Missouri Books

I happen to be part of one of the families discussed in this book. I found it to be quite nice. I wasn't mentioned in the book but my mother, grandma, granpa etc. was. I think Geta did a fabulous job in making this book a success! It took a lot of time to archive this information about my family, and through this book, I am able to know where my ancestors came from and pass the book on to my children in the years to come. thank You.

Sincerely, Sommer Hayes

John Edwards(author}possibly the best of his books. A flowery excerpt of his writings of guerrilla warfare in Missouri during the Civil War. Good source for finding the men that rode with Quantrell,Anderson,Todd,Poole and Clements. Edwards was there and tells it well. Later to become Jo Shelby's Adjuctant and spokeman for the James Boys. One of a kind . We here in Missouri call it the "BIBLE of GUERRILLAS".

I had the good fortune to have Professor Sullivan as instructor in two English classes at Vanderbilt. He was one of the kindest and wisest professors I have ever known.

His autobiography reveals how much Walter Sullivan enjoyed his profession. The picture he gives of his academic career is one of fun and hearty good fellowship with most of his colleagues. I had not been aware how much southern English professors enjoyed their cocktails, but it appears it was rather a lot.

The sad part of this autobiography is the chronicling of a decline in humanistic learning at Vanderbilt which the author observed during the last decades of his career. The study of literature based around close reading of the text was replaced by the ideological rantings of the post moderns. Aristotelian logic gave way to the studied illogicalities of the Frankfurt School and all those who sailed in it. The Department of English at Vanderbilt was one of the humanistic glories of the nation. No longer.

I entered the university teaching profession long after the hires had already been made which would transform departments of History, English and foreign literatures into the hopeless morass of twisted ideologies we currently enjoy. Accordingly, I have spent a fair amount of time building levees against a tide already set in motion in the heyday of people like Walter Sullivan.

Like the nobility of the early eighteenth century, Professor Sullivan and southern academics of his viewpoint, had a jolly good time without noticing or wanting to notice that there was a concerted gathering of barbarians not simply circling around the city but actually passing through the gates into the city. How I wish that some of the energy spent in innocent enjoyment of the academic life had been spent by Sullivan and his colleagues in identifying and stopping the incursion. It is clear from this autobiography that Walter Sullivan felt that it was all due to a random change of fashion. It never occurred to Sullivan and his associates that there was any planning in the sea change which would ultimately swamp humanistic learning in the American academy. With such a careless inattention to what was going on, how could the post moderns not have won?

We mourn the passing of Walter Sullivan. We shall not see his like in the younger generation of "humanities" professors, for people with his views are no longer hireable.

Collected Works Of Langston Hughes V. 4 is a college-level critical examination presenting Hughes' novels Not Without Laughter and Tambourines To Glory, and is recommended reading for any studying the body of Hughes' works. Dolan Hubbard edits these two short novels, which are recommended reading for any in-depth study of Hughes' achievements.

Rod Kessler has a way of putting the reader very close to the character. When reading one of his stories, you might feel like you have been dropped into someone's private life, to watch over their shoulder. It might even make you feel uncomfortable, in some cases, as if you shouldn't be intruding.

My favorite story in this collection is "The Death of Rodney Snee", a story which captures the thoughts and attitudes of a kid in grade school better than I've seen before or since. I come back to that story again and again to remind myself how to make the reader identify with the character.

If you like short stories, and in particular, short stories which give little insights into the human condition, read this collection.

This little book is one part instructional guide on how to systematically approach quality improvement, one part success story of teamwork in action, and full of great ideas for any manager, in healthcare or any other industry. Among these ideas are the "meeting in a box," a great way to spread a consistent message throughout a large organization, and the personal passport as a way of keeping every individual worker focused on his or her key goals. Mandatory reading for anyone in healthcare administration and highly recommended for managers in every other industry.

Focusing on the Southern Illinois hiking opportunities, Alan McPherson has a superabundance of destinations to choose from. Listing fifty of them effectively hits most of the more popular destinations, but also allows for a healthy listing of not-so-well-known places. This makes Fifty Nature Walks in Southern Illinois a book distinct from most others (about Illinois Hiking). If you frequently hike in Illinois, this is definitely a book worth having in your library, especially if you live in or near southern Illinois. If you don't hike in Illinois very often, you might prefer a more general Illinois hiking guidebook, that highlights notable destinations across the entire state.

This book provides trail maps for each destination, several pictures throughout the book, and two maps at the beginning of the book that pinpoint each destination on a regional map of southern Illinois. Trail distances and difficulty are noted with each description. Directions to each area are provided as well, along with interesting insights about the uniqueness of each locale.

Back Cover Description:
Southern Illinois is one of the relatively undiscovered natural areas in the United States. Unfortunately, many, have stereotypically, envisioned Illinois as a vast sea of agricultural flat-lands. While this may be true for some parts of Illinois, the tip of Illinois benefits from the scenic interior plateau as it stretches from the Mississippi to the Ohio River. There is a wealth of natural beauty in Southern Illinois, exemplified by the Ozark hills, natural rock formations, bluffs, ravines, streams, numerous lakes, swamps, sloughs, and the great Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. This book details ample recreational opportunities for the reader for years to come. The nature walks listed range from the simple of the kind that require little exertion to the difficult and strenuous that require many miles of travel and are for the more experienced hiker. Most nature walks are reasonably traversed in a few hours or less. Let Fifty Nature Walks in Southern Illinois help you experience the wonders of this fabulous area.
Alan McPherson has taken the opportunity to catalogue fifty locales in Illinois in a similar way to which he has done in southern Indiana (Nature Walks in Southern Indiana). In southern Illinois McPherson documents over one-hundred actual hikes within these locales, all of which are open for public use. Alan is a naturalist and the author of several successful books relating to nature and hiking in Florida, southern and northern Indiana, and California. He has master's degrees in natural resources, park and recreational administration and alternative education. Alan has personally hiked the trails in this book. Most of all, Alan loves nature and wants you to enjoy it as well, and to protect it for future generations.

First I should say that I read this book in three days. Once I started, I could not stop reading anymore. It is definitly the best book I read in the last year. P.K. really made it to build an exciting thriller on the one side but also give a lot of financial details on the other side. As far as I am able to judge he leaves the impression that he had visited all these countries mentioned in the book (at least he shows many details about Germany's financial capital Frankfurt). Last but not least I would like to point out that this book is worth reading not only for people interested in finance and investment banking. Although Paul K. shows many details about these subjects he always knows how to explain them in a very simple and understandable way. To cut a long story short: it is an incredible book really worth reading !

Eric Voegelin's monumental historical masterpiece encompass a series of 5 volumes of a new vision of a theoretical history. Voegelin's Israel and Revelation approached the question of revelation from a highly sophisticated view of revelation as part of a historical context. The traditional theological analysis imparts only a limited dimension to the historical reality of revelation. Voegelin's theoretical conception takes us to the heart of revelation as a human activity that created a discontinuity from the the secular world view. He carefully used the Biblical account of revelation against a scholarly approach to revelation that is grounded in the order of being, i.e., the order that reflected the symbolism of revelation. He pointed out the inherent limitations of confusing the order of revelation with the pragmatic dimensions of the human existence couple with confusing revelation as a "second reality" experience. Voegelin investigation in the historical figures of revelation and the complex relationship that must be mastered to keep the religious tension with the order of being and pragmatic structure of human existence. A very absorbing book and a great understanding of revelation in a historical context.

The world is a fortunate place when there are two people alive -- at the same time -- who understand Plato. Eric Voegelin was clearly one of those people in the twentieth century. This material was originally published as Volume 3 of Order and History, the core of the magnus opus that Voegelin chose to publish during his life time.

I met Eric Voegelin once as a graduate student, and asked him, "why'd you publish all this stuff?" I've been digesting his answer ever since. It was "to resist totality and totalitarianism."

Particularly, seen from this standpoint, a clear core of this book is his articulation of the Platonic concept of "metaxy," or the in-between character of life. In philosophical terms, this refers most directly and fully to "in-between" the Agathon (e.g., see myth of the cave and the Divided Line in the Republic) and the apeiron (explored most directly and deeply in the Timaeus). For the philosophically uninitiated, it is possible to speak of this in more mundane terms.

An unstated corollary of Plato's notion of the "metaxy" is that life is always larger than our categories. From a Socratic/Platonic perspective, this may include but will entail more than the epistemological recognition that every way of seeing is a way of not seeing. The notion of the "metaxy" is most fundamentally a linguistic indice pointing to ontological plenty as the ground of life, albeit lived within bounds of existential scarcity. This is a notion commonly shared by the great civilizations of East and West. The notion of the "metaxy" underscores that life is lived within a tension between the "transcendent" and "immanent" dimensions of being.

When we lose track of this tension, as we have to a great extent in the modern world, and subscribe to reductive ideological notions/understandings of life -- and most particularly, when we imagine that we can encapsulate life within the pride of our own "enlightened" categories -- on a political plane, there may be little to constrain the prideful actions of ideologies, irrespective of whether their clothing is Red or Black, or whether it is "left" or "right." Irrespective of the political stripe, repression and murder become "justified" in the pursuit of an ideological aim -- which in Voegelin's philosophical terms is to dissolve the "metaxy" in the usual modernist mode, through immanetizing the transcendent "eschaton."

Voegelin's philosophical terms may sound remarkably abstract to the modern ear (recall Robert Dahl's silly review of Voegelin's The New Science of Politics for the American Political Science journal). Facile critiques such as Dahl's typically focus on the unfamiliar language while overlooking the elementary fact that what Voegelin is asking us to do in every aspect of his work is to take a journey that precisely allows us to see the world in terms other than that of our inherited climate of opinion. For those willing to be thorough scholars rather than merely play at it within the context of given suppositions, Voegelin's scholarship offers new vistas and incredibly rich fields of study. His scholarship offers the capacity to reflect upon and act in the world in a substantively grounded mode with implications for every discipline (see e.g., A.G. Ramos' New Science of Organizations).

I submit that a key to understanding this text and the greater body of his work at large is to grasp the central significance of the "metaxy" -- not as a concept within the history of ideas -- but as a life referent of perennial relevance to the recurring challenge of resisting sophistic pretensions and the inherited or emergent ideologies of any time and place.

This text demands a great deal. You'll develop insights into Plato and Aristotle available no where else. But for Voegelin, such studies were never a matter of antiquarian interest. They were a matter of developing meaningful referents for life. The value in this text is precisely in its yield, capable of resonating throughout your life and offering far more than the initial effort it will require of you.