Kansas Books

A father and his son discover that Kansas does have mountains, and many other wonderful things, as they spend a Sunday afternoon bonding on the plains of Kansas. The charming story by George Shannon is beautifully illustrated by Thomas B. Allen. Gorgeous pastels of the wheat fields, grain elevators and sleepy main streets will be quickly recognizable to anyone from the midwest. The twist is - the words and illustrations will make you see your surroundings in a new way, just like the little boy in the book!

Hey--Kansas isn't flat-there are many hills, and this book is an awesome read---and sooooooo funny. You don't have to be from Kansas to enjoy the midwest humor---everyone from Kansas doesn't not have a dog named Toto! You will also find little tidbits of history.

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

I was lucky enough to live in Topeka 4 years where Ms. Davis wrote a column. I loved her then and I love her now.

How often have you read a book and said to yourself, that's exactly the way I have always felt about that, or thought about that? Have you ever wondered if you were the only person in the world who considered an act, an idea, a dream to be impossible?
Davis is (if you will pardon the cliche) "every woman" when she discusses her friends, her children, her fears, her humiliations, her triumphs, her hopes. You will weep with her, and laugh with her. One night, reading in bed, I had to literally cover my mouth so that my laughter would not ring through the house, and wake everyone up. The description of her "big interview" with a local radio station is hilarious. I recommend this book as a gift to friends who appreciate a good sense of humor and who have the gift of being able to laugh at themselves, because that is exactly what you are doing when you read Davis. She is without a doubt the Erma Bombeck of our generation. She picks up where Erma left off....and oh how we needed that!

This book is a must-have gem. I've been acquainted with Kansas City, my mother's hometown, all my life, and never had any idea of the richness and diversity the city has to offer. This book is an extensively (one could even say obsessively) researched tool that has chapters on every conceivable topic, from the outdoors to religious organizations to fine cuisine. Volunteer opportunities and other ways to really engage in the community abound. Connect with Kansas City is a truly unique resource that will improve your experience in Kansas City whether you are a first time visitor, an infrequent visitor (like myself) or a lifetime resident. The author's insights about the value of "social capital" were clearly a guiding force in both the conception and the implementation of the book. Worth its weight in gold!

Order this book now! It is full of things to do and ways to engage in our community. Sandy James makes it easy for us to enjoy Kansas City and all our community provides. A must read for anyone new to our city but also for those of us who have been here for awhile and need some fresh ideas.

Toibin examines Sean O'Casey's early literary life in context with the historical figures around him- Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats. Particularly, the consternation surrounding Sean's controversial PLOUGH AND THE STARS and the defence Yeats and Gregory showered on him. A hugely enjoyable play.

American Director-Harold Prince wrote his own play GRANDCHILD OF KINGS, A version of Sean's early life based upon O'Casey's own autobiographies.

Grandchild of kings
Sean O'Casey - Autobiographies: I Knock at the Door ; Pictures in the Hallway ; Drums Under the Windows
Sean O'Casey: Autobiographies II : Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, Rose and Crown, Sunset and Evening Star

I've lived in Dublin for four months now, and seen a few plays in my time here. The best by far was Toibin's Beauty in a Broken Place, performed at the Peacock Theatre on Abbey Street.
I learned more about theatre, Irish history and culture, and the artistic spirit in the two and a half hours I spent watching this play than in the countless classes I've attended here. This is a wildly interpretive and yet heartreakingly simple and true retelling of the bonds between famed Irish playwrights William Butler Yeats, Sean O'Casey, and Lady Gregory, set against the backdrop of the Irish uprisings and the opening of O'Casey's controversial play (another must-read,) The Plough and the Stars.
I cannot recommend this play highly enough. Read it, go and see it, absorb it...I hope you enjoy it as much as I have!

In reading The Covenant, I found myself making life-changing decisions. The book walks you through the Old Testament covenant process, then applies it to our lives in the 21st century. Dr. Garlow is a true scholar, and his wisdom prevails in this work. The Old Testament Customs of the B.C. era may seem obsolete today, but only a fool would cast their truths as irrelevent. The Word of God has, and will, stand the test of time. It will never lose its power or LIFE. Dr. Garlow explains in layman's terms how we can learn from our past, and enjoy the freedom of engaging in a life-long relationship with God.

I heard about Dr. Garlow's book and decided to buy it. I'm glad I did. I have found a great wealth of information useful for sermon preparation, devotional study, and biblical history. I'm planning on buying the DVD and showing it on Wed. nights for discipling.

Great read, awesome information on details of the Old and New Covenant.

A Wonderful Book! :-) Has alot of Colorful Photo's Showing each of the Artists Wonderful Talent, Layed Out on Each Cow.

This picture book contains wonderful, colorful photographs of each & every cow on display in the Kansas City Cow Parade 2001. It's no substitute for seeing the cows in person, but it is useful as an orientation before visiting the cows, a post-visit reminder of the cows, or an opportunity for folks who can't make it to KC to see how delightful the KC Cow Parade is. The book is organized by location -- cows in the Plaza area are grouped together, cows in the Crown Center area are grouped together, cows at the KC Star building are grouped together, and so on -- so you know exactly what to expect before you venture off to see the cows.

If you've never seen a Cow Parade -- artists/sponsors are provided with a standard model bovine to decorate as they see fit. Some of the models are simply painted -- designer Michael Graves painted a "Light Blue" cow with reddish flowers with Target-logo bullseye centers; there are cows painted with large florals, there's a "Teal". Others are wonderfully ornate, like the "Moo-maid" mermaid cow in a fountain in Crown Center.

Many of the cows involve Kansas City themes -- like jazz ("Jazzy Cow", "Jazz Moosik" -- with saxophone horns, "Cownt Basie", "Charlie Parcow", "Jazzily Blue"); the Wizard of Oz ("Yellow Brick Roadie","Dorothy", "Tin Cow . . . from the Wizard of Ox", the "Cowardly Cow", and "ScareCow" -- the Cowardly Cow looks just like Bert Lahr, jowls & all). There are barbecue theme cows ("Barbecue Bull", "Mixed Plate Blue"), Liberty Memorial (the only active WWI memorial in the country) cows ("Liberty Moo-Morial Monument")and other KC-specific cows ("Shuttle Cow" -- a takeoff on the shuttlecocks sculpture on the art gallery lawn). Some are just plain fun -- like "Cow-Moo-Flage", which features a standard holdstein with a chicken cox & comb, tail , wings, & feet attached, and "Cowntertop", a cow covered in samples of laminate, with a sink in her back, "Moo-lyn Monroe", "Cowzilla", "Cowlvador Dali," "Cowculus." My personal favorite of the show -- "Buttons & Bovines", featuring a cow covered in buttons.

Kansas City hosts a wealth of creativity and artistic talent. We're home to Hallmark -- many talented Hallmark artists show their skills in the Cow Parade. Cows designed by other local artists are also wonderful & clever. This is a great book -- a book you'll want to again & again as you marvel at the cleverness of the talented designers who converted plain cow models into intriguing works of art.

This is an admirable and unusual work, of doctoral-level quality in its sources and methods, while also reflecting the professional intelligence career status of the author. It complements Amy Zegart's broader book, Flawed By Design, in an excellent manner. This book, focusing as it does on the CIA alone, and on internal sources not readily available to Zegart, fills a major gap in our understanding of the CIA's origins. The author excels at demonstrating both the actual as opposed to the mythical origins of the agency, and pays particular heed to the role of the Bureau of the Budget and that Bureau's biases and intentions. At the end of it all, the author notes that the agency was moving in controversial directions within four years of its birth, quickly disturbing Harry Truman, who is quoted as saying, twenty-years after the fact (in 1963), "For some time I have been distributed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational arm and at times a policy-making arm of Government....I never had any thought when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations." The author himself goes on to conclude that "the nature of the new threats and the revolution in information acquisition and dissemination have thrown traditional ways of intelligence organization, collection, evaluation, and distribution into question. ... CIA has entered the second half-century of its existence striving to avoid the fate of its OSS parent. In the process, it is groping for new missions and purposes while blighted by the legacy of its past derelictions, and while operating amid a rapidly changing global environment and technological revolution that are rendering its sources, methods, organizations, and mystique obsolete." I would hasten to add, as my own book documents, that we will always have hidden evil in the world and will always needs spies and secret methods to some extent, but this book, combining academic rigor with insider access, must surely give the most intelligent of our policy, legislative, and intelligence managers pause, for it very carefully documents the possibility that 75% of what we are doing today with secret sources and methods need not and should not be done. This book has much to offer those who would learn from history.

This is a well balanced, well documented, and definitive book on the beginnings of the current U.S. intelligence system. It also provides an interesting smaller window on the development of the entire post WWII U.S. National Security Establishment. For all its merits, this book is not for the general reader because it deals with a very small and specialized slice of modern American history. A more general and equally important book, "Flawed by Design" by Amy Zugert (Amazon.com) would be a better choice for individuals who don't wish to deal with the impressive amount of detail that this book provides. Nonetheless this book is indispensable to any anyone wishing to understand the process by which the current U.S. Intelligence System and specifically the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was created.

As the author makes clear, the intelligence system that was established was very much the product of the disinterest that senior policy makers and the U.S. Congress had in intelligence matters in the wake of WWII. Excepting for intelligence professionals and some far seeing bureaucrats there were no strong constituencies or lobbying groups who cared about a national intelligence system. The author demonstrates that the CIA in particular was very much a creature of good and bad compromises that were imposed by the legitimate concerns of the military intelligence establishments, the FBI and State Department. Reading this book one is impressed with intelligence and dedication of the military and civilians who ultimately still ended up creating the dysfunctional intelligence system that we have today.

In the course of recounting this story, the author quotes an all but forgotten bureaucrat of the immediate post war era, named John Ohly, who, after reviewing the proposals for a CIA, pointed out that there was a lack, "of an intelligence concept which has been carefully thought out and which serves as a clear guide to the various collection and sources and which permits and requires the establishment of priorities as to areas and subjects." This reviewer knows of no more succinct statement on what is presently wrong with the U.S. Intelligence System.

This is a great read. It is clear and concise, and offers a great look into the time period.

This book is a well-focused incursion into several ongoing debates in early American historiography. Anyone who has read academic history about that period in the last thirty years should be aware of the republicanism-liberalism debates as well as the arguments surrounding the development of capitalism in the early republic.
Shankman's book focuses on Pennsylvania politics during the years of the Jefferson and Madison administrations as well as the decades immediately prior and after. Pennsylvania had the most advanced and diversified economy of any of the states. For that reason, Shankman believes that the arguments among the various factions of the Jeffersonian party ended up being of great consequence. Much of the rest of the country followed Pennsylvania's lead and the broad consensus that came out of Pennsylvania in regards to the meaning of democracy and the state's role in economic development became the national consensus for the first half of the nineteenth century.
Shankman's first chapter is a superb exposition of the development of the opposition to Hamilton's economic policies and to Adam's assertion of national power in reaction to the Whiskey Rebellion and in the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts. His exposition is concise and very even handed. On the state level, three strands of Jeffersonians emerged: the Quids, the Snyderites and the Philadelphia Democrats. Shankman delineates their differences and traces those to differences in their geographical origins and social status.
As long as they were a party of opposition these three variants were able to work together. With the election of Jefferson in 1800 their differences fractured their alliance.
This is the meaning of Shankman's title. The "crucible of conflict" is practically a mantra throughout this book. The idea is that the political debates and electoral conflicts in Pennsylvania drove the Jeffersonian's thought in directions it would not otherwise have gone. In the end, they had to either give up some of their cherished ideals or be brushed aside in state politics as irrelevant.
For example, one of the basic assumptions of the thought of the time was the idea of "the people". There was this sense that there was a common interest that united the whole populace. If no one started out from a position of too much relative wealth or political influence and if all were allowed to freely pursue their dreams then no major conflicts could develop among the people. If there was discord, it was due to distortions in the system, e.g., the judges manipulating the judicial system in defiance of the majority (the more things change...) The problem that the Jeffersonians had to face was "the creative endeavors of certain citizens were causing inequality to grow among citizens" (p.168).
The eventual solution to the issue of equality and economic development was to allow everyone an "untrammeled right to pursue his self-interest" (p.165).
This development is played out in Shankman's telling of the 1805 governor's race. This chapter is another incisive exposition. Shankman is an excellent writer.
One final but very important point. In his final chapter, Shankman positions his thesis in the ongoing debates that I mentioned at the beginning. He expounds on Merrill and Wilentz' point that it is easy to look back at this period and to see the development of a capitalist economy as being inevitable. They point out that while everyone back then embraced "commerce and commodity production" that that is not the same thing as capitalism (p.240). This is a common problem in historical writings. A wide open development is seen as having been almost inevitable. One of the real strengths of Shankman's book is that he reminds us just how wild and wooly in possibility this period was. Capitalism was not inevitable. We could have gone a different way. This is a superb telling of why we went the way we did.

This book is a "must have" for anyone, especially the Wichitans who live where most of Gino's sculptures are located! Artists, sculptors and painters will also enjoy and appreciate the talent of Gino Salerno. Not only does it serve as interesting piece of local history, it would make a great tabletop book or unique gift for someone.

Unfortunately, some of the statues only exist as photos presented in the book, due to acts of vandalism. Some have been relocated to private organizations or homes. It is such a delight to be able to see them around Wichita, and some are still around for our viewing pleasure.

This truly is a beautiful book, with some insights shared by the author on his favorite types of woods and tools that he uses.

He still does sculptures, and his contact information is in the book. After seeing all these, you'll want one of your own.

As soon as Gino started with his wood sculptures, a kind lady started to secretly keep track of his work, taking pictures and notes of all of his pieces.

Some years later she died, and left Gino a complete record of his own artistic carreer.

That's why this book offers a unique perpective of Salerno's art, from it's origins to his last pieces, including some that have been destroyed by vandalism or weather, and others that have been stolen. You'll be able to see all the techniques, styles and themes that the artist has explored over the last decade. Some of the sculptures are simply superb.

It's 95% photographic, with just enough explanation to get an idea of his personality, the way he works and some secrets of intrest for other wood artists.

I have enjoyed exploring the work that this peruvian artist living in Wichita, Kansas; a work that is just starting it's way into the rest of America.