On The Edge Books

I can't believe it. He saw my worst nightmare five times over every day.

I believe this book is a very inspiring book that tells you how one lives its life. It gives me a very vivid picture of what the author is writing about, It is like a book come alive, and it's like a movie in some way. I am very proud of this man who sees an opporunity and takes it and achieves it. I can see a deaf man who can do anything, Not even blood stops this man. Death overflows this book, I can see the smoke of the dark cloud come out of this book and it feels scary but is also a very inspirating book which is full of true scenes that happened to him. I recommend anyone to read this book. It may encourage young kids to achieve their dreams and not to let anything stop them. Who can be an Emt like this man and face alot of discrimation? I wonder who can stand this much?
Read this book!

Mixing humor, shock, and sorrow in a memoir format, Carlos Luria's Skating on the Edge held our attention from beginning to end and had us on the "Edge" of our chairs. The author weaves his personal and family struggles into the account of actual incidents of the successes and failures of the CIA in which he served. His respect for that agency is evident in the writing. But that does not dull the edge of his insightful criticism of the metamorphosis of intelligence collection following the cold war in which human intelligence collection activities were overshadowed by reliance on remote technology-based systems. He blames this policy transition for the intelligence failures leading up to the 9-11 disaster. From the hilarious recounting of his own training and that of others to the shocking revelation of the undetected existence of armed nuclear missiles in a part of Cuba missed by U-2 surveillance, Mr. Luria succeeds in sharing his life experiences in an attention grabbing manner. And there is plenty of between-the-lines inference to stoke the reader's curiosity. For example, what was behind the decision to replace much of the human intelligence gathering program with expensive technology? But alas, it is a memoir and, as such, it's a great read.

Marcia and Ted Wallenius, Summit Book Club

Thoroughly enjoyed Mr. Luria's journal. Has a great ability to hold your attention and bring you with him on his jouney through his life in
the CIA and also his time spent in Germany, England and the US. Gave many copies of this book to family and friends as Christmas gifts and have received very good reviews. Mr. Carlos Luria has a special ability to tell stories.

He did a lot of programming when he was director of the Poetry Project, but the title is all about going both ways and having been programmed too, over the years, perhaps as far as birth itself. Zachary Wollard's evocative cover painting shows the young poet "listening" to grave bands of color that pour into his right ear--waves of red, tan, olive and a deep maroon) and then after translation inside his beautiful face, out from the left ear pours the result--birds, butterflies and blossoms strung together on bars of music, stiff bars composed of taxidermist's wire. The poet himself remains singularly unmoved by the operation, ruddy, blonde and severely deadpan, and yet this poetry is bursting with high emotion and "pain screaming."

You get a better glimpse of the boy on the cover when you listen to the wonderful Narrow House recording Berrigan made a year or two ago, PICTURES FOR PRIVATE DEVOTION, where you strain to listen up close, putting your head up to the speaker to catch the intimacy, the way I hung on to my hat at the Five Spot whenever Monk and Coltrane lumbered into "Nutty." In the book under observation I feel sometimes that the immediacy of the writing has been hammered out into a blandness that flirts with what Cardinal Newman once called the "cloud of unknowing," though it is always rescued by Berrigan's acute knowledge of just how much his rapt audience can stand (again like Monk). Has there ever been a poet as self-aware as Anselm Berrigan? After the epic journey of ZERO STAR HOTEL, the present poems seem athrophied, underfed, and most of all pallid next to the world tragedies they are continually evoking, as the speaker whispers, in a Tennyson-stricken gasp, his fears about his lack of agency in whatever situation he's thrust into. "The bomb is an after/ / thought to a product like me," he writes in the title poem, "being numb with fridge/ magnets' vicious laughing everything else for/ / everyone else" -- it is the clarion call of one stretched like Peter Parker in too many directions, and for all of us overworked and understaffed human beings, trying to understand the dilemmas we've gotten stuck into, and our own sticky residue, Berrigan is our hero and will be for come time, I predict. He used to be our Lochinvar, but he has proved himself,

In the poem from the book with the same title, Some Notes on My Programming, Anselm Berrigan writes,

a sense something needs fixing I'd like not to dream
about cutting off pieces of my body tonight

Berrigan approaches the human condition from the ultimate birds-eye view, somewhere far beyond the Milky Way, some place where protons and electrons hang out and exchange ideas, make love without really getting to know each other first, then separate, only to happenstantially reconvene at the record store cash register buying the same Alice Coltrane record. It's at this moment that you realize that you are listening to the same record in your home, cozied up on the loveseat, drinking black coffee, sitting with Anselm; he's not in space, he's in your hand with his legs crossed, sputtering out the kind of truth you don't find in newspapers or the radio. Purposefully disjunctive yet very understandable, seemingly opaque from the outside and yet entirely transparent, Berrigan's poems form a kaleidoscopic vision of a world gone crazy. The shadow of a war-driven U.S. economy looms throughout the work, as does the constant human interface with this clumsy thing we call reality.

Themes interweave throughout the poems. Here are the opening lines from the poem "French Title":

Dreamt I was chopping off fingers
of mine with audience. Not cool

Berrigan knows how to crank out the zingers time and time again - the result of a curious and frustrated emotional intellectualism well rooted in the history of both poetry and the basic human spirit. Nostalgia need't exist only for the melancholy; when applied correctly, it can set a framework for a better, dreamier future. That said, Anselm Berrigan doesn't need to cut off pieces of his body tonight or any night. For this artist, at least a temporary fix can be found somewhere in the poemscapes where his thought patterns reside.

I'll repeat the words the esteemed poets and editors David Ray and Robert Stewart wrote about the book:

In this book of poems Lindsey Martin-Bowen takes us on a journey and from the windows of her stagecoach--or is it an airship, train, or taxi?--points out the transient scenes you'd most likely not have noticed. She makes you love what's out there, framed within these pages, and lofts us far, from place to place, from soul to soul, and back in time and onwards. Such crafted art is rare. All Aboard, Dear Readers!
--David Ray, former editor of New Letters
and author of Music of Time: Selected and New Poems (The Backwaters
Press) and When (Howling Dog Press).

With such poems as these by Lindsey Martin-Bowen, we rediscover the inspiring collusion between sensuality and a spiritual life. There are poems here with direct biblical allusions, but the overlying love of god and humans comes through just as strongly in the gritty details of an unheated two-room flat, a lonely truck driver's wife, a drunken "Antony," slumped at/the sidewalk's edge. In all of these poems, I find a refreshing reliance on imagery and understatement, as the poet, herself, steps aside and lets the people and characters here touch us in themselves.
--Robert Stewart, editor of New Letters
and author of Outside Language: Essays.

I never would have imagined the edge of the world and Kansas together, but Martin-Bowen's poems bring the two concepts together wonderfully. The images are vibrant and the words sing to each other on the pages. You will finish the book with gorgeous phrases seared into your mind.

This book is critical reading material for anyone involved with "at-risk" youth. The author takes the reader back to the beginning of each teen's life, and through this we can better grasp how the subjects are where they are today. This would also be an excellent book for parents to read as it is almost a roadmap for raising a child into a disfunctional adult. I was surprised at how many of the teens in the book began their life in a "normal" home environment, and with a few changes in the family, that environment was destroyed. I believe this book should be required reading for any college course in which the student's career will involve interacting with children of any age.

The author takes his many years of experience and digs into the minds of these teens. I am not in the psychology or education fields and I still found this book to be fascinating. I can only imagine how engulfed someone that is actually in these fields will be with the information in this book. I especially like how the author prepares the reader for each essay with the young adults background and physical characteristics; it really brings you closer to the problems and heartache. He does a great job of debriefing each essay so the layperson like myself can understand the factors that lead to each young adult's behavior. This is a must read for all non-fiction buffs.

My sister has breast cancer and a co-worker's brother is HIV-positive. We dove into this book and kept underlining passages that are of help. My summary: Very compelling reading; you, the layperson, really learn about medicine that seemed intimidating and confusing before - this can help the person you love make choices.

I was the Managing Editor of this book and it had me in tears as I worked on it. The stories are so compelling and the writing so superb that it just draws you in. The people and their families are YOUR family and friends and neighbors--I felt like I knew them. I usually try not to get too emotionally involved with the books I work on, but it was impossible not to with THREE ON THE EDGE.

I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed Dr. Scott's "UFOs for the Millenium". A terrific read that I shall be recommending to other researchers and in my newsletter.

This excellent new book is an exhaustive compendium of UFO incidents and UFOlogy. Literally loaded with both new and old material, it is organized into chapters falling under several subject categories. It shows where Ufology stands at the millennium and where it may be going. It is divided into 4 chapters ("Early Years," "The 1960s-1970s," "UFO Explosion - Aliens, Fires, Missing Cows, 1970-1975," and "After the Crest 1975-Present.") After this the chapter "Informants" contains information from numerous people from presidents to astronauts and it includes personal interviews with several former employees of Wright Patterson AFB. Two chapters deal with Wright-Patterson AFB and UFO crashes. Other chapters are about abductions, conspiracies, and synchronicities. This information is summed up in an epilogue ("The Scientific Approach").

This is an amazing book, full of imagery and energy. It possesses a reality that supercedes the problematic disposition of a city, an instead offers a new reality. Thanks nadim.

This is an amazing book, full of imagery and energy. It possesses a reality that supercedes the problematic disposition of a city, an instead offers a new reality. Thanks nadim.

This excellent book covers some of the same territory as The Borrowed Years 1938-1941: America on the Way to War, by Richard m. Ketchum, a really great book also. But this book is mainly limited to 1941 and while it is mostly based on rather ordinary secondary sources, I found it a great book to read. Most of the book discusses war, but other events are also covered: Virginia Woolf's suicide, Whirlaway's triple crown, Joe DeMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, Ted Williams'.400 plus batting average, Mickey Owen's passed ball, etc. Though I lived through all the time, I found the events on Yugoslavia, Greece, and Crete took on new clarity from my reading of this book. While this is journalistic history, not academic history, I found the book a sheer joy.

The computer and the Internet have impacted on almost every aspect of modern life -- including the fields of employment and job counseling. One of the cutting edge reference books that is a "must" for job counselors and aspiring job seekers is the new "Year 2000" job description guide 50 Cutting Edge Jobs describing a fascinating sampling of new employment opportunities that didn't even exit just a few years earlier. These include such newly developed occupations as Desktop Sound Engineer; Forensic Accountant and Auditor; Multimedia Internet Specialist; Grief Counselor, and more. Each occupation listed and described includes invaluable information on how to get hired, home much the job pays, where you would work, and what you should study to prepare for and secure a position. 50 Cutting Edge Jobs is an essential, core reference title for any school or community job center reading shelf.