News and Media Books

"Halleluya!  On this 26th day of May, 2004, the New York Times confessed to having helped promote the lies that got us into war with Iraq."

"We should fire Rumsfeld, and Cheney, and Bush, and the whole pack of warmakers today -- not tomorrow or next month -- today. "

"Politicians hire brains.  Telling them what to say and how to say it is a big business and getting bigger all the time."

"People who are under the illusion that the Times is a liberal paper should read its editorial today. It says moving good jobs abroad is 'freeing up American capital, labor and other resources for more efficient, high-value uses.' "

----John Hess, from wbai.org

I consider John Hess one of the most important voices in contemporary America. His words and what we are able to learn from them, should motivate us to open our eyes to the corruption and hypocrisy in our nation. The realization that more people recognize the name of a hate monger like Rush Limbaugh than the name of John Hess, illustrates the manufactured ignorance that those in power would prefer. Only through education will we effectively address what is wrong in the U.S. I find John Hess to be an educator who is informed, passionate and motivating!

I bought Mr. Hess' book out of curiosity. I knew Mr. Hess from the days when he was a commentator on a local TV station before Rupert Murdoch bought the station and destroyed it. I expected to try the book and give up after 50 or so pages. Well, I couldn't put it down! Mr. Hess is a very good writer who never bores you.

I lived through the years that he writes about. He explains for me many of the things that I felt were not right about those years as well as the lack of reporting by The New York Times. I have to ask myself where my head was during that period.

I highly recommend this book. It gave me an eye-opening view of The New York Times, politicians, and the sad level of reporting in the United States. It should be required reading by reporters and would-be reporters.

With a diamond-hard honesty rare, if not unique, among today's journalists, John L. Hess has written a memoir that deflates the gas-filled balloon that is the New York Times. A reporter and editor for the Times for 24 years, Hess shows how from the moment Adolph Ochs purchased the newspaper in 1896 it has cozied up to corrupt politicans and wealthy businessmen. In a blurb on the jacket, Kurt Vonnegut terms the newspaper a "mighty crowd-control engine," and indeed Hess provides many examples of the Times leading the way in suppressing news and information that might educate the public as to how they are being bilked. No one could read this book and still think that the Times is a liberal, much less an honest, newspaper.

This book will make those who adhere to covenant theology or classical dispensationism re-examine their own theological systems. Wells and Zaspel do an excellent job challenging us to read the Scriptures in the light of proper exegesis without being so influenced by our creeds, historic attachments, and denominational affiliations. All the major issues pertinent to New Covenant Theology are examined. The book outlines New Covenant Theology very well and gives sound arguments for its plausibility. The book includes discussions on NCT in general, the Mosaic Law, the Sermon on the Mount, the relationship between the covenants, and hermeneutics. Some very strong essays include Zaspel's chapters on the varied interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount (Chapter 5) and the Sabbath (Chapter 13), and Wells' essays on creeds and how they effect our interpretation (Chapter 15) and the relationship between the covenants (Appendix 2). While still being within the circle of traditional Protestantism, these two authors stepped up one level by writing this book. Excellent book for the laity and seminarian on understanding this "new" system that is gaining popularity within evangelical Protestantism.

This is a book every Christian should read. It makes you think about what the New Testament tells us about Jesus, and what he says about himself. It shows clearly how Jesus is above all who came before him. Over and over, he says and does the things that only God does. Thus it would be an excellent book for a person who is unsure of Christ's divinity.

The book also makes you think about the relationship of the Old Testament to the New, and the Christian's relation to Old Testament [and New Testament] teaching. Do Christians have to obey the Old Testament law, or only "the law of Christ?" What does the NT mean by "the law of Christ?" These are issues all Christians must consider.

The book provides a penetrating overview of the Gospel of Matthew, showing how Matthew's aim is to present Jesus as the One who fulfills all the promises of the Old Testament. This helpful introduction to Matthew is followed up by informative exegesis of Matthew 5:17-20, which is a key passage in our understanding of the Christian's relationship to the law, the Old Testament and Christ.

New Covenant Theology aims to be a middle ground between the Covenant Theology of Christians of Reformed persuasion and the Dispensational Theology which is subscribed to by Christians of both Reformed and Arminian points of view.

You will definitely be inspired by reading this book, whether or not you agree with the authors' conclusions.

This book should be read by all who have an interest in the importance of the two major covenants. Though the authors have intended to answer the critics of what is developing into a theology of the new covenant they have also kindly provided to this reader a better understanding of the basic differences between covenant theology and new covenant theology. After reading this book I will never approach the comunion table and drink of the blessed cup thinking that in some way that the blood of Christ is the blood of the covenant engraved upon stones. How could a good many commentators within the ranks of covenant theology lead us to believe that our Messiah is merely a new administrator (as was Moses) to the same over arching covenant with two administrations? The book is not without its faults. Much more attention needs to be given to texts such as Isaiah 42:6 and 49:8. Messiah is much more than just a mediator. He is the Word made flesh. Perhaps in the next book by Tom Wells and Fred Zaspel?

Excellent overview of new literacies and compelling case studies. What I especially like are the description of the method for the case studies and the prose of the case studies. The concept of new literacies is a fuzzy one, but Kist does an excellent of laying out his criteria for selection of his cases. I've used it as a starting point for discussions with teachers and teacher educators. Though there are points that I would disagree with, his candor and transparency (the good kind) make this an engaging read. The cases embody what he considers 'new literacies in action' from a variety of schools and classrooms (jr high to hs). Reading, reflecting, agreeing, and disagreeing with them is an extremely useful way to develop your own framework for looking at new literacies.

I recently was able to meet Dr. William Kist at the NCTE conference in Indianapolis. After sitting in on his presentation, I decided to buy his book to get some ideas for my classroom. I must say that his book is a true inspiration to any teacher who is trying to incorporate new ideas into the classroom to boost student excitement about learning. A must read for any teacher who loves teaching!

I recently attended a workshop at which William Kist was a presenter. I was intrigued by his thoughts on alternative literacies, so I bought this book. I have not been disappointed. Dr. Kist has been very thorough in his research, and his ideas are revolutionary in their simplicity. William Kist's prescriptions for using multi--media techniques in literacy education are perfect for students of all abilities. I have already begun to implement some new literacy projects in my own classroom, and I am thrilled with the excitement that the students are exhibiting toward the art of language. This book is an important addition to any instructor's library. I recommend it very highly.

This third edition of Scrooge Investing, titled The New Scrooge Investing, is a great update of a very valuable resource that I have been using for years. I was delighted to see that all of the things that I look for in other investing books (like to to get free investment advice, reliable hot stock tips, free trades, and cut taxes) are all covered in detail in this book.

Mark Skousen has a great sense of humor, and you'll love his references to Uncle Scrooge, the Disney character (his inspiration for this book). In fact, I have the same collectible set of Uncle Scrooge materials that he refers to in this book.

I feel like I am a knowledgeable investor, but I found new ideas worth tens of thousands of dollars to me in the next year in the 150 tips in this book. You will certainly be repaid for your investment in the book and the time you spend with it.

I have been a subscriber to Forecasts and Strategies for many years, and found that this book is a wonderful summary of the advice I have been paying for over that time. I suspect that I can cancel my subscription now and save even more money!

Here are a few areas where you can quiz yourself:

(1) How should you choose a discount broker?

(2) Why is a discount broker often a poor idea when you buy bonds?

(3) Why should you be looking at closed-end country mutual funds?

(4) How can you use the recent rise in interest rates to increase your income and your capital gains?

(5) How can you get into hot IPOs with discount on-line brokers?

(6) What are the best ways to buy rare art?

(7) How should you sell items on on-line auctions?

(8) How can you acquire foreign currency inexpensively?

(9) How should you approach day-trading on-line?

If any of these questions are ones that interest you, be sure to check this book out.

I thought this book was excellent. Skousen, editor of the financial letter Forecasts & Strategies, shows you the easiest and most effective way to increase your investment returns: lower your costs. He also points out how you can save money on insurance, collectibles, even art. I agree with Skousen. The internet and other changes taking place in the financial industry are allowing investors to control their financial destiny at a fraction of the former cost. This book is a virtual user's manual on how to do it. Well worth reading.

I have to admit I was a little surprised at the usefulness of the tips in this book. It covers so many areas with intelligent tips it really has changed my perspective about how to manage money. Thanks Mark! A book of this type can't cover incredible DEPTH on the various topics that are presented, but it does manage to get you thinking along the lines that can save you a lot of money. Some tips are common sense to people with a lot of experience, but there are surprising gems even for an expert. Some things were a little out of my league (I haven't started any offshore investment programs) but other things really hit home (some of the online/Internet information, for example). My experience is more Internet-related, and I can see that Mark can't cover EVERY red flag to watch out for, but he leads you down a path of figuring things out for yourself. Even for an experienced online user like me, he brought up some VERY good points, which I appreciate greatly. Overall, I think people of all levels of financial expertise will benefit to some degree with this book -- easily covering the cost of the book itself many, many times over! 5 stars!

This is an easy-to-read chapter book with plenty of pictures to spur reluctant readers on. The book has humor appealing to younger children.

I have read this book so many times that I have memorized the story but I still love to read it. SPONGEBOB IS THE BEST!

My sons love Spongebob and thoroughly enjoyed reading this book!

Opinion
I think that New Years Evil is a good book. You will enjoy it if you love to read mysteries. It leaves you in suspense throughout the whole story. I think the book gets better after you get through the beginning. You will like this book if you like the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew.

Character Description/ Comparison
Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys are the main characters in New Years Evil. Nancy, Frank, and Joe have similar personalities. They all three love solving mysteries, and mysteries seem to find them. Bess Marvin is one of Nancy's best friends. Those two are visiting Bess' cousin, Emily, who is working on the film. The Hardys, Nancy, and Bess, work together to solve the mysteries and bring the bad guys to justice.

Summary/Overview
New Year's Evil is a mystery story by Carolyn Keene with Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. They end up meeting each other in Quebec City with different mysteries to solve. Nancy and Bess are there with Bess' cousin, Emily, to find out who is trying to wreck the film, Dangerous Loves, Joe and Frank Hardy were there on vacation at fist, until the ice-racing champion, Snake Junot, was murdered. Then Emily's boyfriend, Jack, disappears. They find many suspects and eventually catch the real criminals. Nancy finds out that Grant Shulman, the assistant director, has been working with a rival company called Oh! Canada Productions to sabotage the film. They find out that Joe and Frank's case is unrelated to that of Nancy's. The Hardys, with the help of Nancy, catch Pierre Desmoulins and Danielle Rocheville for stealing to fund money and murdering Snake Junot when he found out. Jack was also found in Pierre's hotel room. They end up saving the day on New Years.

This book is so compelling and exiting I just couldnt put it down. You really should read this! A great ending!

It holds a lot of excitement and action. New Year's Evil was the second book I read of the series, and it kept me addicted to it. I went on to collect almost the whole series. There are only 3 that I need.

This is a very good book on a subject that is very interesting. I thought that John Kuo Wei Tchen did a great job.

In New York Before Chinatown John Kuo Wei Tchen explores the dramatic shift in representations of Chinese people throughout the 19th century that, he argues, are essential to the development of modern "white" identity. Tchen expands the late Arab/American critic Edward Said's theoretical framework "orientalism", which famously illuminated the fear, loathing and desire of the West for the East, to include cultural phenomena intrinsic to US American life. In doing so he argues that orientalism has been instrumental in forming US American cultural identity. Writing in 1999 Tchen modestly offers this study as an attempt to tease out "subtle patterns" in U.S. history. The academic discretion he employs in so framing his argument belies its power and, in a post 9/11 world seems almost quaint. There can be no question that orientalist scenarios are shaping our contemporary historical moment.

Beginning in the colonial period Tchen describes the struggle to establish a distinct American identity in orientalist terms. He writes, "The beginnings of US modernity in (the) decades after the revolution...were characterized by the rise of self-made men and radical changes in everyday economic, political and social life." The flux of this period was mediated through Chinese consumable goods as US American identities, caught between the modes of patrician Europe and the needs of the new nation, cohered. Tchen emphasizes the passion for collecting Chinese porcelain, which became known as "china" and the merchants who sold it "Chinamen and women." In this way oriental objects came to represent Asian people, a conflation that persists.

While the "tasteful display" of oriental objects was a signifier of wealth and class in Europe and colonial America such "luxury and profuseness" was viewed by some as cause for alarm. British novelist Tobias Smollet warned against oriental luxuries as harbingers of "Indigence and Effeminacy: which prepared the Minds of the People for Corruption (and) Subjugation." Smollet and his contemporaries read a threat into the absence of actual Chinese people that their luxury items represented. His use of feminine terms as a frame for moral degeneracy that prefigures a "fall" is a sexist tactic not exclusive to orientalist scenarios but nonetheless often finds its expression there. The eastern other often vacillates between a degenerate effeminacy and a robust, sexually threatening vitality: an iteration that Tchen describes later as the "Chinese devil man."

Tchen notes that despite such warnings the fashion for oriental objects ran unabated in colonial America. He writes, "Average Americans chafed at any sumptuary limits on consumables deemed foreign and therefore taboo." I'd argue that this early American exercise in white privilege is a scenario that plays itself out in our current moment not over Chinese tea, but Middle Eastern oil. Even as racialized representations of Arabs--which echo the effeminate/hyper-masculine representations of the 19th century Chinese--abound in our culture the hunger for Middle Eastern oil only grows. As in the "American century" our "desire for `oriental' goods (is) stronger than the threat of `oriental despotism.'"

This pattern of orientalist imagining of eastern others from paternalistic delight, to sexual fear (characterized by moral outrage) to demonization (characterized by physical and or mental abjection) plays itself out in the past via Tchen's study and the present through the ethno-racist tropes applied by the Bush presidency in its foreign policy. The arguments John Kuo Wei Tchen makes in New York Before Chinatown have, through the events of the past several years, become overt expressions of the material culture of the United States.

The study of the Chinese in America has been given a major boost with the publication of this important book by historian John Kuo Wei Tchen. In clear and vivid prose, Tchen has altered the landscape of what has heretofore been accepted as Chinese-American history. From George Washington's porcelain tea set to the Bowery to "Siamese" twins Chang and Eng, the book is filled with eye opening original research and thought provoking conclusions. Sure to become a standard reference in the coming years.

After suffering through the prolonged editor's remarks trying to fruitlessless explain Foster's life, go to the real meat of this book. Mr. Foster gives you an insider's look into New York City in the middle of the 19th century. Perhaps he exaggerates some points, but his writing style is rivetting and exceptionally funny for a 19th century author. A must-read!

This book was a delight to read. The fact that it was written as a first person account, using the vernacular of the time, made it even better. Also, the fact that the majority of the book is involved with nocturnal New York, and all the seedy goings-on one might associate with it in any time period, make it even more interesting. I especially liked the way Foster evoked a sense of adventure, by figuratively taking the readers hand and "leading" him down darkened streets and alleys, etc.

For a quick dose of NYC history from a perspective you can't get everywhere else, this book is highly recommended.

Stuart Blumin has done a brilliant job of capturing the essence of George Foster's contemporaneous accounts of New York as he presented it, in "New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches". By that I mean that this collection of "sketches" are not to be taken as literal accounts. This is not a history. George Foster was one of the acknowledged kings of sensationalism when it came to writing about mid-19th century New York City.

While the Five Points neighborhood was a crime-ridden, filthy neighborhood, its depiction in Foster's accounts are highly exaggerated. And while crime was an unavoidable element of a New York which, at the time, had no real police force, Foster's essays would lead one to believe that merely walking down the street--any street--was an invitation to mayhem. This was not true then, nor is it now. So why did he write these sketches? Why did he make Manhattan seem so undesirable? Because there was a profit to be made. Affluent New Yorkers bought these types of books to make themselves feel better about their own situations, and it offered them a bit of voyeurism into a dark world that was a part of their island. It also proved popular with people in other cities, as they could read about the terrors of a New York City that was cluttered with "filthy immigrants", criminals and chaos. And George Foster played it to the hilt!

If you can put aside the over-the-top stuff, however, there is much to be learned in these pages. The streets of lower Manhattan were congested, they did smell (think of the wild pigs or of the countless horses that were relied upon for transportation), and the misery of the slums was a given, if you were poor. Foster's language is also an undeniable historic artifact, as it captures the idioms of the day.

For my money, the more historic sketches are in the second half of this collection, the streaks of "sunlight". Here Foster presents a handful of vignettes of every day life in the growing city. "The Eating-Houses" is a delightful look at how ordinary men and women took their meals. And the "Quarter of an Hour under an Awning" is so lucid, so cleanly written--even with its pickpocket story--that it is the most "real feeling" essay in the book. The sudden storm that breaks out during the afternoon rush hour, the inablility to catch an omnibus (bus) or a hack (taxi) rings true to this day. At times, on my lunch hour, I walk by the street corner near City Hall where this quarter of an hour passed, and can watch it all transpire in my head. With so many of the old buildings still extant in that area, it's easy to do.

"New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches" is a marvelous book about a by-gone era in New York's history, as well as a great insight into the sensational sensationalist that George Foster was.

Rocco Dormarunno, author of The Five Points and The Five Points Concluded

The book is called New York Minute the Success of Jane Ryan's. She's doing fine until her hand held organizer was stolen. Then her sister Roxey got into trouble with the police and she was accused of stealing a jacket and got put in jail, but it wasn't her. Then they found out that it wasn't them and let them go. Also she was running for class president and someone was sabotaging it. Mean while she was getting into a relationship with her crush. She thinks he's the one who's sabotaging her but it's really friend because she's jealous of her. At the end she finds everything out and she wins the campaign.


I really liked the book because it's like a mystery. I would recommend this book to girls because boys wouldn't like it. Also for girls that like mystery type of books. Another thing is this is a Mary-Kate and Ashley book so it could be for Mary-Kate and Ashley fans. This was an exiting book and I couldn't keep my eyes out of the book.

The book is called New York Minute the Success of Jane Ryan's. She's doing fine until her hand held organizer was stolen. Then her sister Roxey got into trouble with the police and she was accused of stealing a jacket and got put in jail, but it wasn't her. Then they found out that it wasn't them and let them go. Also she was running for class president and someone was sabotaging it. Mean while she was getting into a relationship with her crush. She thinks he's the one who's sabotaging her but it's really friend because she's jealous of her. At the end she finds everything out and she wins the campaign.


I really liked the book because it's like a mystery. I would recommend this book to girls because boys wouldn't like it. Also for girls that like mystery type of books. Another thing is this is a Mary-Kate and Ashley book so it could be for Mary-Kate and Ashley fans. This was an exiting book and I couldn't keep my eyes out of the book.

She is the kind of girl everybody wants to be(secertly). But everyone is really like Roxy. This book takes you deep into Janes personal life and what she does. You think she's a goody-goody from what you've seen or heard will think agian. she has an adventures side to herself.

It's about time someone began some dialogue on something that should have been addressed a long time ago. It's voices like this that allow me to rest a little easier...just a little. I'm recommending this book to all my students and friends.

Just a wonderful read. It is about time a book like this came out.

Thought provoking ideas spring from every page, cover to cover. A must for journalists or those studying journalism and those who simply want to be more informed about what is going on in our media today. In this time, when understanding diversity is so important in our current culture, I couldn't recommend this book more.