Kansas Books

I love all the characters in this series. It's always fun to delve into one of these books and see what the quilters are up to. This one is a murder with a family torn apart and has to do with the celestrial, thus the title. However, if you like this series this is another one you will definitely enjoy. I have read all the books in the series and only hope there will be more.

This first-time author brings us a historic Kansas love story based on well-researched fact. He takes an unbiased look at both Native American and European-immigrant lives, as individual families meet in Kansas.

I lived some of my early years in Kansas, and my mother "hailed" from Kansas, so I enjoyed recognizing the names of towns mentioned in this 1880s tale, including St. Mary's, Marysville, Topeka, Manhattan, Concordia, and Kansas City.

The guy has a sense of humor, and it really made the book one to remember. The characaters were well rounded. You got to know them and love them. I loved the main characters and I loved the plot. There was a lot of action in the book but it didn't take the whole thing over. The romance and the plot were well balanced.
The only thing that I will say about the book that I didn't like was the fact that it jumped around. Sometimes you read a book where the author takes you from one scene to another and it skips over the interesting stuff but not the important stuff. You always get the point, but to me there's something missing. I don't know if I'm making any sense... The best I can say is she makes things short and sweet in a scene and she doesn't take time to draw it out... at all. One minute there in a hotel room and the next there in the car.
She did it well. Sometimes I feel like I'm really missing out when this happens, but the fact the she did it well doesn't mean that I can honestly say that I like it. Sometimes drawing out a scene is better then just ending it. My best example is the ending and I can't give that away. I guess you'll have to read it yourself and see if you get what I'm saying.
The book is really realistic. (as realistic as a romance can get anyway.)Good things happen to good people and some bad things happen to good people.
All in all the book was a really good read and one I'll always rememeber.

This book is an unusually focused book. I found it most useful and will use it as reference in my work. I recommend it for ministers approaching retirement.

The only reason i didnt give this 5 stars is he tended to direct his writing more to pastors than regular church-goers. great stuff here including: 1.alot of ways to increase involvement of everyone in the church, 2.how to make people feel at home in church and free to assist, 3.talks about the need & ways to balance the roles of a church such as -building people up, teaching them the word, praise & worship, community outreach & winning the lost to Christ.

This is an important and challenging book, with some distressing implications. First, a couple basic definitions. Policy design, according to the authors, is (page 2): ". . the content or substance of public policy--the blueprints, architecture, discourses, and aesthetics of policy in both its instrumental and symbolic forms." There are several components of any policy design, including target populations (on which, more in just a bit), goals or problems to be solved, rules of engagement for the policy, rationales to legitimate the policy, and assumptions about the components of the design and how they work together to solve problems. With these points in mind, the authors state what is at stake in this book (page 5): "The central contention of this book is that policy designs. . .are strongly implicated in the current crisis of democracy." In short, policy designs are poorly structured to actually address problems.

Why would they say this? A handful of notions and assumptions are critical to their argument. Target populations are those people on whom policy focuses. If we're talking about the need to ensure continued healthy crops from farms, the target population for policy would likely be farmers. In their detailed discussion of target populations, Schneider and Ingram make a nice contribution to political analysis. They note that any population can be defined in terms of two characteristics--social construction (are groups viewed as deserving of government support or undeserving by the public) and power (does a group have power or not). From these two characteristics, they can define four different groups--the "advantaged," who have power and are viewed positively (e.g., the middle class, senior citizens, scientists); "contenders," who are powerful but not seen as so deserving (e.g., the rich, CEOs, heads of savings and loan banks); "dependents," who are deserving but rather weak (e.g., mothers, children, the poor); "deviants" (not a lot of power and undeserving, such as gangs, criminals, persons with AIDS).

Based on this, they infer, then, that government has great motivation to pass laws and create policies that are supportive of those who are viewed positively and who have power. So, quite a bit of policy is designed to help those who are already advantaged. And, conversely, the deviants are "beat up on" by policy makers. Criminals? Punish them as hard as you can--even if the results may not work. Why? Good politics. Decision-makers get credit for being tough on bad guys; the bad guys have no power. What a winner! The problem, according to the authors, is that such policy designs may not work. It may be that being tough is not the best way of dealing with those whom Ingram and Schneider label deviants.

A very interesting argument. If true, it means that many of the policies made by government are doomed to fail, because much emphasis will be delivering goodies to the powerful and well regarded (what social problems does that solve?) and beating up on the undeserving and powerless. The bottom line, though, needs to be established. Does their perspective work? Aye, there's the rub. Research results are rather mixed (including one piece that I wrote on AIDS policy and target populations). So, it is too soon to say that the authors have come upon a major contribution to policy studies. But their argument is, at the very least, provocative and makes one think, not a bad payoff for a book.

Open prairie frontier. Stunning photographs well reproduced. I give a rating of four versus five because only the real thing (in-person photo) could match the quality of Ms. Evans' photos.

The main subject of this book is the once mixed German-Polish population of Wartheland (near Poznan, or Posen). Rutherford observes a close continuity between the Second-Reich's (Bismarck, von Bulow, etc.) anti-Polish policies and those of the Third Reich. He views the Hakata movement as a proto-Nazi one (p. 25). However, the Poles remained indomitable: "Far from eradicating Polish national consciousness and cultural autonomy, Germany's long-standing anti-Polish stance, laced with Teutonic hubris and ethnocentric nationalism, had only reinforced the Poles' desire to shake the foreign yoke and reestablish a state of their own." (p. 32).

For all his racism, Hitler said that he preferred to rule over Negroes than Poles (p. 244). Heinrich Himmler once planned to kill 30 million Slavs as a byproduct of the upcoming Operation Barbarossa (p. 297).

During the German conquest of Poland in 1939, local Germans (the Volksdeutche Selbstschutz) attempted the expulsion of the Wartheland Poles on their own initiative (p. 74). Soon this became official German policy. Owing in part to Polish resistance, the Germans fell far short of their goals (p. 164). Poles resisted expulsion through such means as sleeping in the fields and otherwise avoiding their homes (p. 159). The threatened Poles also engaged in economic sabotage. They slaughtered their livestock and sold the meat on the black market (p. 278). If deported, they often returned (p. 279).

For the first year and a half of the German occupation, the Wartheland Poles and Jews were treated much the same (p. 124). In fact, for Himmler, the pursuit of lebensraum policies took precedence over dealing with the Jews (p. 128), and the extermination of the local Jews didn't begin until late 1941 at Chelmno (Kulm) (p. 172).

Hitler rejected the notion that ethnic Poles could ever become Germans. However, Polonized Germans could, and should, be re-Germanized. By spring 1941, the growing need of local Poles for forced labor had forced the Germans to discontinue their expulsion of the Wartheland Poles (p. 193). To rationalize the continued existence of Poles in this Reich-annexed region, the Germans were forced to relax their racist policies (pp. 207-211) over Himmler's objections (p. 210). In time, even those Wartheland Poles who simply exhibited "German characteristics" (e. g., cleanliness, sense of order, etc.) were allowed to sign the DVL (Deutsche Volksliste)! The de-Polonization of Wartheland was relegated to a decades-long postwar project (p. 203).

Owing to the foregoing turn of events, Rutherford's advanced the premise that, as WWII continued, Nazi policies against Poles became de-radicalized while those against Jews became radicalized. His reasoning is, at best, oversimplified. To begin with, and by his own admission, Hans Ehlich realized that the Nazis could not afford to lose seventy million Slavic workers by exterminating them, even had they won the war (p. 219). Consequently, they de-radicalized their policies against Slavs because they were forced by circumstances to do so!

In addition, radicalization and de-radicalization are relative terms, and Rutherford overlooks essential facts. Nazi actions against Jews never became so radicalized as to prevent some German full-blooded Jews (e. g., the Schutzjuden) from being deliberately spared and re-labeled Aryans. Never did Germany invade its reluctant allies, Bulgaria and especially Finland, to kill off their Jews. At no time did Nazi policies go as far as killing Jewish Allied POWs. Nor did Hitler ever compel Sweden or Switzerland to turn over their Jews as a condition of their continued neutrality. As for "de-radicalization", one must realize the fact that the Germans never stopped murdering Poles (notably the intelligentsia), and that Nazi cultural genocide against Poles never ceased either. In fact, German units attempted to blow up the cultural treasures of Czestochowa and Krakow in the waning hours of the German occupation of Poland.

Rutherford approvingly cites John Connelly, who asserted that, whereas the Germans came to see Slavs as useful, they never came to think of Jews in that way (pp. 219-220). This is patently incorrect. The Germans, realizing the usefulness of Jews, diverted a few hundred thousand of them from the gas chambers and into forced labor. (A large fraction of these ended up surviving the war). The successful Kastner-Eichmann deal, as well as attempts to release Jews in exchange for Allied payment in money or trucks, also proves that the Nazis saw Jews as an economic commodity.

Since he was assassinated very early in his term, it is inappropriate to analyze the Garfield presidency. It would be reduced to statements of his intentions when he took office and speculations regarding how he would have handled events. Although Doenecke spends some time in examining Garfield's personal philosophy, to his credit, it is minimal. He concentrates on one of the greatest problems facing presidents at that time, the federal patronage, which was one of the few things that Garfield managed to do before he was gunned down.
In the era before civil service reform, the change of administration meant that many federal jobs needed to be filled. At the time, they were considered political spoils, to be awarded to individuals who had served the new president in the past or who were expected to serve him in the future. While all presidents used it as a rewards system, they also were frustrated in the number of applicants, and the time it took to deal with them. Therefore, the sections on what Garfield did as president largely deal with his handling of the patronage issues.
While Chester A. Arthur was a compromise candidate for vice president and automatically suspect as presidential material, his presidency suffered from yet another serious problem. Unlike the earlier presidents who died in office, Garfield lingered for some time after he was shot. Eighty days elapsed between the time Garfield was wounded and his death. Furthermore, at times it appeared that he would recover. Therefore, there was over two months of leadership limbo, plenty of time for the government to drift. During this time, Arthur's hands were tied, as there was no precedent concerning an incapacitated president.
There are two things about this book that are striking, although they are related. The first is how little coverage there is of domestic affairs, especially in the area of legislation. The years of the Arthur presidency were a time of little major legislative action, the only significant accomplishment were the initial steps of civil service reform. There is mention of the general economic conditions and the continued expansion of the industrial revolution, but nothing with significant depth.
The second point is the amount of coverage of U. S. involvement in world affairs. With a military that could have been easily defeated by that of nearly all European nations, there could be no muscle flexing. However, the growth of international commerce, the European imperial quest for colonies and the fact that the U. S. now covered both coasts meant that U. S. merchants now traveled the world in search of commercial and economic ties. For reasons that I don't understand, the 1890's are generally considered to be the point where the United States shed the isolationist mindset and began to take an interest in the rest of the world. Doenecke does an excellent job in describing how involved the U. S. was becoming a decade earlier. There is coverage of U. S. involvement in events in Korea, Hawaii, Madagascar, the Congo, South America and Central America. We see the beginnings of a country that is starting to understand that it can no longer restrict itself to what takes place in North America north of the Rio Grande River.
There is also extensive coverage of how incredibly weak the U. S. navy was in the years immediately after the Civil war. In order to blockade the south and starve it of resources, the Union built up what was then the most powerful navy in the world. However, after the war was over, it was so weak that even one of the medium size capital ships of the British navy was more powerful than all U. S. ships combined. Although it started slowly and there was a lot of partisan wrangling, one can see the initial glimmerings of a great power on the ascent.
While I commend Doenecke for his extensive coverage of U. S. involvement in the world, I believe that he should have spent more time in examining the events inside the U. S. I readily concede that President Arthur did little in the way of legislation, however there were many other things happening in the country during his administration. Presidents affect those events, even if only by their inaction, so I would have preferred more detailed explanations of some of those changes.

The presidency of Andrew Jackson marks a significant change in American presidential politics. With the exception of John Quincy Adams, and a weak one at that, all previous presidents had been members of the unofficial American aristocracy that existed at the time of independence. Traditionally, they followed the principle of the office seeking the man and campaigning for the position was generally not done. There was little in the way of populist movements and political parties in the modern sense did not exist. That changed with the rise of Jackson to the presidency and expanded during his two terms in office.
Jackson was the first president who was popularly elected to office, and the prelude to the election was the first true campaign for the position. He was also the first person from the west to be elected to the presidency and a military hero many times over. His reputation as a general places him nearly on a par with George Washington.
Being the first "outsider" president, his election created a great deal of anxiety among the established powers in the east. Cole quite properly begins with a thorough discussion of this situation, as it created a good deal of tension that lasted for several years. There was also an enormous amount of economic expansion going on in the country, which began to exacerbate the regional tensions developing between the northern and southern regions of the country. A great deal of the book is spent examining these regional tendencies and with the perspective of hindsight, we can clearly see the gathering storm that finally led to war. This area is very well done, as the author properly describes all of the growing tensions, not just the problem of slavery.
Cole also does an excellent job describing the personality of Andrew Jackson, sometimes compromising and other times very much "Old Hickory", as he refused to bend. His threat to use federal troops in the south was a genuine one, sparking a lot of animosity, yet accomplishing what he wanted to do. He surprised everyone with his reluctance to become involved in the Texan attempt to gain independence from Mexico. Most expected the "Old Hero" to be much more aggressive in expanding the nations' borders. In the book, we also see the rise of Martin Van Buren, called the little magician for his political ability. He truly was the first modern political power broker, the type of person necessary for effective presidential leadership.
With the economic and physical expansion of the country beginning to proceed at an incredible pace, the
Jackson years were those where the nation began taking on the characteristics of a modern nation. Cole does an excellent job of describing this transition, as well as the man who was at the helm when it was taking place. Andrew Jackson was one of the most complex men to hold the office, as well as one of the roughest. From the book, you learn about these different aspects of his personality as well as how the country was affected by them.