Blanc Books

This book is a great resource to have!

The author speaks through the voice of a boy, Tran, giving information about his family name, Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnam War, refugees, Buddhism, the Tet New Year celebration, and food. He celebrates his family heritage and the America he lives in. Unfortunately, the picture caption on Buddhism erroneously states that they "worship the Buddha". Otherwise, the book fills a need for younger children to read about a contributing culture of our diverse America.

One of the better one's. Titin travels to South America and meets, as usual, characters that stay with us throughout the series. This is a great read, and wonderful pictures of the jungles in South America.

I use it to teach high school computers and the students like the exercises. There are more than enough exercises to keep them busy for an entire year. I recommend it to anyone teaching basic-intermediate Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint, & Integrating them all.

This title was declared a 2003 Notable Book by the Association of Jewish Libraries! Almost 200 children's books of Judaic content were reviewed during the year to find the best of the bunch. Find out more at www.jewishlibraries.org.

Good step by step guide to learn how to use Windows. This book is used for instruction of students in our local high school.

The Town That Died was first published in 1962 and covered the explosion of the French freighter Mont Blanc on December 6, 1917 that nearly obliterated the Canadian town of Halifax. The Mont Blanc was a "floating munitions dump" carrying an incredibly large amount of explosive material to aid the allied armies during the First World War. The freighter collided with the Norwegian ship Imo on their way through the Narrows (a mile long, 500-yard wide channel connecting Bedford Basin with Halifax Harbor). The Mont Blanc caught fire and within 20 minutes or so (the book is not specific on this point) the ship blew up in, what the Michael Bird states in his book's subtitle, "the world's greatest man-made explosion before Hiroshima." Bird uses many primary sources including interviews, journals, and letters from survivors as well as those involved at the harbor and in rescue efforts including official reports of naval lieutenants and records of the investigation that followed.

Bird follows the events of December 6, 1917 and its aftermath through the eyes of several survivors including a young woman who worked at a nearby factory, a junior at the nearby naval college, and a girl who would lose her entire family as well as her father, who was not in Halifax at the time, who presumed she had died with the others. Sometimes, especially at the beginning, Bird skips very abruptly to each of the stories which makes it a little difficult to follow at times, but the stories become more familiar towards the end. Bird does an excellent job detailing the events that took place on the Mont Blanc and the Imo right up to and immediately following the collision. Bird also gives a vivid description of the explosion itself with information on how rocks from the seabed were scooped up and hurled down and that a ½ ton shank from an anchor was flung two miles, how earth tremors caused church bells to swing sixty miles away, and "the enormous, mutated mushroom" that appeared foreshadowing another tremendous explosion nearly thirty years later. The human images of the tragedy are also very moving, especially the horrible sight the factory worker encountered when she saw a soldier who lost the center of his mouth and both eyes with one dangling down from his empty eye socket and tapping against his cheek (p. 122).

The book is 187 pages organized into nine chapters and a very brief epilogue. My copy has three sections of b&w photos. The first three chapters cover the events leading up to the collision, chapter 4 details the collision itself, chapter 5 covers the explosion, chapter six is made up almost entirely of reports from lieutenants on rescue efforts followed by brief background information provided by the author, while chapter 7 continues the stories of the survivors and includes a letter written the day after the explosion. An interview in the Halifax Herald with a naval officer, who was in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake, giving advice on how to deal with looters and bootleggers (Halifax was a dry town) was an interesting addition to the story and demonstrates the extracurricular problems Halifax had to deal with in addition to the ruined buildings and the thousands dead and injured. Chapter 8 provides more coverage of the rescue efforts with excerpts from newspapers. The final chapter deals with the blame issue (there was an anti-German backlash) and the investigation which, Bird explains, exhibited an anti-French bias against the crew on the Mont Blanc. The Epilogue presents final tabulations on the casualties and other costs of the tragedy as well as awards given to rescue workers and the fate of the Imo.

For the most part, the book, while short, is thorough. There are some areas on which Bird does not follow up. He mentions the importance of the close fraternity of pilots in Halifax who prevented outsiders from coming in and easing their growing wartime workload, but only touches on this topic again during the investigation chapter. The reports of several survivors on hearing two explosions (reminds me of the Lusitania) is not elaborated upon. The many names of ships damaged in the explosion became a little burdensome. Also, the chapter on the investigation seemed to focus on one area of contention between the prosecution and Chief Commanding Officer Wyatt that, to me, did not seem that important (whether Wyatt ordered men from the dockyard for fear the magazine would ignite and explode). Bird describes what appears to be unfair and bias results of the investigation and what happened in the end. The blame issue never seemed to be fully resolved. Bird gives some detail on the post-explosion lives of the main participants but not a lot just as he does not present a lot of background information. The book is dated and there are probably more comprehensive books on this subject out there but, The Town That Died is a moving, well-written, quick account of an incredible, and unfortunately forgotten, event.

A young man, sentencing himself to a self-imposed exile, writes a book tracing his infatution with boys. It all begins fairly innocently, with his first glimpse of a nude young man while out hunting. The sight and sensations he feels cause him to faint.

Wanting to learn more about his attraction, he tries to trick a young servant into allowing him to experience what he has seen. And, in school, he develops an interest in one of the other students, Dargelos, who is very manly for his age, wearing trousers and an open-necked shirt. This infatuation ends in tragedy and haunts the young man for the rest of his life.

Realizing that his desires are too different from what is considered normal and accetpable, he attempts to hide his true feelings through a series of failed love affairs: a relationship with an actress named Jeanne whom he discovers to be a Sapphist; befreinding a prostitute named Rose and her "brother" Alfred, with whom he begins an affair behind Rose's back; the beautiful young sailor PAS DE CHANCE who painfully reminds him of Alfred.

Seeing no end in sight to his aching, the young man tries to find solace with the church. This proves difficult when he falls for a young man on a beach, who believes in God but not in religious dogma. Their relationship is put to the test when the young man discovers his new love's infidelities with women.

... But, it is more of a statement against society at large for creating the negativity. At the end, the young man exiles himself, leaving the book behind as a reminder that "I am not exiling a monster, but a man whom society will not allow to live" and a plea for tolerance and acceptance.

If you'd like the intersection of non-gory murder mysteries and crossword puzzles, this series would be a natural for you. Nero Blanc is a pseudonym for a husband-and-wife writing team (black and white, for the squares on a crossword grid, get it?). After seeing the documentary "Wordplay," I went looking for more information on the world of crossword puzzles and stumbled across this series. I then read an interview online in which the husband explains that, separately, his wife's style is flowing and lyrical, while his work is in international thrillers, with gritty characters, and quick and often coarse "tough guy" dialogue. Well. I give this book a C-. The story line is actually quite good, but the dialogue is totally hokey most of the time. Moreover, one minute the characters are acknowledging, internally if not otherwise, their respective smarts, and then you turn the page and they are expressing amazement that someone could possibly know or have figured out the most basic, obvious thing. There's a budding romance embedded in the story, and one minute the characters make "flawed adult" sense, which I can buy, and the next minute they have the reasoning powers of a 2-year-old, which I can't. In other words, by dividing the writing tasks they way the authors seem to have done, not only does the style seem to change for inexplicable reasons and at inexplicable times, but consequently even the personalities of the characters bounce around, which really undermines their credibility. I'm going to give the series one more try to see if the authors' second outing was any better, but that's as much reading time as I'll allocate to this series if I don't see marked improvement.

5/9/03 I purchased the book at a small suburban bookstore ,which specializes in fiction due to the creative jacket of the book(which has a hand filling in the crossword spaces with a red Bic pen... ...the 306 page paperback was not a total intrigue.. Its many puzzles(Pgs 68,126,180,234,260 and a post script puzzle Pg 297)(and "answers" Pgs 301-306)..as well as a little humor in the use of a few Nursery Rhymes as "thoughts to ponder"(Yankee Doodle Dandy/Peter,Peter Pumkin Eater) and the mention of a few current people/entity(s)(e.g. Pg 189 "..calling his office or car phone would be useless and dialing 911 seemed not only a tad hysterical but also premature"),places,things*(e.g.Pg 137 "her chin resting in the palm of her left hand as her right hand drummed the 'Herald's'crossword puzzle with the tip of a red Bic* pen" &(Pg 284/285) a raft of '3' letter Hawaiian words:"lei,hoi,ava,hee,hui,koa,aku,imu,poi" & 4 letter Greek of "Ares,Hera,Leda,Cora,Nike,Hebe,Zeus,Eros,Gaia,Eris,Letodo" spark curious interest ongoingly on everything but solving the mystery.

I don't do crosswords, I hate them, however the five puzzles do not interfer with the enjoyment of this story. Rosco and Belle are great fun and this is a great story

I picked up this book while shopping one day, intrigued by the fact that it included some crossword puzzles and I am a fan of them. After reading the book, I realised the crossword puzzles were extraneous and that I did not have to do the puzzles to help figure out who committed the murder.
Private investigator Rosco Polycrates is hired by the mother of a murder victim (crossword editor for a local newspaper) to investigate the death, which is first ruled natural causes. He has the help of sexy (of course) but married Anabella Graham, the crossword maven for the rival newspaper.
The writing was lively in some spots, but amateurish in others, particularly in its characterizations of the secondary characters, who mostly came across as stereotypes - ugly secretary in love with handsome boss, prissy society column writer, cheating aging sex goddess married to older man, etc.
Not for sure if I will pick up the second in the series or not.

In this series opener of the pseudonymous Nero Blanc's crossword mysteries, private eye Rosco Polycrates investigates the murder of crossword editor Thompson Briephs. Briephs is a scion of the local aristocracy, the son of imposing patrician Sara Briephs and the nephew of her brother, democratic senator Hal Crane. Briephs is also a bit of a loon. Eschewing his family's more traditionally tasteful lifestyle, Briephs lives alone on an island in a house that was built to his specifications, a labyrinthine, red-walled replica of an ancient Minoan palace. This is unlikely in the extreme, of course, but it does provide an excuse for numerous classical references in the book, including a quotation from Sophocles' Ajax: "Silence gives the proper grace to women."

The character quoting Sophocles with disapproval is a crossword editor herself, Thompson Briephs's counterpart in a rival newspaper. Anabelle Graham is beautiful and intelligent, capable of reciting a list of four-letter Greek goddesses even in trying circumstances, and she is, unfortunately for Rosco, married. As the solution of Briephs's murder depends on the solution of a series of crossword puzzles--anticipating his demise, Briephs left clues--Belle becomes involved with Rosco's investigation and interested in the private eye himself.

Although The Crossword Mystery strains credibility in its description of Briephs's island home, the book is a good read, and the hesitant flirtation between Rosco and Belle is fun to watch. Crossword enthusiasts in particular will enjoy the book: it includes six puzzles for readers to solve along with Belle, among them Harrison Briephs's posthumous cryptics.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

This book thoroughly debunks two profound myths. The first is the myth that primitive societies lived in ecological harmony with the land. The second is the myth that primitive societies are not warlike.

I particularly appreciated the research on the environmentally destructive ways of primitive societies, since there are already books that document warfare in primitive societies. Some examples of environmental damage include Native American tribes who, lacking the technology and skill to kill buffalo one at a time, hunted by stampeding entire herds over cliffs. Archeologists have shown that only the top layers of the pile of dead buffalo were processed. The rest was left to rot (page 14). Islands are the classic example of primitive societies living out of harmony because you inevitably find extinctions after primitive humans arrive. For example, the Maori hunted the moa and other flightless birds of New Zealand to extinction (page 52). Evidence for local extinctions are also found outside of islands.

Other evidence of primitive societies exceeding the carrying capacity of the land comes from over-hunting. When archeologists date the bones or shells of animals and find that the average size gets smaller over the years, they know that the animals are being killed faster than they can grow and replenish themselves. In about 2000 BC, Indians in California over hunted seals and drove them from the mainland onto offshore islands. Then they turned to local shellfish and over hunted them, resulting in smaller and smaller shellfish being found in shellfish mounds (page 137). The most direct evidence of exceeding the carrying capacity of the land is sustained population increases, which inevitably leads to a population bust after local resources are exhausted, such as happened to the Indians of the Mibres Valley (page 134).

The strongest evidence for exceeding the local population is warfare, since people would rather go to war to take land from their neighbors than starve. Evidence for primitive warfare is abundant. Mimbres Indians grazed animals and settled on hilltops even though the better land was below (page 56), but primitive societies have always recognized the superior defensive nature of building on higher ground. Archeologists have found more than 1000 hilltop forts of the Maori in New Zealand (page 61). Other examples include finding evidence (in terms of lack of settlements) for a "no man's land" in between established tribes. Sometimes these no-man's lands are 20 miles wide. Archeologists have found settlements that have been burned down, even charred stone buildings (page 62). Unburied bodies and mass graves are other examples of primitive warfare (page 63).

Other examples are primitive societies with weapons and armor. Eskimos used body armor (page 117), Aborigines had both shields and special boomerangs used only for war (page 120). Weapons caches are often found, including one cache of 1,000 missiles for slings - far more than you would ever need hunting (page 63). Anthropologists have estimated that about 25% of adult males in the highland tribes of New Guinea die from warfare, and each century about 30% of New Guinea tribes are completely destroyed through warfare (page 151) and this estimate is pretty consistent for primitive societies as a whole. Lawrence Keeley estimates that 25% of men and 5% of women die from war (page 154). See his book

So how did otherwise intelligent anthropologists and archeologists come to believe these myths? There are actually some understandable reasons. European contact with primitive societies in the 1500's through the 1800's had two results. The first was population losses due to disease, conquest, and the abandonment of the traditional way of life for the cities. The second was that technology from Europeans increased the carrying capacity of the land. A steel knife is worth its weight in gold and then some to a primitive society. And items of clothing as simple as a t-shirt save a lot of time since making clothes by hand is extremely difficult and time consuming.

By the time later waves of anthropologists encountered these societies, they found groups of people living beneath the now-increased carrying capacity of the land, and who were siphoning off some of their population to outside groups, and with improved technology. They had no need to make war, at least during this momentary adjustment to the equilibrium.

The title seems to be more biased than the book. The book actually does not claim that all peoples have always been in "constant battles", he does not try to avoid talking about known non-agressive and peaceful peoples at all. He is debunking the "peaceful past" myth quite well, but when I read the book, I get a picture about "mostly warlike" past instead of "constantly warlike" one. I tend to agree that there was lots of wars and violence in the past. I am more suspicious about LeBlancs claims about constant "overexploitation of the environment" of the prehistoric and modern humans.

LeBlank does not appear to be very focused on the subjects of his chapters. Instead he likes to change the subject constantly between prehistoric foragers, chimpanzees and world wars, gulf war and so on. In most of time, it is interesting reading, sometimes is his point hard to follow. For example, he argues that modern "warlords" are actually pre-state tribal governments as they have existed about thousands of years (I agree with that very much) and then next sentence brings in collapse of Yugoslavia as an example (Does he think that Slovenia was a "chiefdom" ? What has a conflict between parts of modern, bureocratic state to do with pre-state tribal conflicts ?).

From the above reviews of LeBlanc's "Constant Battles," we can clearly see that the "noble savage" interpretation of pre-history engenders strong emotional responses, more in the vein of current TV political shows where name calling is the norm and less in the vein of academic discourse where there should be an appeal to facts and clear reasoning. In fact, in approaching this subject, it might be best to try and put both emotions and political views, if not aside, at least in the background.

LeBlanc is quite clear in stating his own academic history with this topic, the need for this and other studies on the topic, his methodology and his copious citations from peer reviewed scholarship. In addition, he points out that a very large portion of previous scholarship on early human societies assumed a great deal about the pacifist nature of these societies in the face of often clear but nearly universally overlooked evidence as to the bellicose nature of humans and our simian relatives, the chimpanzees.

To these ends, then, LeBlanc provides readers with an amply researched and argued thesis about the ubiquitous nature of warfare among human societies that is often triggered by a given group exceeding their own territory's "carrying capacity." In fact, this thesis is one that is echoed by Jared Diamond in his "Collapse" where Diamond provides clear cut evidence that much contemporary war is caused by environmental distress squeezing out carrying capacity.

Btw, one reviewer refers to the "Human Resource Area Files" when its proper title is, in fact, the "Human Relations Area Files." You know, lads, if you are going to muster evidence, at least get the names of your witnesses correct and do not lie by saying that LeBlanc ignores peer reviewed literature when he actually cites it throughout this useful volume. I, as a professor who teaches early art and culture, find this book a refreshing addition to my course material. But, then again, I would expect this from LeBlanc, who has a Ph.D. in Archeology and is currently at Harvard.

I picked this up after reading Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and then a recommendation in The Economist lauding LeBlanc's theory. As a caveat, I must say that I was probably spoiled by the easy style- and well-developed arguments- Jared Diamond offers. However, given other reviewers' complaints about the writing, I do now feel confident that my reaction was more about LeBlanc than my prejudices: the writing is gramatically awkward- what exactly do editors do these days?- and the substance feels more theoretical and at times even philosophy class logical, with even- I'm not joking- usages of syllogisms with mostly unrelated topics. I think that can be a useful tool to shore up an argument backed up by facts, but that's not the case here.

The central thesis is in two parts: first, human beings have been warring with each other since before we were human; second, human beings have never been able to maintain some kind of instinctive, one-with-nature, Eden-like relationship with our environment. The link between the two is that the lack of balance between our carrying capacity and our populations has necessitated conflicts. As weak as some of LeBlanc's evidence is, it is difficult to argue with the assertion that, all technology being equal, sheer numbers will usually determine who is going to win. That those numbers may grow at the expense of our environment is, perhaps, the price we had to pay to be a successful species.

What was most frustrating about this book was the conclusion. While discussing the facts of conflict and food instability throughout the stages of social development, he promised repeatedly to answer the question of whether or not we were destined for war and conflict. Once at the conclusion, he theorized (and by this time the lack of evidence was maddening) that we are not biologically destined for constant warfare and don't generally get into it unless we feel, as a larger group, that it is warranted for our survival. He pointed to a few instances where traditionally warlike groups became peaceful. Although for the most part this was imposed by an outside force (e.g., European conquerors), for the most part the change to "peace" was happily accepted. However, he also noted that while we are now, for the most part, in a peaceful era (although conflicts take place all over the world, a much smaller percentage of people are involved than ever were before), that could change if, for example, our climate undergoes another major transformation, such as another Little Ice Age or, perhaps, intensified global warming. I guess I shouldn't have expected a definitive answer, even though one had been promised.

I believe in the overall argument that LeBlanc makes, but I'd be hardpressed to defend it using this book. I seriously hope other scholars are interested enough in this theory to pick up the work and further develop it.

I'm just going to say, "what he said" to EN Anderson's spotlight review above. And I'll add, anyone who writes that Tribe Y "extincted" Beast X is guilty of High Crimes against the English language. I quit after 50 pages, and probably skimmed half of that. Bad, bad book.

LeBlanc makes an important point, but so poorly he'll make his opponents chuckle with glee. I can't think of another book that makes his warfare point well, but for the general point that "primitive man" had a lot more environmemtal impact than is usually thought, I recommend Paul Martin's _Twilight of the mammoths : ice age extinctions and the rewilding of America_ (2006), for Amerinds 'extincting' the Pleistocene megafauna; and William F. Ruddiman's _Plows, plagues, and petroleum : how humans took control of climate_ (2005), for early man's (probable) anthropogenic global warming. A very cool book, highly recommended.

Happy reading (something else!)--
Peter D. Tillman