Brandon Books

The book was an eye opener. I thought I had an understanding of Irish history. I was astonished and outraged. The purpose of the book is to reveal the true outrages that caused the multigeneration enmity between the Irish and English and succeeds. No one can understand the present situation in No. Ireland without it.

The book was well referenced, even sighting English historical information to substanciate the truth. 50-100,000 Irish women sold into prostitution and slavery by the same English traders, god-fearing puritan's, who sold African's into slavery. No reference to this in modern history books.

I never knew that the Irish were made literal slaves by the English or the extent of the ethnic and religious hatred and the genocide perpetrated by the British against them. The slaughter and genocide perpetrated has been squelched in the press and media for centuries.

It leaves me with the question of what kind of a media do we have in the U.S. that has kept this imformation from us?

Numerous American's of many ethnic groups have told me that I was lying, it didn't happen just like the holocaust. I was dumb struck and had to bring in the book to prove it too them. It begs the question: What's with diversity in this country does if it only goes one way?

Its a book any one who believes in real diversity should read. You can't understand the present Irish situation between the IRA and the UDL without it.

EXCELLENT

Susan Whitten needs a loan to keep the family ranch. Meanwhile she has a guardian angel watching over her from above named Tabitha who meddles in her life and the life of Hunter Carson. This was an enjoyable read.

The book cover has a quote from Jonathan Edward's: The book is much better than any other book in the world, excepting the Bible, in my opinion. This Treatise was also used emphatically by Edwards in his dissertation on "The Freedom of the Will."

With that said, I was expecting an almost unintelligible treatise on the subject at hand. For one, Edwards recommended it, and brain just functions differently than most. Second, Van Mastricht is a dutch puritan and their explanation of subjects can sometimes be very cumbersome, even though very enlightening.

This book was just the opposite of what I was expecting. It was very understandable, even though I will have to read it again to get the full meaning, and very enjoyable.

Van Mastricht leans heavily, and I mean heavily, on Scripture to show his conclusions on the subject of regeneration. There are three parts to this book consisting of: "The Doctrinal Part" "The Argumentative Part" and "The Practical Part." One of my favorite parts in the entire book was Van Mastricht's "list" of assurance of regeneration. Most Puritans are known for their "tests" of salvation and regeneration, but Van Mastricht gives a great list showing assurance.

Although, I do not agree on every point made by Van Mastricht when speaking of paedo baptism, it is never the less very well done. I would highly recommend this book if you are studying regeneration. One could use this merely as a reference book if needed and would glean enough from that alone to warrant the purchase.

This travel narrative follows Manchán's (he's the kind of writer you want to call by his first name, even if it's mangled in all his books by those with whom he wanders into Mocha; Manchán's a rare Irish saint, and as I dislike coffee, I'll stick with what his parents named him) journeys in the Americas ("Angels & Rabies") and India ("Manchán's Travels"). All of these appear to have happened in the 90's, and while this African installment comes third in English, it appeared in its Irish version back in '98; the Indian one in Gaelic also preceded the Béarla adaptation. Although at the time of the African adventure Manchán was only twenty, years before he'd become a travel writer and documentary filmmaker (using both languages) in partnership with his brother, the scrutiny with which he approaches his task of recording, remembering, and interpreting must have been sharpened early on in his life.

I've reviewed his other two books in English here on Amazon earlier this year, and I enjoyed them immensely. The Sunday Telegraph's blurb on the back sums up, for once accurately, the power of his style: "His writing is unashamedly sensual and he has an engagingly confessional narrative voice; his adventures are as poignant as they are hair-raising." While he does not delight in the half-learned, half-sniggering tone of Redmond O'Hanlon's accounts of the dangers of tropical parasites, Manchán does evoke in carefully organized, easily flowing prose his own discomforts, whether physical or emotional. Yet, he avoids special pleading or sentimentality. He scours his descriptions of cliché; he labors with Yeatsian diligence to disguise with fluid rhythms what I suspect he has pored long over in private to polish-- and roughen-- in his craft as an observer of what he finds inside himself and outside in a world that discourages, delights, and daunts him.

It's 1991, the Gulf War is about to erupt, and for a thousand pounds this Irish youth signs up alongside twenty British (with a few from the Commonwealth) amateur adventurers, mostly young, all restless, to board a refurbished British army vehicle to trundle down from Morocco across the Sahara into Niger, over to Burkina Faso, Benin, and then, halfway, to swing straight across equatorial Africa through Nigeria, Cameroon, the CAR, the former Zaire, and over the mountains into the descent towards Nairobi and then the Indian Ocean. Thirteen thousand miles, not counting getting to Ceuta at the northern tip in the first place!

I made a shortlist of favorite passages and came up with a dozen, too many for a short entry. However, I will convey the gist of his trek, employing his phrasing when I can to share his perspective. He suspects all twenty of them had a "masochistic streak" to prove themselves to parents, ex-lovers, colleagues, or siblings. "We hoped Africa would be an alembic that would convert our vapid hearts to those of heroes." (21) But, this would prove predictably hubristic. "We were like children swinging ever higher on a faulty swing, showing off to Mummy, unaware of the catastrophe that was to befall us." The group splits, yet patriarchy endures, if in feminist fashion. Suzi, their guide, the most testosterone-fuelled of them all, will lord her power over this fractious band of what soon becomes an object lesson in social regression, the failure of moral evolution, and the limits of safety vs. foolhardiness when the surrogate parent's not around anymore.

Without giving away too much of what Manchán will do mid-journey, it's certainly convincing when he tells us that he made a life-changing decision that led his companions into an extremely dangerous situation when they find themselves trapped in the depths of the Congo, needing to escape, nearing starvation, and finding themselves, indirectly through Manchán's impetuous actions, almost destitute. One element that gains appropriate consideration, given the gravity of his unthinking action-- one that nearly any young person would do in these circumstances-- turns into a reflection upon how his fellow travellers begin to fracture under pressure. A third keep their heads down, hoping to survive the rigors of the six months together relatively unscathed; another group wavers between timidity and the promise of exhilaration; the last faction, with Manchán among them, looks for the feckless and the reckless, if in rather innocent fun.

It's not quite "Lord of the Flies," but Manchán as with his previous books excels at examining how a foreign bureaucracy, strange culture, and a post-colonial revenge, as it were, can conspire to assault Europeans abroad in the Third World. His native guides assure him that while the white men break, trying vainly to reduce all to facts, those who survive the continent do so only by bending, by giving in but not succumbing under pressures that dwarf even Manchán's predicament in the Congo. As he survives his forging in the jungle's crucible, he learns to accept how the lion devours the zebra. His veneer cracks, and, I suspect, he becomes a man at last.

Africa, he muses, seems too advanced in its trust in spirits and chance; Europe, contrarily, appears to be fleeing these sinuous truths that quantum physics and a post-Christian mindset may, intriguingly, only be drawing us back towards. He listens to assorted nomads, native and European, like himself. He repels a Berber boor who appears as if he came from the pages of a book-- "an old book soaked in cheap alcohol." (49) He tries to rescue the females-- after a few months on the road-- from the advances of his fellow mates, who sometimes transform into thuggish Lotharios.

He reads a diary of James Sligo Jameson, who 103 years earlier exactly follows the route he finds himself on, that sought by Stanley into Zaire. He's relegated, at a dismal truck stop in the capital of Niger to cut paper reindeer to festoon the truck for Christmas; it's that or getting the fluff out of tampons to make a snowman. One of the schoolgirls has brought snow spray from London. He meets in Algeria's wasteland the improbably named Salade, a "mature student" among the Tuareg, and she and he bond over their memories of a publican, Dick Mack, they both knew in Dingle. He almost falls in love as he dances the soukous; he sees posters of Zairean dictator Bokassa faded in the sun until only his leopard-print wear and his horn-rimmed glasses remain visible, as if a Joan Miro abstract. A few pages later, a menacing military functionary reminds him, "withered and bucolic," of a Velásquez painting.

Manchán studies the dangers that afflict the body, punish the mind, and corrode the soul. As a remedy, he finds throughout his coming-of-age story, he turns to nature as a comfort. At moments of utter despair, he sees, for example, dawn over Tamanrasset 3000 meters above the Sahara. The sun "began to climb its way through the blackened spires and gnarled columns, carving around the monstrous needles and illuminating bits of quartzite as it went, making the world look like a monstrous neon sea urchin." (97)

Similarly, drifting on the Congo, the nadir of their journey's followed by sudden rapture in the sunlight, as they follow detours that lead them along the same path Conrad gave to Kurtz upriver. Despite the equatorial heat and oppressive humidity, not to mention their own parlous state, Manchán and his mates can rouse themselves in wonder, albeit doubly stupified. "The forest was so all-encroaching and the river so bendy that it seemed as if we were only ever sailing through a tiny, though never-ending, pond." (240)

On the savannah, nearing the end, he learns how lucky he's been to glimpse Africa without pity, to see in its integrity people still inheriting traditional patterns of civility and compassion before globalization and urbanization will wipe their spirit, perhaps, ineradicably away into the backwash of the First World. He ponders zebras under attack by a hyena. "After the zebras had fled and the dust settled, In noticed the rib cage of a gazelle-- a Gothic cathedral of bones picked bare of meat-- rising starkly up from its wilted carpet of skin. It seemed to have been placed there solely for me: a sign to say that sometimes you had to risk death to be fully alive." (275-76) Haunted on his trip by dreams of death, getting over the death of his father, Manchán has struggled to stare down mortality, and finally he refuses to flinch.

Manchán at various points in the expedition finds himself chemically altered, not always on endorphins or by dysentery alone, but the appeal of what he witnesses I found enhanced by his ability to balance the artificially induced high with those he attains through pushing his body and his mind to their limits. When you read his story, you gain understanding of how to bend, rather than break, under pressure. The courage that he gains will sustain him well when he roams Canada, the Andes, and India.

This book is great. It will make you cry and it will make you laugh, but it is real. I read the book in two days and would be more than happy to read it again. Brandon Maddox writes excellently. Everyone absolutely must read this. It deals with an issue that many rarely acknowledge, the family curse, but it does exist, and we see it in this book.

Having grown up in Florida - not returning for more than a decade - and wanting to avoid all the tourist traps, I didn't know what to expect from a visit there. I bought the Unofficial Guide to get different advice on the highlights of the sunshine state and I was very happy with the outcome. I returned home from my trip with fond memories....and I highly recommend this book to anyone making the trip out there.

I went through Henry Penix's The Gift - Box Set, which includes this book. In Unwrap Your Gift, Penix asks his reader numerous introspective questions to really get you thinking about who you, uniquely, are. I am taking time off from college due to becoming over-stressed, and before I went through this program, I was floundering, losing self-esteem, and becoming depressed. Thinking creatively on Penix's questions and writing down (in The Gift - Box Set's interactive journal) steps to materialize my goals has given me greater self-confidence, drive, and direction. I would recommend this program to anyone. All you need is a creative, open mind, willingness to explore your own heart, and thirst for positive change.

As soon as I received the box from Amazon,I opened it immediately as I knew it was the "Urban Walls" by Brandon Taylor. The book contains extensive information on collage and grafitti art and specially Burhan Dogancay, Turkish-American artist considered to be one of the best well known wall artist all over the world. Burhan Dogancay's conversation with the author allows us to understand his art in a much better way. The book itself is a must have for everybody interested in collage and decolage art. The quality of the binding, pictures and paper is great. Many thanks to Hudson Hills Press and Mr.Brandon Taylor for creating such a great book.

Almost thirty quilt projects presented by seven quilters pairing some unusual designs with the interests of quilters who gain their inspiration from a variety of traditions, from Amish to Danish, in Patchwork And Quilting Book # 3. Color photos of quilts and sections accompany clear instructions, from materials needed to cutting out and assembling the blocks. A gorgeous, diverse project guide.

When Kevin Sampsell, editor/publisher of Future Tense Books, named this book "Who the Hell is Brandon Freels?" He stole the words that I and I'm sure others had been fondling in their head. Who the Hell IS Brandon Freels, after all? I didn't know. I'd never heard of him. But out of this simple, kitschy, philosophical cliche of a question, with its subtle hint of distaste and angst, comes a self-exploratory surgery performed with a typewriter, rusty pitchfork, and spatula. With an almost sadomasochistic courage, Freels rips out fragmented, hypersexual, insane, brilliant, sometimes complex, sometimes hamfisted, hilarious, dada-truth-serum visions, plops them out on the metal tray, and it seems like he's just as fascinated and surprised by what he's found, if not moreso, than the reader. It's like he's Cain in an autoerotic mating dance from the deeply hidden room from where Kafka-surrealist revolutions begin, cursed by God to forever begat monsters, but instead shooting out words from a snow machine, inches at a time, watching them accumulate into legs and arms and a body until they slouch out into the world. An amalgamation of teenage suicide, tongue-in-cheek satanism, Republican gangsters, vampire conventions, suburbanite punishments epitomizing the Marquee de Sade meets Cantonese cuisine, that smells as sweet as a young Mark Leyner adjoined at the hip with Richard Brautigan and a more-realized, more-attuned, much-more-brilliant, underhyped Harmony Korine. And these beasts are slouching towards the next freeway exit to your town, leaving on your doorstep the afterproduct: a wonderful tribute to the Unbearables.

After reading this, instead of asking: "Who the Hell is Brandon Freels?" I find myself asking: "Where the hell was I when this book was being written?", "How the hell did I not hear the sonic booms off in the distance when this microcosm of a universe was being chiseled into existence?", and, "Why did it take so long to reach my eyes?"

My advice: Don't get caught blind, leaf off the few bucks for the book, and take along a sack lunch for the carnival side show exploration into an irreality that is all to real.