about the Highlands