Kansas Books

CITY SMART: KANSAS CITY is a great book about the Kansas City area. It contains information on all the malls on both the Missouri and Kansas sides, as well as neighborhoods, eateries, museums, theater, and other stuff to do in the area. However, one part of the book that should be taken like the humor in AMERICAN WEDDING, SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE, THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELLING PANTS, HARVARD MAN, DRIVE ME CRAZY, HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER, 13 GOING ON 30, GARFIELD: A TALE OF TWO KITTIES, DATE MOVIE, or CAN'T HARDLY WAIT is the radio listings. Many of the area's major rock stations (KQRC, KCFX, KZPL, KYYS) are not listed, KXTR (classical) is now KRBZ (alternative), KCIY (smooth jazz) is now WDAF (country), and KNRX (new rock) is now KMJK (vintage soul) and is in fact located about 45 minutes away, in Lexington MO. Other than this minor quibble, though, the book deserves five stars.

We used this guide in our recent visit to Kansas City and found it to be helpful. Not as helpful as our friends in the area, who knocked themselves out showing us things, but it even gave them some ideas.

The author did an excellent job in researching sources for the book. A more accurate title for the book would have been "The History of the Evolution of the Cold War Army." The author talked strategy and tied it to the changes in force structure however, the author did not spend any appreciable time on the force structure. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a global perspective.

Ingo Trauschweizer states in his book that it was not until the nineteen eighties that the United States gained a conventional deterrent against the Soviet Union. According to Trauschweizer it was General Taylor, who implemented the Pentomic divisions in the nineteen fifties, was ths first one to take notice of the United States Army in Germany. Even though the Pentomic divisions lacked firepower they provided a political resaon for the United States Army existing in Europe. During the sixties the combat effectiveness of the United States Army in Europe was severely curtailed due to the war in Vietnam. In the nineteen seventies the US Army began copying tactics from the West Germans in how to counter the Soviet Army. Finally in the eighties with the AirLand concept the American army found an effective doctrine in countering Soviet deep attacks by using airpower to destroy echelons of armor. Trauschweizer disagrees with Brain McAllister Linn's analysis of the American army in the eighties by stating that the US Army served its main strategic goal which was to serve as a deterrent to any Soviet invasion in Europe and that training it for COIN operations would be detrimental for this task. The only weakness of this book is that from reading Shimon Naveh's book it appears that the United States army learned more from the Soviet army in creating an operational art rather than from the Germans who concentrated soley on tactics. Nevetheless this book is execellent at describing the constantly changing doctrine of the American army during the Cold War.

As indicated in the previous review, Dr. Ferrell's thorough research has resulted in what, up to this point, must be considered the definitive study of 35th Division's administrative ineptness, training shortcomings, and combat operations before and during the Meuse campaign. (It should be noted that this ineptness was widespread in the AEF, and far from isolated within 35th Division.) Anyone interested in the history of the AEF should certainly examine this book. I understand that "Collapse at Meuse-Argonne" is just a small part of what will be a comprehensive study of the larger Meuse-Argonne campaign, and if the present work is any indication, every student of the First World War should eagerly anticipate eventual publication of the larger account.

That being said, there are some shortcomings to "Collapse at Meuse-Argonne." The first would be a shortage of maps. Only two are provided, one of northern France showing major rivers and principal population centers, and another showing the portion of the Meuse-Argonne sector in which the division operated, which mainly shows Route Nationale 46, the River Aire, Buanthe Creek, and the principal villages in the area. A smaller-scale map showing 35th Division's sector in the broader context of First Army would have been welcome (from the map provided, one wouldn't know 28th Division was on the left and 91st Division on the right), as would a map showing the principal topographic features in the area, such as Montfaucon and the ravine at Exermont, as well as the local transportation net. A table showing the 35th Division's order of battle and principal officers also would have been helpful.

The index is also not as useful as it really should be. For instance, critical geographic locations, such as Varennes, Cheppy, Very, Charpentry, Baulny and Exermont do not appear in the the index at all. References to George Patton are indexed, but tanks are not. This is not insignificant, as at the beginning of the campaign most of the American-operated tanks were assigned to 28th and 35th Divisions in I Corps. (One platoon was assigned to the far left regiment of 91st Division in neighboring V Corps, but they accomplished little.) To those interested, additional references to tanks appear on pages 39-40, 51, 52, 57, 58, 89, 95 and 96. And, although tanks are mentioned in passing in the text, one is left wondering if any of the operational reports submitted by units of the 35th Division discussed the support (or lack of support) provided by the tanks.

There are also a few minor errors. One rather niggling error appears on page 39, where Varrennes is cited as the location where Louis XVI was captured in 1796 during his attempt to escape the Revolution (it actually happened in June 1791 - and the unfortunate "citizen" Louis Capet was beheaded not long after). A bit more substantive is Dr. Ferrell's misidentification of Patton's 1st (later 304th) Tank Brigade as the "First Provisional Tank Regiment" (28, 37). As in the contemporary British Tank Corps, there were no tank regiments in the AEF. (The plan developed by Patton's superior, the underrated Samuel D. Rockenbach, was to create several tank brigades for the AEF by spring 1919, each brigade to be comprised of two light tank battalions and one heavy tank battalion. Glacial American tank production and the sudden advent of the Armistice prevented the plan from being implemented.)

The style of identifying military units is also a bit clunky. Standard practice is to identify divisions by arabic number (e.g., 35th Division), corps by roman numeral (e.g., V Corps), and armies by spelling them out (e.g., First Army). Instead, Dr. Ferrell spells all of them out (e.g. Thirty-fifth Division, Fifth Corps), which makes the text busier than need be, which in turn makes it more difficult to locate citations to particular units within the text.

These cavils, however, should not prevent the interested reader from benefiting from Dr. Ferrell's scholarship. Recommended.

Collapse At Meuse-Argonne: The Failure Of The Missouri-Kansas Division by Robert H. Ferrall (Professor Emeritus of History, Indiana University), is the story of the American Thirty-Fifth Division during World War I. This military expeditionary force was composed of National Guard units from Missouri and Kansas. Engaging in the battle of the Meuse-Argonne with no previous battle experience and only a minor amount of training, as well as a few weeks of garrisoning in a quiet sector in Alsace, this division and its thousands of men quite literally fell apart in the face of enemy forces in only five days. Historian and academician Robert Ferrall does an impressive work of original scholarship to describe what the problems were (including incompetence officer leadership at the highest levels). The focus upon this single battle offers a "window-in-time" perspective that will prove invaluable for a broader understanding of the difficulties of World War I era frontline combat. Collapse At Meuse-Argonne is a superbly researched and presented body of work that is strongly recommended for both academic library collections and military history buff reading lists.

Purchased as text book for class given by author. Interesting historical information about the environmental movement evolution in the state of Wisconsin.

Consuming Nature: Environmentalism In The Fox River Valley, 1850-1950 has an unusual dual nature - in one respect, it is a straightforward chronicle of the debate in Wisconsin's Fox River Valley more than fifty years ago, when the populace questioned and resisted the paper industry's heedless practice of dumping pollution into the Fox River. On a deeper level, Consuming Nature examines not only how this microcosm struggle, repeated in numerous areas elsewhere throughout the state and the nation, reflected not only the clash of economic industrial forces versus environmentalists, but also how it represented the growth of a consumer society. Consumers craved employment and products created by the paper industry, but consumers also craved the ability to enjoy recreation in Fox River, a privilege that excess pollution was about to destroy. At its core, Consuming Nature dares to advance the thesis that the modern environmental movement owes far more than most anyone would admit to the power and influence of consumer society.

I found this book to be one of the best books about command decisions and relationships between Politicians and generals during the Civil War I have ever read. It covers the battles and the leaders of the Confederacy, both great and flawed. I found it hard to believe that some Southern leaders/generals fought harder against their own side in stupid little infights and disputes. The book goes a long way in explaining Lee's strategy and that of Davis and how they were different and the results of that difference. This book concentrates on the Eastern Theatre, the author's other book 'Jefferson Davis and his Generals' covers the Western Theatre of operations and is brillant in its examination of this area. Both books are well worth reading.

It was ok but if your doing a report then it could get a little boring but it is great information!

(4.5 stars)

I cringed a bit when I saw that Michael Glenny (an infamously bad translator) was one of the editors of this volume, but in spite of that, I was really drawn into the book. It begins with a very long chapter on an oceanographer who escaped by jumping off of a cruise ship late at night and swimming for three days until he reached the nearest island, and goes on to give us the stories of Russian émigrés from three different eras--on the heels of the Revolution and Civil War, between the World Wars and during WWII, and in the post-WWII era. Quite a few of the people interviewed in Part One, and a fair amount in Part Two, came from the upper-classes (some were even royalty), and so had a radically different experience of those early Soviet days than did the people on the bottom of the social order. The people in Part Three all seem to be from normal classes, though, not a bunch of dispossessed countesses, governors, wealthy people, and what have you. And depending upon which socioeconomic class and geographical area one came from, the experience was going to be different; for example, someone from the ruling classes and in a place like St. Petersburg obviously was going to be against the Revolution from the start, whereas someone who lived in a poorer area in the Ukraine may have initially supported and welcomed these changes, only to find the new rulers were just as bad for them as the Tsar had been. A lot of these people went through some quite drastic things to survive and to escape, like illegally crossing borders, jumping off of a ship, forging identity cards, deserting the Army, and bribing officials, but they had to take these extraordinary measures because the idea of freedom was so very important to them. Many of them settled in places with large Russian colonies, such as London, Paris, Prague, Belgrade, Poland, Harbin (in China), Israel, the United States, Vienna, Germany, and Bulgaria, though some of them escaped to other places (at least temporarily), such as North Africa and Turkey. I loved almost all of the stories and found very few boring or uninteresting.

Since this is partly a Michael Glenny book, though, there were some things that kind of annoyed me, albeit not so much they totally overwhelmed my overall enjoyment. For example, does anyone under the age of 100 still seriously use unnecessarily gendered words like "citizeness," "poetess," or "Jewess," or make superfluous references such as "a lady congregant" or "a woman cook"? Since a lot of these interviews were translated, I'm assuming that such dated sexist expressions were the work of the translators and not the speakers. (Unlike a lot of other languages, English is not a gendered language!) The chapter on the Dowager Empress's lady-in-waiting also employed the extremely archaic custom of capitalising all royal pronouns, which seems extremely distracting and pretentious today. It might have been considered proper a hundred years ago, but the language has evolved since! Stalin's date of death is twice given as 6 March 1953, when everything else I've ever read gives it as the fifth of March. I have also never seen my favorite writer's wife referred to as "Natasha Solzhenitsyn." In the nearly twelve years I've been reading his work and learning about his life, I've only ever seen her called Alya Svetlova! Still, considering what a great resource the book is, those are admittedly comparatively minor points, however annoying and distracting. Obviously, references to and remarks about "current" events and realities in the Soviet Union are today going to be ever-more-distant history, but such is to be expected with just about any historical book; parts of it will inevitably become dated as time marches on.

This book is about "the Russian dustmen of Cannes", the Russians who fled during and after the Russian revolutions in 1918-1919 and tried to carve out a new life for themselves and their families in the West. The book is made up of 61 chapters, each by a different emigre. Mostly they are extracts from interviews by the book's authors with the emigres; a few are from written sources. A few of the emigres are whiners (the Bolsheviks "took all our lovely horses", one Countess complains) but most have interesting things to say. For royalty watchers, there is the account of Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna's lady-in-waiting of their captivity in the Crimea, and tales of Grand Duchess Ksenia in exile. There are tales of pogroms under imperial Russia, life during the revolution, escape from Russia in multitudes of ways, life in exile, life under the Soviet regime... The book's format makes it easy to skip around, and boring or annoying accounts are easily skipped over. The accounts seem to be weighted in favor of members of the nobility and bourgeoisie. A good book for anyone who is interested in how they lived during the revolution and after.

Bought it brand new and it came in that condition. What can I say its a textbook I am required to do in my course of study to become an ordained minister.

I am a sunday school teacher, and my pastor asked me to give a class on "introduction to the old testament". He suggested I look into this book, so I ordered the book from Amazon.com. I have been using the book for the sunday school teaching and the book has been a very good source for teaching. For individual reading, it is great!. The book goes in sequence starting from Genesis and it explains the books of the bible very thoroughly. It is not a complicated or complex book to read, neither is it too simple. Its format is very nice to follow. I am enjoying it!

I think this is very good book for Public Administration studies. The only beggary is, that is very difficult to read for nonenglish people!

At recent times, lots of book about new public management and reformist movements have been published by varied writers. The most important flaw of the propositions given and models created was the ignorance of the politic realities. And most of the models has been based on pure rational/economic assumptions. Therefore, none of them was completely applicable for public sector organizations. This book gives us some insights about the politic "realities" of the public sector and its relationship to the democratic context of the society. All contradictions the popular public management propositions hold are explained in the book as clearly as possible. The author of the book puts forward arguements contrary to the popular public management propositions. If you are getting bored due to the myriad popular books and models this book exactly is for you to read and gain an interesting and deeper understanding about the essentials of public administration. Strongly recommended.

This book is the best resource that I've found to finish and improve my garden here in Kansas. This book has some nice pictures, but they are not particularly useful. I don't even care though b/c this book is LOADED with great gardening advice. I've read dozens of gardening books, but I learned a lot of new things from this resource. It is especially helpful in terms of plant selection-choosing plants that grow great in our region. I like that it gives more choices than the Sunset "top ten" book. I think this guide may be a little outdated in terms of listing new cultivars, but I didn't consider that a problem, either.

Rachel Snyder takes a practical approach to the unique problems of the plains. Instead of telling me what I can't plant, she gives me myriad options for creating a long-lasting, beautiful garden. What this book lacks in beauty, it makes up for with loads of great advice and information about plants that will survive scorching heat, high winds and cold winters. I highly recommend the book for beginning gardeners.

THE GREAT WHALE OF KANSAS is a tall tale about an 11-year-old boy living in Melville, Kansas, who loves to dig holes. Big holes.

"I believe there is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply digging a hole," the unnamed narrator explains. "A hole is an achievement. A great hole is a great achievement."

While attempting to build a pond in his backyard, the boy uncovers what appears to be a fossil. His persistent digging reveals it to be an extremely large fossil of a unique nature. Soon, thanks to the financial aspirations of the digger's father, the "Fossil Expert" for the state of Kansas gets involved and a series of controversies ensue involving who owns the fossil, what should be done with the fossil and whether or not it is really a fossil at all.

The unlikely tale is great fun to read because Jennings has given his narrator a perfect voice --- smart, wise-cracking and honest, the narrator tells his story engagingly, reporting the bizarre occurrences that pepper the story with a straightforwardness grounded in the idea that most anything can happen in a state as odd as Kansas. The narrator is both supported and opposed by a wacky cast of characters --- a mother who only makes sandwiches for meals, the pretentious "Fossil Expert," a bevy of eccentric members of the Quattlebaum family, and Phil, the solitary duck --- whose various outrageous actions are in perfect keeping with the tone of the story.

The narrator's most stalwart friends, Tom White Cloud, a bookstore owner of Native American descent, and Miss Joyce "Penny" Whistle, the narrator's science teacher on whom both Tom and the narrator have a crush, come to his aid late in the story when it appears everyone has lost sight of the real importance of what has appeared in the narrator's backyard. The "moral" of the story is laid on pretty thick by the book's end, but that hardly detracts from the overall pleasure THE GREAT WHALE OF KANSAS delivers.

--- (...)

I like the book so far,because in the story it tells
about a young boy in his backyard and,they are pucifect.

My best part is that when he is digging,and he discovers
preserved in the cretaceous lime stone is more than spectiacular.

The U.S.Mail the setting of the story is Highley Park,the
conflict is a fossil that is five-foot musasaur the characters are,Phile,Miss.Whistle,Chief Wah-Shum-Gah.