James Flint Books

Probably one of the most realistic alien invasion books ever and I'll be looking for the next in the series, if any. The aliens are TRULY ALIEN and therefore more scarey. The invasion is told in retrospect, but reads like what would really happen--a few cities wiped off the map, but most retained for "use."

Based on my reading of other books by these authors, the guts of COURSE appear to be by Wentworth. The thoroughly delicious inner monologues of the Jao and the descriptive passages of their physique are in that same supple style as seen in STARS ON STARS.

But the first chapter seems to lack pizzaz and most importantly, it lacks a hook to impell the reader foward to the next chapters. Still, once you get past that, you're in for a ride. So strap yourself in tight. Enjoy.

Excellent attempt at reconciling disjoint culture and thought processes. The main antagonist was displayed early with a bit too much emotional anthropomorphism. As the story evolves, other aliens follow suit. Has some valid earth historical contrast and comparison.

Could have been an earth based war story. Read for fun!

I won't go into details of the plot, since others have done that. Suffice it to say that this story seems so real you could almost believe it really happened in an alternate universe. I'm not one of those New Age groupies that feel all ETs are our space brothers, so I found the idea that our world was invaded by force quite believable. As was the fact that the aliens had different factions that fought amongst themselves. Why should ET be any different than humans?

For a very realistic take on an extraterrestrial intervention check out the Allies of Humanity.

I'm constantly on the prowl for sci-fi portraying convincing scenarios of human/alien contact. "Empire" is one of the best of such. The Jao are a fascinating species who come alive because of the level of imagined detail the authors have devoted to them, and because there is potential for "association" between them and humans. With the other aliens, the Ekhat, no bridge of understanding is possible, and these weirdly "musical" monsters provide a common enemy for humans and their Jao conquerers to unite against. But the question is whether the threat of annihilation will be enough to overcome the rivalries in the complex Jao organizational system and the bitter determination of earth's indigenous peoples to resist their fierce occupiers from the stars....

"Empire" does take its time establishing the main characters and the situation in which they all find themselves. But the investment in that steady build-up rewards the patient reader as the action revs up to a blazing fire fight in the sun. Don't stop there though. Then comes the Jao Naukra (enquiry/trial/calling-to-account) where consequences including death are risked by the leaders who exceeded the usual boundaries of authority. The forwarding of a "third way" at those proceedings reminds the reader that thinking outside the box may solve seemingly insoluble political/social/species conflicts. And although a courageous young Jao male and human female spearhead the push for groundbreaking changes, "Empire" does not forget that great revisions are often planned for by "elders," sometimes very Machiavellian ones.

This novel meets the very highest sci-fi standards. A sequel of some type would be wonderful -- perhaps set forty or fifty years in the future, permitting Aille and Caitlin to mature in wisdom and power in the reality they help create and their offspring to be the radical thinkers and doers....just a suggestion.

This one was intriguing, exciting, maddening and fun right from the beginning. It was also hard to put down.

The venue is Earth, at about our present level of technology. The time is about 20 years after an alien invasion. Humanity was conquered by the alien Jao and now lives a precarious existence. The existence is precarious because humans don't really understand their conqueror and the conquerors don't really understand humans. Any infraction is punished mercilessly but there is no rancor in the punishment. There is no rancor except from the alien who commands earth. He hates humanity. That makes the situation tense.

There is a reason for the conquest beyond mere imperial desires. The Jao are at war with the Ekhat. So is everyone else in the galaxy who is not Ekhat. This is for the simple reason that the Ekhat regard all other life as an abomination and wish to cleanse it from the universe. This is not a healthy situation for anyone who is not Ekhat. Unfortunately, humanity does not understand the extent of the problem and many of them do not even believe in the existence of the Ekhat. Many regard them as some sort of Bogeyman used by the conqueror to keep the subject races in line.

The Jao themselves are not completely unified. They are organized into great clans and political alliances and often let those ties overshadow the common good. So it is that the ruler of earth is of one clan and the Jao sent to serve as one of his top deputies is of the clan most at odds with his. This leads to even more clashes of will and ultimate goals.

Although this book deals with conflicts on many levels, it is mostly about indirect manipulations. Human factions try to manipulate each other to their desired goals. Jao factions do the same thing. Humanity tries to manipulate the Jao and the reverse is also true. When larger, even great schemes are laid on top of this cauldron of scheming, things get really complex. It is said that Byzantine court intrigues maid Prince Machiavelli look like an amateur. The machinations in this book put the Byzantines into the same category. It is all wonderfully intriguing.

I think this one dates from 1973. It is a very good crime story. It has always been obscure and difficult to find but deserves more light of day. I couldn't put this down when I read it. Recommended!

This novel is one of my two favorite Schmitz titles (the other being The Demon Breed). I last read it back in the early 80's - my hometown public library had a copy, titled "The Eternal Frontier" - and have been looking for it ever since; I'm delighted to see it back in print.

It's the story of a group of colonists on an unexplored world, who confront a mysterious and malevolent alien presence. My strongest memory of the book is the creeping sense of suspense the author builds throughout the novel.

Unlike the huge majority of Schmitz stories, [The] Eternal Frontier is not part of the Federation of the Hub cycle, so you won't see these characters in any of his other work. Still, it's one of his very best.

This is a comprehensive collection of short works, written between the 40s and the 70s (but mostly in the 40s and 50s). Unlike many of the short stories from that period, these could have been written yesterday.

Even the novel included in the book is very short by today's standards, and would be considered a modern "novella".

These are all non-Hub, non-Vega, non-Karres stories. Some are even not Science Fiction. But they are all great. As the co-editor Guy Gordon wrote in an earlier book, "There's just something about a Schmitz story..."

This is the sixth of a seven-book reissue of all of Schmitz's work. Get it. Get two, in fact, if you even plan to loan it out. It probably won't come back to you if you let someone else get their hands on it!

_Endless Frontier_ is the sixth book in Eric Flint and Guy Gordon's project to return James H. Schmitz' work to print. From my perspective this has been a successful and welcome undertaking. This book is particularly welcome, not because it is the best (it is not, not by a long shot), but because it contains some of the most obscure of Schmitz' stories. Fans of Schmitz, like me, spent much time in used book stories finding his work before the recent reprint series -- and in that way it was relatively easy to collect most of the Telzey stories, the Trigger stories, and books like _Agent of Vega_ and _The Demon Breed_. But it was much harder to find stuff like "The Ties of Earth", a long novella only published as a two-part magazine serial, or "Captives of the Thieve-Star", a novelette which prefigures in some way Schmitz' later female characters, but which was only ever published in a 1951 issue of the classic pulp Planet Stories. But _Endless Frontier_ collects all of Schmitz' short fiction that had not previously been reprinted -- including some stories from mystery magazines. It also includes Schmitz last (and by far weakest) novel, _The Endless Frontiers_. My rating for the book is based more on its appeal to its intended audience -- Schmitz fans -- than on its intrinsic merits. It's fair to say that the earlier Baen reprints gathered the bulk of his best work -- it's easy to see why some of these stories haven't seen the light of day in a while. But for those of us who have learned to love his work, this is an invaluable way to get those tantalizing few stories we haven't yet found.

That said, there are some very fine pieces here. The above-mentioned longer stories, "The Ties of Earth" and "Captives of the Thieve-Star", are both very uneven, but even if they don't work completely, they have some nice bits. And among the shorter stories are some first-rate pieces. Many of these are in the section the editors have called "Dark Visions" -- Schmitz usually went for fairly conventional happy endings, but in these stories the horrific implications of some of Schmitz' ideas are fully explored. Especially good is "We Don't Want Any Trouble", a very neat SF horror story about an alien invasion. Another fine alien invasion story is "These are the Arts". Schmitz wrote some crime fiction as well, often for the SF magazines, but also in mystery magazines. Stories like "Ham Sandwich", about a slick operator running a psi scam, and "Where the Time Went", about a very different SFnal crime, are clever and enjoyable.

Even the lesser stories here are generally breezily enjoyable. This book probably isn't a good choice for your first Schmitz book, but if you try the more famous ones and find you like his stuff, it's a worthwhile purchase.

Flint Hills Cowboys by James F. Hoy places you on the saddle of a horse loping through the historic Flint Hills of Kansas. Mr. Hoy himself grew up in the Hills and was raised working cattle alongside some of the best cowboys the region has reared. Chock-full of authentic and personal stories, the reader continually feels like one of the cowboys living the exciting, and difficult, life of a Flint Hills Cowboy.
The book both informs and delights. Mr. Hoy lacks pretentiousness and his writing is accessible. After completing the book, it was obvious to me that he desires only one thing: to share his love and passion for the Flint Hills of Kansas and all the colorful and honorable people who dwell there.

Flint Hills Cowboys: Tales Of The Tallgrass Prairie by Jim Hoy (Professor of English and Director of the Center for Great Plains Studies at Emporia State University) is the engaging combination of personal memories, frontier history, and folklore tales about the prairie lands of the Flint Hills country of eastern Kansas. A remarkable and inherently fascinating anthology of stories and anecdotes of the rodeo, ranching, ranch hands, and working with stubborn cattle and contrary horses, Flint Hills Cowboys reflects upon a half-century of life and times in the Flint Hills. As a superbly presented compendium of action, humor, lore, and history, Jim Hoy's Flint Hills Cowboys is very strongly recommended and entertaining reading for all anyone with an interest in the landscape, people and history of the Flint Hills country.

I love this book. Very unusual & hard to categorise. It is a sort of non-fictional novel. It is structured like a quest, like a computer adventure, a search for father. It has a who-done-it feel. It even has a love interest that leaves me wanting to shout advice as the Asperers protagonist is clumsily devoid of skills in this area. It has touching moments. Great turns of phrase in a Tim Robbins way.

I also liked Habitus, Flint's forst novel. I imagine it would appeal to people who like nery novels like Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Flint wants to be the best cowboy on the rodeo circuit, and this classic Will James western tells the story of a young man determined to try. Flint Spears first appeared in 1938 and this superb reprint will introduce Will james to a whole new genertion of readers!

James Vanderkam and Peter Flint are names well-known to those who follow the scrolls. Each has contributed their own work in book and article form to the body of literature about the Dead Sea Scrolls. This volume, 'The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus and Christianity' is one of the most comprehensive, in-depth and well-organised introductions and overviews of the scrolls done to date. Published just a few years ago, it takes into consideration all but the very latest of scroll research and publication. As Emmanuel Tov, another name well known to scroll aficionados, states in the foreword, the publication of information about the scrolls has proceeded so rapidly during the past decade that it has become necessary for a new volume such as this to provide an adequate introduction to the scrolls.

In the first part, Vanderkam and Flint give an overview of the discovery and identification of the scrolls. This includes discussion of the acquisitions and explorations, the dating processes, and the archaeological digs around the site at Qumran. The authors also discuss the use of technology in the processes around the Dead Sea Scrolls; processes such as Carbon-14 dating were in their infancy during the time the scrolls were first discovered - both technology and scroll knowledge have come a long way in the past 55 years.

The second section looks at the relationship of the scrolls to scripture. The chapters here look almost exclusively at the Hebrew Bible; questions regarding the New Testament are reserved for a later section. The scrolls contained at least some portions of every text of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament save (perhaps) Esther; there are also apocryphal and pseudipigraphical texts among the scrolls. This section shows some of the multi-task use of the book - in discussing the relationship of the scrolls to the canon of scripture, they go into some detail about what is meant by the use of the term 'canonical', and what constitutes the canon of scripture for the Jewish, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox bibles. This makes this an excellent text book for biblical studies classes in addition to a book for the general reader.

The third section surveys the nonbiblical scrolls - phylacteries, commentaries, community documents, and more. In addition to looking at these texts, the authors recreate from them a possible portrait of the community at Qumran, providing of course that one accepts that the scrolls are related to the Qumran site. The authors mention various interpretations at different points, but largely concentrate on the most commonly accepted interpretation, which is that the Qumran group was a part of the Essenes, one of the three primary groups of Judaism identified by Josephus as being present in the late Second Temple period. This section also addresses some of the more interesting characters found within the writing of the scrolls, the Teacher of Righteousness and the Wicked Priest.

The fourth section takes up the issue of relationships between the scrolls and the New Testament. The authors discount the various claims that New Testament fragments have been found among the scrolls, while not ruling out that such discoveries might in fact occur. However, the primary claims have largely been discounted. The connections between Essene thinking and practice and some early Christians, however, is stronger, but not to the extent that Jesus or John the Baptist can be identified as Essenes (or, as is also sometimes speculated, Zealots). The authors take issue with those whose sensational interpretations (Allegro, Thiering, et al.) rest on shaky extrapolations.

The final primary section gives a good account of the controversial history of the scrolls, looking at the governmental politics, the academic politics, the sensational and sometimes outlandish conspiracy theories about the restrictions placed on the scrolls and the content of 'hidden' scrolls, and the long court battle that resulted from the publication by Herschel Shanks and others of a famous 120-line text, 4QMMT, made far more remarkable for the problems of publication than it perhaps ever would be as a part of the larger body of scrolls.

Authors Vanderkam and Flint provide several appendices, including indexes, quotations and allusions, and a good listing of further readings, including translations of the scrolls in book, microfiche and electronic forms. The book has a very generous collection of photographs, charts, graphs, line-art drawings and maps. There are useful highlight boxes and technical detail boxes to focus upon particular important points. The general layout of the book is very nice, easy to read and visually interesting.

A great book!

I like both the prequel Shadow of the Lion and this book a lot. I do not always have the patience and concentration for this type of book, very long, many strands, many characters, definitely not a quick read. But well worth it, the ideas, the people, the religious background, the historical intrigue, all very well done, quite gripping and easy to read once you have the characters and places fixed in your mind. For those who like a lot of intelligent politics and strategy in their fantasy, highly recommended.

For those who are looking for the continuation of this series:
I found this info hard to find - there is an excerpt of the book at the end of the ppbck edition of This Rough Magic, but it also does not say clearly that it is a sequel in this series:
Dave Freer has written "Mankind Witch", alone, which is part of this series, and his website says that he plans two more.

I regret that this is not to be found here in some reference (i.e. tag the book as an Heirs of Alexandria series book) or put on the website of Mercedes Lackey, or Baen, I like this story and its people, and I will read Mankind Witch as soon as I find it. Maybe others will find this useful info.

This is the following tale of "The Shadow of the Lion". It takes place in Corfu rather than Venice. Actually, it is an alternate reality in whichmagic persists and good and evil emesh the characters in a struggle for supremacy. The strength of this tale lise in the character development, especially of Maria and Benito. Most of the carryovers from the previous book are developed and humanized except Francesca, who seems a bit wooden and Marco and Katerina, who are reduced almost to caracatures. However it is in many ways a superior tale, and if you likked the first book, you will love this one.

A captivating sequel to 'Shadow of the Lion'. I read all night!

First off, I will admit that I didn't read the first book. I didn't know there was a first book until about halfway through. However, I wasn't very impressed. I generally love Mercedes Lackey so I can only attribute the lackluster performance of this book to the other authors. I felt there was too much jumping around to the different groups which made me confused as to who was where and with whom. In addition, I wasn't much engaged with many of the characters.

I also thought the blood sacrifice descriptions were a bit much. I understand wanting to make the evil characters really loathesome, but I don't think it added anything to the story to describe the sexual activities and satanic human sacrifices. To me, it cheapened the book, as if the authors couldn't write anything more engaging. Besides if they had cut out all that description, the book would have been much shorter. Long books are not, in and of themselves, bad, but they have to be extremely well-written in order to keep from lagging. This book lagged and lost steam a few times throughout.

At the same time, the plot was reasonably interesting and the characters fairly well developed. I knew from the beginning who Benito would end up with, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Happy endings are good in my opinion, and this book had that even with the bittersweet background. That's why it gets three stars instead of two.

I read this book without reading the first one.

Very very good, quick paced, with enough background that you can read it without reading the first.

I have been a long time Mercedes Lackey fan, this book just confirms and renews my faith in her:)

Mr. Chickee's Funny Money has a little of realistic fiction and mystery together. The theme of this book is helping Mr. Chickee with things he needed. The setting of this book starts with a kid in Michigan named Steven. The conflict is that Steven is trying to find out if the Quadrillion-dollar bill Mr. Chickee gave is real or not. Steven always helps Mr. Chickee on Saturday, because he was blind. The Mr. Chickee rewarded Steven with money for being so kind to him. After, Mr. Chickee moved to Philadelphia, the home of brotherly love. I liked how Steven used the Snoopeeze 2000 to spy on Agent Fondoo through the wall. But, I disliked how the other kids mocked Mr. Chickee for being blind. These are my reasons why I recommend this book.

I love how the characters of Chickee's Funny Money have such "funny" names, like Zoopie, Agent Fondoo, and Mr. Chickee. The characters are hilarious! This book would be great for 8 to 12 year-olds (2nd grade to 6th grade). Mr. Chickee's Funny Money is adventure fiction. In the book, a boy named Steven sticks up for his old blind neighbor, Mr. Chickee, when all the other kids (except for his five-year old friend, Russell) make fun of Mr. Chickee. One day, Mr. Chickee wants to leave Steven's town to visit some relatives. Mr. Chickee gives Steven an envelope and tells Steven not to open it until he gets home. When he gets home, Steven opens it up to find a...quadrillion-dollar bill with some jumbled letters! He wants to know what it means, so he shows it to his Mom and Dad. Steven's Dad takes him to a government agent named Agent Fondoo. When Agent Fondoo saw the quadrillion dollar bill, he wanted to get it back. It used to be the government's bill, but Mr. Chickee somehow got it. Christopher Paul Curtis made the words pop out from the page, like when Steven's dad said, "'I'M NOT PLAYING WITH YOU, STEVEN DAEMON CARTER. STAY OUT!!!!!!!!!" My favorite part of the book is in the ending, but to tell you would give the entire book away. Two thumbs up for Christopher Paul Curtis!

An excellent mixture of comedy and intrigue. Book positively explores the concept of relationships. Is a little week on supporting authority figures, but all in all a very good book for youth.

The Wastons is one of by favorite books and I really liked Bud Not Buddy and Bucking the Sarge...but alas this one does not reach the same high standard. Compared to the Watsons, Bucking the Sarge is for an older reader and Mr. Chickee is for a younger reader. It does have some very clever ideas and some funny moments but it does not come together as brilliantly as his first two books.
What ever happen to the movie for the Watsons?

My 6th grader couldn't resist reading this book out loud at the dinner table, chuckling the whole time. A didactic father who turns every event into an excuse for a math or history lesson, an overly patronizing mother who has read one too many child psychology books -- what child wouldn't identify with their long-suffering son, who sees right through them? I especially liked the fact that here, as in Bud Not Buddy, while it becomes gradually clear by the end of the story that the protagonist is African-American, that fact is no more and no less relevant than describing some other character as Irish. Highly recommended.

I have been facinated w/ the Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran my entire life. My wife and I are finally taking a trip to Israel this summer, Qumran being one of the sites we're visiting. This is not a "guidebook", nor a tourist outline. It is an exceptional, college-level textbook covering the entire topic of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is comprehensive, expansive and entirely accurate. It doesn't offer speculation or supposition, but rather reveals the absolute truths of what happened, what was found and what it means. For anyone who wants to learn about the Dead Sea Scrolls, this is a must read.

This is the best book about the Dead Sea Scrolls for amateurs, being also excellent for scholars.

This book is part introduction to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and part overview of the texts and the work done by scholars since their discovery. It is not a detailed academic work, but it doesn't set out to be. It is intended for the intelligent reader to gain a good insight into the scrolls, their history, the significance of the texts, and the work that is being done. In this respect, it achieves its objective.

I like this book because it is possible to pick it up without any great knowledge of paleography or patristics, yet still be able to make sense of it, and gain some perspective at the same time.

If you are interested in finding out about these fascinating texts, and if you want an intelligent yet readable work, this is the book for you.

There are introductions... and introductions to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most of them serve strange hypotheses. Because they hope to sell well, they are often creations espousing the authors' pet theories. Otherwise, they are academic and soporific. The discussion of Qumran archaeology, the biblical and sectarian texts themselves and their relationship to the canon and Jesus is fair, comprehensive for the layman, clear and level-headed. Flint and Vanderam's intro steers deftly between the Scylla of sensationalism and the Charybdis of dullness. It is well-organized, very readable, and...not expensive (as Scrolls literature, especially, academic ones, go).
Any beginning self-learner of the Scrolls and its secondary literature will benefit from this well-written book.

James Vanderkam and Peter Flint are names well-known to those who follow the scrolls. Each has contributed their own work in book and article form to the body of literature about the Dead Sea Scrolls. This volume, 'The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus and Christianity' is one of the most comprehensive, in-depth and well-organised introductions and overviews of the scrolls done to date. Published just a few years ago, it takes into consideration all but the very latest of scroll research and publication. As Emmanuel Tov, another name well known to scroll aficionados, states in the foreword, the publication of information about the scrolls has proceeded so rapidly during the past decade that it has become necessary for a new volume such as this to provide an adequate introduction to the scrolls.

In the first part, Vanderkam and Flint give an overview of the discovery and identification of the scrolls. This includes discussion of the acquisitions and explorations, the dating processes, and the archaeological digs around the site at Qumran. The authors also discuss the use of technology in the processes around the Dead Sea Scrolls; processes such as Carbon-14 dating were in their infancy during the time the scrolls were first discovered - both technology and scroll knowledge have come a long way in the past 55 years.

The second section looks at the relationship of the scrolls to scripture. The chapters here look almost exclusively at the Hebrew Bible; questions regarding the New Testament are reserved for a later section. The scrolls contained at least some portions of every text of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament save (perhaps) Esther; there are also apocryphal and pseudipigraphical texts among the scrolls. This section shows some of the multi-task use of the book - in discussing the relationship of the scrolls to the canon of scripture, they go into some detail about what is meant by the use of the term 'canonical', and what constitutes the canon of scripture for the Jewish, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox bibles. This makes this an excellent text book for biblical studies classes in addition to a book for the general reader.

The third section surveys the nonbiblical scrolls - phylacteries, commentaries, community documents, and more. In addition to looking at these texts, the authors recreate from them a possible portrait of the community at Qumran, providing of course that one accepts that the scrolls are related to the Qumran site. The authors mention various interpretations at different points, but largely concentrate on the most commonly accepted interpretation, which is that the Qumran group was a part of the Essenes, one of the three primary groups of Judaism identified by Josephus as being present in the late Second Temple period. This section also addresses some of the more interesting characters found within the writing of the scrolls, the Teacher of Righteousness and the Wicked Priest.

The fourth section takes up the issue of relationships between the scrolls and the New Testament. The authors discount the various claims that New Testament fragments have been found among the scrolls, while not ruling out that such discoveries might in fact occur. However, the primary claims have largely been discounted. The connections between Essene thinking and practice and some early Christians, however, is stronger, but not to the extent that Jesus or John the Baptist can be identified as Essenes (or, as is also sometimes speculated, Zealots). The authors take issue with those whose sensational interpretations (Allegro, Thiering, et al.) rest on shaky extrapolations.

The final primary section gives a good account of the controversial history of the scrolls, looking at the governmental politics, the academic politics, the sensational and sometimes outlandish conspiracy theories about the restrictions placed on the scrolls and the content of 'hidden' scrolls, and the long court battle that resulted from the publication by Herschel Shanks and others of a famous 120-line text, 4QMMT, made far more remarkable for the problems of publication than it perhaps ever would be as a part of the larger body of scrolls.

Authors Vanderkam and Flint provide several appendices, including indexes, quotations and allusions, and a good listing of further readings, including translations of the scrolls in book, microfiche and electronic forms. The book has a very generous collection of photographs, charts, graphs, line-art drawings and maps. There are useful highlight boxes and technical detail boxes to focus upon particular important points. The general layout of the book is very nice, easy to read and visually interesting.

A great book!

this was used for two core classes and its great. contains pretty much everything needed.

The book has been great so far, the only real issue is that some of the diagrams are labeled and/or referenced incorrectly which can be confusing at times.