Avery Brooks Books

I liked this book because this book was about fighting crime and it was a comic. I like comic books because they are easier to read than other books.

The story was about a girl who gets in a fight with a guy at high school. Then a guy comes and saves her and she gets amazing spider powers. She becomes a hunter with those amazing spider powers.

A reader who likes comic books would like to read this book because comic books have a lot of action in them. People who like Spider Man/Girl comic books would like to read this book. If you like fiction books with a lot of action in them and a lot of fighting crime then you would like to read this book. If you are an adult then this would be a great book for you son/daughter

I read this book on Kindle a couple of months ago. I remember watching the mini series as a kid but had never read the book. I'm not going to go into the literary aspects because that has been covered, in it's good and bad points already. I will say I'm glad I've read it. I won't consider it a completely accurate history lesson, but it does make a person think past normal boundaries. This book is formatted well for Kindle, it had no formatting issues. The fact I read it on Kindle was "handy" because I could look up tribal phrases in the dictionary, or wiki with little effort and go straight back to reading.

Love reading this book after so many years! It reminds me that all men deserve dignity and repect. Also, freedom is not free. We all in one way or another has paid a price for freedom!

Book is in perfect condition as described by seller and arrived in the time stated. I recommend ordering from this seller.

Almost finshed with book I also bought DVDS but wanted to read first. About 900 pages seems too much, but I am relly suprised that I am just about through. I would recommend this book

I love Roots and think the whole world should read it. It's an important and vital book about American history, family history, and triumph over hardship. I loved Roots the first time I read it twenty years ago, and I love it still, having just finished it yesterday, BUT...

1) If only Alex Haley hadn't plagiarized whole sections of the book (see Wikipedia's article on the author Harold Courlander)

2) If only Haley really HAD been related to Kunta Kinte (genealogists state he consciously perpetrated a hoax)

3) If only Juffure really WAS Haley's ancestral village (evidence suggests that the griot from modern Juffure with "memories" of Kunta Kinte's disappearance in 1767 was coached about what to "remember")

I found these fabrications depressing. And what's so sad is that I believe Haley had no need to lie and cheat, because he's really a top-notch storyteller.

This aside, though, I have a few other critical comments.

1) The book begins a slow descent into petering out after Kunta Kinte exits. The characters become increasingly wooden and one-dimensional. Kunta is great, Kizzy is good, Chicken George is fair, and everyone and almost everything after that is forgettable.

2) The book lauds having tons of children, mindlessly, and fails to criticize parents who have children and cannot provide for them. Haley makes it seem that having children and passing on the family name, no matter what horror the child risks getting subjected to, is the noblest of goals. I disagree! It sounds crass to say that slaves shouldn't have had children, but I hold all parents, slaves or not (rape victims being an exception), responsible when they knowingly bring children into a world of hell. (And Chicken George - a neglectful parent, to say the least - bringing 8 children into slavery? Nothing admirable there!)

It was a good book but I wanted a surprise ending but it never came lol.

This complex love affair is very true-to-life, and though the characters may not have the baggage couples in most stories do, you'll be riveted.

work to date. I first read this book in 1994, and in the year 2007, I still consider it to be her BEST stuff!!!

I loved both Franklin and Zora. The complex love affair between the two characters is very real and it played out nicely throughout the book. I particulary loved having a front row seat to their individual thoughts as their relationship progressed.

Their story is a true testament of how easy it is to lose yourself in another when in love.

This book was one of the first that I had read that portrayed a reasonable male-female relationship without much of the baggage that seems follow many of these relationships. The male had problems dealing with ghosts of the past, the female had problems with her ghosts. Its nice that it has since become a movie. I think the book is a much better journey than the movie.

I love all of Terry's books. She tells it like it is from a woman's perspective.Books are always better than the movie. You get so much more out of it. I own the movie and it wasn't all that, not like the book.The movie could have been much better than it was.Waiting to Exhale and Stella were good movies as were the books. Those two movie adaptations are the only exceptions. If you want to enjoy a good read, kick up your heels and laugh, as I enjoy with her other novels, read this by Terry! She will keep you in stitches!

The book "Sounder" was very depressing and at times annoying. It has no main characters besides Sounder and the boy. There are sad things in the story like when the boy's dad dies and a month later Sounder dies. The police were not nice either to the visitors. Once the boy went to the police to see his dad. His mom baked a cake to bring and the polic threw it on the ground and told him to pick it up. A guard threw a piece of metal and injured the boy's hand too. The only nice thing in the story is a school teacher that teaches the boy how to read and write. The ending left me sad and wishing for a happier story. However, all stories don't have to have a happy ending, if you're looking for a sad and realistic book this could be for you.

Sounder, the dog, stole my heart, I cried so much! But it was defiantly a good book!People are saying it isn't a good book only because they don't give other people names and that the story was sad, but they didn't give any names becasuue the WHOLE story was on Sounder. Even though the story is sad, trust me you'll love reading it. It will probably make any animal lover cry!And once you get into the book, you'll want to know more and more, and you won't put the book down.
NOTE: I HATE READING AND YET I LOOOOOVE THIS BOOK< AND THAT IS VERY RARE!!!

Sounder is one of the best dog books I've ever read, even though there are some ups and downs in the plot. Comparing it to Shiloh and Because of Winn-Dixie, I realized sometimes ups and downs are good things. For example, in Shiloh it was always tense, and always what I call "up". In Sounder, though, there was calm "down" and tense "up". It is amazing how the author captures the reader's interest in a short story, whereas some longer books don't even get close to keeping the reader's nose in the book.

There were some slow parts, but on the other hand, it was a very good story, told very descriptively and in complete detail. The story starts out calmly, describing Sounder, a racoon or "coon" dog as the best, fastest, loudest and calmest of them all. The boy, his father a sharecropper, really wants to go hunting. The father doesn't allow him because it is cold and windy that night. The father says he won't have a good hunt anyway since the wind will blow away any animal scent. Later, the father steals a ham because his family is hungry and so poor. The father gets arrested for the theft, and the sheriff shoots Sounder in the process. Sounder crawls under the porch, and then isn't seen for a while. Finally, Sounder turns up, bone weary. The boy works in fields to earn money. The boy's father gets sent to many other jails across the state, so the boy sets out to find him. One day, the boy's father comes home. One whole side of him is distorted. That is because he got trapped beneath limestone while working in a prison quarry. Sounder is so happy to see his long-lost master that he lovingly welcomes him with a long bark: something he hadn't done in weeks. It was a very heartbreaking story.

Sounder was not a good book. William Armstrong did not explain anything clearly. For example, nobody had names except for the dog. They were instead called the " The Man" or "The Mother." Also, everyone in the book was gloomy and sad and there was nothing good ever happening in the book. Another reason I didn't like this book was because the characters had no reaction. When something big would happen in the book they would just move on with life.
This story is about a poor boy and his family. His father is a sharecropper who struggles to feed his family. Every night the boys father and their great coon dog hunting but they've been getting nothing lately. One day, amazingly, there is a ham roasting on the stove. That day the boy's father is taken to jail and sounder goes missing. Soon enough the father is taken to jail and Sounder is still missing.
If you want to find out why sounder went away you have to read the book. Though I didn't like this book you might. If you love gloomy and sad books this is just for you.

Sounder for me was a very disappointing and depressing book. It was not very descriptive, but it was very sad. For example, a part of the book is "The piece of iron lay on the inside of the fence. Drops of blood from his fingers dripped down the fence, wire by wire." You need to be in the mood for a sad story in order to read this book.

The people don't show any emotions. If anything bad happens, they don't try to fix it. If something good happens, which is rare, they act like they couldn't care less.

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The whole thing was very tragic and had an abrupt ending that had people wanting to know more, like about what happens to the boy when he grows up. The whole story was a fiasco and I would urge you to avoid reading this book.

The relationship between business and democracy is often murky. As such, operationalizing the relational power between these entities has long been the task of political economists. Lindblom and Vogel set out to examine the issue of business power in democratic political systems; each coming to a different conclusion.

Lindblom argues that big business and corporations do not "fit" with the idea of democracy. He supports this proposition by examining the many different types of politico-economic systems, ultimately breaking them down into a two-by-two matrix. In his examination, Lindblom finds that all democratic systems are characterized by a free-market economic arrangement. The author explains this anomaly by arguing that democratic systems are dependent on the market and private enterprise (162). He then builds on this foundation to demonstrate the ways in which corporate power maintains control or at least a significant amount of power, in democratic systems.

Lindblom begins to shore up this premise by examining democracy from a historical perspective. He argues that although many hold that democracy (or polyarchy) is a system of popular rule, it in fact is a system established to ensure the personal freedoms of individuals. Often these liberties exist in the form of economic freedoms, exemplified by participation in the free market. He writes, "Polyarchies were established to win and protect certain liberties: private property, free enterprise, free contract and occupational choice" (164). Under polyarchy, the liberties illustrated here were to be protected from the infringement of the governing authority.
Once Lindblom captures the idea that the purpose of polyarchy is to protect the liberties of the people, he poses the question as to why the people never attempt a system of central planning in order to address collective problems. Lindblom suggests that such an experiment has never been undertaken because the process "is subversive of the existing system, specifically of the prerogatives, privileges, and rights of the business and property-owning groups" (168). It is at this point that Lindblom makes the strong move to suggesting that corporate business interests possess a good deal of control under democratic governments. He writes: "We must at this point consider the possibility that existing polyarchies are not very democratic, that political debate in them is not very free, and that policy making in them is actually in the hands of persons who want to protect the privileges of business and property" (168).

Lindblom supports this argument of examining the advantaged power of business. In a system of centralized planning, all decisions regarding the production and dispersion of good and services (all things economic) would be left up to a centralized authority. However, in a polyarchy, many of the economic decisions affecting a nation are made by those in control of the business arena. Lindblom suggests that in free-market systems, it is the corporations which "decide a nation's industrial, technology, the pattern of work organization, the location of industry, the market structure, resource allocation" and other aspects of nation's economic well-being (171). The author refers to this relationship as the "public function" of the corporation. Once business begins to take on a public function, the government cannot readily avoid taking into consideration the interests of the corporate world. It becomes a necessary action of government to ensure that business is able to operate in an efficient manner. However, the relationship is not necessarily a hierarchical one. Rather what emerges is a "duality of leadership" between business and government leaders (180). The question then becomes, why, in a polyarchal system - one in which the government is supposedly run by the masses - do business interests hold such a disproportionate sway over government.

The problem arises in the fact that the under the duality of leadership between government and business, only government is constrained by polyarchal rules. Although often affected by the decisions of corporations, the citizens do not have a means to control the actions of big business (191). In fact, Lindblom argues, a rivalry emerges between the polyarchal interests and those of business. However, business often maintains an advantage over the polyarchal interests.

Due to the inordinate amount of resources, business interests are far more able to influence government than the polyarchal masses. First, corporations can draw upon the finances garnered through business. This grants them a significantly larger war chest which can be "thrown into party, interest-group, and electoral activity in pursuit of what ever corporate executives themselves choose" (194).

Secondly, corporations are often better organized than the polyarchal people. The corporation is an organization in and of itself. Staff exists which can be readily diverted to political issues. Lindblom argues that interests that rival big business to not have the organizational capacity to effectively purse their political interests.

Lastly, building on the previous point, business interests are already closely tied to governmental leadership. Having a duality of control puts them in a position of significantly more power than those pursuing polyarchal political influences. Lindblom writes, "Because of their privileged position in government and politics [corporations] are already known to government officials, already attentively listened to, already engaged in negation" (197). Such a close relation automatically grants big business a privileged position in negotiating with government in the pursuit of its interest.