Paul Walker Books

A comprehensive guide to keeping cichlids. There are also useful tables concerning plants and decorations suitable for cichlid tanks. The first 100 pages contain the more general info on natural habitats, aquarium selection, water requirements and filtration, heating and lighting, aquascaping, maintenance, feeding, health and breeding. The last section on breeding has separate sections on African, Central American and South American cichlids. This same division is used in the second part of the book, the species section. The descripion of the different fishes is very comprehensive and includes wonderful information such as sexing and compatibility. The index includes both scientific name as well as common name. Great reference book for the beginning and advanced hobbyist alike.

My 2 year-old daughter LOVES this book! We got it for her because she is afraid of the dark. She loves reading this book. She chimes in on the repetition and sound words. She seems to sympathize with the two boys and their night fears. Great illustrations.

This is an odd book, the story of a boy who, as a summer project, creates his own civilization. He bases his civilization on the cultivation and use of a single crop, a plant of mysterious origin and almost miraculous versatility. He starts the summer as a nerdy and unpopular boy and ends it with many of his schoolmates (and former tormenters) drawn into his society. The idea is intriguing and the art is engaging.

I call the book "odd" because, while it's clearly a children's book, it isn't written in a style that would obviously appeal to children. After I read through it I thought, "cute, but my kids won't care for it." I thought that the lack of dialog and the general absence of a traditional story-line would leave them cold. Wrong, big time. They love it. They're four and six, and they're just fascinated by the story and the pictures. Sometimes kids are more patiently thoughtful than I give them credit for. This book is thought-provoking for them and frequently requested. Excellent book.

If you can't be a part of THEIR world, make one up for yourself and they will want to be in your world! I love the way this books teaches a sort of self reliance and a CAN do attitude. Recommend to children of all ages.

When my daughter was two, she randomly chose Weslandia from the library. We took it home to read it, and I was astonished! What a great book!! The illustrations are vivacious and the story is wonderfully imaginative. I found myself wondering what my own civilization would be like.

I thought, due to the subject matter, this book would be over my toddler's head. I was very wrong. It has become one of her favorites. We checked it out from the library so often, I bought our own copy, and have since bought several as gifts for other children. The youngest kids will love the colors and illustrations, and it will grow with them...they'll discover something new every time they read it.

My absolute favorite children's book. Very highly recommended!

This book is SO innovative. The author is of a very rare, wonderful, unique variety. I recommend this book to anyone with children of any age, or even just get it for yourself if you enjoy spark, imagination, and creativity.

I love this story. I suppose I can somewhat relate as I see so much of myself in the young boy featured in this book. A young, lonely boy, who somehow just does not fit in, decides to invent his own world and simply make it the way he wants to make it. The story is quirky enough to appeal to most kids as I do feel there is something of that loneliness in all of us. The illustrations are great. The story is touching and is good and it is a great illustrations of just where our minds can take us if we let them. It tells us that it is good to be a bit different and not something we should set around and worry about. Recommend this one highly.

I bought this book because I am a devotee of Flannery O'Connor, and I have read and been enchanted by both Merton's and Day's autobiographies. The author's approach to the lives of these four Catholic writers is unique and seems at first to be somewhat of a stretch. The connections between most of them are tenuous at best - Merton and Day had a long-running correspondence, but O'Connor only was only ever in direct contact with Percy, for instance. However, the connections they made during their lives, though interesting, are not really the point of this book. What the four really had in common was their writing, religion, and their approach to similar themes during an overlapping era, as well as the enduring influences that they had on each other and on other writers (the author mentions John Kennedy Toole, etc.).

All four sought to define through their work the roll that religion plays in the modern world and in their own lives, and this book gives a particularly insightful and well analyzed overview of how each of them went about this all-important task. The author has clearly done a great deal of research. The contemporary commentary he includes about each author is fascinating.

This book was particularly interesting to me because I am quite familiar with most of Flannery O'Connor's work, and it was wonderful to finally be able to connect her stories to her life and to the time and place she was writing from.

I highly recommend this to all searchers, and to those interested in that which is mysterious in life and religion. This book should be read by all people interested in Catholicism in America, religion in the modern work, and in literature or American History in general.

An excellent read, the livesof Merton,Day,Percy and O Connor beautifully melded and yet distinct. I highly recomend this book for all lovers of literature as well as Christians.

Inevitably, the attempt to merge four writers into one narrative that reviews their correspondence, books, essays, pronouncements, talks, and travels makes for an ambitious if uneven journey. Percy's Christian existentialism by contrast with his determinedly contrary if congenitally eccentric fellow Southerner O'Connor's keen eye and bitter comedy comes off as aloof, bookish, and not that interesting if by no fault of his own. His novels nearly all pale by comparison with her best fiction, and Elie has difficulty making some of his lesser novels even minimally engaging.

Day, by contrast with Merton, herself suffers from asceticism! While the two converts and one-time near counterparts in NYC progressive political and au courant literati circles in the years between the wars (albeit at some remove from each other's direct influence and circles of friends) share roots in what we'd call the typical avant-garde movements of Modernism and experimentation that generally any bright young thing in an urban East Coast environment has wandered into over our past decades, Day comes across as markedly more inflexible, so as to anchor her pacifist and anarchist commitment to individual choice to live the Gospel as "fools for Christ" must. Merton learns by contrast to adjust whether to his moral shifts before he entered the Trappists, his infatuation with the Abbey of Gethsemani and his sudden fame after he wrote his memoir, his diagnosis by a shrink as a "narcissist hermit," and his love affair with a nurse in the mid-1960s just as so many of his clerical colleagues were reneging on their vows and falling in love themselves with women rather than, or as well as, their calling to separate themselves from the ties that bind most of us, or used to.

Elie makes the best out of the enormous secondary criticism that has accrued around O'Connor, and of the correspondence and previously censored material now available to Merton scholars. He gives instructive close readings of "Wise Blood" and "Everything that Rises Must Converge" as well as contrasting the letters to Elizabeth Hester that show her public manner as preserved for posterity vs. hints of a more combative and much less PC Jim Crow-era attitude in her letters to Maryat Lee. The hints of what happened to Robert Lowell as a result of his manic visions of God and Caroline Gordon's own descent into a rigid form of Catholic scrupulosity needed more detail, however. Percy's life fails to emerge, and his family and career shimmer only vaguely throughout. Also, we have almost no sense of what Flannery did in college or during her MFA years in Iowa City, not to mention her own NYC stint prior to her diagnosis for lupus. I wanted more connection of her own urban flourishing to tie in to Merton's previous trajectory there, and Day's own movement away from the secular boho to the Catholic boho contigent, but perhaps such tracks remain too vague for serious biographers to retrace or imagine.

Well-chosen photos: young Percy strolling a German rustic trail, Day in the Bob Fitch snapshot of her sitting defiantly as two sheriffs loom to arrest her at a UFW rally, O'Connor radiant as she holds a new copy of "Wise Blood," Merton slouching in a straw hat and kicking back against a bench on the day of his ordination. These enliven these writers, too often reduced to small book jacket photos we have seen perhaps too often.

Percy appears genial if gloomy. The loss of much of his correspondence, unlike the stacks of carbons that fill up the enormous epistolary collection "The Habit of Being " for O'Connor and the letters and diaries for Merton posthumously published may explain Percy's diminished presence vs. his other two rivals for literary and spiritual audiences. Day seems not to be much interested in writing even though she dutifully published her memoir, carefully glossed as was Merton's for a more reticent era, "The Long Loneliness." Day early on appears to have chosen a lifestyle and a manner committed to renunciation of her own early fling, her sexual adventurism (although by our standards she and Merton are the norm, more or less, for those raised less religiously at least today), and her flirtation with Marxist and leftist movements. I like Merton's advice around the time of the grandstanding Berrigan Brothers agitprop: "I think the best thing is to belong to a universal anti-movement underground." (qtd. 396)

Elie is at his best in this section, as he shows how Day separated herself from the peacenik hippie priests and those playing to the camera while "the whole world is watching" in the later 60s for revolution that made Jesus a proto-Che. Elie explains that Day took pains to empathize with the other side, always, and not to place any dogma or manifesto between her and her identification with those who may have not wanted war in Vietnam but who could not be led to sympathize with guitar-strumming hippies and angry clerics spilling napalm and blood on shredded draft documents as cameras rolled. Merton, too, as Elie takes great care in documenting, struggled to be a leader of the Catholic reformers and the progressive left from his hermitage on the Abbey grounds where civil rights organizers and leftist luminaries made their own pilgrimages to meet with him and where he attempted to stay in touch from behind the monastery walls with a world that he knew needed his advice even as he vowed to stay faithful, at terrible and necessary personal cost, to his promises to remain a loyal priest and obedient monk. Merton too shrank from the violence that inspired young people to immolate themselves as burnt offerings against the war, and soon enough he too would meet in his sudden death "the Christ of the burnt ones" to whom he ended his memoir "The Seven Story Mountain".

O'Connor, being like Merton the more familiar of the four writers, comes across like him as the one you might like to meet and chat with, although unlike Fr. Louis I would fear reading about myself in her letters after the fact. Day's harder to make appealing, as her severity and devotion to seeing the Lord in the shattered ones kept her focused upon the less prosaic and less easily dramatized side of life that eschews sentimentality and exalts the utterly assured recognition of the Messiah in the poor and the crazed and deluded ones. Her choice, despite the convulsions of the Catholic Worker Movement and the fact that she could rarely find the time alone that Percy, Merton, and O'Connor needed to become speakers to the rest of us, "making oratory out of solitude," does make her active apostolate all the more admirable.

I conclude with a couple of passages. Elie compares O'Connor with Merton, Day, and Percy. Discussing an admittedly unlikely essay anthology in the tumultuous days of '69, "Mystery & Manners," Elie describes how she combined "objectivity and fierce personal conviction," speaking out of "aloneness and absoluteness," and how her Southern allegiance in the North, as "a believer in a disbelieving literary society," as "an artist in a church of philistines," transcends loneliness or alienation. What she and her fellow writers share is what all believers today share: "the aloneness of the religious believer generally." (426) She knows faith, the "substance for things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," as I paraphrase the old Baltimore Catechism (as Elie I recall did much earlier in his book).

If O'Connor derived her power from her inflexibility, Elie continues, Merton by his sudden death escaped the end-time days of rage constant upendings of the 60s. His fluidity enabled him "to represent and call forth the aspirations of others." (427)

Elie finds his appeal in his "radical identification of himself with another" that evoked in his readers a similar identification. Merton was able to mature and recognize that his smarts, his charism, his desire for the spotlight could be used to turn attention from himself as the bestselling contemplative, the talkative monk, the literary talent submitting his work to censors (well, at least most of the time--the love letters he sent his nurse Margie notwithstanding, and showing the humanity that endured and made him ultimately a better monk and a kinder Christian at again what must have been enormous sacrifice and, at fifty-two, having to "grow up" even more). He had the gift of getting us to feel as if we were in his sandals, observing wryly and compassionately and righteously what he could see from beyond the walls around his hermitage, and beneath his own defenses within himself, schooled as he was in all the trends of the literati at the shrink.

A year and a half before his death, Merton in the thick of the antiwar campaigns addressed his brothers outside the monastery. Reading Camus, Merton came to realize the existential predicament for the believer mattered as much as for those like Camus who could not return to believe what they had left behind. Merton reflects in the letter to his superiors that he has moved beyond the "answers" that his early years in the monastery once led him to think that he had gained.

"Can a man make sense of his existence? Can a man honestly give his life meaning merely by adopting a certain set of explanations which pretend to tell him why the world began and where it will end, why there is evil and what is necessary for a good life? [. . . .] I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man' s heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and which one learns that only experience counts." (qtd. 402)

This journey into the arid regions impels the monk. He leaves the world's distractions to concentrate upon the battle within, and behind the defenses of the cloister he stands vulnerable "to remain open to God wholly and directly." Whether God answers is not up to the monk. Merton finds God must be known, not proven. "To seek to solve the problem of God is to seek to see one's own eyes."

Elie on the last page sums up how these four writers' predicament is now that of any believer, half a century and more now since these four writers thought and argued and prayed. Elie insists that they all knew what any believer or unbeliever today knows: authority lies not on the institutional Church or a social monolith commanding conformity to the Magisterium. Elie imagines a reform of today, for assimilating or uncertain Catholics, or anyone "quasi-religious," might be abandoning the idea of a true faith. Elie tells us now that "clear lines of orthodoxy are made crooked by our experiences and complicated by our lives." (472)

All of us look for signs. Readers, we are trained to and thrive by our own pilgrimage for meaning. Elie notes that "the burden of proof, indeed the burden of belief, for so long upheld by society, is now back on the believer, where it belongs." Now we have the testimony of Day and O'Connor, Merton and Percy, who all had to balance their unwanted label as "Catholic writers" or intellectuals in thrall to the Vatican with their own real tensions and longings and upsets. They imagined their own afflictions and some made poems and fiction out of it, others and other times these became editorials, letters, diaries, and conversations. And, the four new evangelists all witness to us, as evangels, messengers, of the pilgrimages they too stumbled through as their narratives ended.

What a joy this was to read! My personal thanks to Paul Elie for showing me how these four exemplary literary figures of my generation managed to live out a life of love and creativity within their constant struggle for faith. Such a universal story of people moored by the faith, but beset by the pityful human sinfulness of the institutional Church. Elie shows us how Merton, Flannery O'Connor,Dorothy Day and Walker Percy, renegades all, pursued their art and intellectual/spiritual quests in such different ways. Though I have read almost all of Merton and O'Connor and much of Day and Percy, it was with particular joy that I learned how much these figures overlapped in time and space, knew each other and were often correspondents. Elie's weaving into the text much of their correspondence gave me new perspectives.

This attempt to link Day, Merton, O'Connor, and Percy doesn't work. While it's true they were Catholic writers whose lives overlapped to some degree and who read each other's work to some extent, it's also true that their lives were extremely different and that they rarely had contact with one another--a few meetings, some small bits of correspondence.

Also, the Publisher's Weekly reviewer is incorrect: the book is ponderous, and the prose is the very definition of workmanlike. The author was evidently attempting a self-consciously literary style--lofty, philosophical--alas for his readers. The writing reaches a particular crescendo of blandness in the pages when these Catholic writers come to the end of their lives. In fact, I couldn't quite make out how Merton had died from the account here and had to look it up on Wikipedia.

Perhaps because of the detached prose style, I felt that the author had little if any affinity for either the writers or their writings. The New Yorker says O'Connor is his favorite, but Day comes off best in the book, as the author sympathizes with the Catholic Worker movement and with Day's pacifism. He also seems to have found value in Wise Blood and the Moviegoer.

In general I wondered if the author's own pilgrimage in writing this book had left him fatigued and simply glad to be finished with it. I know that's how I felt by the end.

On the positive side, I did find some of the details of these writers' early lives fascinating. If you have not read such details in other biographies or autobiographical writings, you might find it worthwhile to check out the first half of this book.

In Sputnik, Paul Dickson takes a single historic event and uses it as a spot from which to take a look around and see what can be learned. When applied cleverly, that writing strategy leads to some great books. This is one of them.

Dickson covers the history of rocketry and missiles, taking a look at the science and the scientists that led up to the launch of Sputnik. He captures the mood of the Cold War and gives you a sense of the rude awakening the United States experienced when the USSR beat it into space. Then the book ranges into the responses of the US and the USSR to Sputnik, covering the space race to its end on the moon.

All of the material is carefully brought together and conveyed in such a way that you keep reading long after you needed to put the book down and do something else.

Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys history. This one is very well done.

I vividly remember the Sputnik announcement when I was 6 years old. Gradually, I became part of the cohort of the concerned. By my seventh birthday, I worriedly discuss the possibility of a Soviet bomb hurtling down from a satellite to kill all Americans. My cousin, Mark (older and wiser), reassured me that bombs from satellites were not possible. On a piece of paper he drew a picture of an object falling from outer space. "They burn up before they hit the ground," he explained. This seven year old's analysis was reassuring and I became less panicky. Later, of course, I learned that my cousin was wrong -- things could fall from space without burning up.

Frankly, I am glad that I (and other Americans) didn't know the content of Dickson's work when Sputnik was beeping. The Sputnik "freak out" would have been far worse! Dickson demonstrates a history of lack of vision. It should come to no surprise that the US government and military were unable create a policy that would maintain technological advances. If the Soviets wanted to stifle our process toward outer space, they couldn't have done a better job than our governmental incompetence. If it weren't governmental meddling, I am sure we would have a colony on Mars now.

The eerie aspect to understanding the historical circumstances of Sputnik involves two dimensions. First, I see a continuation of gross incompetent government leadership. Things haven't changed. We can't seem to construct a coherent immigration policy. Our military lacks an effective strategy to combat guerilla warfare (we call it "insurgency"). Our governmental leaders are only recently admitting that global warming might be a problem. It is Sputnik all over again. Second, one can quickly recognize our weak educational system. At the beginning of the space race, we used our brains and the slide rule. With the technological advances associated with micro chip, Dickson demonstrates that we have an increasing proportion of engineering disasters like bridge collapses. We seem to be witnessing an increase proportion of senility. Perhaps, we need to surrender our computers and return to the slide rule!

Dickson is a crafty writer. Although Sputnik is well-documented piece of nonfiction (great footnotes), it reads like fiction. If one enjoys reading about history, technology or incompetent governmental officials, I highly recommend SPUTNIK.

2007/10/25 a video based on this book is called Sputnik Mania and it is nominated for an award. awards night is 7 december 2007.thehoffmancollection. i think it is important for baby boomers to read because they may become curious as i did about the cold war, the world trade center and osama bin laden. through the artificial moons now circling the earth we are entertained.hopefully, we will not just amuse our selves to death.1957 sputnik.2007 plumpynut.we could not have had 2007 without the events of 1957.

This is a terrific accounting of the event leading to the ramp up of the Space Race. The anecdotal information is great for those who want to fill in the gaps in the true, inside story of the politics and pressures leading to the creation of NASA and Kennedy's challenge to reach the Moon.

Dickson's work is more support of the thoughtful active presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, who was far from the lame duck, do-nothing president described during the 1960 elections.

This "Shock of the Century" also serves to illustrate the outrageous hyperbole of the the American press and of American politics.

Sputnik was the "beep-beep-beep" heard around the world, the beginning of the Space Age on Oct. 4, 1957. Paul Dickson has written a compelling account of the epic event that shocked the American public. Sputnik heralded the modern era of transistors and miniature electronic devices, communications satellites and the worldwide Internet.
How could Russia, a nation then considered technologically backward, suddenly propel itself into forefront of world science, scoring a worldwide publicity coup in the process that surprised even its creators?
Dickson's book is one of the best popular books about Sputnik yet published, a tale of challenge, fear and the resulting monumental government program that put the first man on the moon.

The book is a companion read of "Tuesdays with Morrie." Although both books cover similar material, the difference is the originality of the material. Morrie explains his prospective living and dying in addition to his other life experiences. The reader will get insight on such topics as "handling frustration" and "reaching acceptance" to "relating to others" and "being kind to yourself" or understand Morrie's view regarding "It's not too late to develop new friendships or reconnect with people." Or "It's not to late to...ask yourself if you really are the person you want to be, and if not, who you do want to be."

After reading the wonderful 'Tuesdays with Morrie' I was craving for more wise lessons from Morrie Schwartz. Eventually I came across this little booklet written by the man himself. It's filled with the same inspiring wisdom and lessons you'll also find in 'Tuesdays', but there's one big difference. In 'Tuesdays' Morrie was teaching his old student Mitch how to live a better life. As such that book is enormously relevant to everybody who reads it. In 'Morrie in his own words' the focus is more towards helping the dying and terminally ill deal with their situation, settle some important relational 'unfinished business' and reach acceptance and closure. About 75% percent of the book seems to be aimed at this specific group of people.

It still includes valuable lessons and especially Morrie's interpretations of Buddhist concepts appeals to me, but for most people this book will be less relevant than 'Tuesdays'. Having said that, Morrie remains a remarkable man and among his inspring lessons is one about accepting that we'll eventually all die, so we better learn to accept it and make the best of the days that are given to us. So, even the lessons in dying in this booklet will become relevant sooner or later. As such it certainly doesn't hurt to have this little booklet in your collection for when the time comes ...

I wish I had read this book when my husband was dying of ALS. It should be a must for everyone who'd been given a Medical Death Sentance and their family who have to stand by helplessly while their loved one diminishes and then dies before their eyes. It's compelling and would at least ease the sorrow that becomes part of their life.

The shipping to Guam was VERY FAST although it was only USPS priority mail. If you are a Mitch Albom fan, this book is literally in Morrie's own words. So the style is not quite the same. If you just want a little more in depth of him (Morrie), this is must. My 17 yr old has to do a project quarterly and read all of Albom's books, and this is the last one.

This book makes you realize that Morrie was such an amazing person. It makes you wish you had known him. But it is also more a book for a person who knows he is dying. Or for someone who loves someone who is dying, you could read it together. It offers positive thinking for a person who has already accepted his imminent death.

My daughter read this first and recommended it to me. I like the fact it was not gruesome and it avoided a lot of unneeded details. I read it pretty quick and I would recommend it to any YA. It's an age appropriate book, parents, feel good about letting your teenager read this.

REVENGE! MURDER! This book "A Fate Totally Worse Than Death," will keep you reading up until the very last sentence. It has the elements of suspense, and mystery all combined together in one short, but very interesting book.
In this book, between the three main characters, Danielle, Tiffany, and Brooke, they show the many signs of aging, or becoming older, much older! This is the mystery that keeps these girls up at night- why are they rapidly aging? Was it that horrible, unspeakable thing they did the past summer? Is someone out to get them? Or even kill them? They used to be young, beautiful women and now they are old, wrinkly and falling apart, literally!
The plot line of this book reminds me of the series of movies called Scary Movie 1, 2, and 3. It also reminds me of the Hannibal movies too! The way that the author, Paul Fleischman uses word choice and imagery creates many vivid pictures in your mind. What I liked about this book was how you can follow the storyline and also relate to it in various ways. I also liked the language in this book too. It wasn't bad or offensive in any way, just creative and fun. This book will make you laugh, guaranteed! To be honest, there really wasn't anything that I disliked about they book. The only thing that I could really say that I disliked would have to be that there barely was any info about the three girls families. I would have liked to know more about their past and backgrounds. Over all this entire book was great and fun to read. Very enjoyable. It's a good read for teenagers, rather than adults.

I loved this book.My friend told me about it and I actually read the whole thing and loved the whole thing.This book is great and if you dont read but maybe 1 book every 5 months (like me) I suggest you read this book you wont be disapointed.

This was a really good book. Three rich "Huns" (millionaire teenagers from Cliffside High) are jealous of the new exchange student, who all the guys like. When they talk bad about her, or try to sabatoge her, they grow older and older. One of them gets arthritis, one is losing her hair, and the other is shrinking! It's a really good book, with a really good twist!

For anyone who enjoyed Scary Movie with it's over-the-top humor, sarcastic wit, dry parodies, and unrestrained juvenile one-liners, A FATE TOTALLY WORSE THAN DEATH is a must read.

The plot revolves around three girls, Danielle, Brooke, and Tiffany, who are members of the Huns--the absolutely only clique to belong to at Cliffside High. The Huns believe in one rule above all else--the Hun boys belong to them, and them alone. When Helga, a Norwegian exchange student, shows up, the girls begin to feel threatened, and decide to take matters into their own hands.

They've had to take drastic action before, you see, when the boy Danielle is in love with, Drew, started dating Charity Chase, a girl who was definitely not a member of the Huns. The group of three committed an unspeakable act of horror--and now they're beginning to pay for it, in the form of Helga. Because once Helga showed up, and Danielle, Brooke, and Tiffany set about ruining her life, bad things began happening to them instead.

As the girls struggle to get through the day, unable to understand why their bodies are betraying them, they come to the conclusion that Helga isn't a girl at all--but the ghost of Charity, come back to haunt them and exact revenge.

A FATE TOTALLY WORSE THAN DEATH is definitely funny, outrageous, and a very quick read. For anyone who likes a dash of humor with their horror, this book is for you.

Yes, this book is great. It opens one's eyes to all the ethnicities in the world and how the different "tribes", albeit it Mexican, Black, White, Teenagers, Asian, Mixed with two or three ethnicities, etc., communicate. So, read it and learn to love people for their character, not the slang they speak.

Regional U.S. slang and uniquely 'American' terms are covered here in Slang: The Topical Dictionary of Americanisms: a revised, updated version of a classic slang dictionary arranged by topic. The unique arrangement by subject rather than word allows for easier cross-comparison of slang: having an updated version with new chapters and 10,000 words further enhances its usefulness as a definitive slang reference.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

I had always thought that slang was what your mother told you not to use at the dinner table. That turns out to be an old-fashioned idea. Slang, according to this enlightening, entertaining, and--dare I say it?--educational book, is the way the American language replenishes itself. (Some words once labeled slang: bogus, clumsy, snide, and spurious.) The latest round of replenishment comes from the Internet, which, author Paul Dickson says, "could be the greatest of all dispensers of slang and new English since the invention of movable type." One of the innovations of this book is the division of slang into categories: You look up definitions by turning to "Net-speak," say, to find out what, say, "kevork" means: "To ban electronically from a site or bulletin board. From the name Jack Kevorkian, a doctor who assisted suicides." Net-speak is one of thirty categories. Others include Java-speak (black eye: "Expresso mixed with brewed coffee") and that grand old American dialect, Bureaucratese (fuzz: "To blur on purpose; to make less direct"). As you can see, it's a book not for just looking things up but for browsing, for searching out new words, and for replenishing your own noggin.

The French have a special committee to ensure that the purity of the language doesn't get corrupted by among others those vulgar Americans. As such, they are effectively marginalizing their language to the past and preventing people from being able to discuss current trends.

The English language, especially the American variant lacks any such sense of formality and is creating new words just as fast as anyone can think them up. Many of them, especially in the computer field aren't words at all but TLA's (Three Letter Acronym) that substitute brevity to save typing.

Every aspect of American society has been busy creating new words, almost it would seem just for the fun of it. And this book is organized (if you can call it organized at all) by the general areas where the new words began, such as: Automotive, Bureaucrat, Computer, Drugs, Media, Medical (Sub-title: words you don't want to hear from your hospital bed --C&T Ward: Place where comatose patients are placed in a hospital - it stands for 'cabbages and turnips.'), politics, schools, and on and on.

It's easily enough to keep you ROTFLOL - Rolling on the Floor Laughing Out loud, or even ROTFLMAO - Rolling on the Floor Laughing My A__ Off.

I bought this book after hearing about it on NPR, and was really looking forward to reading through it. But after reading it cover to cover, I was appalled at the number of inaccurate definitions of commonly used slang terms. Did no one fact check this book? Some of the definitions aren't even from the US, they are from other countries - and the meanings are very different. The way the book was organized wasn't very logical either, it appeared to jump all over the place, making finding a particular term difficult. I can't recommend this book for someone wanting to learn about American slang.

If you want a constant smile on your face! Bought 4 copies for family and friends because it will do the same!

Enjoyable read. Got quite a few chuckles. Even my 89 year old aunt (who is Republican) got a few laughs out of it. A good gift for friends and family - regardless of who wins in November.

This straightforward little book is an easy, fun read that besides creating some laughs also provides a pretty pointed attack on George W's competence and moral compass. However, even my republican-voting dad laughed when he flipped through it. The book could benefit from more illustrations/comics!

WWWD gets you to reflect on where "W" is leading us. The book brings to light critical issues in a true and funny manner. Those that can face the truth about W will find it hilarious. This is the best parody of W out there!

"What Would W Do" is intelligent, thoughtful and hilarious. My favorite part is one of the responses to what W would do if he was captain of the Titanic: "Tell Iceburg it hates freedom." That kills me. I bought this book a little while ago and I keep reading it over and over, sharing it with my friends...it was my best purchase of the summer! You must read this book!

As the Kendrick's stated at a recent book talk on their new work: 'we often approach this war [Civil War] through the lens of its ending...but it wasn't like this at all at the time.' This book chronicles, in a very enjoyable novel-like way, the constantly shifting dynamics of the War as reflected in the personal relationship of two great men. Not afraid to tackle the folklore that surrounds each man, Paul and Stephen Kendrick provide helpful insight into a profound relationship.

Douglass and Lincoln is an exceptionally researched and well-written book on the relationship between these two important men. Most of the book focuses on Douglass rather than Lincoln, perhaps necessarily so. The Kendricks do a superb job of tracing Lincoln's slow transformation from a leader reluctant to press the emancipation issue to one who eventually embraced it, all within the context of Douglass's lifelong struggle not only for emancipation, but for equality. Douglass and Lincoln met only a few times, but it's evident in this book that they held a mutual respect for each other due to each man's struggle against adversity in their early lives. I recommend this book not only because it is well-researched, but because it's well-written. It's quite a page turner. I couldn't put it down.

As a student of history, I found this a compelling look at two towering figures and a cogent study of their rarely-explored relationship through the Civil War. Approaching the subject with subtlety and sensitivity, Kendrick and Kendrick make a case for the mutual influence of their dialogue. It was this force that ultimately cemented Lincoln's conviction to continue the war, not just his aversion to breaking the Union. Through new primary sources--unpublished letters, black abolitionist papers--the book provides critical background which gives abolition new resonance.

Having read both Oakes' Radical and the Republican and the Kendrick's new book on Lincoln and Douglass (the Abolishionist, not the rival Senator), it seems to me that this recent book gives a much fuller human dimension to the relationship. Though this is an amazing political story (one Americans should know more about), Douglass and Lincoln offers a more vivid, personal insight into these very complicated, indeed enigmatic, men. All told, I enjoyed the book, and have no hesitancy in giving it the full five star treatment. In the current deluge of Lincoln books leading up to the 200th anniversery, this is one book that truly has a fresh angle on a well-worn topic. To see the struggle of the Civil War through Frederick Douglass' eyes makes it all seem new, even surprising. A wonderful read even for people tired of the Civil War.

This is a truly fascinating book and an exciting story.
The Kendricks' use letters, articles and mountains of other research to bring these men and their struggles to life. I found myself seeing them not as icons, but as people. It is an exciting story to follow Douglass' mission to make the Civil War about freedom, his son's perilous experiences as soldiers and the Kendricks' interesting take on Lincoln's evolution.
Watching Lincoln through Douglass' gave me a Lincoln I had never seen before. While they do not hold back with aspects of Lincoln on race that may surprise you, he emerges as great because he is not paralyzed by his prejudices as he rises to monumental deeds.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. These two have a true gift for making history interesting and inspiring.