Powell Books

This book is required reading for my 16 yr old son....the
book arrived quickly & in great shape! Saved me driving all
over town to compete w/ other parents also looking!! Thanks!

This was a required reading for my son's class at school. Although he enjoyed the story line, the use of the local slang (written out phonetically ) was difficult for him to read and distracting to the story, he felt.

I have heard about many of the essays included in this text and was excited to find that I could get them all in one book. I love the footnotes for additional information and the fact that the essays include both sides to teaching this book. I highly recommend for anyone who needs to know more about this classic text.

Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a timeless classic that lives up to its prestigious name. It takes place in an array of locations along the Mississippi river around the time of 1835-45. The story is about Tom, a free-spirited boy, and his numerous adventures with a run-away slave named Jim.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn proceeds Mark Twain's original novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but within the first page Huck acknowledges this and says reading the first book isn't that important. However, I personally recommend reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer before this book. While it is not essential, it adds a lot to the book and gives an initial understanding Huck's character.

The book starts right where The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ended: Huck is struggling to fit into his new found "civilized" life with the Widow Douglas. Huck is uncomfortably forced to learn to be proper while his fortune is held for him.

It wasn't long till Huck's Pap, the village drunk, came to kidnap Huck for his fortune. After living with his abusive father for a while, Huck decides to escape. One night, Huck feigns a robbery on his Pap's cabin and then feigns his own death. Huck escapes to a nearby island and decides to live there. Soon word spreads through town about Huck's death and the town suspects Huck's father, but then suspicions transfer to a runaway slave named Jim who was living on the same island.

Jim and Huck set off on a raft before people could find them. They embark on a series of adventures, including boarding the ships of robbers, murder mysteries, gunfights, family feuds, great storms, mobs, con artists, and other extravaganzas. During their voyages they also come to deal with a series of topics and realizations, such as the irony and hypocrisy of "civilized" and adult culture, slavery, racism, morality, human nature, and superstition.

You'll notice pretty quickly when you pick this up that Huck doesn't spell too good and his grammar isn't so hot either. But if you look a little more closely, you find that he sure knows how to use the semi-colon, and his sentence structure is picture perfect. Mr. Twain may have decided that he was going to have some fun with his charming narrator, but he sure wasn't going to sacrifice good writing to do so.

The novel, as everyone knows, is a masterpiece, and works splendidly on every level. Plot, character development, theme; everything is here. Anybody reading this review has probably read the book several times and moreover has probably read about it a dozen more so it's pretty certain that my little review is not going to add much. I would, however, like to comment on something which struck me while reading it most recently, which is how richly it evokes middle America of the mid-nineteenth century. In other words, as well as being literature of the first rank, Huckleberry Finn also functions as a thorough and fascinating historical document of a time and place that every year sinks deeper and deeper into our collective memory.

Here he is describing Uncle Silas' place in Arkansas upon seeing it for the first time. "It was one of these one-horse cotton plantations and they all look alike. A rail fence round a two-acre yard; a stile made out of logs sawed off and up-ended in steps, like barrels of a different length, to climb over the fence with . . . some sickly grass-patches in the big yard, but mostly it was bare and smooth, like an old hat with the nap rubbed off; big double log house for the white folks--hewed logs with the chinks stopped up with mud or mortar, and these mud stripes been white-washed some time or another; round log-kitchen, with a big, broad open but roofed passage joining it to the house . . . hound asleep there in the sun; more hounds asleep round about . . . outside of the fence a garden and a watermelon patch; then the cottonfields begins, and after the fields the woods."

The first thing that strikes you about this is how . . . impoverished this all is, especially compared to how we live today. And this is a cotton-field owner with a number of slaves! But this was the south: rural, poor, hot, languid. Oh, yes, we are all familiar with the palatial southern mansion from novels like Gone With the Wind; I suspect that most of the South in the 1840s was closer to Huck's description than to Margaret Mitchell's.

Here's Huck's description of the town in which the King and Duke put on their first show: "The stores and houses was most all old, shackly, dried-up frame concerns that hadn't ever been painted; they was set up three or four feet above ground on stilts, so as to be out of reach of the water when the river was overflowed. The houses had little gardens around them, but they didn't seem to raise hardly anything in them but jimpson-weeds, and sunflowers, and ash-piles, and old curled up boots and shoes, and pieces of bottles, and rags, and played-out tinware . . . There was generly hogs in the garden, and people driving them out." Charming, eh? Of course, we in our modern twenty-first century aren't immune to such slovenliness. Sometimes, historical descriptions remind us that things don't change much.

Along with his brilliant observations of humanity and the human habitat the novel also contains breathtaking descriptions of nature, especially the Mississippi River. There's heavy timber on the Missouri side, mountains on the Illinois side, the lights of St. Louis: "We run nights, and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up--nearly always in the dead water under a towhead . . . Next we slid into the water and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we sat down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee-deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywhere--perfectly still--just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a cluttering, maybe. The first thing you see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line--and that was the woods on t'other side." How wonderfully evocative this is; how it makes one ache to experience such things!

Again, the novel is so much more than this. I'm not going to bother with the theme and the plot and the characters--what else is there to say?--but I can not finish this without giving an example or two of the wonderful humor contained in here. Here's the charming Huck after sneaking into the circus under the tent: "I ain't opposed to spending money on circuses when there ain't no other way, but there ain't no use in wasting it on them." And when the King and the Duke run on hard times: "First they done a lecture on temperance, but they didn't make enough for them both to get drunk on. Then, in another village, they started a dancing-school; but they didn't know no more than how to dance than a kangaroo does, so the first prance they made the general public pranced in and pranced them out of town . . . "

Oh, how rich this is. Rich and funny and lovely and hilarious. Read it for the pure entertainment contained in here, if nothing else.

This story is set in 1940s Louisiana. A young black man is with friends who plan and execute a robbery--which goes bad quickly. The young man, Jefferson, is quickly arrested and tried for murder--even though he had no weapon and was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Enter Grant Wiggins, a young black teacher who is chafing at the racial inequality of the times. He'd like nothing more than to leave this racial backwater bayou and head north for a city with more equality. But Jefferson's grandma is a family friend, and she begs Grant for the things he can provide--knowledge, dignity, and the ability for her grandson to die like a man...not the "hog" the white racists have called him. Very well-written, not preacher-like, I enjoyed this novel immensely. It shows us the frailty of humanity, along with the strength of human dignity. This novel should sit on everyone's shelf of books that made them think.

The thought process and inspiration behind A Lesson Before Dying were brilliant; however, the story just fell flat. I felt that the characters were one-dimensional and disengaged one from the story; Grant was a bore, for example, he repeated the same lines and the same ideas, most of the time in the same words. I kept waiting for spectacular and inspiring events to occur and to make me feel proud of Grant's work to reach Jefferson, but I was severely disappointed. This story moved water-drop slow, trickling from one important event through insignificant episodes to another important event. While I do feel that stories need time to develop the characters; however, in this story, I didn't see much character development. At the end of the book, Grant was the same man, same selfish mannerisms, yet in life, people change all the time. I would think that witnessing an execution and the injustice of the death penalty would be enough to change most people for better or worse. Then the story became absurd when Jefferson, an ignorant teenager who was brainwashed by a racist society, transformed into a man overnight because Grant made an inspiring speech to him. Why should Jefferson listen to Grant, who happens to be a selfish, cowardly and "educated" black? This book disappointed due to the fact that exaggerations are laced throughout, and it only delved into skin-deep into the death penalty issues. The story contains few descriptions of the execution (the climax), and so many descriptions of tedious events such as Grant's brawl with two bricklayers. Jefferson's execution was brief at best; it just didn't achieve the heart-wrenching ending that it was supposed to accomplish. Save your money and buy a book like Rain of Gold that can achieve true engagement between reader, characters and story; nevertheless, guaranteeing a first person perspective of the book.

This book seems to have been created for the express purpose of selling a film option and padding the Oprah Winfrey Book Club list. Trite, sentimental, peopled with unmemorable characters, and written in a flat and artless style, 'A Lesson Before Dying' is a lesson to avoid. Skip class at the Ernest J. Gaines school of writing, go down the road and jump the fence at Harold Bloom's orchard to pick something from Western Canon instead.

I picked up this book with great anticipation, as I knew it was selected for Oprah's Book Club and had won a couple of awards, including the National Book Award. Although I had never read any of the writer's previous works, his name is familiar and so, naturally, I assumed I would be in for a dramatic and stunning emotional rollercoaster. I wasn't.

This book is so poorly written I really hope that my suspicions are true and that all the pages of the original text were replaced by a 15 year old promising prankster. While the main premise of the book has the potential to be a real winner, Gaines fails to give it the depth it really needs. Instead, he treads above the surface throughout the entire book, using superficial emotions with superficial, and stereotypical, vocabulary. At the end, we get what everyone expects, the standard tearjerker in a Lifetime movie. The book was a chore to read, with Gaines' digressions making it nearly unbearable (must we know about every single person that attended the school play, and must we go through the play in its entirety?).

Nevertheless, Gaines does have an incredible way of making the story seem realistic. The main character, Grant Wiggins, is clearly not a writer yet when he telling the story it is as if he were simply talking to an old friend. Still, while Wiggins is not a writer, Ernest J. Gaines is, and an established one too. One would've hoped that a man with his clout would give us the mature literary quality one expects. Instead, we have this overwrought and sluggish lump of a book that has the potential to be refined into a literary masterpiece yet is nothing more than a bad extension to a Tyler Perry play.

Strong, powerful read...

So strong and so powerful that you may almost put it down in the first chapter, the language used to described a black man, a fellow human, so strong and offensive that you just want to close the book, slam it to the ground, and have nothing to do with it.

BUT, almost immediately it grows into a strong, heartwarming and ultimately inspiring story.

In the end, it touches all avenues of human character and endeavor and moves us to the core of our being.

If you liked "To Kill A Mockingbird," you'll like this one, too. Count on it!!

Wells' tale of the future of mankind is both highly entertaining, and a valid critique of the rigid social class system associated with capitalism. Wells was so far ahead of his time, that this tale is actually not the least bit dated. Despite being written over a century ago, Wells' scientific theories are still as believable and sound as they were in 1895. If you have even the slightest interest in Science Fiction pick this one up, its a concise, highly captivating read

H G Wells has awakened the world with his art of tale through the travel of time. He is the inspiration of every time travel writer in existence today, with no exception, myself included. Along with great classics like Twenty-thousand Leagues Under the Sea, I remember the first time reading these classics. I was in awe. Though time travel, a genre given life by H G Wells is the ultimate epic sci-fi adventure. The very idea of time travel has opened the eyes of every imagination in my soul. The ramifications are endless. H G Well's Time Machine is my favorite, all time story. Even when you think of how the future looked as grim as it did thousands of years from the story line's origination, one only needs to remember that this tale is merely one possiblity of billions that could be changed with a simple act of maybe a push of a button or even less. I believe THAT was the message Wells was revealing to us all. This is a very well written story that I highly recommend to anyone of any age or time. This very book was my biggest inspiration since I was first able to read.

I enjoyed this book. It's about a man that we only know as the "Time Traveler" who obviously invents a time machine and he goes into the future and ends up meeting up with the friendly Eloi, and befriends Weena, an Eloi. While he is with the Eloi his time machine goes missing. He finds the Morlocks, which Wells describes as ghostly apes. They are the reason that everything works so well for the Eloi, but they only prove as food for the Eloi.

In the end he gets his time machine back and hurries back to his own time to tell all of the other scientists about his journey. This is how this book is written, in first person, the point of view of the time traveler.

If you liked War of the Worlds than this is a must read.

Wells, H.G. Time Machine, The
December 1992, Tom Doherty Associates,LLC.

As I stated in my other reviews, I normally don't enjoy science fiction novels; this book I had to read for school. As I read what I expected to be a boring and unentertaining novel, my opinion changed, and I became more open to enjoying the story. I found that it was an enchanting novel that no one should pass up. H. G. Wells made the story come alive and he made the setting, set in the future, somewhere you feel could possibly exist as his descriptions are so vivid and his wording fanominal. Read this story and your beliefs on time travel and the way earth will turn out in the future will change. H.G. Wells gives you somthing to ponder while you enjoy the sentences that flow together like the river he describes. H.G. Wells makes an unknown world seem familiar and is an expert in his proffesion. I guaranty this book will send powerful astonishment and awe up and through your mind.

I am sure that you have seen the movies that have been made from this book, there are quite a few and most of them are very entertaining. Unfortunately none of the movies that I have seen have captured the social meaning behind this book. Certainly they have the adventure part down pat, but the rest of it is changed, for the times I'm sure. I would advise those of you who love Sci-fi to read this book, and to those of you, like myself who have a hard time getting into that genera, look at this as a classic and read it anyway.

The unnamed inventor of a time machine, known only as the traveler, leaves his home to travel forward through time. Seeing drastic changes in the world he finally settles on a distant future to get out and explore. He quickly meets tiny humans which he refers to as the Eloi. They are fair to look at, complete ADD cases with little to no true knowledge or skills. The Traveler attempts to communicate with them and has some difficulty. He spends a great deal of time in this futuristic world and discovers that the Eloi are not alone in this new world, and that their counterparts are far more sinister.

One of the biggest changes made in the movies is the cause of the split between the Eloi and the Morlocks. It is very interesting to read Well's actual reasoning, which is the separation and elitism between the social classes. This becomes more defined and is the actual basis of the entire novel. Rather than being a true Sci-Fi book, this really is about Victorian Society and what it would look like if left unchanged for 800,000 years. Because this book only vaguely touches on the science involved, it is likely to never be outdated. Though this is not a fast read by any means, it is a fun and meaningful one. I don't know that I would hand it to a 10 year old because odds are they would be bored before he even leaves for the trip. However if you can take a deep breath and leave our societies mindset behind (the theory that everything needs to be exploding and that we all need instantaneous gratification at all times) this is a brilliant piece of fiction that spans several genres and is in fact as timeless as the Traveler.

Well, this is a classic example of why histories should not be written within a few short months of the event. Woodward fawns over President Bush, accepting without question that Bush had nothing to do with orchestrating the grand deception of the American public that led to war. His questions of the president, during and after, are softballs that are infuriating to read as the Bush innocently claims he thought he was just getting the finest intelligence that ever was, and blaming everything on George Tenet for his alleged "Slam-Dunk" statement. Gosh, golly, I really believed ol' George, yuh know--in fact, that's all I needed. What, me worry?

At the least, some of the sinister side of Dick Cheney shows through. If Secretary of State Colin Powell did in fact have such misgivings about the war, however, as stated in the book (and yet stayed on out of political loyalty and sent thousands to their deaths), I find it even harder to believe that G. W. Bush was the innocent bystander that Woodward paints him to be.

We returned this book because you sent it to us minus the first twenty or so pages. We did not read this book.

Woodward seems to have a little industry of churning these books out (and other people doing a lot of the work).

This book shares the faults and good points of the earlier book: basically a recounting of a lot of meetings that we were never in...but still a limited picture of what people were REALLY thinking...and no analysis of what they SHOULD have been thinking.

Somehow it seems just a bit richer and more interesting than the previous one. As if either the events were more intriguing or Woodward had warmed to his subject more. But still...too much of a reportorial data dump.

Very well-written and informative book, but the person "reading" the book had a somewhat monotone voice. Really detracted from it. Worth reading -but not worth buying the book on tape.

I just reread _Plan of Attack_, and was struck by how much light it sheds on the currently unfolding drama swirling around Iran.

To the extent that President Bush still appears to believe that it is his sacred duty to strike pre-emptively at evil wherever he finds it, then the current "coercive diplomacy" being aimed at Iran--the current exemplar of his "axis of evil"--seems likely to end in war, just as it did in Iraq.

The parallels between the developments that Woodward reports on in the run-up to the war in Iraq, and what we are seeing with respect to Iran, are eerie--the distortion and exaggeration of intelligence to justify the war, the simultaneous building up of forces in the region, and the willingness to shift justifications as needed, jump from the page.

At this moment, December of 2007, when we are learning that our own intelligence does not support the existence of a nuclear threat from Iran, we're also seeing the neocon establishment attack the messengers, and re-focus on Iran's intent rather than capability. Unless Bush and those around him have experienced a real change of heart, the White House depicted by Woodward can be expected to redouble its efforts to bring about regime change in Iran, rather than admit any errors and change course.

I strongly recommend giving _Plan of Attack_ a read or re-read right now, certainly for what it says about how and why we got into Iraq, but even more for what it may presage about Iran.

Wow, i have heard that this book is good but when it came to my hands its actually really better! I am going to have a lot of fun with the tutorials from this book. If you are not stupid you will make very good use of this book or if you are stupid you are going to hurt yourself in the end.

If you skip the Commie crap, the book is worth keeping. The information is availible to anyone with a computer but most of the research has been done for you.

This book should be a part of every survivalists library.

I remember having a burning desire to have this book. Back in the 80s when I was a high school student and there was no 'internet' to speak of. Well, a few BBS's the college kids were talking about, long distance phone bills to dial up another city's thing...

So, because of the limited availablity of "Stuff", things like this became very alluring. Go to the bookstore, say "Do you have the Anarchist Cookbook, the Satanic Bible, or the Shams Al Maarif by Al Buni..." and hear "I've never heard of it..." or in case of the former a firm "We DON'T carry it!" and it becomes a mantra of "Forbidden knowledge that the man does want to keep away from you..."

Then, actually getting things like that it becomes rather overhyped. When I read this with some friends, well fortunately I'd learned enough real science and tech to be a bit worried and skeptical about the 'instructions'... Ah, and Geraldo made the second look so cool, but it wasn't that good. And, for the third, as soon as I both get it and figure out enough Arabic to read it... Well, perhaps third's a charm...

Flash forward to adulthood. I'm still a radical who only does the most minimal 'pretense' of normalcy to survive, but would love to tear down/would love when it falls down/ civilization, or at least somehow send it on a more liberal/progressive path.

Here's how; Study big time the 60s, including talking to some 'old dudes'... Communes, political movements, do's and dont's, what works and doesn't. Tangent with modern "Anti Capitalist" stuff. I like Crimethinc a lot, no I'm not a member or whatever. And form a doable, local progressive plan.

We are having a recession starting now, that could turn into a Depression lightning fast. Learning a lot of skills people took for granted would be a big help. Along the way, with 'global economics' shafting Americans big time at last, lots of the stuff they mocked as 'anti fair trade' will come back into appeal. Like "Local farms should feed local people", unions, trade barriers, the corporation is evil and the rich are rich because they take from the people...

What you start up, be it a commune on the outskirts of town, a small business somewhere, a community project or a 'living collective' in some abandoned industrial building (likely got cheaply due to outsourcing) that will be the 'change' you broadcast into society. Save the "Blow stuff up" stuff for only if it becomes necessary, (like a paranoid 'crackdown' by globalists) then don't use this book, you'll have volunteers who know what they are doing.

One thing I've learned, is that despite the propaganda lies of being spitters, real hippies actually took disgruntled vets in. They fed 'em, helped them stand up again, and believe it or not didn't preach to 'em. First, it's a nice thing to do for your fellow man. Second, disgruntled vets make the best "Yippies" should "The wind be blowin-" if you catch my drift so to speak.

I was in the military for quite some time working with explosives of all kinds....let me tell the prospective buyer of this book this....The recipes contained in this book are dangerous and can often be lethal. They teach us about this book in our job school and the recipes are extremely volatile and unstable. Losing a hand or arm or your very life is a real possibility if you start trying to make stuff in this book. Use at your own risk....hope you have your will done up......

When I was 16, back in the 1980's, my friend and I bought copies of this book to try and see what kind of explosives we could make. These recipes are dangerous, ineffective, and could potentially burn your house down. Smoking banana peels is not a good idea. Gunpowder is dangerous to home manufacture in any quantity. The recipes only partly work, the booby traps are a farce, and the whole book only makes sense to an immature mind that can picture fighting a guerilla insurgency against invading Soviet scum (moi, circa 1984). Fact of the matter is, children have access to far more dangerous ideas and images on the web than they do out of this book which if serialized and published as a blog, would have gotten the author some mild notoriety but nothing more so than young people airing ridiculous ideas and their body parts on line. As an adult with a child of my own, I can understand the why behind the book, the historical context around it, and the desire by many reviewers, including myself and the author, to just bury the book, but I don't think it needs any more attention than pictures of Barbara Streisand's house, Obama-girl, Britney-Lindsey-Paris, and leaked financial documents from a Swiss bank. Stop looking! Don't stop thinking.

This book was great. It filled the gaps left after reading The Secret.
At first I was a bit turned off because of the some of the psycho-babble but in the end it was perfect. The author explain concepts well and reinterates points just frequently enough that they became something that I kind of sang along with and now I am putting in to practice everthing that I learned in the book. The book explains our place in the world and that our desire to get rich is ok and even expected. Please take the time to read/listen to the book yourself. It was quick and it won't take anything out of your life it you don't like it. I think it was wonderful.

Loved this book--excellent info. It's been almost 100 years since first publication but it rings just as true today. Two versious of the book are included--updated for today's reader and the original version. I love the original version and it's references to businesses of long ago--you can see in retrospect that Mr. Wattles was correct.

Think and grow rich...great concept. I'm trying it out and hope for the best.

Wallace Wattles' masterpiece, one of the definitive works on the principles of success and wealth. Thank you. Definitely belongs in any library on wealth and success.

Note to publisher: There are typos and editing errors. Please fix before the next printing!
Dorothy

The Science of Getting Rich:
Attracting Financial Success through Creative Thought, 4th ed.
By Wallace D. Wattles
If you watched The Secret and wondered what the little book was that changed author Rhonda Byrne's life, this is it. Originally published in 1910, its time has come. In light of recent scientific discoveries, we are creating a new worldview in which consciousness is in everything, and in fact, it's through consciousness that matter comes into being. Many of today's widespread prosperity movements are tapped in to this knowledge and now you can also learn the secret.Rahasya Poe, Lotus Guide magazine

I am the mother of a two children, ages seven and five. We have read and reread nearly all of Roald Dahl's children,s stories. In general, I love this author. His stories are entertaining, even magical, and so beautifully written. When reading Dahl, I am always aware that my children are exposed to high quality literature with a richness of vocabulary and ideas. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator is the only exception to our general delight with Roald Dahl. It is dark and lacks the sense of optimism, the charm, the magic of his other stories. Neither of my children enjoyed this book and I did not either. My advice would be to stop after Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and not pick up this sequel. Instead, grab Matilda, the BFG, or James and the Giant Peach and treat yourself and your kids to a real treasure!

Not as good as the original.


The takeoff into the Sequel of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is ok, but the rest doesn't live up to it, unfortunately.

You can save the kids this one and go for some of Dahl's other work, or just go through the first book again.

The space mission here isn't as much fun and doesn't offer as much clever commentary as the other book.

After reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my 5 and 7 year olds, I got down my childhood copy of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. It made for a terrible read aloud! The plot was slow, the dialogue boring and I had to edit out some racist parts about China and the Chinese. We all decided to abandon the read aloud after Chapter 5. Very disappointing! I was actually surprised to still find the book in print!

Actually, in comparison with the first book (Charlie and the chocolate factory) this book is definitely not as good. I did however read it in 2 days because I wanted it to be done in a matter of time for school, and, I couldn't put it down. This book does not have as much adventure because it's in space and then taking wonka vites and Vite Wonkas and so on and so forth. This book did keep your attention and of course, was written by roald dahl which makes it superior.

Because my children dearly loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I could not have been more delighted to find a sequel. I bought it as soon as I discovered it, and proceded to read it to my daughter. My son then proceded to read the book himself.

As I read it to my daughter, we were both very disappointed. We had hoped to discover what happened as Charlie learned about running the Chocolate factory and ultimately how he took over. Instead, we found some sort of a creepy science fiction type of story, complete with very frightening aliens. Neither one of us enjoyed the book very much.

My son read the book and had nightmares about the aliens for months afterwards. He wrote a book report on it and stated that he did not like the book in his report. (I wonder why?)

While I certainly recommend the first book, I cannot recommend this one at all. It isn't fun to read and just isn't the kind of story most of us are looking for after Charlie won his factory.

Highly recommended reading for anyone who wants to know how we ended up in the quagmire of Iraq in spite of Bush and his cabinet initially proclaiming going to war in Iraq would be quick and decisive, including Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld's famous quip to reporters that "we don't do quagmires."

This is a comprehensive, well-researched examination of why and how the Bush administration took the country down paths they said they would never go, how the internecine relationships in the Bush cabinet, and Bush's disengagement and dislike of real discussion of differing opinions, led to the war and its aftermath being controlled by ideological academics with little if any real world experience, while those with proven track records of success were shunted aside, often fired outright. You get a good look at how the chaotic mismanagement of U.S. decisions post-Sadaam destroyed the secular and moderate Iraqi establishment and infrastructure, leaving the country wide open to fanatics and terrorists from inside and out.

Isikoff's and Corn's _Hubris_ describes the run-up to the Iraq War, including the activities of the CIA and other intelligence agencies around the world. Although there was bad intelligence in general (yellowcake uranium in Niger, aluminum tubes that were not suited for nuclear enrichment, "Curveball", etc.), the Administration selected bits and pieces of this already suspect intelligence in order to promote the war.

This book also covers the Valerie Plame (Wilson) leak story. Only Scooter Libby ever really got in any sort of trouble over that.

_Hubris_ doesn't really get into the actual prosecution of the war all that much; try Thomas Ricks' _Fiasco_ for more details about what was/is going on in Iraq.

Although Corn writes for _The Nation_ and has written _The Lies of George W. Bush_, _Hubris_ doesn't really come across as stridently partisan. It does necessarily rely on a lot of personal communications and anonymous sources, making it difficult to independently confirm what was said. Some chapters heavily use asterisked footnotes, which can be somewhat distracting. And, the book is a bit longer than normal (about 400 pages, plus notes, index, etc.)

But these are minor quibbles. Read _Hubris_, and learn how this war got started....and might have been avoided.

Isikoff and Corn have a lot of blame to distribute for the march to an unneccessary war in Iraq. Neocons and other leaders within the administration acted on unchecked intelligence sources when it suited their purpose and ignored contrary facts when they threatened to slow the march. There was rarely a fact the administration was unwilling to distort or a patriot it was unwilling to defame in order to serve the purpose of democratizing the middle east. Perhaps worst of all, the press gave them a nearly free pass out of laziness or fear. Hubris does for American arrogance in statecraft what Fiasco does for it in military planning and execution: it exposes both the sinews of American excess and the price that all of us will pay for it

Yes, there are lots of problems with the war in Iraq. Yes, it has been mishandled, but the question for me is if this war is wrongly ran or is it fundamentally wrong?
The book tends to argue that we had no business in Iraq, and the situation there is a mess because we should not be there in the first place.
Let's have a historical perspective: We pacified and democratized Germany, and we kept troops there for 60 years. No one is arguing with that. We also pacified and democratized Japan, and we kept troops there for 60 years also no one is arguing with that. We saved S Korea from communism and made it the 9th largest world economy, in contrast with their Northern brothers that are starving to death... We saved Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from Sadam, no one is arguing with that either.
Now is Iraq. Five years and 3000 casualties later we are all whining and begging our leaders to quit with our tail between our legs. What if FD Roosevelt quit after a couple of years of fighting Germany and Japan? What if Harry Truman and General McArthur, just said "This Korean winter is colder than we thought, lets just pack up and go"? Well, they didn't, and they had to send thousands and thousands of young Americans to the ultimate sacrifice.
Today FDR is know as the savior of civilization and democracy and General McArthur has a 50 foot statue in the port of Incheon, Korea as the saviour of this nation. (well, half of this Nation)
But Iraq? Let's just quit... great leader Ahmadinejad and his friends can take it over...
Oh... where have all he cowboys gone?

While looking for this book, I stumbled on "The World Without US" - a documentary similar in topic. After checking out the trailer in the reviews, I got the DVD and the film was amazing. It takes the premise of this book a step farther by asking, what would happen should the US withdraw its military completely from the world? I think that the film makers did the question justice by traveling around the world and interviewing amazing people with amazing points of view. Answering a hypothetical question is hard, for any author and filmmaker, however this movie did the job, weather you agree with the answer or not. Check it out also.

The World Without US - With Niall Ferguson

If you enjoy reading a biased book filled with false information then this book is for you. After all who needs facts when you have an agenda. I am sick of reading books who use "CIA official" as a source. I understand you need to keep some sources confidential but when who base an entire book on unnamed sources it tends to raise questions in my mind, especially when the book is nothing more than a hit piece designed to make the administration look bad. To all you Bush haters who could care less about the truth then by all means read this several times over. If you are looking for the truth then leave this alone, it is not even good for a laugh.

The book was in great condition, but the content was much less than i had hoped for, and as a guide it had little explanation... would have pass on purchasing this book...

This is an excellent book. It is not just for diabetics, but for anyone that wants to eat healthy. I HAVE recommended this book to my family & friends.

This book is not for everyone. It is very technical. I can comprehend almost anything, but there is a lot of thinking that goes into the chemical issues.

This book opened my eyes about watching my glycemic index. I first became aware of it when I used the NutriSystem diet plan and noticed immediately that my tummy fat started disappearing. I realized that I needed to know more about the glycemic quality of foods since there is diabetes in my family history. I highly recommend this book.

Let me preface the following by stating that I've never been a "dieter", I've always just tried to eat as healthy as I can. And, as a life-long vegetarian I'd never really been able to participate in most fad-diets anyway (I need my carbs!). But, I'd noticed over the past year that even though I work out pretty consistently, my metabolism was changing and I had dramatic drops in blood sugar that left me feeling tired, light headed and nauseous a lot. I read an article about the low GI diet in one of my fitness mags, and it sounded like something I could actually try as a vegetarian. My husband read the same article and felt it was something he could do without eating "diet" foods.

It really isn't meant as a diet to help you lose a lot of weight quickly, it's much more about changing your overall eating habits and combinations of food so that you regulate your digestive track, which in turn controls hunger, crashes/spikes in blood sugar, increases energy, promotes overall long-term health, etc. It actually started as a method of eating for diabetics, but has since been adopted by non-diabetics.

This particular book is great because it explains the science behind it and also has a bunch of recipes and GI values for most foods. I've found that after doing it for 2 full months, I can pretty much make foods without recipes just by being able to judge whether it's a high or low-GI food. I also bought the vegetarian recipe book, and already have a few favorites in it.

Anyway, I've been doing this for about 2 months and really like it - you're not really depriving yourself of much. The only real adjustment is trying to buy organic when possible so there are no preservatives, and cooking a lot more!

Although it shouldn't really be considered a "weight loss diet", I think just the nature of the changes in my diet has led me to loose some weight. I've never considered myself overweight and have always been a healthy eater and consistent gym-rat. But, over the past 2 months, I've lost about 10 lbs - and that is with the occasional cheating, weekly dinners out, plenty of chocolate and wine, and a 2-week respiratory infection where I didn't work out once!

I would definitely recommend this book - and lifestyle - for anyone who is just trying to be, feel, and look more healthy overall without typical diet constraints.

As a ghost novel, this is fair. Not spectacular, but fair.

Any student of history would be skeptical of any claim that the book is from an original manuscript written so many years ago--it is too full of anachronisms and figures of speech which are 20th century. As a student of history, I had a hard time suspending disbelief, but when I did, I was somewhat entertained.

One of the better Bell witch books i have read.There are some really bad ones . We Tennesseans like our Bell Witch stories.

This story is dull and slow-moving at times, it is a worthwhile endeavor to muddle through till the end. Written about a "haunting" of the 1800's, this book is written in the literary style of that time. Sometimes, that could prove trying to some readers. This book is worth the extra effort.

Betsy is haunted by a ghost. The people of the time, the 1800's, believe it is a result of a curse placed on her when her father had a land dispute with a neighbor woman. Throughout the book we follow all the details of the haunting, as well as the town's reaction to it. It isn't until the very end, that the true reason for the "haunting" is revealed. The ending is a shocker, but satisfying.

This narration, written by Betsy's husband to their daughter, reveals the details of her mother's haunting. With the text of this book, Betsy's father also left a statement explaining that the book must be opened and read if her mother began to again show signs of the "haunting". This serves as the prologue of the book.
The haunting of Betsy is written vividly, with colorful descriptions and settings. The characters are well-developed, and the reader actually falls in love with Betsy's sweet and devoted husband.

On the surface, this story doesn't seem very spooky ... until something in the text reminds you that it is not a historical novel. This is a journal of paranormal events that truly happened ... and it stays with you.

This was the best fiction chiller I have read all year. You never can quite tell whether it is fiction or fact. Chilling tale with a good twist at the end.