Journals Books

This is a great calendar that you can re-use every year--I hang it right next to my current year calendar so I won't have to re-write all those birthdays, anniversaries, etc. each time I get a new calendar. I even used my electronic labelmaker for the entries so they look nice and neat. A must have if you are an organization freak like me!

Mary Engelbreit is the Frank Capra of illustrators. Her veiw of life and bits of wisdom offer a bright spot of hope in any gloomy day and a bright new day tomorrow!

This text was very well written. To this reader who was also reared on Lamming and Naipaul and the rest, there is nothing more gratifying than a beautiful sentence, and Neptune gives us lots of those. Lovely. The spicy tale of the Yanks in the Windies is, as Neptune insists, sometimes glossed over as a Williams-inspired legacy floats on in our various discussions. But indeed, none of what happened during or after the Americans populated Chaguaramas en masse is as cut-and-dry as your average old-time calypso would have you believe. Neptune pieces together a refreshing new narrative that thrusts agency back into women's fingers, exposes the clandestine operations of white hegemony's champions and re-weaves the threads of Trinidadian nationalism. All the while, he delights us with clever, modern usage of the contemporary language rapport during the occupational shenanigans subtly and tastefully. It is a lovely read for anyone, and West Indians in particular will probably be quite tickled throughout. The "Coda" was quite a teaser, particularly the last couple of paragraphs. Neptune opens a world of conversational possibilities for his future books, which you'll be eagerly anticipating after putting this one down.

Peace!

I confess I've never been one to pick up an 'academic' history book in hopes of getting a pleasurable read, however this book breaks the scholarly mold. Though I find Neptune to be heady and thoroughly introspective, his writing lacks, and thankfully so, the jargon and esotericism that can keep me from connecting with a book. 'Caliban and the Yankees' brings up some great and interesting points about revolution and forced me to revisit my image of the revolutionist--here, the disenfranchised people finally get recognition for an often overlooked branch of intelligence that can not be studied in the universities or acquired through a privileged upbringing.
The US occupation in Trinidad, as told by Neptune, becomes a salacious tale of race and class relations, the construction of a national identity and the people who took it upon themselves to reshape and define the culture of its land for the history of its future.
Not only a solid read, but a good one.

This was the most helpful book I have ever read on prayer. It was not only informational, but very practical for my spiritual life.

This journal is taking me to a deeper level of relationship with God. This 30-day journal has Bible quotes and lots of prompting with the prayer process. My prayer style before this book was lots and lots of requests. This book is teaching me not just to talk, but to listen, and to commit to Jesus with all my heart. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to go deeper in their faith.

As an ecologist, I knew little of Prof. Schmidt- Nielsen's research. However, I was impressed by three aspects of his autobiography:

1. He showed that research in the field or the lab can be a real adventure.

2. His approach to research was a strong combination of observation and humane experiment- ation.

3. He is a scientist who can write clearly, with no reliance on jargon used only by scientists in his profession.

This is a book I recommend to scientists, budding scientists, and anyone curious about the way scientists live and love!

Schmidt-Nielsen's book, "The Camel's Nose..." is a history of science in the 20th C., a textbook on physiology, and a personal journal. From the first page I was as fascinated with his research subjects as he was! It was refreshing to learn of a time when personal curiosity and professional work were not at odds with each other, but worked to create the best possible research and a happy life. Schmidt-Nielsen believes that scientific literature should not be convoluted, and his memoirs follow this rule. I highly recommend this book to anyone who still has their childhood curiosity about how non-human animals work! A science degree is not necessary to be totally enthralled by his work and life.

Sebald fans should own this book. As it's a collection of disparate pieces, it hasn't quite the overwhelming impact of "The Rings of Saturn" or "Austerlitz," but every piece in the book rewards attention. The brief meditation on Bruce Chatwin is alone worth the price of the book.

WG Sebald whose too early accidental death in 2001 is a much-lamented loss to the literary world he so quietly entered briefly before his demise. He is a unique writer, one whose style includes ramblings and crude snapshots of incidental places that support his strange tales. For many he is an acquired taste and only time will tell whether his honored books will withstand the test of immortality. And that fact is very much in keeping with the worldview of this enormously gifted observer of the human condition and the plight of the individual played against the backdrop of history and melancholy.

CAMPO SANTO is not a completely successful book in the manner of this highly praised novels. But the very fact that his early departure from the writing stream impacted readers to the point of wanting more justifies this aggregation of four chapters of a novel based on Corsica and multiple lectures and essays and addresses. The book opens with a fine essay by editor Sven Meyer, a timetable that introduces Sebald to readers unfamiliar with his odd life. The subsequent works are translated from the German by Sebald's longtime translator Anthea Bell. And that fact introduces one of the many odd quirks in Sebald's career: why should a man who spent the better part of his expatriation from his native Germany teaching in England write in German instead of his adopted language English?

Perhaps one reason lies in the focus of each of Sebald's works. His stories are travels and meanderings through various locations that serve as his platform for posing the question of history as memory, the unresolved restitution of Germany after WW II (a period he only knew from seeing the disastrous postwar results and reading the reflective works of other writers coping with the crossfire of guilt and sadness/remorse and anger - he was born in 1944), an the driving need to understand the role of mankind in the flux of a globe at unrest.

Reading the first four chapters of CAMPO SANTO makes us wish he had completed this novel about Corsica and the fascination with the life of Napoleon who was born there. But the saved fragments of this novel interrupted by his award-winning AUSTERLITZ are savory and contain many eloquent passages to assuage the reader longing for more.

The remaining essays and lectures are dense and more cerebral but for those Sebald addicts there is much to digest about his thoughts and philosophy. And for those readers especially this final book is a must for the library. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, May 05

It's a great book and I would explain more but it's too good to explain.

I am a teen myself and this book helped me get through hard stuff. From boys to grades this book helps you put down what you feel. I rate it a shining 5 stars!

I concur, this is an exceptional book. It is layed out for easy read and input.

This book was created when I needed it the most, it was a long time coming. I purchased twenty books and gave these books to my support group. Excellent source for a caregiver and family member.

Few American economists have the reputation Irving Fisher has--he is probably second only to Henry George as an economist of whom the American public was aware in the early twentieth century--and no other economist has undergone such dramatic reversals of fortune over time to achieve his reputation. Fisher's ideas and life seem, in some ways, stranger than fiction....

Fisher was always more than a theorist. Like other public intellectuals, such as the late Milton Friedman, he often engaged in supporting public-policy positions. Unlike Friedman's policy advocacy, however, Fisher's concerns--which ranged from good eating habits and life extension to public health, eugenics, and Franklin Roosevelt's monetary and gold policies--often interfered with his ability to perform his teaching duties. He was away from Yale more than he was there. Toward the end, he did little teaching. Fisher's driving passion to engage in public political debate, to run businesses on the side--he invented a card index system and sold it the company that became Remington-Rand, and he published a weekly index-number newsletter that at its peak reached 7 million readers (p. 51)--and to raise Yale's profile even as he raised his own rankled many of his Yale colleagues. No doubt some were simply envious of his pre-1929 crash wealth (he was a millionaire), and others were jealous of his celebrity. Many also doubted the wisdom of his positions on issues such as backing 100 percent reserves for banks and setting up a mechanism that he claimed would produce absolute price stability.

Fisher's personal ideological proclivities were all over the political map and sometimes changed as circumstances did, especially after the Great Depression suggested empirical difficulties with his quantity-theory approach--an approach that Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz resurrected in 1963 and argued had been true all along. Even though Fisher had studied with William Graham Sumner, he was never an advocate, as his professor had been, of total laissez-faire. As Joseph Dorfman mentions, "he opposed any all-out laissez-faire. He supported such liberal measures as high inheritance taxes and wider dispersal of corporate ownership through profitsharing, employee ownership, and co-operation. As examples of existing types of activities which were neither pure private ownership nor pure government ownership, he cited `government regulation; leases to private capitalists with reversionary rights to the city, state, or nation; subsidies; price-fixing; guaranteeing prices, underwriting against loss; taxes on profits or on excess profits'" (The Economic Mind in American Civilization [New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969], 5: 298). To this list, one may add Fisher's sometimes-successful Progressive Era crusades for pure food, abolition of alcohol consumption, human eugenics, government manipulation of the international gold price, and even national health insurance.

At the height of his fame, Fisher did something of which economists should always be wary: he made an economic prediction. Two weeks before Black Friday, in October 1929, he proclaimed that stocks "have reached a permanent high plateau." Ouch! One has to admire, however, the fact that Fisher, unlike so many of his contemporary colleagues in the quirky discipline of economics, at least put his money where his theory was: he then went completely broke in the market crash. Only Yale's forgiveness of the rent on Fisher's New Haven residence, which had been sold to the university, prevented him from declaring personal bankruptcy. His prestige took a huge blow, and he found himself ridiculed, his reputation diminished. Even the economics profession in later years seemed to agree that he had become a fascinating curiosity. At the first Fisher commemorative conference at Yale in 1967, however, another famous economist, Paul Samuelson, made his own prediction: professional economists would ultimately come to recognize Fisher as "this country's greatest scientific economist" (p. 54). Unlike Fisher's unfortunate prediction, Samuelson's has been borne out. Today, most of the citations to Fisher's work pertain not to the history of economic thought, but to his theoretical work. He is, among other things, the father of the Federal Reserve's problematic quest for "price stability" and hence of the entire field of contemporary monetary policy....

Had Nobel awards in economics existed during Fisher's lifetime (he died in 1947, and the first Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded in 1969), there is little doubt he would have been a recipient. His wide-ranging theoretical ideas have influenced modern neoclassical theory probably more than any other individual's ideas, and many remain relevant for policy decisions today. Most conference proceedings are mixed bags, at best, but Celebrating Irving Fisher is a happy exception: the level of analysis is high and the discussions always on point. Any reader interested in the life and ideas of one of the nation's foremost economists will find much of value in the book. Whether your interest is the history of ideas or Fisher's analytical contributions, Celebrating Irving Fisher is a wonderful place to begin to understand why Fisher continues to be widely regarded as a pioneering economic theorist.

This volume of collected essays on Fisher,edited by Robert Dimand,establishes that he was in fact one of the greatest economists of the 20th century.What has hindered Fisher's historical reputation was the problematic,incorrect,notorious forecast he made in late 1929 that the stock market was on an upward path.The Great Crash of October,1929 cost him 11-12 million dollars in losses personally.His response to this catastrophe was to publish his debt-deflation theory of depressions which correctly points to the debt load in the economy as a whole as the best indicator of a possible depression resulting from some exogenous shock that starts the snowball rolling downhill.The excessive debt loads get worse as the price level falls.This leads to a first round of personal and business bankruptcies and home foreclosures .These bankruptcies force furthur rounds of bankruptcies as the debts of one individual were the assets of another.There is no substantial difference between Fisher's analysis and Keynes's General Theory conclusions.Unfortunately, Fisher's work was ignored in the rush to accept Keynes's work.This volume reestablishes Fisher's overall standing .It has great relevance today given the excessive debt loads that have again been created since 1981 in America.

I have never been to San Quentin before - but I have now. Through the reading of this amazing book, I have experienced various stories - some sad and many of positive reform. It all has to do with choice. San Quentin is "for better or for worse" as the title states. I appreciate the efforts of Joe Hare and Kathi Macias who have highlighted life within the walls that most readers will never experience. Mr. Hare, Correctional Counselor, went to the prison for a short term job and stayed thirty years. That in itself speaks for the depth of love and understanding that he had for the men. His Christian faith was the foundation from which he reached out to help those who wished to move beyond the pit of dispair. God opened doors for his witness , as he was not the chaplain but one who could answer questions that any inmate asked about life. He said that he "discovered kindness and compassion in some of the most hardened criminals." Therefore, reading about "Papa Joe" as some called him, was heartwarming. This book is a blessing!

Joe Hare has done a wonderful job telling his story about working for 30 years at California's San Quentin State Prision.
After seeing the many changes in the California penal system over the year, I'd have to agree with Joe Hare that things just aren't what they used to be. Ever since Govenor Jerry Brown made major changes in the prison systems, things have gone down hill.
During most of Mr. Hares carrer the prision was used towards rehabilitation and punishment. The inmates in the "old" days used to have to work at some prison job. Some were excellent ways for an uneducated man without any skills to get an education and some useful training like those received in the furniture factory Joe supervised.
Joe's caring and christian way of dealing with everday circumstances earned Joe the respect of the inmates and fellow correctional officers as well.

These days, celebrity authors earn thousands of dollars for a speech, but back in the 1880s, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the first American author known to receive payment for delivering a talk, was paid $5 and oats for his horse.

Some quotations from Adam Starchild's wonderful afterword to this book are appropriate:

"Children today are starved for the image of real heroes. Celebrities are not the same thing as heroes. Heroes existed way before celebrities ever did, even though celebrities now outshine heroes in children's consciousness."

"Worshiping celebrities leaves children with a distinctly empty feeling -- it doesn't teach that they'll have to make sacrifices if they want to achieve anything worthwhile. No- talents become celebrities all the time. The result is that people don't seem to care about achievement or talent -- fame is the only objective."

"... Despite immense differences in cultures, heroes around the world generally share a number of traits that instruct and inspire people. A hero does something worth talking about, but a hero goes beyond mere fame or celebrity. The hero lives a life worthy of imitation. If they serve only their own fame, they may be celebrities but not heroes. Heroes are catalysts for change. They create new possibilities. They have a vision, and the skill and charm to implement their vision."

"Heroes may also be fictional. Children may identify with a character because of the values projected. People tend to grow to be like the people that they admire, but if a child never has any heroes what images will he copy? Adults need heroes too, but the need is even more urgent for children because they don't know how to think abstractly. But they can imagine what their hero would do in the circumstances, and it gives them a useful reference point to build abstract thinking skills."