Wang Books

A "revolution in values" took place during this "search for order." Wiebe traces a pattern of "bureaucratization" in such diverse areas as science, philosophy, business, education, journalism, law, medicine, and social work (although Wiebe neglects the influence of arts and technology). A new middle class emerged as certain occupations such as law, medicine, and teaching became professionalized. Journalism became more scientific. Social workers began to establish their distinct field. "Idealists" and "utopianists" advocated the idea of progress by stages. A "business unionism" developed establishing a set of values for organized labor and carrying "the obligation that union executives become experts in their particular industry" (125). Factories turned to scientific management. With the establishment of the American Farm Burea, even farmers allowed their former image as "the people" to fade in favor of an agricultural business image. Such bureaucratic solutions were also attempted on an international level with the League of Nations (curiously, foreign policy makers seemed quite confident of America's superior place in the world despite domestic confusion). In other words, when the new middle class joined the Progressive movement, reform had altered its meaning from results to procedures.

The success of this bureaucratic integration was made evident by the ability of the nation to mobilize for the First World War. However, as Wiebe maintains, the successes of the Progressive movement actually helped lead to its downfall. Achievements such as financial reform following the panic of 1907, workmen's compensation laws, and policies under Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom "dulled the reforming urge" (212). Former Progressives began to defend the status quo as the nation entered the 1920s. What is more, the Progressives had "constructed just an approach to reform, mistaking it for the finished product" (223). Although Wiebe does not fully explain the reasons Americans turned to bureaucratic trends in their "search for order" and is often guilty of over-generalizing, over-intellectualizing, and inundating his work with an excessive use of abstractions, he does make a strong case that there was a "revolution in values" during the Progressive era. These values of Progressivism are with us today, including an active executive begun during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

The preface states that no C programming is assumed, so it should be for a beginner. I would submit that this would only be true by re-reading the text several times and parsing the information into more natural categories for better understanding.

The information was there, possibly, but why waste your time.

C++ Primer Plus is an excellent book, with appropriate humor, carries only about 10% bloat, and more reasonably priced.

The value of this book is further increased by the fact that it is one of the few available books that cover the C++ standard. Features such as namespaces, the string class, RTTI and the STL are covered in detail. The book also presents an excellent reference.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning beyond the basic C++ constructs and is serious about understanding C++ as a powerful object-oriented language. I consider this book to be one of the very few that are worth keeping.

I have examined many books about C++, and this is my personal favourite from now on. The good thing about this book is, that it is only about 550 pages (I hate those 1000 page manuals you know you will never be able to finnish), but covers all the modern koncepts like namespaces, exceptions, and of course OO, in a clear way.

I would have prefered this book hard-cover, and with few more pictures and diagramms (and perhaps the OO diagrams could have used a notation that would be more similiar to UML). Also the part on STL is a bit thin, but the most used libaries, like the vector are discussed.

But compared to dozens of other books out there, I am very happy to own this one.

"Epicene" was less easy to digest, but was worth the effort. There is a surprising twist in the final scene and I suggest that the reader avoid any literary criticism or introductions to "Epicene" until after your first reading. I had less empathy for the characters in "Epicene" and it was difficult to identify any "good guys". The characters were not terribly disagreeable, but simply dilettantes that had little concern for morality or ethics. The dialogue is more obscure (and more bawdy) than in "Volpone". I found it helpful to first read the footnotes for a scene before actually reading the scene itself.

"The Alchemist" is more like "Volpone". The main characters are unscrupulous con-men; their targets are gullible, greedy individuals. I learned quite a bit about alchemy, at least alchemy as practiced by 17th century con-men. As with "Volpone" and "Epicene", I was unable to predict how Ben Jonson would bring the play to a satisfactory conclusion. I enjoyed "The Alchemist" and I expect that I will read it again. I don't know if it is performed very often, but it would probably be quite entertaining.

"Bartholomew Fair" introduces a large, motley collection of characters that largely converse in lower class colloquialisms that require some effort to master. The comedy was intended in part to be a satire on Puritans and thereby please King James, but it was equally an introduction to the varied individuals that might be encountered at an annual fair. It was not easy to keep track of the many characters and I continually referred to the cast listing to reorient myself.

There are a number of collections of Ben Jonson's plays. I recommend an inexpensive collection, "The Alchemist and Other Plays", publish by Oxford University Press as a World's Classic. The introduction, glossary, and explanatory footnotes by Gordon Campbell are quite good. Begin with either "Volpone" or "The Alchemist" if you are new to Jonson. I hope you are as surprised and pleased as I was.

While Ryan is one of the most renowned sports columnists in the country working for the Boston Globe, his book doesn't even come close to unearthing the full story of professional baseball in America during its infancy at the turn of the 20th-century. Ryan's work largely centers on the relationship between Globe baseball writer Tim Murnane and Boston player-manager and Hall of Famer Jimmy Collins. But there was much, much more to the story of this inaugural World Series than just a friendship between a pro ballplayer and a sportswriter.

Masur's scholarly work, complete with numerous photos, box scores and statistics, tells the story of the breathtaking series, but also examines the off-field doings among legendary baseball men at the time like Charles Comiskey, Ban Johnson, and Henry Killilea.

Even before the first World Series pitch was thrown by immortal hurler Cy Young at the Huntington Avenue Grounds, professional baseball was coming apart at the seams. That is until a Peace Conference in January involving several highly controversial owners at the time realized that the ongoing "war" between the fledgling American League and National League had to come to an end if America's pastime was to continue.

Masur also does a great job of illustrating how controversial Cincinnati Reds owner John T. Brush did all he could to squash the peace negotiations that the owners reached until he realized that doing so would bankrupt his ball club. Brush was so distraught over his defeat that he refused to gather with the rest of the National League owners to sing "In the Good Old Summer Time."

AUTUMN GLORY is an absolute treasure trove of how passionate fans were about their baseball teams in Boston and Pittsburgh during the early days of the game. Masur dedicates eight different chapters to provide in-depth information about each game of the thrilling series that Boston, believe it or not, won five games to three (originally the World Series had a best-of-nine format, as opposed to the best-of-seven format that is used today).

Masur, who is a professor of history at City College of New York, editor of the prestigious REVIEWS OF AMERICAN HISTORY and author of two other previous works, does a fine job at bringing to life numerous ballplayers who were stars of the game 100 years ago. Through tireless research of several newspapers, magazines and diaries by Masur, the importance of players like Boston pitcher Bill Dinneen, who was clearly more dominant than Young during the series, and Pittsburgh Hall of Famer Honus Wagner, is evident throughout the book.

Another fascinating aspect of AUTUMN GLORY is the impact of gambling in the game of baseball by players as well as fans. Masur again does stellar work in narrating the rampant gambling that infected the sport up until 1919 and the great Black Sox scandal.

Certainly both Ryan's book and AUTUMN GLORY overlap in some areas, but Masur crafts his story of this utterly important event in a much finer fashion.

--- Reviewed by David Exum

The year was 1903 when the first World Series was played between the Boston Americans of the newly formed American League and the Pittsburgh Pirates of the National League.
As historian Louis P. Mazur author of Autumn Glory-Baseball's First World Series,states, "the story of the first World Series is the story of the birth of baseball as a modern game, as an American ritual."

In 1901 the American League claimed major-league status and what ensued for the next two years was a constant raiding by the American League of players from the National League. In 1903 a truce agreement was signed between the two leagues that ultimately led to the playing of the first World Series. It was decided that the team who won the best of nine games would be declared baseball's champion of the world.

Within an historical context, Masur provides his readers with an inning- by-inning account of all of the games of the series, score cards of each game, statistics, a composite record, newspaper commentaries, anecdotes, backroom shenanigans among various baseball executives, and generally a dramatic insight as to why until to-day baseball, as the author states, "best embodies in the realm of sport the American ideal of life. Baseball allows individuals to shine, but individual performance alone will not result in success. Teamwork matters. By fusing the individual and the group, the solitary and the communal, baseball illustrates what it means to be an American."

As an added bonus, readers are introduced to some of the greatest players of by gone days such as, Cy Young, Jimmy Collins, Hobe Ferris, Honus Wagner, Jimmy Sebring, Bill Dinneen and so many others, who now form part of Baseball's Hall of Fame.
To put faces to names, sprinkled throughout the book are black and white photos of the two teams as well as some of baseball's principals.

Although the story is about a series that had taken place one hundred years ago, there is a "dèja vu" feeling when you read about the owners' greed, unruly players, and fans' unrest.
As the French say "plus ca change, plus c'est la même chose"- the more things change the more it is the same thing.
However, baseball has still prevailed and will probably continue to be played until doomsday.

This review first appeared on bookpleasures.com

Baseball did not magically appear at the beginning of the 20th century - the National League was founded before Custer met his fate at the Little Bighorn. Subtitles like Masur's imply that nothing of importance or interest occurred in baseball in 19th century.

For a good description of the World Series played before "Baseball's First World Series", I recommend Jerry Lansche's "Glory Fades Away: The Nineteenth-Century World Series Rediscovered".

"William McKinley - America's First President"

She points out that censorship itself may have "modeling effects, teaching authoritarianism, intolerance for unpopular opions, erotophobia, and sexual guilt." In her conclusion, she comes utterly to the point: "Censorship is an avoidance technique that addresses adult anxieties and satisfies symbolic concerns, but ultimately does nothing to resolve social problems or affirmatively help adolescents and children cope with their environments and impulses."

She revisits the virtues (for all of us, including children) of ambiguity, catharsis, and irony and says that the humorless overliteralism of so much censorship directed at youth "reduces the difficult, complicated, joyous, and sometimes tortured experience of growing up to a sanitized combination of adult moralizing and intellectual closed doors."

A previous reviewer wants to know why we don't have more data on how, say, pornography affects teenagers. One reason is that a controlled experiment would be nearly impossible: finding teenagers who haven't been exposed to any pornography is difficult enough, but for a scientist or social scientist to get approval from human review boards for the other half of the experiment (the teenagers that you're going to make sure have been exposed to plenty of pornography, to study its supposed effects) would be nearly impossible. But as the previous reviewer points out, we have a vast profusion of anecdotal evidence: pornography is widely available in Europe, which seems to have fewer of the supposedly pornography-related problems than does the United States. Second, since almost all teenagers voluntarily expose themselves to pornography, it's safe to observe that the vast majority of them suffer from no effects. Who are we protecting with laws prohibiting minors from obtaining pornography? Parents who cannot and will not deal with the fact that their 12-year-old son is always horny and quite probably already is sexually (if not emotionally or intellectually) an adult?

The true picture of how the allies treated the refugees comes to light and will bring many to realize that the horrors of modern conflict are nothing more than mankind reliving the wrongs committed by those who came before us. Those that forget the past are condemned to repeat it!

This work is somewhat confusing but filled with detail and is worth the effort to pick apart the excellent research within.

However, I must agree with a previous review that states the somewhat repetitive nature of the book. Another weakness, I feel is the fact that the book does not deal at all with the persecution of other people by the Nazis. Overall, it is a well written, well sustantiated book that is evidently the result of excellent research.

Farber starts his book with a quick overview of the 1950's, essential for studying the 1960's. Farber shows how economic, social and political conditions laid the groundwork for the 1960's. Some of the conditions of the 1950's fairly well known: the baby boom and suburban growth were the fuel for the fire in the 1960's. Farber also writes about the conditions of blacks in the 1950's, as well as the growing omnipresence of television and advertising. Farber titled this chapter, "Good Times," but many problems lay under the surface, ready to explode at the slightest spark.

The rest of the book deals with almost every aspect of the 1960's. From Kennedy to Nixon, Farber misses few opportunities to bring to light both the good and the bad. He covers everything from LSD to the Bay of Pigs, from SDS to the sit-ins. His major theme is how the 1960's started out with Kennedy's vision of a "New Frontier," where anything seemed possible for an America rich in resources. By the end of the book, Farber shows the dawning realization that it can't all be done, that possibilities are not limitless. It took a mess of assassinations, a spoiled generation of brats, a huge war, and the Great Society programs of LBJ to show America that there were limits on what the country could do.

This is a good book that will certainly introduce anyone who reads it to the major themes of the 1960's. Focusing on the 1960's is important because it helps us forget about the 1970's, with pet rocks and the clothes my Mom made me wear predominating the memories of that decade. This was the main book for the class I took on the 1960's, and it was a good choice.

sharecropping and how it affected the relationship between the planters and his former slaves. He separates fact from fiction and debunks theory that the populist was a person who was a) an isolated farmer, b) self-sufficient yeoman with little knowledge of business and/or commerce, 3) lived in stereotypical frontier settlements with little connection to the"outside." Chapter Two: Cultures of Protest 1867-86 This chapter identifies the similarities between the apparently disparate peoples that eventually formed the populist movements. Note is made of the fact that even though many of these people came from different backgrounds and areas of the country, they did share a culture of "protest" that was associated with their own history of land ownership. The Populists had a vision of a "well-ordered" society that had its origins in the Founding Fathers and antebellum farmers and artisans. They viewed the prefect society as a republic where the common good always superceded the individual need. In this ordered society there could only be one problem and that lay with the attempts of businessmen to establish monopolies, which they equated with "special privilege." They countered with the idea of "equal rights" as a way to insure stability in an orderly society. The author explains that while rural peoples were those most affected by monopolies, it would be a mistake to think that they were all the same. Most of the rural people were not the

same - divisions of race, class, culture and region existed among them. So where populists could easily identify those engaged in monopolies - the same could not be said in return because of the diverse backgrounds and beliefs of the populists. Anger against supposedly abusive business practices resulted in vigilante behavior, which spread in the South, Great Plains and Western Mountain regions. However most of the future populists did not resort to vigilante action, rather they joined "voluntary" associations, such as the Grange that helped people deal with problems they faced at the local level. This organization laid the groundwork for future political action of these people. Chapter Three: The Farmers Alliance in Search of a Cooperative Commonwealth, 1887-89 This chapter deals with the attempts of farmers from different parts of the country to organize and establish communities of strength that could deal with problems faced by them all. It also explains how they worked, when possible, with workingmen's parties who were also facing the power of monopolies. In some cases cooperation worked and in others not. Regardless, the work they did complete was enough for some to believe that these urban and rural groups could consolidate into a permanent cooperative movement and labor party that could upset the balance of political, social and economic power of the country. It describes the work of C.W. Macune and the Texas Alliance and Exchange, the National Cotton Planters Association, the Agricultural Wheel, Elias Carr and the North Carolina Farmers' State Association, Issac McCracken and Brothers of Freedom, S.O. Daws and the Agricultural Relief and others. Note is made of the recruitment processes used by each group to encourage membership, of the secrecy required of some, of the race relations (or rather lack of) between white and black farmers. It even touches on the efforts of white reformers to establish a Colored Alliance and eventually incorporate them into the entire populist movement. It compares the work of the different Alliances to the resolution of the Oil Embargo of the 1970's that affected this country and while at first successful, the Alliances were ultimately not able to compete against the monopolies that affected agriculture, especially cotton an tobacco. He finally talks about the fact that the Alliances would have all but died out if not for the Great Plain agricultural and real estate boom collapse, the drought of late 1880's, the hardships caused by falling commodity prices and rising transportation costs farmers were forced to deal with. He states that in light of these developments, the Alliances sprang back to life in many communities and formed the core of the political movement that came later. Chapter Four: Farmers, Laborers, and Politics: Interest Groups and Insurgency, 1890 This chapter outlines the different farmers movements that attempted to form coalitions of sorts in order to bring about the change they desired from the politicians of the country. Unhappy with the lack of government to respond to their needs, they took steps that would insure survival of the family farmer. However, as McMath states in this chapter, this was not an easy proposition because every alliance had their own agendas and manners in which to deal with their problems. It goes into detail about the failed mergers and how they led to successful mergers. They addressed the problems that they felt Americans faced in the age of industrialization, namely that the fundamental principles of the Republic were being undermined by unrestrained or unchecked industrialization. This led to a rise of Christian nationalism that called attention to the plight of human suffering brought on by industrialization, especially in the 1870's. These groups singled out many causes for the problems facing the republic form of government that had been established with the Constitution, but at the core, they blamed capitalism for the ills that had befallen (in their minds) the country. These new reformers continued to attract dissatisfied farmers but now added middle-class reformers and women to their ranks. The new Populism appealed to people outside the three areas mentioned before, however, this chapter deals almost exclusively with Mountain Populism (namely California and Colorado) and its effects on workers. Chapter Five: Creating a Political Culture: The People's Party, 1891-92 This chapter dealt with the efforts at establishing a political party based on the needs of the common people and the need for developing a political platform that would attract large numbers of citizens. Mention is made of the Ocala platform and how the new party acquired the name of "populus" which is Latin for people wh

If you have the least bit of curiosity about the movement, this is the first book you should read. The one significant criticism I have is that the author cuts off the narrative at 1898. In this manner, he avoids many--but by no means all--of th e more troublesome aspects of the movement and its participants. It would also seem that an additional chapter on populism's legacy through the twentieth century would be in order, encompassing as it does such diverse figures as Wright Patman, Huey Long, and George Wallace.

Finally, to all who are interested in the issues surrounding the new global economy: Read this book! Study the Populists! You will gain much insight into the process of "development" since WWII and the struggles of people throughout the "less-developed world" for their livelihood.

Indeed, I fancy that the ghosts of Tom Watson and Mary Lease were with those in Seattle marching against the WTO last year and in Washington against the World Bank and the IMF this year!

This book explores the actions of besieged rural Americans, first through cooperative efforts based on dense community ties, and then through political efforts, to counter the forces of industrialization. It is a complex story involving a variety of agrarian and labor organizations, though dominated by the National Farmers' Alliance with its beginnings in western Texas in 1878 and to some extent the Knights of Labor, ranging from the far West, through the Plains and the Midwest, and through the entire southern belt. Agrarian reformers were forever in a contest with the forces of orthodoxy from community values to the agendas of the Democratic and Republican parties; a contest that they would eventually lose.

The author admits to drawing upon the vast work of historians concerning Populism or agrarianism. The book is somewhat complementary to the work of Lawrence Goodwyn, author of the "Democratic Promise. He finds little agreement with those who view Populists as reactionaries, unwilling to accept the demands of progress.

While Goodwyn finds the core of Populism to be located in the southern Farmers' Alliance and is somewhat dismissive of agrarian movements in other regions, McMath is more generous in his estimation of the forces of reform in the western and northern plains. In addition, he pays more attention to organizations and movements that were forerunners to the agrarian movement. They both agree that the demise of the Alliance and the Knights of Labor eroded a base of activism and undermined the chances that the Populist Party could succeed.

Despite its relative brevity, this book is a highly readable and insightful overview of the Populist movement. It is an excellent introduction to Populism. And it contains an extensive bibliographical essay for further reading.