Missouri Books

Kept me laughing all weekend. Lots of stories, even lectures, besides the jokes--all with the regional twist.

This book is a wonderful book,for someone who is alone and don't have anyone to cozie up with. I gave this book 5 stars because this book brings out the best of the author and he should write more books like it.

This book is an amazing exploration of women in American history and literature. We see women coping as spies, soldiers, thievies, con-artists, and "everyday" pretenders, struggling to survive and sometimes enjoying the games they are playing on us. This book is a delight and the characters really come to life, especially the thieves

Back in the 1940's the author and her husband moved from Chicago to a farm in the Missouri Ozarks. They encounter the typical culture shock of city to rural area, which was even more so during the period in which this book was written. The author pokes fun at herself and her husband, " the jedge", and relates hilarious tales involving them and their neighbors, whom they came to know and love. Both this book, Take To The Hills, and the next book, Fresh From The Hills, are written in a lively manner with lots of character description and humorous dialogue and action. I highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys reading about country life as it was, and especially for anyone with any ties to the Ozarks.

Because the author took the time to talk with dozens of Missouri players and most of the living coaches, Tales from the Missouri Tigers captures a ton of great moments in the school's sports history.

I liked that it gave me a "behind-the-scenes" look at many of my favorite Mizzou games and accomplishments, especially what the players and coaches were experiencing. As a relativly new Tigers fan (since the early 1990's) I was also very interested in the stories from as far back as the 1940's and 50's -- I especially enjoyed reading about Missouri Football's golden age in the 1960's -- something I had heard mentioned now and again, but never knew the details. The author deserves a lot of credit for tracking down so many players and coaches from this era and earlier!

Overall, the author did a great job at providing a lot of history in an enjoyable, easy-to-read way. The book made me a more appreciative fan and I learned some great facts about my school's sports heritate.

I was captivated by the book as soon as I saw the cover. Having an expectation of what the book was like, I opened it and recieved an unexpected book. What I thought was going to be a historical account of what went on in Pilot Grove since the turn of the century, turned out to be one persons account of how he grew up, and became a man during some of the most troubling times of our country. The very details that he remembered and captured into words concerning some of the littlest things and the biggest things that he did. Such as when he used to by ice cream in the local ice cream parlor, or when he worked on the railroad when he was just fifteen years old. He described how he managed a crew of older men that could well have been his grandfathers with such detail, that I felt like I was right there with him. I felt a sense of aw when he related his motor cycle troubles with the reader. I was in complete attention when he commanded a quad fifty-caliber machine gun in Korea, and especially when he unleashed a halo of fire into a bunker of Chinese, that were trying to take out his entire unit. I felt saddened when he came back to a town that had changed so significantly, by taking out the railroad, the one thing that had meant so much to him, and his father. I think that the raw feelings of this man's story was there, and if somebody else were to read the book they would be in agreement with me. Thank you.

The textbook I purchased was exactly what I expected! Fast Shipping and easy purchase!

The Temptation of Innocence in the Dramas of Arthur Miller stands as an important contribution to Miller scholarship as well as an appealing text that speaks to all individuals interested in the plays of Miller. In the tradition of Christopher Bigsby and other Miller scholars, Otten explores the Miller canon thoroughly in an historical and comprehensive cataloguing of the plays and an exploration of Miller's personal and political psyche. In the book's seven chapters that analyze Miller's works from his beginnings at the University of Michigan to his later works and Mr. Peters' Connection, Otten elucidates the development of Miller's recurrent themes and characters as consistent yet varied versions of Miller's philosophical and political commentary; while building on those themes often discussed by other scholars, Otten aptly clarifies how the theme of innocence and the clash between incorruptibility and experience emerge consistently in Miller's works.
Beginning with All My Sons, Otten explains how Miller's reaction to the Depression and the war, coupled with his earliest developing moral themes, becomes the groundwork for Miller's continuing preoccupation with the presence of innocence in his plays. Otten compares All My Sons to The Iceman Cometh as a significant moral and social commentary on post-Depression and post-war enigmas. Otten's examination of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible is elucidating in that he carefully constructs from traditional readings of Willy Loman and John Proctor as tragic heroes a vision of them that places them in the center of the conflict between innocence and experience. Through a close reading of The Misfits and After the Fall, Otten underlines Miller's conscious and unconscious connections with Marilyn Monroe in the light of the plays' expostulations about innocence and redemption. Otten continues his investigation of the parameters of innocence, virtue, responsibility, and guilt in chapter five in his examination of Incident at Vichy, The Price, and The Creation of the World and Other Business through an elucidating discussion of the varying personal psychological paradoxes and behavioral patterns that emerge from the characters as they wrestle with issues of innocence, guilt, and the loss of an Edenic construct.
Chapter six explores The Archbishop's Ceiling, The American Clock, and some of the one-act plays of the 1970's and 1980's in which Miller becomes more experimental in his attempt to delineate the projection of the psychoanalytic self into the various dramatic components of the drama; Otten assembles from previous critical assessments of these plays his hypothesis concerning how innocence operates within the structure of the plays as a critique of human behavior with all its inherent dialectical, political, and psychological accouterments. The book's final chapter carefully investigates The Ride Down Mount Morgan, The Last Yankee, Broken Glass, and Mr. Peters' Connections, plays written at the end of the century, as examples of Miller's continuing concerns with familiar issues explored in innovative manners through his development and presentation of characters morally bankrupt or socially misguided who, nevertheless, are able to encounter modes of expression and human interaction that accentuate the role of innocence in their behavior.
Otten's text is a valuable and revealing study with significant scholarly implications that will enhance the perspectives of Miller scholars; the text also will prove
to be beneficial to those who teach Miller in undergraduate and graduate courses as well as to those who are interested in learning more about Miller's canon.

Comments on Clayton E. Jewett's book : "Texas in the Confederacy: An Experiment in Nation Building".
Sometimes hard to read because it is extraordinary well searched and contains a lot of appendixes, Clayton books is the definitive "must" about the role played by Texas in the Confederate Trans-Mississippi Department during the American Civil War.
Unquestionably, Clayton Jewett has hit his aim : to prove the separate identity of Texas in the Southern Confederacy. Like a surveyor, his book is as straight as a die with its four well definite chapters : Defining, Establishing, Securing and Implementing the separate identity of Texas.
Serge P. Noirsain, Belgian historian. Author of "La Flotte européenne de la Confédération sudiste" and "La Confédération sudiste, Mythes et Réalités".

A great read. You can find alot of segments from it on Google-Book search, but I suggest buying a copy to get the full sense of what it was like to live in rural MO in the early 20th century.

On a personal note, I'm from Snow's home county - and everyone I've talked to have said he was a bit pompous and long winded. If that scares you away from this book, it shouldn't. This book isn't 'by' Snow - but it references his observations over the course of important events that helped to shape MO into the agrarian economy it is today.

The contents are a little political, a little economic, but all based in a lot of down home common sense. It's excellently compiled, well written, well cited, and a truly interesting read.