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!

William H. Armstrong, Sounder (Harper Collins, 1969)

Sounder is another book I read this year because I missed it when I was growing up; I somehow never had to read it for class when I was in school, and since my daughter did last year, I figured I'd give it a shot. And I had the same reaction as I did to the other book I read this year for the same reason (The House of Dies Drear)-- what's all the fuss about?

Sounder is the story of a boy and his dog. Early in the story, the boy's father is arrested for stealing a ham and carted away; as they're leaving, one of the policemen shoots the dog, who then disappears. Much of the rest of the book is spent on the unnamed boy searching for the dog, while learning to deal with having a father in prison and learning far more about the world than he ever wanted to know. So, in other words, not your normal a-boy-and-his-dog tale. Why I don't get what all the fuss is about is that books, especially those for younger readers, are supposed to be about character transformation; there can be no doubt that the subject of this book transforms, but there's no connecting the forces that cause him to transform (for none of it, as far as I could discern, comes from within; his transformation depends entirely on outward forces, which feels artificial) with his actual transformation except in the most basic, clumsy of ways. We don't actually see the boy transforming; we are given the forces, we cut to a later point in the story, and presto, the transformation has occurred without us having to see it-- or Armstrong having to write it.

None of this is to say it's necessarily a bad story. On its face, it works, and Armstrong keeps the pages turning. But in the greater scheme of things, it just seems to me there are a whole lot of books that handle everything here better; the obvious comparison is the superior Where the Red Fern Grows. It's not bad, but it's nothing special. ***

The novel Sounder, by William Armstrong, depicts a story about a young boy, his family and his dog. The story is set in the early 19th century and most of the events occur in and around the families meager cabin house. The novel opens with a scene depicting the boy (whose name remains unknown throughout the novel) and his father, a struggling sharecropper. The boy's attachment to his family and love for his dog is clear in the early lines of the story.
Soon the families struggle to earn money and survive leads the father to steal a ham in a desperate attempt to put food on the table. The next morning, the police arrest the father. As he is taken away, the boy attempts to hold onto the dog, who is snarling and lunging at the police. As night falls, one of the police officers shoots the dog. He lies, seemingly dead, in the road as the mother quickly ushers her young children inside.
The story continues as the boy searches desperately for his dog. His hope that the dog survived the gunshot turns sour as weeks go by. One day, the dog miraculously reappears, with a wounded shoulder and missing eye. The boy and his mother are astonished to see the dog still alive, and take him back into their home.
The family soon learns about the fate of the father. After being locked up in the town prison, he has been released to do hard labor. The boy searches for his father, sometimes walking miles only to find a long line of laboring men he cannot recognize. After one visit, he stumbles upon a school and is taken in by the head teacher. The boy has a book with him and the teacher reads him part of the story. After this encounter, the boy decides to go away to school in the winters and stay back to help with the harvest in the summers.
The boy continued at the school for several years. One summer when he was home, Sounder came running up to the house, barking wildly. The father followed shortly behind, dragging his leg which had been destroyed when dynamite exploded in a prison quarry. Eventually, his broken body let go, and the father dies. Sounder dies shortly after his master.

Negative aspects:
While Sounder is an engaging novel, some of the language used is simple and may not challenge all students in the upper grades. The vocabulary is not overly difficult, yet might be on the correct level for some students. Lastly, because Sounder was written in 1969 and takes place in a old, country setting, students may have difficulty relating to the characters and making connections to their own lives. However, the themes of family, loss of a loved one (even a pet) and courage will engage students in the story.

I would recommend Sounder to any middle school teacher. The novel is interesting, engaging and generally easy to read. It would be perfect to implement in literature circles or as a whole-class novel, as students could read chapters on their own or at home.

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.

I have to admit, I hate the soft sciences, but I had to take Sociology 101 for a requirement. Thank goodness this was the textbook assigned to the course! Everything is perfectly clear and it's actually really fun to read. Even if you're not taking a course, I'd recommend this book to anyone who would like to call themselves knowledgable. It is a fun read, and you'll come out so much more informed in the end - painlessly!

Admittedly I haven't read a lot of sociology textbooks, but this one is quite good. Every chapter has real-life examples (and many of the author's own experiences), so it not only makes you know the theory but also feel it at work in our societies, although the author writes quite a lot of his own feelings (it's dead obvious that he wants to change the world), which I don't know if it's a good point or not.

I was assigned this textbook for my high school Sociology class that I took as an elective in the last semester of my Senior year. I had gone into the class expecting an intriguing, thought-provoking subject that led students to ask the big questions about why people and society are the way they are, and that the textbook would help guide me along the way. Unfortunately, I was pretty dissapointed, to say the least.

Let me add a disclaimer saying that I am a firm Independent; I'm a college-bound kid who dislikes political and ideological squabbles and believes both the Right and the Left have equal merit in their own ways. That being said, the reason for my rating is that, as my title suggests, the author's opinions and biases shine through quite blatantly, much of it appealing sharply to the Left wing of the ideological spectrum. While most textbooks simply give you facts, with maybe some interpretations to help you form your own conclusion, Henslin has the negative tendency to editorialize, using word choice and selected statistics (not to mention his own "personal observations") to paint certain aspects of society in a good or bad light as he sees fit. This is a very inappropriate, and I might go so far as to call it dangerous, thing to do when writing educational material to be taught to youngsters.

As an example, take a look at his chapter on economic theories, in which capitalism and socialism are both given analysis. The problem is, when socialism is mentioned, Henslin spends a significant majority of the time in which it's mentioned explaining the goals and the lofty ideals of it, and little time mentioning its inherent drawbacks (which all ideologies have).

The whole rest of the chapter, however, is dedicated to capitalism; more specifically, how capitalism basically is so totally exploitive, greedy, and concentrates power in the hands of the tiny few, with the phrases "exploitation," "greed", "believe greed is good," and "elite" dropped here and there. Add further excerpts implying that American democracy is little more than a puppet show controled by rich business interests who sway the government, and it's not hard to see how someone impressionable would learn to unflinchingly hate the whole theory in general. This is NOT what a textbook is supposed to do.

Henslin then spends much of the time talking about class, race, gender, etc...as was to be expected. The problem here is that, again, he editorializes, rallying around whatever the oppressed group of the time may be and almost relentlessly guiltmongering against whites, men, and people in classes that can live comfortably.

The chapter about gender is a particular treasure trove for this sort of thing; near the beginning, Henslin writes a particular gem referring to gender in the workplace, which goes something along the lines of "Imagine that two women are talking when they are supposed to be working. When the male boss walks by, he would most likely tell them to get back to work. But what if it were two men talking? For instance, if they were talking about sports, would he be more likely to join in on their conversation instead of telling them to get back to work? This is just one of the inequalities that women face in the workplace." (not a verbatim quote, but that's the basic gist of it).

And it just gets better from there, some of it based off of true injustices that happened in the past and do still happen today, but a lot of it off of generalizations and editorials that I, as a young male, found quite offensive. When my class finished with that chapter, I felt as if Henslin was doing everything short of saying that I was going to roast in Hades for having an XY chromosome. Extremely one-sided, with the guilt and blame poured on heavily.

I could go on about how the book gives readers guilt trips about how people in our own supposedly-prosperous nation and around the world are living in poverty while we comfortable-living ingrates sit on our butts taking part in an exploitive culture driven by self-interest, but I've already gone on long enough.

Suffice to say this much; this book's biases are dead obvious to anyone who is truly objective-minded enough to notice it. It's kind of a shame, because I truly believe that Henslin had good intentions when he wrote this, and I do believe that, like many liberal-minded people, he has a genuine concern about the injustices of the world and a desire to see it change for the better. But that doesn't excuse the fact that opinionated language, finger-pointing, guiltmongering, and editorializing play a major role in getting this textbook's points across.

A schoolbook is supposed to present cold hard facts to students with an absolute minimum of bias, so as to respect them enough to form their own beliefs and interpretations; not indoctrine them with the exlusive ideas of a narrow ideological philosophy. I'm almost disheartened that this book has gotten so many rave reviews singing its praises about it's objectivity and enlightening messages. Then again, as much as I hate to perpetuate stereotypes, this is mostly read by college students, and, on the political spectrum college kids are often...well, you get the idea.

I wouldn't really recommend this textbook to any educator who wishes to maintain a proper balance of opinion in the classroom. If you do end up reading it, though, be prepared to take your grain of salt to class with you.

Excellent service. Book was shipped same day and I received it 2 days later.

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.