Alabama Books

So glad to see this classic study back in circulation. Also liked the new and improved introduction that talks about how much Tolkien research has changed since the book first came out. The much bigger bibliography is also very useful, which also shows how much more has been written about Tolkien in the past decade. Belongs on any Tolkien scholar's bookshelf.

I've seen this book around and finally decided to take a chance on it. I was not disappointed. There's so much garbage being published about Tolkien now because of the high popularity from the films, but thank Valinor, this book is one of the real ones. Very clear organization, hard evidence directly from the Tolkien writings, a specific topic successfully argued in terms appropriate to the fields of comparative mythology and sociology.

Dissertationeez doesn't bother me (reads like a lot of papers I've written as an English grad student). What I'm looking for is original thinking and competent scholarship. Petty delivers on both counts. Her newer book is more fun to read if you don't want to concern yourself too much with sources and references, but this early study of Petty's lays a lot of the groundwork for myth-based studies of Tolkien in general. I didn't read it for fun. I read it for ideas and information; well worth the price of admission.

I am a graduate student in English Literature, and this book turned out to be exactly what I need in researching the structure of Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings." A bonus was how "The Hobbit" fits into the scheme as well. Precisely and carefully written - the author knows her field well.

A reprint from 1979 of a doctoral dissertation, with the problems of that breed. Petty uses the terminology of Vladimir Propp to perform a folklore motivic analysis of LotR, and at times it's pretty hard going, though the attempt to fit Tolkien into Propp's theories requires less grunting and squeezing than many such efforts. Petty has updated her bibliography, and provided a new introduction discussing the place of mythological studies of Tolkien.

This new edition does not have many changes from the previous. The cost of the book went up too much compared to the the minimal changes.

Now a compulsory part of US paramedic certification, this book is an excellent addition to the shelf of anyone interested in prehospital care, be they nurse, paramedic, EMT, First Responder, physician, or even First Aider.

It logically and systematically lays out the skills and knowledge required to handle trauma effectively in the field, taking a system by system approach to underline the conditions and pitfalls commonly associated with certain injuries.

For me, this was one of the most entertaining courses I have taken in my EMS career. I would definitely recommend this book to all prehospital care providers at every level.

This great book is a requirement for completing the BTLS course (Basic Trauma Life Support). It's written in a simple language, with full explanation of the pathophysiology of the life-threatening and the potential life-threatening diseases occuring during accidents. It teaches you first the knowledge and then the skills needed to perform certain procedures.
It has numerous colored diagrams, pictures, and tables.

The BTLS Course is about 2 days long; the test is on the form of MCQs (choose the best answer) which is much better than True/ False questions.

We had the pleasure to meet one of the book authors, Ms. Donna Hastings from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. According to her, this book is gonna be published in Arabic language in the future.

This book comes in 364 pages, published in 2000 by the Prentice Hall, 4th edition.

Chapters inlcude: Scene size-up, Assessment & initial management of the trauma patient, Patient assessment skills, Initial airway management, Aiway Management skills, Thoracic trauma, Thoracic trauma skills, Shock evaluation & management, Fluid resuscitation, Head trauma, Spunal trauma, Spnal trauma, Spine management, Spine management skills, Abdominal trauma, Extremity trauma, Extremity trauma skills, Burns, Trauma in children, Trauma in elederly, Trauma in pregnancy, Patients under the influence of alcohol or drugs, The trauma cardiopulomnary arrest, Blood and body fluid precautions in the prehospital setting.

Appendices include: Optional skills, Radio communications, Documentation: The written report, Trauma care in the cold, Role of the air medical helicopter, Trauma scoring in the prehospital care setting, Drowning Barotrauma & decompression injury, Injury prevention and the role of the EMS provider, Multi-casualty incidents & triage, Glossary, Index.

Recommended for Paramedics and every health care worker.

This is great text for all Paramedics to own. It entails the most up-to-date information on trauma assessment, patient care, patient packaging, ALS interventions, and transport methods and considerations.

This text is easy to read and learn from, intergrating lecture material with the practical material.

A must for the serious Paramedic.

Warren W. Hassler Jr. was one of the top military historians of the Civil War and Professor of American History at Penn State University.

His book Crisis at the Crossroads is not a casual read. It is a thin little book and is for the more serious student who is already well grounded in the history of the battle and can easily visualize the ground from having visited the battlefield. It focuses on unit by unit movements at the regimental level during the first day's battle which makes it somewhat difficult to follow being in a rather condensed fashion. It is however, extremely well researched with multiple source material backing up statements of the action. Dr. Hassler does not make judgments about command decisions or leaders but simply spells out the actions that took place.

If this work has a serious drawback, it is in the lack of good quality maps showing regimental positions and movements which would have greatly enhanced this work.

I have known and have worked with Dr. Hassler personally at Penn State and know of the scholarly detail he demands of historical research. If you are a general student of Gettysburg and are looking to begin going into depth with the first day's battle, then I highly recommend his work to be added to your collection.

If the student is looking for a more readable account of the first day's fighting, written is a less formal style with more inside information, then I would refer you to the book Gettysburg: The First Day by Harry Pfanz.

Hassler's depiction of the first day at Gettysburg is a no nonsense work that pleases from the get-go. An excellent history, this book details and asserts that the engagements fought here, northeast of and through the town of Gettysburg, were the keys to the Union's victory. Most current analysts agree.

This is an easily digested read. The writing style is fluid and to the point. The tactical decisions on both sides are detailed right down to the unit commanders. You sense the fear and guts of this first day of battle. An altogether worthwhile effort, this is Civil War literature you can read with gusto.

Early in the morning of July 1, 1863, the advance soldiers of Confederate General Henry Heth on reconnaissance towards Gettysburg ran into the cavalry of Union General John Burford. With this encounter, the Battle of Gettysburg was underway.

The first day of the battle is sometimes neglected in comparison to the fighting on day 2 at Little Round Top and the Peach Orchard and Pickett's charge on day 3. But the fighting on July 1 was decisive to the Union's victory at Gettysburg. From sunrise on July 1 to about 4:30 p.m, the Union first and eleventh corps held off a larger force of Confederate troops under the Corps commanders A.P. Hill and Richard Ewell. Their stand enabled the remaining elements of the Federal army to concentrate on the high ground of Cemetry Hill and Cemetry Ridge southeast of Gettysburg which was to prove an almost impregnable position. In addition, the Union Army inflicted great losses on the attacking Confederates. The Southern casualties on day 1 severely hampered the Southern attacks on days 2 and 3, particularly on the Union right on Cemetery and Culps Hills and in the attacks on both days on the Union Center.

There are a number of detailed studies of the fighting on July 1, but I found Hassler's short book "Crisis at the Crossroads" (1970) extremely lucid and useful in explaining the confusing, frequently uncoordinated events of that day. The book begins with a discussion of the convergence of the Union and Confederate armies in the environs of Gettysburg, stressing the lack of knowledge of each side of the movements of the other side. Then there is a short but extremely helpful discussion of the topography of Gettysburg, including the ten roads leading into the town and the geographical features of the terrain that played a critical role in the troop movements and in the outcome of the fighting. Many studies do not pause to give an overview of the terrain. This makes the account of the battle more confusing and harder to follow than it needs to be. Hassler's book, after the reading of several other accounts of day 1, helped me a great deal in following what was happening.

In short, focused chapters, Hassler discusses the early morning encounter between Burford and Heth, the death of Union General Reynolds, the repeated fighting at the railroad cut in the morning and afternoon, the defeat of the Eleventh Corps north of of Gettysburg by Early, the fighting at Oak Ridge, the ultimate defeat of the Union First Corps on McPherson and Seminary Ridge, and the Union retreat through Gettysburg to Cemetry Hill. Hassler addresses the most common question arising from the first day of the Battle: whether Ewell and Lee should have pursued the attack on Cemetery and Culps Hills. He concludes that such an attack would likely have failed. The book ends with a short chapter in which Hassler gives his views and conclusions on the fighting on day 1 and on its impact on the rest of the battle. I found his discussion judicious and insightful.

Hassler describes the battle both from the perspectives of the commanders and also from the view of the foot soldiers on the line. The role of artillery in the battle receives great emphasis. There are places were more maps would have been helpful. Hassler's stresses the valor and conviction demonstrated by the soldiers of both sides on that dreadful, eventful day. His study concludes (p. 155)with the words:
"[t]heir conduct was indeed sublime".

This book lacks the detail of Henry Pfanz's study of day 1, but I found Hassler gets to the point quicker and is easier to follow. I suggest the reader with a strong interest in exploring day 1 of Gettysburg read Hassler's book first, if possible, and then follow it by a detailed reading of Pfanz. This book will help the student of the Civil War understand our country's greatest battle.

Hassler manages to bring the reader to the front without much delay and the action gets right to the point. Common among other 1st Day books in regards to Gettysburg are sometimes boring biographies of people involved. This book simply skips the biography and states the incident quite quickly. From AP Hill's movements, Buford's defense, the 1st and 11th Corps retreat and the mad dash through town to Cemetary Hill this book quickly defines what happened. It was refreshing reading the regiment movements and actions along with the officers' guidance in these chapters. This book is not of the huge detail that is common in Harry Pfanz's book on the 1st Day, though it is a rather quick study of the general events that played out on July 1st 1863.

One thing that I wished were more prevalent were the use of maps. Hassler's regiment movements were sometimes a bit hard too follow. This book is one you would want to take to the battlefield and read as you could use the markers and monuments to get a better understanding. Some maps are used though I found them not as helpful as in other books on the subject.

Overall I think this book deserves the 5 stars as it captures the important aspects of Day #1 without lengthy trivial details. It reads well and focusses on just one thing- Day #1!

Martin Heidegger's special intellectual relationship with the Presocratics is often discussed as if the German philosopher was some sort of romantic originalist or nostalgist. But Heidegger always insisted that the point about going back to Heraclitus, Parmenides and rest was not to recover the specific contents of their thought (or, worse, to wallow in their supposed primitive "purity"), but to recapture the spirit of their efforts to "think the question of Being." You won't find a better presentation of this - or a more candid glimpse of Heidegger as a working philosopher - than in this text. It presents the record of a seminar on Heraclitus conducted by Heidegger and the German scholar Eugen Fink in the late 1960s. Heidegger's discussion of specific Heraclitian texts makes for difficult reading but is, generally speaking, quite lucid. And the dialog with Fink and student participants is eye-opening. (Heidegger's pronouncements are by no means always taken as Gospel!) Most important, in spite of their rather recondite subject matter, these seminar records wonderfully illuminate Heidegger's own philosophical development in the last two decades of his life. Although this book does require familiarity with Heidegger's work and somewhat unique philosophical terminology, as well as familiarity with the history of philosophy generally, I wouldn't call it a text "for specialists only." Unless, of course, all readers of philosophy are specialists! And it does provide a welcome corrective to current "New Age" tendencies to view Heraclitus and the other Presocratics as authors of quasi-religious wisdom manuals. No dumbing-down here; just a tough confrontation with difficult material!

I would like to suggest that the widest stance that I have encountered reading philosophy shows up in Greek on page 18 of HERACLITUS SEMINAR: Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, translated by Charles H. Seibert (Northwestern University Press, 1993). The English translation was copyright 1979 by The University of Alabama Press. First published in German as HERACLIT. I have the second paperbound printing, 1994. The hermeneutical circle is correlated to fragment 7, translated in Note 4 on page 163, but the discussion of the Greek terms involving a moving relatedness of things that actually exist which elucidates an indeterminate number of things of a quintessential kind. "In smoke, to be sure, things become elusive, but it does not eliminate those distinctions which become evident . . ." (Fink, p. 18). Heidegger becomes interested in the gnosis of "grasping humans" on page 19.

This book does not have an index. The page guide on page 171 shows that every ten pages in English is 16, 15, 14, or 17 pages in the German. Heraclitus wrote a book which was familiar to many thinkers in the ancient world, but all we can do now is "cast light on an inner coherence of the fragments' meaning, but without pretending to reconstruct the original form of Heraclitus' lost writing, [On Nature]. We shall attempt to trace a thread throughout the multiplicity of his sayings in the hope that a certain track can thereby show itself. Whether our arrangement of the fragments is better than that adopted by Diels is a question that should remain unsettled." (Fink, p. 4).

I believe the Fr. 1 mentioned by Heidegger on page 7 is the beginning of Heraclitus' book. In the discussion, we have the exchange of ideas:

Heidegger: Since when do we have concepts at all?
Participant: Only since Plato and Aristotle. We even have the first philosophical dictionary with Aristotle.
Heidegger: While Plato manages to deal with concepts only with difficulty, we see that Aristotle deals with them more easily. (p. 7).

One of the problems with concepts is how they are applied:

Heidegger: Thus, you mean the transformation of things with respect to one ground.
Fink: The ground meant here is not some substance or the absolute, but light and time. (p. 10).

Fink: . . . The transformations of fire then imply that everything goes over into everything; so that nothing retains the definiteness of its character but, following an indiscernable wisdom, moves itself throughout by opposites.
Heidegger: But why does Heraclitus then speak of steering?
Fink: The transformations of fire are in some measure a circular movement that gets steered by lightning, . . . The movement, in which everything moves throughout everything through opposites, gets guided.
Heidegger: But may we speak of opposites or of dialectic here at all? Heraclitus knows neither something of opposites nor of dialectic.
Fink: True, opposites are not thematic with Heraclitus. . . . (p. 11).

The set-up is basically a dialog, and considers topics like:

Fink: The problem of constitution in Husserl's phenomenology . . . (p. 84).

Heidegger: From this it follows once again that we may not interpret Heraclitus from a later time. (p. 85).
Fink: All the concepts that arise in the dispute over idealism and realism are insufficient to characterize the shining-forth, the coming-forth-to-appearance, of what is. It seems to me more propitious to speak of shining-forth than of shining-up. . . . (p. 85).

The poem "Hyperion" mentions Heraclitus and Heidegger discusses being as beauty in Hegel along with "The one that in itself distinguishes itself." (p. 113).

Participant: "There is no sentence of Heraclitus' that I have not taken up in my LOGIC."
Heidegger: What does this sentence mean? (p. 113).

Fr. 88 of Heraclitus, as Diels translates, "And it is always one and the same, what dwells (?) within us: living and dead and waking and sleeping and young and old. For this is changed over to that and that changed back over to this." (p. 118).

Heidegger then has to correct himself on Hegel by reading some lecture:

"The true deficiency of the Greek religion as opposed to the Christian is that in it appearance constitutes the highest form, in general, the whole of the divine, while in the Christian religion appearing obtains only as a moment of the divine." (p. 122).

But he can also complain about being translated into French:

Heidegger: In French, Dasein is translated by [being there], for example by Sartre. But with this, everything that was gained as a new position in BEING AND TIME is lost. Are humans there like a chair is there? (p. 126).

Heidegger is quite interested in how well he is understood in German, but he finally comes back to the plight of what is unthought in the end.

I must admit from the outset that my familiarity with Heidegger's philosophy, not to mention Fink's (a philosopher I'd never heard of), is not up to par with my fellow commentators (this is a generous assessment in my favor, to say the least--and obvious). That said, this review is not intended to sway Heideggar junkies one way or the other re: purchase, nor will it aid those who know Heraclitus' Fragments backwards and forwards; I am not in a position to do either. I aim to address only those nonspecialists who--like myself--are interested in Heraclitus, and who are considering making a purchase for that reason, and that reason alone.

I ordered "The Heraclitus Seminar", perhaps naively, in order to gain a better understanding of Heraclitus and his Metaphysics--I came away from the ordeal completely dumbfounded. This is partially my own fault--I knew going in that Heidegger makes for difficult reading, and that his precipitous works are, almost without exception, extremely abstruse. As such, his books require great dedication and patience. This, I was prepared for. However, I came to an impasse with the book almost immediately. This resulted from the multitude of passages that were written, within the body of the text, in Attic Greek--with *no* translations. (no kidding)

This one is better left for the later grad students and/or their profs--that is, unless you happen to be an extremely patient novice, who can read Greek without a lexicon, and who has a penchant for Heideggarian analysis of the pre-Socratics.

In terms of personal experiences, Heidegger is most revealing on page 5, in the first session of a seminar in the winter semester of 1966-67, when he mentions in his third comment to the participants, "Suddenly I saw a single bolt of lightning, after which no more followed. My thought was: Zeus." This experience is a link to the antiquity also experienced in the Biblical book of Job, in the speech of Elihu, at Job 36:27-33 and Job 37:3-24, leading up to the speeches of Yahweh. By page 7 of this translation of the seminar, Heidegger is demonstrating his link with "Fr. 1" of Heraclitus by quoting more than five lines in the original ancient Greek. Those who would prefer to know the English are given the Diels version in Note 3 on page 163. I find that Note 4, the Diels translation of Fragment 7, quoted (in Greek) by Eugen Fink in the second session of these seminars, is a bit easier for me to understand. The Glossary on pages 166 to 169 is a great guide to the Greek words for the major topics in this book. There is no index, but the approach being pursued in the fashion of this book could hardly gain any clarity by an attempt to locate the ideas in this book by any system related to page numbers. My comment on this reflects Heidegger's reaction to a participant who noted that the first philosophical dictionary didn't occur until Aristotle. (p. 7) Before things were sorted out, Heraclitus was trying to communicate something in Fr. 11 about "Everything that crawls . . ." (p. 31). The excitement picks up on page 32, when Fink quotes a poem by Holderlin called "Voice of the People."

Lately, I find myself returning to literature written before I was born (1956). When I saw the review of LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN in THE NEW YORKER, I became instantly convinced that I should purchase it. I'd known Agee's work since I was 13, when I first read DEATH IN THE FAMILY. I belonged to the Scholastic Book Club and every month my mother gave me change out of her the bottom of her purse so I could buy the books I had faithfully marked on my order form. I was haunted by this book as a teen, and I remain haunted still. I will always believe that few American writers ever achieved anything comparable to the beginning of DEATH IN THE FAMILY, a short italicized introduction which begins: "We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child." Agee's sensory details throughout DEATH amaze. Another stunning passage reads: "Supper was at six and was over by half past. There was still daylight, shining softly and with a tarnish, like the lining of a shell;" I could go on, because every page of this book is a treasure. But I would like to turn my attention to LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, which I had never read until now.

I will preface my remarks by saying that I am a writer currently very interested in the distinction between fiction and non-fiction writing. Agee addresses this issue by saying: "In a novel, a house or person has his meaning, his existence, entirely through the writer. Here, a house or a person has only the most limited of his meaning through me: his true meaning is much huger." It's perhaps this interest of mine in the craft of writing itself that has made FAMOUS MEN so fascinating to me.

Another thing: In the beginning pages, Agee writes with absolute humility towards his own writing and his subject matter. This was stunning to me, because I've also read Agee's movie reviews, and in those writings Agee is witty, merciless, honest, and very confident in his own opinion. In short, they are some of the best movie reviews I have ever read. However, FAMOUS MEN is another kind of writing altogether. As Agee admits, his efforts to capture his subject matter through words were a failure. Words are inefficient, inadequate in matters so huge. He wrote: "If I could do it, I'd do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement."

That FAMOUS MEN is not more popular does not surprise me, nor was Agee surprised, I think, when the book got bad reviews and suffered poor sales. FAMOUS MEN, I think, is not the sort of book that would ever gain wide acceptance. It is a flawed masterpiece that takes a lot of work to absorb, but well worth the effort.

I don't know the extent to which Agee may have been devastated, nonetheless, at the way America turned its back on his masterpiece. I do know that Agee seemed to suggest in the early pages of FAMOUS MEN that the worst thing that can happen to any artist is mass acceptance. Perhaps mass acceptance is something the writer both wants and fears; I don't know. But Agee does say in FAMOUS MEN that he felt that as soon as, say, Beethoven's music is used as a form of relaxation or as a background to the mundane activities human beings inevitably become so wrapped up in, then the music has lost its vitality. That is why Agee suggests:

"Get a radio or a phonograph capable of the most extreme loudness possible, and sit down to listen to a performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or of Schubert's C-Major Symphony. But I don't mean just sit down and listen. I mean this: Turn it on as loud as you can get it. Then get down onto floor and jam your ear as close into the loudspeaker as you can get it and stay there, breathing as lightly as possible, and not moving, and neither eating nor smoking nor drinking. Concentrate everything you can into your hearing and into your body. You won't hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it."

The same might be said for FAMOUS MEN. You can't read it as you would some other books, even DEATH IN THE FAMILY, which has a nice and clean chronological structure. You have to really pay attention when you read FAMOUS MEN. If you concentrate, you will hear FAMOUS MEN in your whole body. And if it hurts you, you will be glad.

Agee was an outrageous bleeding-heart, a man whose life and work were compromised by posturing, mawkishness and complacency in anguish. The gush of his prose--the hemorrhaging of that bleeding heart--is deeply and cloyingly purple. His endless rhapsodies betray a stubborn adolescence that will delight those who see an artist as a perpetual kid and repel those who don't.

Immense suffusions of tenderness are not the most helpful or respectful way of responding to fellow human beings, and they signal an obsession with one's own feelings instead of their ostensible object. In this regard, one notes that Agee's tenderness did not prevent him from engaging in serial adulteries and enforced threesomes, devoting his life to personal fulfillment rather than self-denying altruism, and indulging himself to death by the age of 45. Of course Agee felt guilty about all this (his writing fairly reeks of a rotting conscience), but he saw his guilt as a reassuring index of purity, like the parishioner who sees confession and absolution as a license to go on sinning.

Moreover, Agee's tenderness was reserved for the disadvantaged. The obverse of this solicitude was an affected brutality of reference to just about everyone else (except family and friends, his favorite artists and his latest lover). This tough-talking pose, which has not worn well, assumed a moral superiority that the record does not bear out.

Art and morality are not the same thing, but Agee thought they were, and this confusion permeates his work. Again and again he makes moral claims upon us which he thinks that his aesthetic project will validate. It does nothing of the kind: it merely aestheticizes.

What did Agee actually do for the Gudgers, Woods and Ricketts other than make the hearts of his readers bleed for them in as transient a fashion as his own? In one respect at least he did more harm than good. He over-idealized "Louise Gudger" to such a degree that he left her with a permanent sense of failure. Unable to reconcile Agee's fantasy portrait with the reality of her ordinary self, she finally committed suicide--further proof that sentimentality can be pernicious as well as meretricious.

Agee did possess extraordinary powers of lyric observation, and a sharp mind when he wanted to use it; but aching sensitivity, metastasizing into ecstatic intoxication, tended to distort his vision, soften his rigor and sentimentalize his voice. He has his devoted followers, or rather his cultists, but one doubts that his place in the canon is as secure or exalted as they might wish, or as this Library of America volume would suggest.

Let me be clear... I've not read the present volume though I've read the individual books collected in it years ago. "A Death in the Family" remains vivid in my memory, depite almost 30 years since I last read it, and "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" is an absolute classic.

Though I have not yet received the LOA edition, I was compelled to add a review if only to counter the first reviewer here who is intent on seeing only ideology rather than the writing. If the work is looked at without the rose-colored glasses of (conservative) political correctness, you'll find there is an amazing writer and thinker behind the words.

Just read the works for yourself, not through an ideological smokescreen.

This recently reissued collecton of Agee's work includes the brilliant, touching photos of Walker Evans with James Agee, photos made during the Depression Era of the 'thirties. Agee's writings are true Americana, his prose flows and the reader is made a part of the families about which he writes. This compilation belongs in the library of anyone concerned with human feelings in times of hurtin', hunger, and need. If you lived through the time,as I did, you will know it again through Agee's superb reflections on it.

It is a shame to admit; colonization of our planet by inhuman creatures who are demonic in nature is a fact! This brave women eloquently describes her reality in a heartfelt manner;clear and consise, considering the REAL nature of our earth and aliens.We are asked to really put aside our programming by an elite military entertainment complex and admit that we have been found, tagged and bred! We are their property; like lab-rats to, the owners of the black triangles. Read this book! and lucid dream of resistance, citizens!

NOTE: I have not read this book yet and only gave it a rating because Amazon's system forced me to do so, in order that I might publish the following comments. Sorry about that.

In the book "Taken," which very well may be the most important book ever written on the subject of alien and military abductions of humans, Dr. Karla Turner stated that she was convinced that Leah Haley's story as told in "Lost Was the Key" was genuine, based on private information that Dr. Turner had been given in confidence. That's a very important and valuable endorsement.

If you're not already familiar with the critically important work of Dr. Turner, get her books and a video lecture -- all for free -- at triple-w dot karlaturner dot org.

Lost Was the Key is Leah Haley's personal account of alien abduction and governmental harassment. It is unlike any other abduction account I have read, as it incorporates in one story a great number of experiences shared by other individual abductees. She claims to have been abducted multiple times since early childhood; smallish, chalky-colored beings have examined her physically on a number of occasions and have removed eggs from her ovaries, ostensibly for the creation of hybrid children; aliens have inserted implants into her body, and she has discovered physical marks on her person that coincide with her experiences. She has interacted with more than one type of alien, including a reptilian race of beings apparently at odds with the race of her interstellar guide Ceto. What is most important about her experiences, though, is her reported harassment at the hands of military and government agents on earth. She claims to have been abducted several times by such human agents, who drugged and interrogated her to get information about the aliens. Why the military should be so interested in her experiences becomes obvious when she quietly drops a bomb on the reader, saying that she was inside a spaceship that crash landed after having been shot down by the U.S. Air Force.

I'm not sure of my feelings for her story. I have met the author and heard her speak of her experiences, and she struck me then as quite credible. Her hypnotic regression sessions were handled by John Carpenter, who is well respected in the ufology community. Her writing is not polished; it most definitely reads as her own personal effort to describe the things she has remembered and learned in her own way; it is in no way a slick presentation targeted at the reader. She constantly jumps around from one experience or idea to another, which I found pretty frustrating. She has many questions and very few answers. Clearly, what makes this book stand out is her reported encounters with very human government agents; the personal trauma and excessive harassment she claims to have suffered at human hands is, if true, exceedingly grievous. I really can't commit myself either way in this case; Haley makes so many claims that one has to be somewhat skeptical, although I have no reason to disbelieve her story. She herself never comes to any firm conclusions about her experiences, constantly questioning her own sanity every step along the way. This is truly a unique abduction account, and for that reason I would encourage any potential reader to familiarize himself/herself with the literature associated with this phenomenon before attempting to sort out the complexities of Haley's reported experiences.

Leah Haley's book purports to be an account of repeated alien abduction discovered through hypnotic regression, and as such is a celestial cousin of Whitley Strieber's more famous Communion, and its sequels. She sounds perfectly sincere about all this, and it is courageous of her to expose herself to the inevitable ridicule that such accounts attract. What is particularly disturbing about Ms Haley's story is that she claims to have been stalked, abducted, examined and harassed by OMAGS ("obnoxious military and government scoundrels") from Planet Earth, as well as by the little "chalky-coloured" men. Is this fact imitating X-Files? Since she doesn't have all the answers to her numerous questions (why, who, where, when, etc), the book cannot help but have an unresolved quality, but that heightens its credibility. All the same, I don't dare to be 100% convinced. If some of her conclusions are true, the future of the human race doesn't bear contemplation. Brrrrrrrrrrrrr!

David Adler has done a tremendous job with this biography as with the others in the series. The book is a great introductory biography for young students in grades K-3. Although his biographies have been criticized for being simplistic, I feel this is exactly what makes these books perfect for younger audiences. They were meant to be an INTRODUCTORY biography, not an exhaustive research study. Young listeners will not be bored and will not drown in excessive information. The book is abundantly illustrated with colorful pictures and concludes with a timeline of important dates. My kids, ages 5,8 and 11, love this series.

This suberb book helps know what happened during segregation. It really teaches you alot and has amazing pictures. If you need to read a great book to read this exciting book is the book to read! I would recommend this book to all ages because it really is that good!

I hope every child gets to read a lest one Black history Book. Even grown men and women.Every person in this world should be able to fell What it was like to be in Black history and this book is prefect to help you.You will feel like you were there right next to Rosa Parks. If you your child or anybody else is interested in Black history I promise this is a book for you.

I really enjoyed this book. It is filled with great illustrations and fun & interesting facts that make it a wonderful book to teach children about Rosa's life. I would highly recommend it for all teachers & parents to share with children.

This rather unflattering portrait of a self-indulgent and motor-mouthed Satchel Paige adds little new to either the Paige legend or the history of the baseball era he represented. It also raises some serious questions about the author's journalistic approach. Why does Paige--so lucid in memory on all other matters--boast of facing Mickey Mantle during the 1948 pennant race (Mantle was a rookie in 1951), clinching the tight pennant race by defeating the Yankees (Cleveland won in a playoff with Boston), or facing manager Casey Stengel that year (when Stengel didn't arrive on the Yankee bench until 1949)? If Paige is simply forgetful or chooses to purposely distort historical facts, was doesn't the author/interviewer point this out in a footnote, or perhaps in his postscript? And how could Paige's several days of detailed and colorful ramblings be here reported in such word-for-word detail and in Paige's supposed own words if the author/interviewer made no tape recordings (something Fox claims in the postscript)? One leaves this book wondering how much in its pages is actually Satchel and how much is a fictional character dreamed up by Bill Fox?

The treatment of this supposed 1970 in-depth interview with Paige is also quite repetitious in spots (much of the Postscript is a reprise of Chapter 1) and thus the treatment seemingly lends itself far more to the original intended magazine piece and not to a full-length book. There is also little here (despite the book's misleading title) that captures the flavor of America during the 1930s and 40s eras in which Paige played.

There are far better portraits available of Satchel Paige, especially those written by Negro leagues historian John Holway.

Theb book was interesting and informative. I enjoyed it very much.
The price was reasonable and the service was timely and satisfactory.

As already noted, this work is the results of a seven day or so interview of the great Satchel Paige by the author in 1970. It is far more than simply a book of "baseball war stories." The interview clearly illuminates the personality of one of the greatest baseball players who ever lived (beyond a doubt the best pitcher). There was much more here, to this man than just a great arm. The author captures Paige's somewhat erratic personality. The man, Paige, was certainly a character and much more that a simple "jock." On the other hand, reading between the lines, there is a whimsical sadness ever present. As you read, you cannot help but wonder what might have been had the times been different. You get the feeling that Paige knew, ergo, the sadness. Recommend this one for any baseball fan or those simply interested in or countries history, warts and all.

Lots of writers have praised William Price Fox's work: Walt Kelly (the creator of Pogo), John Updike, P.G. Wodehouse, Pauline Kael, and, yes, even Bruce Springsteen (Springsteen's song, "Darlington County", was based on Fox's book, Dixiana Moon), Richard Yates, Michael Murphy (Golf in the Kingdom), and then some.

And now the Library Journal (the number one publication for Libraries in America) has ranked Satchel Paige's America as one of the top 25 books to read in 2005.

Hopefully more and more people will take notice of his great work once again. For those who have never been introduced to Fox's work, I highly recommend reading his collection of Short Stories: SOUTHERN FRIED. (Shel Silverstein wrote the music for a play based on this work of fiction.)

Mr.Young wrote this book about boyhood adventures in the south, and I can relate coming from the south. After meeting Mr.Young I got a deep appreication for his book. This is a good piece of literature for anyone who wants a good read and something to think about.

Bard offers empathy and absolution for the ineptness that comes with the territory of growning up and which haunts one for a lifetime. He reaches into his thoughts about courage which are often felt and rarely confessed and shares them in a most compelling manner. I've been reading women's literature almost exclusively for some time and found Snake of God a refreshing change and a reminder of how close the genders can be.

The writer has a beautiful way with words. This is a short book, and one you won't be able to put down until you've finished. I plan to give a copy to those I love the most this Christmas.

The Snake of God is truly a work of art and of the mind. Young poses the unique question to the reader about his/her own treatment of feelings of fear, confidence, and prejudice through a series of childhood experiencs in rural Alabama. The depictions of the people and places are impeccable, and the underlying current of respect for nature is effectively presented. This book is a must

To properly understand history, you must be able to accept all aspects of your topic, good, bad, and all shadings in between, as sources of information and for enrichment of your knowledge. History rarely conforms to our personal view of the world, for there are so many factors which are beyond our control. So it is with Stars Fell on Alabama. The South was no friend to anyone but itself, and this book gives the reader, no matter what their background, an honest, sometimes raw, sometimes fantastic, sometimes poignant, picture of what a part of the South was like for everyone, black and white, and that is its value to anyone who read it and especially to anyone who uses it to teach about the South.

Before Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Carl Carmer took a train from New York to Alabama to become a college professor, writing of a strange country he visited and returned from, as different as another planet for his known world. He roamed and wrote of the cornwhisky- swilling backwatersof Alabama and the rough-hewn urban centers like Birmingham during the 20s and early 30s -- the time of the Scottsboro boys, the Klux Klan in its first great revival, deep oral and cultural traditions among Alabama African Americans including the title, inspiration for the 30s pop song about a meteor shower more than a century before.. The Civil War veteran turned murderer of U.S. marshals and religious zealot -- lynched to avoid a trial and certain execution -- before Jim Jones and Waco.The great outlaws and train robbers, Rube Burrow and Railroad Bill, one white, the other black and so feared his body was displayed in several cities to prove he was dead. A period piece -- the N word is used-- it also paints a picture of a complex and diverse black community, its cultural and folk roots, its white relationships. Many Alabama natives, including this expatriate, would not know these tales but for Carmer who returned to New York to write about that state and area for decades more But his Alabama is Sleepy Hollow with a bite like "Two-toed Tom" the 15 foot gator trapped in a pond by stalkers only to find him surfacing in a nearby pond, devouring a 12 year old child, decades before scientists learned of the ancient underwater tunnels of the reptiles. Tom moved on to become a legend in Florida where he's still talked about just as Carmer's retelling of the great tales lives on in Alabama, too often without his name attached. Sometimes a bizarre mixture of charm and horror, and perhaps a bit of hyperbole, Stars Fell on Alabama is one of those Academic reprints that reminds us the past is never so simple as we might dream and that the man with manners is to be as feared as the trainrobber with a gun

Reading "Stars Fell on Alabama" brings to mind lines from the opening scenes of "Gone With The Wind," lines that said something like "look for them (these days)no more because they are gone with the wind..." The same could be said of the Alabama described in Carl Carmer's book.

The days of Margaret Mitchell's classic "Gone With the Wind" never really existed, at least not in the romanticized way in which she wrote about them, but the days described in "Stars Fell on Alabama" did happen. They did, unfortunately, exist, but thankfully, for the most part, they, too, are noe "gone with the wind..."

This book is about life, a cross section of real life in the terribly rural South from about 1921 through 1927. It was not a pretty time or an easy time, and these are not quaint, pretty sketches of life during that time. The innocent, naive and politically correct reader of today might find parts of this book, most of it actually, quite offensive. And rightly so. But these times, these days and these ways, did exist. And they put life in today's Alabama into perspective.

It is clear to a reader living in Alabama that the state has progressed far more in the last 75 years (1930-2005) than it did in the 75 years immediately after the Civil War (1865-1940). That may be true for the country as a whole, but it is especially true for Alabama. Many intellectuals and scholars cite this book as one of the points at which this progress began. As Howell Raines writes in his introduction (added in 1990) this book was one of the first times Alabamians read about themselves as others saw them. It was not a pretty picture, not all bad not all ugly, but for the most part, it was not how Alabamians felt about themselves and not how they wanted their state--and themselves--to be perceived by those outside the state. To be sure, there was some beauty among the thorns, but it was a racist time and the thorns greatly outnumbered the rosebuds. There are no memories of the grand and glorious "Lost Cause" in these pages. Any and everything but.

Speaking of Howell Raines' introduction, it would be far more useful and appropriate as an Afterword or Epilogue. In this book it would be better to put what you have read in perspective than to write about what you are going to read. That's not true for all books, but it is true for this book.

In the hours after finishing "Stars Fell on Alabama," two thoughts come to mind again and again:

--"We may not be where we ought to be, but, thank God and by the grace of God, we aren't where we used to be..."

--And this book was obviously written before football took over the University of Alabama (where Carmer taught for six years) and the state as a whole. Football is never mentionied, either during his time in Tuscaloosa, or in his travels around the state. Not once. In that respect, life in Alabama has certainly changed. But even now, there are racial overtones in the rivalry between Alabama and Auburn. But that is another story for another time.

If you are from Alabama, live in Alabama,or want to learn about the rural South as it was in the twenties and thirties, read the book. You will learn from it and you will enjoy it. Parts of it will make you cringe but it will be a learning experience. And learning is good, even if you don't appreciate and agree with all that you learn or are exposed to.

I often wondered why falling stars appeared on Alabama license plates and why Dylan sang about the same. Ultimately I found my way to this book, written by Carl Carmer over 60 years ago. The answer to my original questions are within the book. The forward is perhaps more interesting and revealing, exposing the strength and Achilles heal of Carmer's work. Carmer was writing about the Alabama he experienced at the time he resided there. It is a snapshot of history and was very controversial when originally printed. So, it has some literary and historical value. However, many of the characters and incidents are composed of amalgamated individuals and conglomerated incidents. So, it is more representational like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn than an accurate recounting of actual events. Allegedly, Carmer was trying to mask actual places and people to protect their privacy but it left me questioning the authenticity and veracity of the whole. It took the edge off, making the book much less appealing and leaving me disinterested in places. Is it fiction or non-fiction? Is it exaggerated or not? How much to rely on this thin ice is what the reader will have to consider and that will be a distraction throughout.