Party The Books

CG3: Block Party is just as good as the first two. Love the carrying case.

This is a great card game to play. It's addictivem and completely humorous. The whole point of this wonderful card game is do things and buy things (slack) that relieve you from the stress of your job. The cards range from wholesome things, like a cat, and cup-of-noodles to more wild things like nookie, beers, and "significant others". This game is a laugh riot to play with a group of friends, I prefer to play it by spouting out the hilarious quotes from each card as I play them. This game is a must for people in their late teens through their twenties, a complete blast!

I bought this book about 3 years ago now and have used it for several occasions. I originally bought it to plan my wedding but found it very useful for other events, such as the wedding shower, baby shower, christening, etc. The book is very informative and correctly depicts each of the locations according to my experience. If you want to plan a different kind of paty for any occasion, this book is very useful.

My fiance and I bought this book to help plan for our wedding, and were really impressed by the range of locations that it provided. We highly recommend this book to anybody getting married in the Chicago area, straight, gay, or otherwise.

Wolfe wants Archie to drive him to a meeting with an orchid hybridizer. Archie begs off, showing Wolfe a marriage license. Archie tells Wolfe that he (Archie) must attend a Christmas party at which his impending marriage will be announced. Wolfe charters a limousine and leaves for the meeting, and Archie goes to the party. Before anything can be announced, the host drops dead of poisoning, and the chief suspect becomes a bartender dressed as Santa Claus. Santa disappeared shortly after the death and long before the police arrived on the scene. Wolfe must solve the murder before Santa's identity is discovered--Wolfe's very freedom may depend on it.

In "Man Alive," the second story on the tape, a beautiful designer is suspected of murdering a homeless man. She hires Wolfe to keep her out of jail. This murder is the last in a string of strange deaths that have bedeviled the designer's existence. Unraveling the tangle of greed, jealousy, and vengeance is no easy task, but Wolfe is up to it.

The CBC produced 13 Nero Wolfe radio plays, and Durkin Hayes Audio has published six of them on three cassettes. The production values are excellent, the stories well acted, and the CBC plays provide a medium for enjoying Nero Wolfe that is every bit as entertaining as the current A&E television series.

In 1982, CBC Radio (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) decided to adapt 13 of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe short stories and novellas for radio. This tape contains two of these 1-hour long shows.

In general, the series was excellent, true to the character of the original stories and the original characters, with strong production values, good music, nicely integrated sound-effects, and good casting.

Mayver Moore, as Nero Wolfe, initially doesn't seem quite right (he doesn't sound fat enough), but soon overcomes any objections. Don Franks, as Archie Goodwin, Wolfe's assistant, is the perfect Archie, ably portraying this pivotal character, and it is hard to imagine any better Archie than we have here.

It is a shame that the CBC only did 13 episodes in total. Keep an eye out for other CBC radio plays, such as their excellent "Midnight Cab" series.

I read this book 2-3 weeks ago and it's great!I know I'm only a child 11/F but i love this book of corse i'm talking about Final Friends:The Party this is a great book you really should read it i've read 3 books a C.Pike and I love them all really you people should read this book! Signed, C.P.lova

I read the Final Friends trilogy about 10 years ago and have always wanted to tell the world what I thought about it. It's the kind of story you like to pick up and read over again although you know the outcome. Like a favorite movie. Christopher Pike tells about high school life in a frank and realistic way. The mystery/triller aspect keeps you constantly engrossed in the story. You can imagine yourself in this school and in the situation these kids are faced in. I bought only part 1 at the book store just to see if I'd like it, the next day I had to have the other two books. Don't read the backs of the other two before you read it! The characters become real to you. You can relate to one or more characters in the story and the story becomes apart of you. You never want it to end, but just like graduation day, you get your diploma and everyone goes there separate ways. But the situation you and the characters have found yourself in will always be apart of you. Exellant characters. Exellant plot. Fabulous storytelling. It will force you to read every word!

I LOVED IT! THAT STUDMUFFIN BALDWIN CHAD IS SOOO SEXY AND COOL! I DON'T KNOW WHY EVERYONE HATES HIM SO MUCH! I RECCOMEND THIS TO CLUELESS FANS!

In this book, De seems less bonded with Cher and Amber . Other than that , it still remains nice storylines

Unfortuantely, I have only seen Codename Greenkil's chapter 4 regarding the "CWP's role" in the organization of the Brown Lung Association. I can speak to this with certainty and state that this chapter is on the money.

Some current CWP veterans claim that they organized the first chapter of the BLA in Greensboro, NC. This simply is not true. The hard work of organizing, i.e. facing down the fear factor of what Cone Mills might do, door knocking, building leadership, coordinating meetings/events, etc, was done by social activists with no affiliation with the individuals who later formed the CWP.

However, those individuals who later became the CWP did contribute invaluable medical roles in helping workers become identified as "possible" victims of brown lung disease, a critical first step in getting eligible for compensation and one that rarely occured in the Carolina's before 1974. In spite of the fact of expert physician estimates of 30-40,000 brown lung cases in the Carolinas, only some 80 had received workers' compensation before 1974.

I lived in Greensboro, NC when the the events in this book took place. Ms. Wheaton has done a remarkable job of research, in addition to naming names and defining the racist nature of the actions and the cover up. So sadly, it was no surprise that these events took place in my former city. It was also no surprise that the collaboration between the police/Klan/lawyers/
city officials convinced the 'jury' that the so-called officials had acted properly. In this year it perhaps becomes a more important read than when it was first published.

"Come to the party with Jesus" is an action rhyme story of the first recorded miracle of Jesus at the wedding feast at Cana. I have come to love Chris Saunderson's colorful illustrations. They depict the characters and settings of Bible times. In this story the faces reflect an air of festivity and celebration. The text by Leena Lane and the actions that accompany each illustration create an interest for the reader and make learning a fun experience for the child. Everyone will long remember the party atmosphere, the music, the miracle and celebrating in the presence of Jesus.

The Action Rhyme Book Series is ideal for use in day care centers, kindergarten classrooms, and in church school programs. It also provides an opportunity for those surprise and unexpected teachable moments that help bond child and parent.
Reviewed by Richard R. Blake, a Christian Education Consultant

Who doesn't love the story of Jesus helping out, even if reluctantly, by providing another round of wine at a wedding party? If you are a mom, or know one, you will appreciate the underlying message of this New Testament story of "listen to your mother ..."! Kids will love the actions suggested for the party scenes - "toot toot - yum yum - pour pour". This title from the Action Rhyme Book series can fit into any religious education curriculum.

This fascinating book represents Gene Clanton's matured historical wisdom about the importance of Populism in Kansas during the Gilded Age. From Sockless Jerry Simpson to the Wizard of Oz, Clanton illuminates the significant story of agrarian discontent in this crucial state along with the leaders and issues that make the subject so interesting and controversial. Clanton's work also provides key background for understanding modern American politics. Lewis L. Gould, Professor Emeritus, University of Texas at Austin

Readers of Thomas Frank's current bestseller, WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS: HOW CONSERVATIVES WON THE HEART OF AMERICA, would do well to add O. Gene Clanton's A COMMON HUMANITY: KANSAS POPULISM AND THE BATTLE FOR JUSTICE AND EQUALITY 1854-1903, to their personal library. In a well-researched and written volume, Clanton adds the human interest details of how early Kansas agrarians struggled in the last half of the 19th century to overcome the burdens of industrial monopolies and credit shortages.

Clanton, like Frank a Kansas native, points out that although the Populist--or People's--Party withered away with the coming of the new century, its adherents' educational efforts laid the groundwork for the later successes of more potent and progressive reform efforts.

David C. Flaherty, editor emeritus, Washington State University, 12/10/04

These documents sum up 16 years of discussion of the fight for women's rights in the Socialist Workers Party. These documents explain why patriarchal class society is the cause of women's oppression and how deeply women are oppressed in modern imperialist capitalism. However more than analysis, these documents provide a blueprint for the coming fights that will advance women's rights, the massive struggle by working people to take power out of the hands of capitalism. This is not an academic discussion, but a discussion by front line fighters for women's liberation, leaders of the struggles on campuses and the fight that won abortion rights in the early 1970s, leaders in the fight for women's equality in industries like coal, steel, and the railroads in the 1980s Important struggles like the unsuccessful fight for the Equal Rights Amendment and the victory that forced the Supreme Court to grant abortion rights are an important part of these documents as is evolution of organizations like the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the Coalition of Trade Union Women.

This three-volume trilogy is really satisfying. The sweep of subject matter is amazing -- takes up every question that could possibly ever puzzle you: how were abortion rights won (explore connection with civil rights movement)... is there a distinction between women's rights and workers' rights...what about women's struggles in the Middle East, Africa, Asia...do men profit from women's oppression...what about getting into non-traditional jobs (and the relative weight of women neurosurgeons versus women coal miners)...how to develop women's self-confidence...Could only have been written by those totally immersed in the fight to change the world -- and who therefore have been driven to understand the weight of women's fighting contribution and the means to actively promote it.

When I first went to China in the mid-1970's, I was confused as to how Hong Kong, with no resources, could be so rich, and China, with massive resources, could be so poor. Nowhere was the contrast so stark as crossing the bridge at Lo Wu, where we had to disembark the Hong Kong train and stroll across the border to re-embark on a Chinese train to Canton. The Hong Kong border police were sharp, disciplined, lively, friendly and their cousins across the bridge, literally cousins, were sloppy, unhappy, sullen and dull. That difference ran through everything on both sides. How could this be? How could the China that gave the world Shang bronze, silk, paper, tea, amazing ceramics, stunning architecture, gunpowder, the stirrup, not to mention literature and ten thousand other useful things, could end up so poor, so uninventive?

I mention in my book that China has been under foreign control for some 500 of the last 1,000 years. I developed a hypothesis that under foreign domination, China does not thrive. Further, given Chinese history, there is nothing in Chinese culture that would bar China from assuming a position in the first rank among the nations today. Later, when I took a sabbatical from work to finish a bachelors degree in Asian studies, I came across a professor who made the same point, except about the Chinese under the Yuan Dynasty when poetry and art flourished. He proposed since all industry would benefit the Mongols, the Chinese elite retreated into the reflective arts, and the industrial arts re-emerged when the Ming tossed the Mongol invaders out.

But here is the problem with my hypothesis, China was poor, and is poor, but clearly Mao Tse Tung and all his associates were Chinese, so China clearly spent the last century under Chinese control.

Or not.

I just finished two books by Laszlo Ladany, a Hungarian lawyer, fluent in Chinese, who spent the 1940's in Shanghai and North China and moved to Hong Kong in 1949 eager to see how the new China would develop. He started China News Analysis, a weekly summary of Chinese media and party documents. His reports were required reading in all of the intelligence services around the world, if nothing else to double check what the home services were learning. He died in Hong Kong in 1990. The first book "Law and Legality in China" is a summary of Chinese law in history, and then covers specifically law under the Peoples Republic of China. In essence Ladany demonstrates China had all power in the hands of the party, with party members exempt from the law, and chaos otherwise. So, under Chinese communist rule, things can be very bad indeed. Think power with no responsibility.

The next book was more to the point: The Communist Party of China and Marxism, 1921-1985: A Self Portrait. It is a strange title. But his success as a China watcher stems from his discipline of working strictly with documents from the Chinese Communist Party, and reading their official publications. Hence the "self-portrait," that is, Chinese Communism as the Chinese Communists tell it. Ladany also met with escapees, refugees, defectors and anyone else heading in or out of China (recall China was closed to the world for at least 10 years, and had only one ambassador, to Egypt, during the cultural revolution). Ladany even consented to meet with me a couple of times, but back then there were only a couple of hundred Americans let in China twice a year, and I was one of them.

As the Communist party tells it, Chiang Kai Shek and Mao were revolutionaries... both looking for something to fill the vacuum of the crumbling Qing dynasty. Chiang choosing nationalism, and the founders of the Chinese Communist Party in the 20's, Mao among many others, turned to the recently victorious communists in Russia for a plan of action. The degree to which the Chinese "communists" did not understand what communism was, and the degree to which they slavishly followed Moscow is astonishing to read. All this by page six! As the book progresses, communism in China was a Russian operation, which begs the question, how could so few people, under foreign direction, manage to take over a country? Ladany lays this out, translating from the Chinese documents.

According to the communists, the nationalists were winning the war on the communists at every step, forcing a grand retreat, or the Long March to Yan'an. Lucky for the communists, the Japanese invaded, tying up the nationalists, and Moscow directed the Chinese communists to ally with the nationalists in the fight against the Japanese. At the same time, the communists were to avoid any heavy lifting in the struggle while doing everything they could to undermine the nationalists, especially in public opinion. One result was after the US victory over Japan, US generals, short of the manpower necessary to garrison North China, had to rely on surrendered Japanese troops to maintain order. So in spite of the victory, the Chinese citizens were still facing Japanese bayonets and soldiers. The communists offered an alternative. The communists were given equal rank in international negotiations, as the Soviets insisted. Although a history, the book proceeds almost like a novel, so read it for the details. But as I proceeded, I felt confident that my hypothesis was in fact a worthy theory. Chinese communism was merely a Eastern European import, not Chinese.

I recall reading Mao's little red book in China, and being astonished at how banal it was. (This is not unique, everything I've ever read by any politician has since proven to be as bad). Through constant struggles, anyone with any education or wisdom was purged in China, so the farther along the communist progressed, the cruder and more ignorant the leaders left standing. Forgive me for repeating myself, but this is what the communists say about themselves, after Deng Xiaoping gained power. Recall the rehabilitation of many past leaders, such as Liu Shaoqi, and criticism of even Chairman Mao.

I took particular delight in Mao's campaign for More Faster Better Cheaper, an effort to bring material benefits to the Chinese peasant through communism. Now, correct me if I am wrong, but more faster better cheaper comes through free markets, or given human nature, relatively free markets.

To review the argument in How Small Business Trades Worldwide, innovators introduce new and better products, and eventually conservators "steal" the product and lower the cost and widen the access to the item, service or agricultural produce, through economies of scale. At the same time access (distribution) widens, the quality improves and options emerge, giving more better cheaper faster.

Think telecommunications, travel, energy, distribution, and even beer. In the last 3 decades we saw all `deregulated' to some extent, and in that measure in these fields we got more better cheaper faster.

This free market is not what democrats or republicans call free markets... when they say free market they mean policies that reward their friends and punish their enemies (each has a different set of friends and enemies, while there is a super class that benefits either way, not unlike the super bowl, where one loses and one wins, but the owners clean up regardless, making money off of taxpayer funded stadiums).

The free market is not `capitalism.' Capitalism is a term coined by the enemy of free markets, slick because it describes one function in the free market, and that is capital formation. Capitalism is to a free market as a carburetor is to a car: important, but not the thing. Free markets precede governments, let alone any "ism." Free markets are merely exchanges between neighbors, and cultures evolve in part to protect (the root of the word "legal") free trade from either coercion or fraud, or both. Like natural law, indeed as part of the natural order, free markets already are, and how, given the terrain, climate, resources and human genius the Chinese cultures grow around what is natural in man, so it is different from what, say the Saxon cultures grow around what is natural in man.

When Chinese revolutionaries grasp something temporary and possibly the worst experiment in human history and manage to impose it on China, the results were starvation, murder, theft and every other conceivable disaster. (And to read Ladany, about the riskiest career choice a human could make in the last century was to become a communist. No one slaughtered more communists than communists.) Not only did China fail to get more better cheaper faster, they ran out of toothbrushes. Forget about vitamin E. The Chinese clinched it...in every attempt, socialism bring less, slower, more expensive and worse. You can say the Chinese had astragalus and other wonderful home remedies from traditional Chinese medicine, but they did not have those either since production and distribution of everything collapsed.

The book entertains the question as to whether China was ever communist at all, or simply in a constant conflict of a Trotskyite sort. In any event, constant purges wiped out the educated class, leaving the army in control of the country, with Mao on top. Well, of course, if communism had just one more chance, like Cambodia, it would work, but it never does. (Of course pure communism works, but only in monasteries where a closed economy of people who have died to the world and prove their dedication to Christ by submitting to a Prior. Not everyone is called to that life.)

I watched the change from the Maoists being in control to Deng Xiaoping gaining control, and I was under the impression that the chaos stopped with Deng. Not so, according again, to the communists. And obviously, in 1989, the Tien An Men square debacle showed the conflicts continue. No one can riot like the Chinese, and films come out of China regularly proving this art is gaining popularity. They do have the advantage that in a riot, the more the merrier, and in all things Chinese, a large crowd is assumed.

Back to my hypothesis: on page 453 of the latter book, there it is... Ye Qing, who studied in Paris with Zhou Enlai, and with the Communists in Moscow in the 1920's left the communists in 1927 calling them "just more warlords who split the unity of the country." He said "communism was a European product, an imported foreign commodity" His argument was the divided China presented a temptation the Japanese could not pass up. Because of the communists the Japanese invaded, and 50 years of misery ensued. Ye's argument from the 1920's was recalled in the 1980's because precisely that question was being asked in China... how did communism ever help China? To ask the question is to know the answer.

But one thing is clear. Can you name the leader of China? I had to look it up. No more all-powerful Chairman. Rational law is being instituted. Freedom is growing and economic opportunity with it. Anyone who travels to China can see it is changing, growing fast. China now lends the United States money, to help us out!

It is not so much that China has instituted reforms that are helping Chinese, but that the communists have so little control that the Chinese people are very free indeed. What we are seeing, are Chinese, relatively free of foreign influence, are exhibiting the creativity any nation would show, and succeeding quite well. As Chinese.

The communists tried to wipe out China's past, as the Soviets tried in Russia, as Pol Pot tried in Cambodia. It didn't work. There is a group in China, in charge, called the communist party. They are about as communist as I am. There is no Soviet Union calling the shots (so to speak.) The Chinese are rebuilding China after a disastrous century, a century in which China's fate was largely decided by foreigners. This next century I think we'll see China reassume it's natural place in the world and begin to offer mankind the fruit of its genius. In the natural course of events, a China that is 1/4 of the world's economy would be a very good thing, no more a threat than New York is to California. Each getting rich benefits the other. Competition means to "strive with," competition is not combat.

India is reassuming its rightful place as well.

Magnetism belongs to nobody, and the Chinese are making great strides in magnetic levitation transportation, a cheap clean and fast way of moving things. Coupled with computer technology, they very well may leapfrog America in advanced transportation and distribution. Just as Jobs at Apple took GUI from Xerox and built a fortune on it while Xerox could not catch a profit, so China will take what naturally belongs to everybody, in their relative freedom and their natural genius as humans, (merely Chinese in this instance), and profit.

USA cannot do mag lev for the simple reason too much of our economy is based on subsidies to the auto and airline industry. In 30 years, taking a flight in USA will be as quaint (and as embarrassing) as riding a rickshaw in Hong Kong is today, when Red Wind Transport can deliver you door-to-door 300 miles away in one hour flat, providing any personal services you desire on the way.

This book is very helpful for those who want to know more about the earlier years of the Chinese Communist party. More than half the book covers the period before the 1960s. The author has synthesized a lot of information from the the available documents and interviews with old Communist leaders. He does a good job of pointing out the inconsistencies of currently available knowledge (for personal testimony is often self-serving, not least in a Communist country), while also supplying solid educated guesses at what really happened. The writing is clear, though because of the nature of the material, one might get lost at times with the many, many names if close attention isn't paid. This is probably a better book for a person already acquainted with recent Chinese history than an absolute beginner.