Tobacco Books

This book contains a very complete list of virtually any widely distributed cigar maker in the market. It lists the manufacturer as well as all of the sizes produced. If all you are looking for is a quick reference for cigar brands and the sizes they are available in, then buy this book.

However, if you are looking for discriptions of taste, or recomendations, then you will need to go elsewhere. A sentence or two of description is about all you can hope to find here. The majority of these run along the lines of "Cigar A is good, well made, cigar manufactured in Country B."

As I mentioned above, if you're looking for a list of cigars there's no better source. But if you're looking for any kind of depth, substance, or recommendations you will need to look elsewhere.

The reviewer who indicated that this book was only a list was apparently unaware that the book is intended to be a definitive list of cigars available in the U.S. It is a reference work -- indeed, the only one of its kind -- and is not meant to be a guide to ratings, taste or quality of individual brands. Other books and magazines cover those things, but remember that specific rating information is often outdated by the time you read it. Cigars of the same manufacturer and type vary from year to year in taste and quality just as wines do...and for many of the same reasons.

Perelman's includes nuggets about where the filler, binder and wrapper of specific cigars comes from whenever possible. Sometimes, the information isn't released by the maker, other times it changes because of weather or political conditions. But this book is the only reference that comes close to providing complete coverage of this kind of fundamental information.

As a specialized reference, Perelman's Cyclopedia is both unique and invaluable. Highly recommended for those looking for definitive cigar information.

I'm a big fan of ACC basketball, and I learned a lot about the history of the Big Four - stories about past teams, players, coaches that I hadn't heard before.

Just be aware that it's a survey, a collection of anecdotes spottily covering the last almost hundred years, and only so much can fit in the book. It's not a comprehensive history by any means and huge portions of that history are skipped over or only mentioned in passing; but it is well worth reading.

I am in the unusual position of having been both a Duke and a Carolina fan, so I was interested in what Featherston proposed to add to the tale of this storied rivalry, as well as the intense competition with NCSU and Wake Forest.

Featherston's writing was clean and enjoyable, but the book did not include anything that I had not already read in other titles or had already heard from other sources. It would serve more appropriately for someone wanting an introductory lesson on major ACC rivalries. For something more in-depth, other fans might want to turn to Art Chansky's "Blue Blood : Duke-Carolina: Inside the Most Storied Rivalry in College Hoops."

That being said, don't let me stop you from reading it. It's not a bad book at all. Just not the cornucopia of knowledge I was hoping for at the time.

Once in a blue moon a trilogy can become a series and continue the story of a fictional world.

This book is not one of those rare times.

I've always disliked Kris, the lead female character, but I could stand her, and I enjoyed learning about Botany and seeing Zainal through her eyes. Not now. Not in this book. A strong woman has become flat and weak and easily swayed. The woman who risked her life to escape slavery on a alien planet and knocked a potential rapist out cold now can't stand up to her stepsons. Zainal, the lead male character, has become dull. What made Zainal so interesting to me was the mystery of the man. We rarely saw his thoughts, only his actions. This book is peppered with Zainal's more mundane thoughts, never anything interesting or his frustration at not being able to search out the Farmers. The other character's, major and minor, have undergone personality changes as well. They're little ones, barely noticeable if you haven't read the other books recently. But I read all three back to back, and could easily tell things weren't quite right.

The flow of the story is another flaw. In previous books different characters POV's were separated into long sections, and rarely switched from Kris's view. In this book McCaffrey makes the novice mistake of switching POV paragraph to paragraph. It doesn't happen often enough to make the book completely unreadable, but it happens often enough that I can't simply slip into the book's world via a character's eyes. It's too jarring.

Not that I want to immerse myself in the book because the plot is horrid. We all know Earth needs to rebuild, and the colonists of Botany plan to help. We also know Zainal, at one point, planned to search out the Farmers. Of the two potential plots available to write, McCaffrey chose the first, and it is a bad fit for the characters. Kris and Zainal were set up as adventurous explorers in previous books. Now they're in sales. The plot of this book is better suited to be an interesting and somewhat amusing subplot of a book focused on Zainal's search for the Farmers.

Overall, I'm disappointed with this book. It has its moments, but I wish I had spent my money on something else and borrowed this one from the library. I won't be reading it again.

This and the other books in this series are very good and a very enjoyable read.

I usually enjoy Anne McCaffrey's writing and I own many of her books. Unfortunately, this book is far below her normal quality. I like all of the Freedom series books less than those in her other series, however, the first three books had intriguing characters and featured an interesting exploration of the dynamics of forming a new society on an alien planet. In addition, the end of the third book worked well as the end of a trilogy. In my opinion, the only topic worthy of writing about further in future books was a greater exploration of the mysterious Farmers. That storyline is not addressed in any depth in this book.

This novel resembles the additional material an author writes to flesh out the characters or the story's world in the first draft of a novel--the kind of material that is usually greatly condensed or eliminated in the final version. There simply is not enough material here to warrant a novel and the material that is here is more observational than narrative. There is almost no direct conflict in the book to move the plot forward and no major character development either. Unless you like reading about coffee and trading for spare parts for hours, I would recommend stopping at the third book. Better yet, read one of her other excellent series instead. I recommend the Pern series for fantasy fans or the Crystal Singer series for readers who enjoy science fiction.

It finishes off the collection I have. So now I can enjoy this books anytime I want to.

I truly enjoyed this book, as this is the second time I have purchased and read it. I have all of Anne McCaffrey's books and enjoy reading and re-reading them.

The author of ALL THE KING'S MEN wrote during a time when one could speak his mind and beliefs in an upfront way with dignity without critical interrogation as to his politics, religion, etc. He was not like Huey Long. Robert Penn Warren is a disguished Southern writer, born in Guthrie, Kentucky. Since he graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, we like to claim him as one of us. The first book of his I read was A PLACE TO COME TO. He went on to get degrees from University of California, Yale, and studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1930.

He was a most prolific writer, some of the main ones I enjoyed were THE LEGACY OF THE CIVIL WAR, JEFFERSON DAVIS GETS HIS CITIZENSHIP BACK, JOHN BROWN: THE MAKING OF A MARTYR, BAND OF ANGELS (a movie was made of this), ALL THE KING'S MEN (won Pulitizer Prize for Fiction) and EYES, ETC.: A MEMOIR. He wrote a famous play called ALL THE KING'S MEN and many volumes of poems, most especially AUDUBON: A VISION, CHIEF JOSEPH OF THE NEZ PERCE, PROMISES (1957, which won the Pulitizer Prize for Poetry) and NOW AND THEN (his third Pulitizer Prize).

In 1944-45, he was the second occupant of the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress. He received numerous other awards for his writing of all sorts, as he continued to be a professor of English. He was one of a special group of Vanderbilt-educated writers, including some well known personages as prolific as he and as well-loved. He did an in-depth study of Melville. He was a controversial figure in his old age, but always the true blue Southern gentleman.

Penn Warren ended up with a fine reputation, largely based on "All the King's Men" and poetry and literary criticism and his standing as a "modern" Southerner in the mid-20th century who could explain some of the past sins and virtues of his ancestors and neighbors. This first novel displays promise, but is not a compelling read page-by-page. It improves with each chapter after getting off to a slow start. For my taste, there is excessive Kentucky backwoods dialogue, some uninteresting digressions, and some failure to develop the major characters in ways that make one care deeply about their fates. Percy, the lawyer and main figure, idealistically but with some vanity, jumps into a tobacco growers union which plans to fight the big corporate buyers in order to get a fairer price for the crop. However, little-by-little, the association members begin to become coercive, and then to terrorize, those who won't join. A moral cause has become an immoral enterprise by the end of the book. Lives are taken or ruined, and the acts "justified" because the cause has to be saved due to the energies already invested in it. Meanwhile, Percy commits an act against justice to get a client free of a murder charge, an act against his innocent wife which destroys his marriage, and an act of murder to preserve his cause. He does not seem to know just how he sunk that low, or how to recover. He has an affair after his wife leaves him that seems loveless and even lust-less, yet it leads to tragedy for the father of the girl with whom he sleeps. In some ways the book is a replaying of the lost Confederate cause of the Civil War. I've stated some of its weaknesses, but I must say that I did want to stick it through. I came to care about Percy and wanted to find out how it ended, even though Percy is not fully likeable. There is one earlier review posted on this site, and that writer dissects the novel more skillfully than I can. I agree with his assessment. Worth reading if you have a special interest in Penn Warren, or in Kentucky, or tobacco history, or in how organizations with high-minded goals can be corrupted by forceful leaders or strained circumstances.

Percy Munn, a young lawyer and tobacco farmer in Kentucky, becomes a powerful member of The Association - a group of farmers who band together in an effort to break the economic monopoly of the big tobacco companies. It's not an easy fight, and soon The Association is acting like the KKK, coercing farmers into doing their bidding, resorting to violence if necessary. Munn's morals disappear. Warren explores this dilemma of a good man doing bad things for a good cause and the effect it has on his life pretty well. It's a powerful work in spots, especially in Warren's use of dialogue, but finally the story, and the book itself, seems too long and drawn out. A decent first novel, but Warren would do better work later on.

Though it has now been almost 30 years since I last spent a fall afternoon cutting tobacco, spearing the stalks onto wooden staves, and hanging the staves into the curing barn, I still remember the smell of the plants, the stickiness of the resin, the glint of the cutting and spearing tools. This tenuous link to a much earlier time, the time of the tobacco wars that rocked rural Kentucky and Tennessee just before WWII, provided me with just a sliver of insight to the hard times Robert Penn Warren depicts in his first novel, Night Rider.

The protagonist, Percy Munn, is an affable but pliable young lawyer, happily married with a growing law practice when he is drawn into supporting "The Association," an ardent band of tobacco farmers, including doctors, politicians, and other men whom "Perse" admires and who in turn admire him for his oratory skills, leadership, and status. Percy, himself a tobacco farmer, and the association work to break the economic monopoly exerted by the big tobacco companies (those bastards were evil well before they started lying to the public about the addictive nature of their deadly products). But when legal and ethical means are not enough, the collective leadership starts down a slippery slope of coercing nonassociation members to join or else face the consequences. Bands of "night riders" fan out across countryside, first destroying the crops of those who refused their entreaties to join up, then property, until even the taking of human life is justified as a means to their end once they have made the decision to torch the tobacco warehouses in Bardsville and the other towns in the vicinity.

Percy Munn finds himself at the center, and as other men whom he admired peel off from The Association because their moral bearing will not allow their continued participation, Percy eventually finds himself cut off from his wife; men such as Capt. Todd whom he greatly admired; Lucille Christian, the woman who tries to save him from himself; and eventually the leaders of The Association who let him take a fall for something he did not do.

The story is properly characterized as a tragedy even though Percy Munn is not as noble a central figure as one might expect. His great weakness is that he attaches himself to causes without much thought of the consequences. In other words, he is an idealist, but a flawed one. Though Percy's fall is in part caused by his flaws, a series of betrayals---sometimes he is the betrayer and other times he is betrayed---also conspire against him. When loyalty becomes more a currency than a principal, tragedy is inevitable.

Robert Penn Warren captures the speech and mannerisms of this main characters effectively, but he does not develop three-dimensional characters, with the exception of Willie Proudfit, the hard-scrabble, nearly destitute farmer who is something of a mystic who lives life fully and with a fervor Perse cannot experience as he continues his spiral inward. The landscape and settings seem more like those rendered by wood cuttings rather than a photograph. Some of Robert Penn Warren's digressions meander for pages without bolstering the story, and at times the allegorical and naturalistic elements of the novel seem at war with one another.

If permitted, I might rate this novel three and a half stars. Reading Night Rider is a worthwhile book for wintertime reading, butit is not the finest work by the author who was to become the first Poet Laureate of the United States.

Excellent book but not good to have alone. This is more of a supplemental.

Nice pictures, but author knows nothing about Zippo! Captions don't fit the pictures, prices are way off, but its nice to look at. Would not use as a reference book.

While the book has some interesting information on the subject of Zippo lighters, I feel too much space is used to show old magazine ads for Zippo lighters. This space could have been used for more pictures of actual Zippo lighters and updated pictures from inside the Zippo factory. The pictures of the plant itself show workers putting Zippos in the old flame boxes which were only used until 1976. The other main issue of my dissapointment was the apparent lack of research that went in to the writing of the book. There are many errors in the style names of lighters shown in the pictures as well as the values. The biggest error that stuck in my head was where they said Zippo manufacturing cleans the lighters before they return them to the customers after they go through the repair clinic.
It is unfortunate that Mr. Pope didn't have the opportunity to finish the book he started, perhaps more research of facts would have been done before publishing.
While the book that David Poore wrote years ago is a bit outdated on the values, it is a very valuable piece of reference material for the novice and seasoned Zippo collector. I would strongly encourage anyone thinking of buying a book on Zippos that they consider Mr. Poores book instead.

Let's face it, Chekhov is odd. But this compilation gathers his 7 most famous farces together in one book. Each play is a gem in its own right.
A must-have for up-and-coming actors or directors, or veterans who don't already own this.

Anton Chekhov's 7 Short Farces, is a book of seven Russian plays. The first play (The Bear) is his most famous of the plays in this book. It is an entertaining story of a man collecting debts to pay his mortgage. He travels all around, but nobody can or is willing to pay their debts. So at the last house owned by a recently widowed lady refuses to pay they argue and it breaks into chaos. The rest of the plays follow this pattern. They start of with a normal somewhat comical situation that ends up in utter chaos than just ends. Most of the plays have something to do with irony. I think that Chekhov wrote these as a symbol of the Russian government at this time. Its supposed to show how chaotic and ironic Russia's politics are. After the third play this book becomes somewhat tidies. I think it would be more interesting if these were acted like they were intended to be. Individually the plays are interesting, but when read one after another they are boring. Overall I would not suggest these plays to be read but I would suggest them to be acted for a better understanding of Russian literature.

This book is excellent! Wonderful color pictures of multiple cigar cutters. A must for anyone who's a collector!

I SENT YOU IN MY REVIEW ABOUT TWO WEEKS AGO. DID YOU NOT GET IT OR DONT YOU WANT TO PRINT IT?

I thought this book was great. The daily exersices helped keep me from smoking again and kept reminding me why I quit. I still have it and anytime I get the urge, I start reading it again.

Having recently (2+ weeks) quit smoking cold turkey, I found that following this book has been less than helpful. It does not contain any new information (in other words, info which can't be found for free on the Internet or through the American Lung Association or any number of other sources). The suggestions and exercises have caused me to obsess on the subject of smoking rather than distract me. While a few of the exercises were somewhat helpful, most led to cravings I might not have had if I hadn't followed the suggestions. I understand the need to study past behavior and behavior patterns, but the suggestions/exercises in this book lead to a feeling of being stuck in the past rather than moving forward. Worse yet, on Day 5 of my quit the author suggests considering the patch as a method of helping me quit. By Day 5 of a cold turkey quit, the physical withdrawal is pretty much finished. Why add nicotine back into my system at that point? Buy something else with the money you save by not smoking...this isn't worth it.

This book has lot of informative history of tobacco and tobacco smoking. The stories incouded were not only interesting but also full of intrigue. It includes a description of different pipes and their uses. I very much enjoyed learning about the humble beginnings of the Dunhill family. It does make a wonderful coffee table book. VERY WELL PLEASED!!

While this book is filled with fascinating drawings of strange and unusual pipes from around the world, it is certainly not one of those "just sit down and read it from cover to cover type books." Think more of an "a to z" dictionary of pipes. As a novice pipe smoker, I was hoping for something more informative on the actual mechanics of pipe smoking. I would highly recommend The Perfect Pipe by Jeffers or, if you can find a copy, Weber's guide to pipes and pipe smoking.

"Tobacco and Shamanism" has been selected for listing in "Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments: An Entheogen Chrestomathy." http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy

This book is nothing but a survey of previous literature. It's an exhaustive (and I mean EXHAUSTING) list of every mention of tobacco in the notes, logs, and published works of early explorers, scientists, and missionaries in South America. There were a few interesting things - I didn't fall asleep EVERY time I tried to read it, just almost every time. It took me 2 years to get through this book. Don't look here if you want to understand the role of tobacco in South American medicine.