United States Books

An exçellent and an outstanding book . It gives a very good view on Shumpeter as student, as economist , as entrepeneur , as politician and as academic. But it giges an excellent over view of the world history relevant to understand the economic and politic and sociologist thougt of Shumpteter and his remarquable intelectual dimension.Well written , acurate the book contains enormeous information on the times when and on the countries where Shumpeter has lived
Ernesto Cunha

Joseph Schumpeter was brilliant, magnetic, cultured, urbane, witty and engaging. He was superbly educated and he taught at the best universities. He was an accomplished scholar and prolific writer, a snappy dresser and bon vivant, elegant, charismatic and handsome. Colleagues revered him, students loved him and women adored him. His ambition: to become the best economist, horseman and lover in the world. He confessed that, sadly, he failed to meet his goal with horses. Schumpeter was one of the world's leading economists while he lived, and has become an iconic figure since his death. John Maynard Keynes is widely considered the doyen of economists. However, Schumpeter's ideas have more impact in our postmillennial era, which some economists have termed the "century of Schumpeter." Scholar Thomas K. McCraw paints a vivid portrait of this remarkable man, his economic theories and his far-reaching influence. getAbstract suggests that being familiar with Schumpeter is pivotal to understanding today's entrepreneurial economy. McCraw's book is a good place to get to know him.

I thoroughly enjoyed Prophet of Innovation as biography. I think it is the best biography I've read in twenty years.

I am not an economist, but I was first exposed to the ideas of Schumpeter in my one year general ed Economics course. This course was taught by one of only two conservative instructors in my whole college education and he was influenced by Schumpeter. (I did take economics in high school which was taught from the Keynesian model.)

That was in 1968, the year the New Deal-Cold War Liberal Democratic Party coalition was itself undergoing creative destruction. Of course, that year, the Vietnam War and the protests were the central focus. But, the Schumpeter seed had been planted in my mind and I began to see the relationships.

My Father, foolishly, as he admitted to me much later, had gotten his old job back after he left the army post World War II. He was entitled to it under the Selective Service Act of 1940. He thought he would be secure as rural passenger train depot agent. But, the railroad passenger service was about to get a creative destruction death blow. In 1954, the Boeing 707 made its maiden flight. In 1958, the Boeing 707 made its first flight for Pan Am. In 1959, he was out of a job. He was a member in good standing of the Order of Railroad Telegraphers, AFL-CIO, but that didn't matter. If you had no customers, then no business, no jobs, and no union. When the business traveler ditched the trains for the planes, that was the end of the railroad passenger service along with 110 jobs per train. (He floundered around for awhile and took a few community college classes and got a better job afterwards.)

Later, I encountered Schumpeter again in political sociology, one of my areas of study in graduate school. As the author notes, Schumpeter attacks Marx on the static nature of his theories of class structure.

For me, McCraw makes two very impressive points about Schumpeter the teacher and scholar. As Teacher, McCraw quotes his student, Paul Sweezy writing that Schumpeter never judged students and colleagues on their agreement with his views. Sweezy called it "the rarest of all qualities in a teacher." I would say its even rarer today.

As a scholar, he mostly stayed out of policy advocacy. He did not seek to found a Schumpeterian school. Many of his best students were Keynesians. It takes a great deal of courage, character, and humility to forego such ego feeding ventures. Perhaps his experience as Finance Minister in the rump Austrian socialist government post World War I cured him.

On a more somber note, it is really staggering the amount of personal tragedy this man suffered in his life. He lost his father at age four. World War I destroyed his country. He lost his mother, wife, and son all within one month. He lost one of his best graduate students at the University of Bonn, Clare Tisch, to the holocaust. He also lost his companion, driver, and caretaker, Mia Stockel to the holocaust along with her husband and sister. His third wife Elizabeth, who had rescued him from deep depression, got breast cancer in the last year of his life.

McCraw does a fine job of weaving Schumpeter's life and writings together into a great biography of Joseph Schumpeter and history of the first half of the Twentieth Century

I thought this to be a very dynamic book that is loaded with ideas that spring from an intellect that is honest. This is a quality that is all too rare in our times. His thought process as described by McCraw seems to me to be the envy of anyone that strives to get to the bottom or truth of something. Schumpeter is brutally honest with himself and that also is a very rare thing indeed! I'm not sure just what "truth" is but think he has come as close to it as any man can.


Brad Angell

Moravian-born, Vienna-educated Professor Joseph Alois Schumpeter, who liked to say of his aspirations to be the world's greatest economist, horseman, and lover that only the second had given him problems, was a study in contrasts. He relished his fame as one of the interwar years' premier economic theorists yet modestly declined to mention his work in his Harvard classes or in his exhaustive book on the history of economic thought. (Citations to his work were inserted into that book by his wife after his death). An obsessively hard working, morose (indeed often depressed) writer in private, he affected a public image of carefree, cheerful ebullience. A notoriously easy grader to his students, he often gave himself low marks in his diary. A one-time banker, he relied upon the women in his life to balance his checkbook. He chronicled the evolution of the auto industry but never learned to drive. He admired mathematics but failed to employ them in his work. A harsh critic of the static, steady-state equilibrium thinking of the neoclassical marginal utility/marginal productivity school, he nevertheless declared one of its founders, the French neoclassical equilibrium theorist Leon Walras, the greatest economist of all time.

All his life Schumpeter championed capitalism yet was an expert on Marx, Marxist economics, and the entire socialist literature. A Marxist economist, Paul Sweezy, was among his closest Harvard friends. Schumpeter was a political conservative and anti-socialist who,notwithstanding, served as Finance Minister for a socialist government in post-World War I Austria. He lauded capitalism's superior performance while predicting the system's death from too much success. He preached creative destruction -- the incessant tearing down of old ways of doing things by the new -- as capitalism's inescapable iron law, yet was unprepared when his own work fell prey to it.

The 1990s saw the publication of at least three biographies of this complex, paradoxical figure. Now comes Thomas McCraw's definitive and elegantly written study to top them all. Drawing upon Schumpeter's diary, correspondence, early drafts, and published works, McCraw, a Pulitzer Prize winning emeritus professor of Business History at Harvard, paints a vivid picture of Schumpeter's life and times, his loves and achievements. Readers will choose their favorite parts of the book. Most enlightening to this reviewer is McCraw's survey of Schumpeter's scholarly contributions. Ironically, McCraw writes that he is "not concerned with Schumpeter's economic thinking, narrowly construed," but with his "life and his compulsive drive to understand capitalism." But that is a false dichotomy because Schumpeter's theories cannot be divorced from his attempts to come to grips with capitalism: each guided and shaped the other. In any case, McCraw provides a perceptive and accurate account of Schumpeter's academic greatest hits and misses.

Greatest Hits
Hits include first and foremost the path breaking and seminal Theory of Economic Development, published in 1911 when Schumpeter, then 28, was in what he called his scholar's "sacred third decade" of peak creativity. Other hits followed including the subtle and provocative Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, and the mighty History of Economic Analysis, which Schumpeter worked on throughout the whole decade of the 1940s, and which was edited and published by his third wife, Elizabeth, four years after his death in 1950.

Schumpeter pushed one idea all his life: that capitalism means growth and growth requires innovation. The book that put him on the map, The Theory of Economic Development, states for the first time his vision of capitalism as the economic system that delivers faster growth and higher living standards (especially of the middle and lower income classes) than any other system, albeit in a disruptive, jerky, anxiety-inducing fashion. Like a perpetual motion machine, capitalism generates its own momentum internally without the need of outside force. Even technological change, seen by some as an exogenous propellant, is treated by Schumpeter as a purely endogenous matter, the product of economically motivated human ingenuity.

Breaking from received wisdom, Schumpeter replaces the static equilibrium analysis of his neoclassical marginalist predecessors and contemporaries with a dynamic disequilibrium theory of cyclical growth. His key building blocks are profits, entrepreneurs, bank credit creation, and innovation. Profits (supplemented perhaps with a desire to create a business dynasty) motivate entrepreneurs, who, financed by bank credit, innovate new goods, new technologies, and new methods of management and organization. These innovations fuel growth and generate cycles.

Why cycles? Cycles arise with a backlog of pent-up potential innovations seeking to override the barriers of habit, custom, tradition, and entrenched positions blocking their realization. When the first successful entrepreneur overcomes the stubborn resistance of incumbent interests and eases the path for other entrepreneurs, the resulting bunching of innovations (not to be confused with mere inventions, which Schumpeter saw as occurring more or less continuously) boosts investment spending, which bids prices above costs and raises profit margins thereby triggering the upswing or prosperity phase of the cycle. The high profit margins then attract swarms of imitators and would-be competitors into the innovating industries. Output overexpands relative to the demand for it, prices fall to or below costs thus eliminating profit margins, and the downswing or recession phase begins. The recession continues, weeding out inefficient firms as it goes, until the economy absorbs the innovations and consolidates the attendant gains thus clearing the ground for a fresh burst of innovation.

If the upswing has been accompanied with speculative excesses nonessential to innovation, the downswing may overshoot the new post-innovation equilibrium. Then the cycle enters its depression phase where the excesses are expunged and the economy returns via a recovery phase to equilibrium. Schumpeter stressed that the latter two phases and the phenomena that generate them are unnecessary for cyclical growth and could be prevented by properly designed policy. It's not speculative bubbles but rather the discontinuous clustering of innovations in time plus their diffusion across and assimilation into the economy that produces real cycles of prosperity and recession.

Profits, entrepreneurs, bank credit, innovation - all are essential to the growth of per capita real income in Schumpeter's model. Remove any one and the growth process stops. Innovation, for instance, is abortive in the absence of bank credit creation necessary to effectuate it. Cash-strapped entrepreneurs cannot build their better mouse traps from thin air. They require real resource inputs and loans of newly created bank money to hire them away from alternative employments. In highlighting this observation, Schumpeter effectively abandoned the classical dichotomy notion that loan-created money is a mere sideshow, a neutral veil that together with metallic money determines the nominal, or absolute, price level while leaving real economic variables unaffected. Not so, said Schumpeter.For him, money and credit are integral to the process of real economic growth and so have real effects.

Schumpeter's most popular hit was his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. In it he coins the term "creative destruction" to denote capitalism's incessant killing off of the old by the new. The book contains his famous end-of-history prediction that capitalism's very successes, not its failures and contradictions as prophesied by Karl Marx, will produce social forces -- the routinization and depersonalization of innovation, the destruction of the image of the entrepreneur as romantic hero, the creation of a class of intellectuals hostile to capitalism -- which undermine the system and lead to its demise.

If capitalism cannot survive, can one rely upon its successor, socialism, to deliver the goods and amenities of life efficiently and fairly? Yes, said Schumpeter, who proceeded to provide the supporting argument. Many readers took him at his word, but not McCraw. He sees Schumpeter's "defense" of socialism as a devastating satire that mocks the system instead of bolstering it. Schumpeter, in other words, comes not to praise socialism, but to bury it. In the end, Schumpeter's case for socialism rests on extremely abstract theoretical conditions unlikely to be realized in practice. All of which creates a problem: if Schumpeter sought to show that socialism was a practical impossibility, then why did he predict its ultimate triumph over capitalism? One wishes that the real Schumpeter would please stand up.

As for democracy, Schumpeter viewed it as a political market in which politicians compete for the votes of the electorate just as producers compete for consumers' dollars in markets for goods and services. But Schumpeter, always skeptical of consumer rationality, believed that market power resides more with vote seekers than with the electorate, whose apathy, ignorance, and lack of foresight enable politicians to set the policy agenda and to manipulate voter preferences. Even so, he felt that capitalism, as long as it operates within a proper legal framework, is largely self-regulating and so requires little intervention. It thus constrains politicians' market power more than does socialism. McCraw fails to note that these ideas mark Schumpeter as a forerunner of the modern public choice school.

The last hit in the Schumpeter canon is his History of Economic Analysis, whose title expresses his contention that the rise of analytic techniques in economics is part of the economic growth process and must be studied as such. The History, in terms of its scholarship, breadth of coverage, richness of content, originality of interpretation, and wealth of resurrected valuable ideas, ranks with Jacob Viner's 1937 book Studies in the Theory of International Trade as the finest history of thought ever written. Scholars still mine it for ideas today. Among other things, it provides sparkling accounts of the quantity theory, the gold standard, Say's Law, the development of production and utility functions, and much more.

Greatest Misses
Apart from an unfinished book on money, Schumpeter's misses include his massive, two volume Business Cycles (1939), which he wrote entirely by himself with no research assistance. Seven years in the making, it emerged stillborn from the press. McCraw, however, values the book for its historical narrative of the vicissitudes of firms in five industries and three countries. But Schumpeter's contemporaries saw only the book's prolixity, discursiveness, and lack of focus. Most of all, they rejected its contrived, mechanistic analytical schema composed of three superimposed cycles -- the 50-year Kondratieffs, 9-year Juglars, and 4-year Kitchins, all named for their discoverers -- into which Schumpeter forced his data. As if these flaws weren't enough to sink Business Cycles, it had the bad luck, and bad timing, to appear when J. M. Keynes' celebrated General Theory was sweeping the field. Everybody talked about Keynes' book, few about Schumpeter's.

Schumpeter and Keynes
Schumpeter fumed when Keynes and Keynesian economics upstaged him in the 1930s and 1940s. Economists preferred Keynes's theory to Schumpeter's because it seemed to offer a better explanation of and remedy for the Great Depression, because it possessed greater policy relevance, and because it was more amenable to the mathematical modeling, econometric testing, and national income accounting techniques just beginning to come into vogue in the 30s.

Schumpeter should have foreseen this state of affairs. It was consistent with his doctrine of creative destruction in which new theories, like new goods and new technologies, displace the old in a never ending sequence. Here Keynes was the innovator whose analysis of capitalism rested on such novel concepts as the multiplier, marginal propensity to consume, marginal efficiency of capital, and liquidity preference function. Taken together, these Keynesian innovations were bound, according to the creative destruction doctrine, to have supplanted Schumpeter's old-fashioned theory.

Instead of accepting this outcome, Schumpeter reacted exactly as he had described entrenched interests doing when threatened by an innovation that disrupts their accustomed status quo: he put up stubborn resistance. His resistance, however, was motivated not so much by simple self interest, or desire to protect his own theory, as by his scientific judgment that Keynesian economics was fundamentally unsound.

Schumpeter accused Keynes of assessing capitalism on the basis of a short-run, depression-oriented model when only a long-run growth-oriented one would do. He scorned Keynes's claim that capitalistic economies tend to be perpetually underemployed and in need of massive government deficit spending to shore them up. He attacked the "secular stagnation" notion that capitalists face vanishing investment opportunities and slowing rates of technological progress when the opposite is true. He rejected the contention that income must be redistributed from the rich (who save too much) to the poor (who cannot afford to save) in order to boost consumption spending and aggregate demand. Nonsense, said Schumpeter. The insatiability of human wants ensures that income, regardless of who receives it, will be spent in one way or another.

McCraw does a fine job discussing Schumpeter's criticisms, all of which were valid, penetrating, and correct. He fails, however, to note that Schumpeter essentially attacked the wrong target. For it was not so much Keynes as his British and American disciples -- people like Joan Robinson; R. F. Kahn; Abba Lerner; Schumpeter's Harvard colleague Alvin Hansen; and others -- who were largely responsible for the doctrines, especially their extreme versions, that Schumpeter countered. But McCraw rightly points out that Schumpeter slipped when he opined that the Keynesian-style permanently mixed economy, or public sector-private sector partnership, was unsustainable and could not last. The private sector, Schumpeter reasoned, would become addicted to government expenditure stimulus and demand ever-increasing amounts. In this way, the public sector would expand relative to the private one and the economy would gravitate to socialism. Time has proved Schumpeter wrong. Private and public sectors have coexisted in a fairly stable ratio in most developed countries for the past sixty years.

Controversial Issues
Schumpeter held politically unpopular opinions in the 1930s when New Deal activism and populist anti-business sentiments were on the rise. He opposed President Roosevelt's New Deal reforms on the grounds that they hampered entrepreneurship and growth. For the same reason, he opposed Keynesian macro demand-management policies designed to tame the trade cycle. In his view, because growth is inherently cyclical, one flattens the cycle at the cost of eliminating growth. Other controversial opinions, all corollaries of his work on innovation and creative destruction, flowed from his pen.

Of income inequality he wrote that the gap between rich and poor is a prerequisite to and a relatively harmless byproduct of growth in a capitalistic system. The rich are necessary since it is they and not the poor who save and invest in the innovation-embodied capital formation that lifts the living standards of all. Moreover, high incomes provide both incentive and reward for the entrepreneurs who propel growth. No one need fear that an unequal distribution will condemn them to poverty. The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto's notion of the "circulation of the elites" assures that. The ceaseless rise and fall of entrepreneurs into and out of the top income bracket means that it will be occupied over time by different people, many of them drawn from the ranks of the poor. The poor replace the rich and the rich the poor in never ending sequence.

In assuming a high degree of mobility across income groups, Schumpeter may have overlooked an education barrier. He failed to acknowledge that a superior education, increasingly a prerequisite to entrepreneurship and wealth in today's high tech world, is more affordable by the rich, enabling them and their offspring to stay on top.

Monopolistic firms and monopolistic profits hardly worried Schumpeter. He thought that monopolies, unless protected by government, are short lived, inherently self-destroying, and require no anti-trust legislation. Their high profits attract the very rivals and producers of substitute products that undercut them. For the same reason, he regarded anti-trust laws aimed at breaking up large, non-monopolistic firms as ill-advised. Not only are big firms often more efficient than small ones, but their research and development departments house teams of specialists functioning collectively -- and routinely -- as an entrepreneur who creates innovations that drive growth. Indeed, the very existence of R&D departments indicates that big firms realize they must continually innovate to stay alive.

Schumpeter's politically unpopular opinions continued into the wartime years of the 1940s. He distrusted Roosevelt, suspecting him of trying to establish a dictatorship. And he had mixed emotions about the Axis nations, Germany and Japan. He despised their military establishments, leaders, and advisors. But he admired the people and cultures of the two countries and feared that the United States would impose punitive reprisals at war's end. Most of all, he saw the United States' wartime ally, the Soviet Union, as its chief long-term foe, and thought that it would need Germany and Japan to serve as buffers against the communist nation. These views found little sympathy among Schumpeter's friends and associates in the ultra-patriotic environment of the early 1940s, a circumstance that caused him much unhappiness.

Schumpeter Today
The new improves upon and kills off the old. True enough. But what's new and what's old may lie in the eye of the beholder. Today's cutting-edge theorist and mathematical modeler may regard Schumpeter's analysis as older than old, a pre-Keynesian, pre-monetarist, pre-new classical/rational expectations relic. Accordingly, Schumpeter's name is stricken from required reading lists in many top graduate economic programs where theory is king. To businessmen, journalists, and historians seeking not abstract theory but rather practical understanding of global capitalism, however, his work is as fresh and insightful as the day he penned it. Journalists speak of a renaissance of Schumpeterian economics and of a reversal of his relative ranking with Keynes. Although McCraw does not say so, Schumpeter undoubtedly would be pleased, but hardly surprised, by the revival of his work. It fits his description of the zigzag path of doctrinal history in which sound economic ideas get lost or forgotten only to be rediscovered and restored to their proper place.

A Complaint
A great book deserves a great index, or at the very least an adequate one. McCraw's book has neither. Lacking comprehensiveness and precision, the index creates problems for readers searching for particular items in the text. It is inexcusable that the index fails to cover the 188 pages of endnotes containing valuable scholarly information and constituting a fourth of the book. One can fault the publisher, not the author, for this oversight. Luckily, it does little to mar McCraw's outstanding text. Elizabeth Schumpeter wrote that her husband "loved to read biographies." It's a sure bet that he would have enjoyed this one.

---Thomas M. Humphrey, reviewed for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond's Region Focus magazine, Fall 2007.

I purchased this book back when it first was published, and have recommended it to many people who used to consider themselves to be rightwing conservatives. This book helped convince them that the right was wrong, and supported stealing with both hands, whether it is Corporate Welfare that ADM has taken for buying influence, or altering trade barriers to block out legitimate competitors, or simple illegal price fixing on a global scale, the ADM Corp led the way. Now that ethanol has offerred up a new way to steal from the public trough, ADM is again leading the way with the biggest 'snout' in the Government Trough.

Jim Liebert gets to the truth. Dwayne Andreas and others at ADM are not kind folks. Their ties with murderer/dictator Fidel Castro are real. Their contemptuous involvement with the illegal extraction of Elian Gonzalez from freedom and his subsequent delivery to slavery in Castro's communist prison is also very real. All in the name of appeasment to Castro. These people are stench and deserve to be imprisoned, if not worse. Thank you Mr. Liebert for telling the truth.

Attorney Lieber deserves high praise for his objective, informative presentation of the antitrust criminal case vs. Archer Daniels Midland, the agribusiness giant, that ADM, its powerful lawyers and Clinton's Justice Department did not want published. To his credit, he continued to pursue this case after most reporters backed off and swallowed the dizzying spin and disinformation that ADM's CEO Dwayne Andreas and his aggressive lawyers gave the media, crying crocodile tears as the "victim" of an allegedly deranged ADM executive, Mark Whitacre, who became the FBI's mole, and made hundreds of tapes incriminating ADM executives fixing prices in world markets with their competitors. Lieber correctly smelled the stench of a cover-up and adroitly guides readers to make their own
conclusions after compiling evidence, omissions from court records, and other factors that allow readers to infer that the judicial process was compromised by ADM's widespread political
influence before the trial even began. Although Dwayne Andreas,
the infamous political fixer and king of corporate welfare, got immunity in a highly secretive plea bargain to Justice in 1996,
after ADM agreed to pay a record fine of $100 million, his son
Michael was convicted and imprisoned with Terry Wilson for a
mere 3 years, and Dwayne (thanks to outraged and courageous ADM
shareholders) finally resigned. Tragically, Whitacre was
convicted, fined and sentenced to a harsh term of 9 years
because of ADM's swift retaliation against him as whistleblower, for exposing to the FBI the ... corporate culture of
ADM...(anything goes-but don't get caught-and here's your big
bonus (not reported on books)to keep silent, the unspoken words
being that an employee would be fired and crucified if they
blew the whistle.
Lieber's chilling comment (p. 322)should concern every citizen
or future whistleblower who believes in due process and our rule of law: "It was expected that ADM's attorneys would savage the
snitch. What was highly bizarre in the world of criminal law was the way the Justice Department joined in the frenzy to destroy Whitacre. This was an aberration...the perpetrator was a
politically wired corporation whose law firm- the president's law firm- had unbridled entree and influence at Justice. The
mole's lawyer had none."
Lieber makes a strong case that this American corporate history- "one of the most important antitrust cases of the century"- should be closely examined. Rightly so. Why was the court record sealed, why were key witnesses (e.g., Wayne Brasser) not deposed, who could have validated Whitacre's claims that the hidden bonuses were a quid pro quo for engaging in illegal price-fixing? The author's appendices are very helpful. ADM and Dwayne Andreas not only have lobbied for years to emasculate our antitrust laws (the "Magna Carta" of free enterprise) but know that the massive soft money donations to key politicians can grease not only the wheels of justice, but also ensure that ADM continues to get huge subsidies for ethanol and other favors from Agriculture Dept. (high fructose corn syrup,peanuts) that have cost taxpayers billions of dollars.
Rats in the Grain is highly recommended, and was a difficult book to write because of the case's complexity. James Lieber should be considered for a Pulitzer Prize.

I have not read this book, but it seems that the publisher's statement here at Amazon should include some mention of what this book can tell us that Kurt Eichenwald's exhaustive, prizewinning book, _The Informant_, does not. Eichenwald's book covers exactly the same material, and Eichenwald (the _New York Times_ reporter who covered the case) had the same access to Whitacre and other sources that Lieber had.

For obvious reasons, I would prefer not to give a "number-of-stars" rating to a book I haven't read. But Amazon demands it, so I've chosen a neutral "three."

Lieber possesses a unique blend of talents to investigate the price fixing trial of the century.

The book chronicles ADM kingmaker Dwayne Andreas's rise to business and political power, charts the evolution of US antitrust law, and dissect's the testimony of key witnesses in the trial.

The chapters on the trial delve into ADM's chief defense: its executives were white-hatted American heroes intent on destroying an "Asian" cartel. You will find the race baiting and "we-are-heroes" defense surreal, especially since audio and video tape caught the conspirators red-handed and potty-mouthed.

Lieber presents shocking evidence to build a solid case that the US Justice Department often subjugated itself to ADM's political power and well-connected attorneys in the prosecution of informant Mark Whitacre for fraud and tax evasion. For example, Whitacre still maintains the nearly $10 million of ADM money he stashed in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands was "off-the-books" bonuses given to him by Michael Andreas with the approval of ADM president James Randall. Lieber provides multi-layered facts that endorse Whitacre's story.

The book's final chapters contain even more revelations: alleged document shredding by ADM chairman Andreas after the June 1995 FBI raid; ADM's hiring prostitutes to help steal competitors' technology; the never investigated role of ADM president James Randall--or Chairman Andreas--in price fixing conspiracies; the Justice Department's refusal to release public documents, and other sordid facts of sex, lies and videotape.

As you will discover in reading this book, justice was plea bargined away and the wishes of the Andreas crime family boss Dwayne were granted, one of which was sending Whitacre to jail for 10 years.

Lieber is to be commended for this historical document which will explain to generations to come how corporate crime destoyed our country.

Rebels and Redcoats is not the first book to read about the American Revolution.

I know this book has glowing reviews by others. But those readers already know the basic story. If you think you fit in that category, go for it. Fascinating as the first person accounts may be, the context of the war is sometimes lost.

The men who fought the War are not the most literate. Spelling and grammatical conventions of the late 18th century may be confusing to the modern reader.

A teacher or another reader to help with the story line would be good. Or read 1776: America and Britain at War, by David G. McCullough first. You'll get much more out of your reading.

The editor/authors do a good job weaving the tales told by various participants. The reader may find the differing styles confusing. An interesting alternative would be Joseph Plumb Martin's classic account as a teenage recruit during the Revolution.

What else can be said that has not already been posted? Scheer and Rankin nail this book! A must for anyone interested in our amazing revolution and the men / women involved in it. With actual written accounts from people who were there you could not get a more fact based account of what it must have been like. It is very rare that this book gets "dull" as some fear history must be. Written how all history should be - so that it touches you and makes you think of what it must have been like to live through such time, If you want to learn and enjoy history (esp. such an important part of history) get this book and "Angel in the Whirlwind" by Benson Bobrick = both are fantastic! A plus!

Once I started this book, I couldn't put it down. Full of eyewitness accounts at many of the major actions of the War for Independence, this book is well organized and a very enjoyable read. I highly recommend it.

"Rebels and Redcoats" is a tremendously good read recommended for anyone interested in a history of the American Revolutionary War written by those that fought and lived it.

Authors George Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin have compiled, organized and edited a comprehensive collection of letters and papers that provide unparalleled insights into the war as it unfolds. Some of the participants, such as Paul Revere, are well known. Most, however, are not, including rank and file American and British soldiers.

The result is an extremely well written and compelling chronological history of the American war for independence through the eyes of those that won - and lost - it.

Lasting eight years, the Revolutionary War was both America's first long war and civil war. By it ends, four times more American had died (percentage wise) than in World War II. The war showed how hard it is for any nation, no matter how powerful and technologically advanced its military and economy, to defeat a people numerous, armed and far away, possessing strong allies, and fighting for their independence on ground of their own choosing.

Anyone interested in a first-hand account of a war that gave birth to the United States of America and changed the world should read this book.

Reads like a good novel. The first hand accounts woven into the narrative are well selected and perfectly integrated. A variety of perspectives was chosen and this is quite even-handed. There is enough detail to make it lively and interesting but not so much that it overpowers. Anyone wishing to pursue further personal study has broad cross section of topics, biographies and events to choose from. This is an excellent book and should be required reading for all high school and college students instead of the the race-gender-class dribble that is probably used today. 1000% better than Langguth's "Patriots".

I have been visiting sanibel for many years and still got a lot out of this book. It gave me ideas of new things to do while on the island, and the candid restaurant reviews were spot on. Great Book.

This is indeed a great guide book for Captiva and Sanibel Islands. We stayed on Captiva in a private house and used this book for dining and shopping recommendations. (Didn't need it for the recreation -- who needs anything more than beach, pool, shells, ocean??!) Weren't disappointed once! We referred to the shell guide more than once.

I usually devour multiple guide books before we go on a trip because it always enhances our vacations immeasurably. For Captiva, the typical (Fodors, Frommers) books were a little sterile. This one felt very local and authentic. I definitely recommend it for anyone lucky enough to visit these beautiful islands! Toast the sunset for me!

This is by far one of the best travel books I have ever used. It kept us busy the whole time- beaches, nature preserves , shelling, accomodations, great great restaurants. everything!!!!! If you go to Sanibel/Captiva this is a must buy!!

Wow! This is a really great book. We're going to Sanibel Island for the first time and couldn't find any travel books that would give us the lowdown on where to go and what to do - until this book! It gives you a "must do" intinerary if you are planning on staying 3 days, 4 days, etc. It also includes tips for shelling: when to go, where to go and a comprehensive guide to help you identify what you find. I really enjoyed this book and it's now packed in my suitcase ready for the trip.

We had the best vacation EVER thanks to this book! Even when our flight was postponed, this book gave us a few options of activities in Fort Myers on the way to the airport. Who would have thought Sanibel/Captiva had so much to offer. The authors share ever bit of important info and more. Have Fun!

Daughter of a full-blooded Navajo father and white mother, Lori Arviso Alvord grew up on a New Mexico reservation in a family that took pride in its native heritage, but followed few of the traditional ways. She attended Navajo schools but never learned the language; she knew her clan relationships and enjoyed the security of tribal connections but seldom attended ceremonies or understood the depth of meaning in the Navajo concept "Walk In Beauty."

Such a person might expect to shed the remnants of tribal culture on leaving the reservation to become a high-powered surgeon, a career that by its very nature flies in the face of Navajo precepts like privacy and self-effacement.

Indeed, throughout her memoir, co-authored by Elizabeth Cohen Van Pelt, Alvord seems to straddle two worlds separated by an uncomfortable gulf. She first looked upon the deepness of that gulf at Dartmouth.

"For a girl who had never been far from Crownpoint, New Mexico, the green felt incredibly juicy, lush, beautiful and threatening." Unable to see the horizon, she felt claustrophobic. But the culture shock was worse. "I thought people talked too much, laughed too loud, asked too many personal questions, and had no respect for privacy." Navajos do not put themselves forward and cooperation is valued over competition. Not a good prescription for success at an Ivy League school.

At Dartmouth she began to feel her tribal identity more strongly and wonder if a kinaalda ceremony (a celebration of womanhood) would have helped empower her in such alien surroundings. But not until after medical school at Stanford, where she was forced to break numerous taboos (Navajo never touch the dead, for instance) and joined a profession where it is essential to ask prying, intimate questions and invade another's personal space at will, did Alvord really begin to explore the philosophical grounding of Navajo culture.

Becoming a surgeon at the Gallup Indian Medical Center, close to the reservation, Alvord notices that her patients do better when they are calm and relaxed, that harmony - even in the operating room when the patient is unconscious - is important for recovery.

She grows more interested in the Navajo philosophy that "everything in life is connected and influences everything else." To "Walk in Beauty" a person strives to live in balance, symmetry and harmony with everything and everyone else.

While this is an ancient precept, held in common with many other cultures and enjoying something of a renaissance in American medicine today, Alvord comes up with a particularly striking example. One of her surgery patients, a young woman, was the first to die of a strange illness that swept through the Navajo nation, killing 11.

A doctor working for the Centers for Disease Control, Ben Muneta, visited a medicine man, a hataalii, who told him "the illness was caused by an excess of rainfall, which had caused the pinon trees to bear too much fruit." There was "a significant deviation from the natural harmony of the world."

The medicine man showed a sand painting of a mouse and said that twice before in years of excess rainfall a similar disease had struck. " `Look to the mouse,' " he said. Weeks later the CDC determined that the Hantavirus was contracted from the droppings of infected deer mice. The deer mouse population had surged due to an excess of pinon nuts. "It was the rain."

Alvord's tone is quiet, reserved. It does not seem easy for her to describe the alcoholism of her charming father or the difficulties and generosity of her (married at 16) mother. Though she takes us to a nightlong ceremony for the sick and celebrates the strength her patients draw from medicine-man visits, she never explains why it takes her so long to visit a hitaalii during her own pregnancy. Or why she never approaches a medicine man to discuss cross-cultural treatments despite her growing conviction of the efficacy of the "whole body" approach.

While most of the book concentrates on her work and her struggle to reconcile cultures, she provides a wide, sad look at reservation life, beset by poverty and "white mans'" diseases. The long grief of history resides in the alcoholism and the self-loathing of so many - a balance that can never be put right.

At last Alvord leaves. Seeing it as the next natural step in her own "life trail", she returns to Dartmouth as a surgeon and a dean of minority and student affairs. At Dartmouth, she hopes, she can teach the Navajo "Walk In Beauty" principles to new doctors as well as working within the established system to bring better care to her own people.

I am full-blooded Navajo, I was taught to believe in my traditonal ways and it disappoints me that she has talked about very scared ceremonies.

Lori Arviso Alvord walks in two worlds. Raised on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico -- "the rez" -- she is the daughter of a Navajo man and a white woman. Carrying this dichotomy into her education and career, she went from the reservation high school to Dartmouth College, then found her path to Stanford University School of Medicine and a surgical residency in New Mexico.

As the first Navajo woman surgeon, she learned to integrate the science-based world of medicine and the spirit-based Native American culture. The importance of the singing cures, native healing practices, and other spiritual traditions was brought home to her when she observed her patients' outcomes. Surgical skill was often not enough when delivered without respect for the language, culture and spirituality of the Navajo patients.

The main focus of this memoir is Dr. Alvord's path to acceptance of the first Navajo principles: balance, harmony and wholeness, known as "Walking in Beauty." Along the way we learn a great deal about Native American history and culture, sensitively presented.

Dr. Alvord speaks of the cultural bases for Native American alcoholism and the prevalence of gang culture, monumental threats to the health and well-being of her people. The healing of these ills will never be achieved in the operating room alone, and many patients' stories illustrate this lesson effectively.

The outcome of Dr. Alvord's journey is signaled from the beginning, as is often the case with a memoir. While this may dilute the dramatic tension of her story, we're rewarded with a thoughtful and inspiring look at one woman's life and work, in all its contexts. I recommend this book to readers young and old who have an interest in the cultural aspects of medical care.

Linda Bulger, 2008

I picked up this book and I could NOT put it down. What a wonderful journey described here....how she interlocks traditional medicine with Navajo, how harmony and positive spirit is such a process in the healing world. You will not be disappointed with this read. I have shared this with all those close to me. Make it part of your list

--Dr Alvord writes about her journeys as a Native American student and physician. The book seems clearly designed for non-technical readers rather than the professional medical community, and there's little medical jargon. She uses her own difficult pregnancy and the death of a beloved grandmother as case studies in integrating Western medicine and Navajo ideas.
--On the one hand, it's worth reading this book just to hear such an inspirational story from such a role model. Dr Alvord tells her story with dignity and courage and she has many good ideas about listening to patients and integrating Balance and Harmony in our profession (although these ideas don't seem as radical or as rare within the medical community as she seems to imply, and I don't think she does anyone a great service by implying they are).
--On the other hand, the authors remained disappointingly abstract, even given the limitations of confidentiality and space. The stories of Navajo healing barely scratched the surface and the book was pretty scanty with practical advice that would help non-Native healers understand Native American patients. I'd love to have heard her perspectives on the magnitude of Native American health problems, how she handled the constant pressures of time and funding, or how she successfully used traditional Native American methods to help manage serious medical-social problems (i.e. alcohol use, diabetogenic diets, family pressures, basic compliance and responsibility issues, etc). In short, I'd like to have heard more about her successes.
--The book's perspective gives a good counterpoint to those who criticize Western medicine as too impersonal/sterile/uncaring/whatever, while they fail to demonstrate how to predictably improve things and still efficiently deliver technically competent health care to people with different levels of motivation and understanding. Western medicine works beautifully in its own niche, but it will be made to work less efficiently if we mess around with the wrong things. Perhaps medicine will improve if we balance the responsibilities of patients to live a healthy lifestyle with the responsibilities of healers to carefully listen to patients and then help them heal.
--This book did not practically help me to do this, so I cannot give it five stars despite my respect for her credentials. I do look forward to a sequel.
--Other books which may be of interest include Blessings (by Dr. A. Organick), The Dancing Healers, and Primary Care of Native American Patients.

Essential reading for all rail enthusiasts, not just PRR. A great historical overview of the life and times of a railroad engineer in Central Pennsylvania, from the turn of the century to WWII.

As I read this book I could almost feel the track clicking below the engine, hear the chuffing of the engine as it labored to pull the cars, listen to the lonesome sound of the whistle as the engineer arrived at the crossing and feel the power as the fireman put the coal to the firebox and the engineer pulled the Johnson bar. All in all a great read and a book that anyone interested in the steam era would read with relish.

One of the most compelling railroad books I've read - the narrative is compelling because of Orr's consistent, insightful commitment to doing his job well and discovering the most efficient way to get his train over the road. Of course hardcore railfans will enjoy this book, but I think students of industrial history and those interested in the way people go about their jobs (a la Studs Terkel/working) will get something out of this book as well.

Set Up Running is simply the VERY BEST railroad related book which I have EVER read! If you don't have it GET IT! PERIOD! (PS: I have NO financial interest in this book or any organization/company which sells it). I'm doing YOU a favor by rating this book and advising YOU to get it!)

ceh

The detailed descriptions in "Set Up Running" will have you smelling coal smoke. Even though I have been a rail fan for all of my 65 years, was an NYC-PC employee, and I'm a native of Pennsylvania, I learned something new on nearly every page and thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Although "Set Up Running" deals almost exclusively with operations on a PRR branch line, ferroequinologists (students of the iron horse) everywhere will love this book. It has the unique quality of making you wish it would go on forever.

This is a very inspirational book. Great for in-service teachers. I loved their dedication and devotion to their students' success and belief that they are "human."
Wonderful.

a wonderful read... a triumph of heart, mind and human spirit. great job mike, robynn and students. The movie will be a must see on my list.
maj. davie a megahan, usa-ret, huntsville al.

a wonderful read... a triumph of heart, mind and human spirit. great job mike, robynn and students. The movie will be a must see on my list.
maj. davie a megahan, usa-ret, huntsville al.

I usually prefer fiction books, however, this true story of a teacher so dedicated to his students was too hard to resist. It is uplifting and motivating to see that there are others in education who will put their heart and soul into helping their students succeed! So many children need teachers like Mike and Robynn.

A Smile as Big as the Moon, by Mike Kersjes, is a very inspiring and encouraging book. Personally, I was happy to see a teacher who took risks to make those children with disabilities feel proud of themslves. Personally, as an employee at a school with disabled children, I know what it takes to make those children happy. I can call Kersjes a gifted teacher who devoted his time, energy, and money to help those children in special education. Based on a true story, it is very interesting and keeps the reader eager to know what happened next. I would reommed this book to teachers, parents and older children.

His abiding love of trees is evident in this deeply personal account of trees he's found and ...respected enough to photograph, research and write about. I bought this because we already had "Meetings with Remarkable Trees" and we were in no way disappointed. The photos are excellent, the trees selected really are remarkable, and the narrative is engaging. Not much else to say, both my husband and I love the book, and it's on the coffee table right now. We have had guests pick it up and also fall in love... attesting to the wide appeal of this photographer-naturalist.

A very nice book, with remarkable trees, however, from the cover I suppose I wrongly assumed they would be beautiful trees. Quite a lot of the book is spent on African trees of a very strange nature, and to my husband's suprise, very little was done on the banyan tree. I was looking forward to large, ancient trees myself. All in all, it is still a wonderful book, it just wasn't what we were expecting.

Great Book will enough the wonder hopefully they have it in the school systems or county systems

Trees are grouped by various, sensible categories that other books on trees might neglect: Giants: Gods, Goddesses, Grizzlies; Dwarfs: For Fear of Little Men, In Bondage; Methuselahs: The Living and the Dead, Shrines; Dreams: Prisoners, Aliens, Lovers and Dancers, Snakes and Ladders, Ghosts; and Trees in Peril: Do the Loggers always Win? and Ten Green Bottles. Pakenham's text is great fun to read, as can be viewed from those sectional titles, and individual tree titles such as "Tie up my feet, Darling, and I'll live forever" for the Bonsai tree that is the In Bondage section.

I suppose coffee table books really shouldn't be considered exceptional items to read - view, yes; read, not so much. This is an exception. Tolkien's Ents are invoked for a handful of trees, and rightly so; geography students who get a core borer stuck and (somehow) get permission to cut down what had possibly been the oldest tree in the world just to retrieve it are warned against; and, of course, it is mentioned that any fool can climb a gum tree. I've read this about six times this year, high time I count it officially.

In fall 2006, Lansing's forestry department planted a tiny gingko biloba tree between the sidewalk and the street in front of my house.
It had four and a half branches, all oriented in one plane like the candlesticks in a menorah. You could barely roast a wiener with it.
I scrambled into the house for a book I had bought, by sheer coincidence, the previous day -- Thomas Pakenham's "Remarkable Trees of the World."
Yes! There, sprawling across pages 110 and 111, was a gingko nearly 1,000 years old, still living in Tokyo, measuring 30 feet in girth and 66 feet high.
Pakenham, a British historian with Irish wanderlust and a gentle sense of drama, has traveled the world to photograph and research the history and lore of 60 of the world's most remarkable trees.
This oversize book, just now out in paperback, is so relaxed and un-sensational you picture Pakenham walking from tree to tree, a Haydn string quartet playing in the background, not minding the continents and oceans in between. It's a follow-up to another book that's just as good: "Meetings With Remarkable Trees," in which Packenham confined his wanderings to the British Isles. The response to "Meetings" was so warm that Pakenham packed his bags and expanded his search to global proportions.
Pakenham's style is that of a curious, intelligent pilgrim. He pairs generous full-page or double-page images of his subjects with un-fussy, lightly conversational background information. He clearly respects local lore and legend, but doesn't go overboard with it, nor does he bog the text down in scientific details. The result is almost a set of personality profiles.
The images are spectacular -- given the subject matter, most of them can't help it -- but sensitively chosen and framed, with an eye toward the unique setting, mood and attributes of each tree.
It's a low-key approach, but if this book doesn't awaken your sense of awe, nothing can. That little stick of a gingko in my front yard, for example, belongs to a hyper-ancient species/order/family that predates dinosaurs. Its peculiar lineage (it's related to ferns) is betrayed by unique, fan-shaped leaves that have no central fold.
Of course, trees have their own agenda, and don't care whether they get into a coffee-table book or not (it's tempting to think they'd rather not, insofar as books are made of paper). But it was hard not to think of Pakenham's gargantuan gingko as a thundering encouragement for my little tree's stressed-out, brown-fringed leaves and spindly trunk.
For one thing, Japanese Buddhists believe the gingko, not the Bo tree of India, was the tree under which Buddha found enlightenment.
If lore doesn't thrill, Pakenham serves up history and science. For example, a gingko 800 yards from the epicenter of Hiroshima threw up new sprouts even after the atomic bomb hit.
But enough about gingkos. In this book, the reader will meet a panoply of the world's most amazing creatures: General Sherman, a mega-giant sequoia in California that weights 1,500 tons and is probably the largest living thing on Earth; ancient teapot-shaped African baobabs out of a Dr. Suess illustration; the leaning Italian cypress said to have been planted by St. Francis; wind-lashed cypresses clinging to the rocky California coast; great oaks with hollows where 20 people can sit down to a banquet; bristlecone pines now into their fifth millennium of existence.
Some of these magnificent trees are near roadsides or chained off in parks, all but ignored by passersby. The wonder of this book is that it tunes the mind to the low-frequency, centuries-long chords only these creatures can hear. Looking at trees that have lived the better part of a millennium make you wonder whether there will be a California -- the home of a disproportionate number of these giants -- or a Lansing in 1,000 years.
My bet's on Lansing, which is far less likely to slip into the ocean before my gingko grows up.

This is one of the all time great true crime books. If you like true crime, you must read this book.

Swift Justice is more than a story about the murder of Brooke Hart, the son of a prominent San Jose businessman in 1933. It is about vigilante justice in its worst form--lynching.

Farrell starts the book off with Brooke Hart and the events that led up to his kidnapping and murder. He points out that most of his material was gathered from witnesses and/or people who wish to remain anonymous to this day. So, he cautions the reader about the accuracy of his story. The detail in which he describes the body and the lynching is gruesome. It works with the story, though, because I got the sense why the citizens of San Jose flew into a rage at those two men and the justice system. Brooke Hart and his family were revered by many, and in their eyes, what those two men did was unforgivable. The sheriff's department started receiving anonymous threats against those men and alerted the police chief. When the threats became more severe, he brought in more deputies to secure the area while the police chief did nothing. Then a small crowd gathered outside the station house. Slowly, it grew into a large mob. At eleven o'clock that night, they stormed the jail, dragged the men out of their cells, and hung them on two trees in St. James Park.

Farrell did an excellent job in depicting this scene. I felt like I was right there in the sheriff's office while he pleaded for those men to confess to their crime. I felt his desperation and terror of the crowd outside, and the adrenaline rush when he and his deputies fled for their own lives. He was a man on his own; however one firefighter helped another prisoner escape. Other than that, nobody helped them. Then there was the mob, itself. As I read those pages, I couldn't believe how good, decent citizens turned into bloodthirsty savages. But there they were, chanting and raving as the men were dragged out by their peers. The lynching was a spectator event, and everybody who knew or heard of the Harts attended with their babies and children. It was appalling and sickening. The authorities didn't arrive until it was time to gather the bodies and clean up the mess.

The St. James Lynching of 1933 was the last to occur here in San Jose. Since then, the penal system has made several improvements; however, the system leans more toward the civil rights of the criminals than to the victims. The pendulum always swings left and right, never landing in the middle. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in San Jose's history and/or the justice system. With all terrible tragedies, there is something to learn.

I realize this is an odd heading for a review, but one of the very first things the author points out is that the crime was as incredibly stupid as it was brutal. I don't want to spoil the story too much, but added to a long list of very stupid mistakes made by the kidnappers was an apparent failure to understand how the telephone system in San Jose worked.

The author tries to explain this, but I supect that in this day and age when many people haven't even used a rotary dial phone, his explanation was inadequate. In 1933 the telephone system in San Jose was completely "manual." Telephones had no dials or buttons. When someone wanted to make a call, he or she simply picked up the receiver. This action caused a small light to go on over a jack in the switchboard, which was of course marked with the number of the calling party. The operator then plugged in one of a pair of cords from the shelf in front of her and asked "number, please?" The caller then spoke the wanted number to the operator who used the other plug to connect to the jack of the wanted number. She then had to press a small lever to ring the wanted party's bell. Consequently, tracing a call was ridiculously simple; all someone had to do was read the numbers next to the jacks in question on the face of the switchboard.

Of course all operators would have been alerted to signal the Chief Operator when anyone asked for the number of the Hart residence. The operator could also delay a few seconds before starting to ring the Hart's phone, giving the Chief Operator extra time to alert the law enforcement officers at the Hart residence that there was an incoming call.

All this resulted in Thrumond being arrested while using a pay phone to call the Hart residence. While San Jose city police were not involved in the arrest, it should be noted that he was using a telephone something like 150 feet from the main police station, not the wisest choice of locations.

This evidence would have been crucial if the case had come to trial and if Thurmond and Holmes had recanted their confessions, or if the confessions had been ruled inadmissible, which was possible even in 1933.

In other areas the author paints a vivid picture of the local political scene, and how "bosses" controlled much of city and county government. It's also interesting to note that much of the area around San Jose was rural at the time.

The brutality of the crime notwithstanding, I cannot in any way approve of the lynching, and I'm of the opinion that the governor should have been impeached for first failing to provide national guard troops to help defend the jail, and secondly for his outright approval of the lynchings and treat to pardon anyone convicted of taking part in them.

Prosecutors in three, if not four different jurisdictions were preparing charges against Holmes and Thurmond. There is simply no way they could have gone free if the first case against them for any reason had failed.

I'm not ashamed to stay I stayed up all night reading this book. I thought I'd read a few chapters before bed and...well, I just couldn't put it down. Brooke's murder is particularly brutal -- I could hear his final calls for help inside my head. The description of the lynching is so vivid you feel as if you're there, shouting and manning the battering ram with the rest of them. My only complaint was that the "after the lynching" section seemed to drag a bit. All in all a wonderful book, which I would highly recommend to any fan of true crime.

I must admit, I have a biased viewpoint. As a descendant of not one, not two, but three people who were summarily executed without the benefit of due process (one was most probably guilty --- the other two probably were not), accounts such as the San Jose Lynching tend to rub a raw nerve with me.

In a brisk, wonderfully written narrative, the author sets the stage and lets the events unfold to their unsettling conclusion. Along the way, he makes some interesting points about mob mentality, vigilante justice, and the abication of moral authority that our leaders on occasion display.

Most troubling for me are the points raised at the end of the book. The abrupt dispatch of the two murder suspects meant that other leads never were followed up on by the authorities. The author makes it clear that the two men were most certainly guilty --- they confessed to the crime, and the circumstantial evidence certainly pointed towards their guilt. However --- most troubling of all --- the circumstantial evidence also pointed quite strongly to additional men being involved in Brooke Hart's kidnapping & murder. Did other men get away with murder because the San Jose mob was too impatient to wait for a trial? The author does not beat us over the head with his theories, but he correctly points out that, because there never was a trial, a lot of questions that needed answering went unaddressed.

Certainly, it is a cautionary tale for those who believe that the justice system is too sluggish, and that we should just "line 'em up against the wall and shoot 'em." Maybe some time has been saved --- maybe justice has been served fully. But you can't confidently state it as fact.

"A Time for Courage" centers around 13-year-old Kat Bowen who lives in Washington D.C. with her family. The year is 1917 and there are many political developments in the country - the women's movement towards voting rights for females and also the US involvement in WW I. Kat's mother and aunt are involved in the movement, and though Kat's dad supports his wife, her uncle is against it. Readers are also made aware of certain historical facts such as the fact that President Woodrow Wilson wasn't a supporter of women's right to vote. The story also explores Kat's close bond with her cousin Alma.This makes a great introductory read in politics especially for younger readers, and will enhance their awareness of the subject.

As is the custom in the Dear America series, there is a hisorical note at the end that touches on women's rights in the middle of the nineteenth century and the leaders of the suffrage movement in America. There are also historical photographs and a timeline of American women in politics. Conclusion - a fascinating fictional account of the suffrage movement as seen through the eyes of a young girl.

What can I say!!!Another great Dear America Book!!Their becoming addicting.As Kathleen Bowen lives with a topsy-turvy life you can see the real life features of Life in Washington D.C. 1917.Great book for anyone who is as addicted to the Dear America Series as I am!!

Kat Bowen is a thirteen year old Washingtonian girl. Her family is generally wealthy, and she has a s many friends as she could need. Her cousin is her best friend, Alma, and her father is a well known and widely respected physician. But when the first World War and the women sufferage in her own home city begin to take the spotlight in her life, Kat finds herself being pulled deeper in with each day. Her mother decides to become a sufferagete, and her father supports her.
But Kat's uncle, Alma's father, is outraged, and refuses to allow the womenin her family to participate. Kat decides to help her mother sew banners for the suffragete movement, and do other deeds to help the women.
Real characters are incorperated into the book, which is one of the reasons as to why it is such a good historical reference. Another success in the Dear America Series.

Kat Bowen is living in Washington D.C. during the woman's fight for the vote. Her own mother is among the woman picketing outside the White House Kat writes down her own views and opinions during this time. She supports her mother but at the same time worries about her mother. Especially after Kat sees how women picketing are being treated. She also witnesses trouble in her family when her uncle is so against the picketing and noting of women voting to the point it almost ruins the marriage of her aunt and uncle. Its amazing how badly picketers were treated and at the same time the women who did picket and go through the hunger strikes and horrible time in jail they were all so brave. An excellent book.

A Time for Courage by Kathryn Lasky is one of my all-time favorite books in the Dear America historical fiction series. It is not particularly my favorite era of American history, but it is so well-written and interesting you just fall right in.
Kathleen Bowen's mother, aunt, older sister, and best friend's mother are all deeply involved in women's suffrage and equality rights, living in Washington D.C., 1917. Kathleen's father does not approve only because he worries for his wife's safety---many women have been arrested and beaten by police for protesting outside the White House. Yet Kathleen's friend's father disapproves of his wife's antics because he is a bit of a sexist. Soon, Kathleen becomes involved with the rights of women everywhere, just like her sisters and mother.
This timeless addition in Dear America will please all, and I promise you shall not be able to put it down. All the protagonists are extremely likable, and this book is just indescribably great. I just can't put it to words. READ IT!