Fighting Books

This book is an extremely comprehensive collection of LSU Tiger Football history. I have had it for months and have just begun to scratch the surface. Anyone who ever played for the Tigers up until the publication year is listed in this book, along with the years and positions that they played. In addition, there are amazing facts and stories recorded here. Finney does a fine job of capturing the spirit of LSU Football. This ain't light reading, however as most people know, most Tiger fans don't do anything lightly.

I read the book couple weeks ago. It is drama from the beginning to the
end, in a diplomatic way. Every body who works for the UN should read this book.

This book is an inspired, readable, and labor of love account of the growth of popular education in El Salvador. The writer shares the continuing challenges faced and rewards shared by students, teachers, and those who teach the teachers.

As in El Salvador, the US, especially Texas, California, Florida, New Mexico, Arizona will increasingly face similar challenges. With the growth of the Spanish speaking populations in the U.S. over the next twenty years, educators and health care professionals will be challenged to adapt and at times abandon certain professional roles and attitudes, in favor of more indigenous methods and messengers for advancing literacy and promoting life enhancing health practices and interventions. Public policy in Texas is already shifting toward the use of community based practitioners in healthcare with a view toward building social capital in Hispanic cultures that can become self-sustaining. Professional treatment and education models are not abandoned, but new program growth may be toward the use of professionals to teach the teachers, health educators, and care givers to care for their own communities, and build community based, rather than, state driven programs.

Social service professionals in the U.S. may see their future in this book.

This girl did what more people should do, she took her chance to have a wish and made it into a way to help others. I want to pass this book on to everyone that I know just becuase it will help everyone that reads it, either by getting a new perspectiveon life, or to become a little more empathetic, greatful, whatever it is we owe her thanks. And you go girl nothing can hold you down.

"Fighting Toxics" is an outstanding handbook on how to get polluters in your community to become a "good neighbor" by cleaning up their act. This book guides the reader on how to investigate potential environmental hazards in their community, how to research a company, and how to organize a campaign. I work for an organization which organizes "good neighbor" campaigns, and this is the best resource I have seen on organizing. I highly recommend it to any citizen who is concerned about environmental hazards in their community.

The product description is good, except that it wasn't just an anti-automobile "campaign" exactly. Streets had always been public places, open to all comers under reasonable public regulation. Automobiles were fast, deadly, unregulated intruders in this world. Yet "common sense" was reversed 180 degrees in two decades.

Norton has documented a forgotten history that is more complicated, and more interesting, than the after-the-fact "consumer demand" theory of the right and the corporate conspiracy theories of the left. Another piece of the story is that traffic engineers weren't always automobile promoters. At the beginning, they used impartial efficiency models that showed the obvious: streetcars were far more efficient users of public streets than private cars. (Full review at http://buildingcommunities.nd.edu/news)

I read this book decades ago and came upon a copy recently - it was as good as I remembered.

Loaded with photographs, and with terrific stories and technical details of planes with a wing design which saw a very brief but illustrious time during the WWI era, as well as stories of the men who designed, built, and flew them. With the exception of the Fokker DVII, which was a biplane, triplane types were the most advanced and deadly designs both for bombers and fighters in WWI.

Done in by a desire for planes which depended upon speed rather than maneuverability (for which monoplanes are better suited) that has marked aviation design since the end of WWI, this type nonetheless dominated the field in the era when quick climb and nimbleness were the keys to air victory. This is by far the best text on triplanes.

Korbonski gives many insights into the Polish Underground State. It includes everyday life under the German terror. Special emphasis is placed on the development and protection of clandestine radio transmitters. Interestingly, a simple rope-signaling system finally overcame high-tech German surveillance systems (p. 334). Good detail is provided about the murders of Poles at Palmiry, the Katyn Massacre, the role of freed British POW John Ward during the betrayed and foredoomed Warsaw Uprising, and the subsequent systematic destruction of Warsaw by the vindictive Germans.

The recent widely-acclaimed publication of FEAR, by Jan Thomas Gross, has accompanied accusations, by Gross and his fans, of Poles being too proud to admit negative aspects of their history, specifically acts of Polish collaboration being ignored because they do not fit the ruling paradigm of Polish resistance. The utter nonsense of such charges is readily evident in Korbonski's book. He devotes considerable detail to Polish consorting with and collaboration with the Germans (e. g., pp. 256-257).

Of course, the line between accommodation and collaboration was not always clear-cut. Korbonski clarifies the Volksdeutsche. While most of them were Polish-speaking Germans, some were ethnic Poles, of which only a small fraction should accurately be reckoned collaborators: "No sentence of death was ever passed on a Pole for having registered as a `Volksdeutsche'. The reason for this leniency was that the problem was more complicated than it appeared on the surface. Roughly speaking, the problem bore different aspects in the various aspects in the various provinces of Poland. The Silesians, for example, at the very beginning of the German occupation and in sheer self-defense, decided to register as Volksdeutsche, which in my opinion did not affect their patriotism and devotion to Poland. In Pomerania, from which district large numbers were deported to the General Government, the remainder of the population was compulsorily registered as German, and all men of military age were conscripted into the German Army. The same occurred in Posnania. These soldiers by compulsion eventually deserted from the German army and jointed the ranks of the Second Polish Corps in Italy. It was only in the General Government that the Poles were not compelled to register as Germans and cases of defection were extremely rare."(p. 135).

Another borderline case of accommodation and collaboration is exemplified by the Polish Blue Police (the Policja Granatowa). Wrongly equated with the Jew-killing Ukrainian and Baltic collaborationist units (the infamous Hilfspolizei, or Hiwis), the Blue Police was, in actuality, an anti-criminal force: "The Blue Police consisted of the pre-war Polish Police force; the Germans made them co-operate for the maintenance of public order."(p. 93). Of course, individual Blue Policemen did become open collaborators, and some of these were killed by the underground for helping the Germans kill Poles (p. 130, 134) and Jews (p. 206). Otherwise, some units of the Polish Blue Police were used by the Germans, with or without their consent, for anti-Polish and anti-Jewish actions. For example, the Blue Police was warned by the underground not to take part in the roundups of Poles for forced labor in Germany (pp. 118-119, 224). All in all, the actions of the Blue Police defied simplistic classification: "The attitude of the underground authorities towards the Blue Police was hostile, because as a body it had become a tool in the hands of the German police; but a number of policemen, such as the above-mentioned Inspector, were members of the underground, and frequently carried out most dangerous instructions. The Blue Police were aware that the underground authorities had ordered the suppression of banditry, so they were always glad to take a hand against them."(p. 242).

There are common mischaracterizations of Poles being indifferent too, or even secretly approving of, the Germans' extermination of the Jews. The truth is otherwise. Korbonski recounts the fact that underground Polish reports of Jews being sent to death camps were disbelieved by the British (pp, 252-253). Neither were the events of the Warsaw Ghetto (p. 359) accepted. (The advantage of John Ward reporting on the Germans' use of Polish civilian shields around their tanks during the Warsaw Uprising was the fact that he, an Englishman, was believed: p. 359).

In a cruel irony to the malicious charges (e. g., Schindler's List) of Poles cheering as Jews were being railroaded to death camps, the laughter was actually on the other side: "However, when the trains from the various countries continued to arrive, and when here and there Polish railwaymen were able to whisper a warning to the unfortunate Jews, they were not believed and were laughed at, especially by those Jews who traveled in passenger trains with their luggage and bedding; who were convinced that they were being transported to some labour camp, and that they would be able to survive the war by working hard."(p. 254).

On the basis of the fact that the Kresy (eastern borderlands) had only an ethnically Polish minority (albeit a large one), the British supported Soviet claims to Poland's eastern half. However, most of the non-Poles on these territories were not pro-Soviet, and some were pro-Polish. Consider the following entreaty: "I am a man from Minsk. Now that the Minsk province is under German occupation we can get in touch with people in the motherland. I have come to Warsaw as a representative of the ancient province of Minsk to ask the Polish Government not to forget our country, so that after the war the Minsk territory may be reunited with the motherland. It has been a Polish land for centuries, and wherever you go you'll find evidence of it. There are Poles still living there, and they are dreaming of a reunion. And the White-Ruthenians, too, dream of Poland as their deliverer from the Soviet hell."(p. 314). This was not to be.

A very readable story of the 43rd Wessex Division. A day by day account from creation of the division, to the Normandy Landings, to the surrender of Germany and everything in between. Includes many black and white photographs, maps and drawings. Well worth reading.

There have been many stories written about the Amcerican Civil War. But I've seen few written about the artillery, and to my knowledge none at all about the Horse Artillery that served with and went with the cavalry. This alone would make this book a welcome addition to a Civil War library.

Wars are fought by young men. Still it is a surprise to read when a 'kid' of only twenty-one becomes an officer, and shortly thereafter is a Major.

Major Breathed was already a physician when he joined the Confederate Army. He served all through the war, not as a physician but as a combat leader. He was in almost all the significant battles in the Eastern Theater. This reports on an aspect of the war that is little known.

The book is extensively researched and well written. It reads well yet is full of detail that fills in the story in a most interesting way.