North America Books

An excellent overview of the four years that shaped a lot of America's values and changed America's character. The 8 volume series was never boring and I found it especially valuable in that I could break it into 1-hour commute times. The introduction cassette covered some often over-looked tidbits of history and I found it most interesting. I would certainly recommend it.

An outstanding collection on the Old west. The format is well thought out, editing is good overall, and content is about right. The series use of actors to read material (diaries, letters,and newspaper articles) gives you a good idea of what life was truly like during the period. Though the editing is very good, I can't help feeling that they should have either spent more time on fewer categories, or spent more time on the materials covered in this set. Prices vary, so be careful (I saved $10 per set on MSRP), but still will be donating sets of this (and other titles in the series) to the local school's libraries. The kids will love it! A great gift!

An excellent overview of the four years that shaped a lot of America's values and changed America's character. The 8 volume series was never boring and I found it especially valuable in that I could break it into 1-hour commute times. The introduction cassette covered some often over-looked tidbits of history and I found it most interesting. I would certainly recommend it.

Very informative history of the Cleveland franchise from the late 1800's to the present. Comments and player stats for every season. Bios on all players, front office, ballparks, Hall of Famers, Great Moments and many other features. There really isn't much of note that you could want to know about the team that isn't included. This effort must put the Indians fans in a more knowledgeable position about their team than any other fans

The wealth of expertise from author/editor Russell Schneider is demonstrated in this hefty volume of facts and history of the Cleveland Indians.

Schneider was a long-time Indians beat reporter/columnist for The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer and ended his newspaper career several years ago as a sports columnist for a small weekly chain based in northeast Ohio. He has written a number of books on the team.

This is a definitive exploration of the franchise, with the sketches on each season a major highlight. And since the 2008 team has stumbled to its 10th consecutive loss, the information is readily available on the last time the club reached such futility (for the record, it was 1979, in a season where the club stole more bases than hit home runs).

The encyclopedia will be a welcome addition to the clubhouse of any fan of the team and is certainly a first-round draft pick for those who enjoy exploring the history of "America's Favorite Pastime."

The Cleveland Indians Encyclopedia(2nd Edition) is even better than the first! I don't actually own the book, my mother-in-law, Lillian Zupancic, does. She is not only a die hard fan of The Cleveland Indians but a fan of both the authors as well. Russel Schneider has a co-author who also worked on the 1st edition with him, Mr. Joseph Simenic. He is a prominent baseball researcher and co-founder of the Society of American Baseball Reasearch. He is a long-time Indians fan.

The authors have done a marvelous job on the book. It is complete with beautiful color photos and a color insert of the current home of The Cleveland Indians, Jacob's Field. Facts included are all players from the origins of The Cleveland Indians to present time complete with stats. This is a book that you definitely must own if you are a fan of the Cleveland Indians.

I say this not only because Mr. Simenic is my mother-in-law's brother and my husband's uncle, but because The Cleveland Indians Encyclopedia (both editions) are a valuable asset to any fans' library!

A must have for anyone interested in Bone and Soft Tissue Pathology. I'm not sure when the new edition is coming out, though. You may want to look into that.

Dear Sirs,

I have returned the book "Pathology and genetics of tumors of the soft tissues and bones" because I have already bought by amazon.com in my other account (vencio56@hotmail.com). My mistake.

The book is very good (5 stars).
Sincerely,
Eneida Franco Vencio

This is a great book to review bone and soft tissue tumor.

This book is a knock up the side of the head! Now I understand the disconnect between what I was brought up to believe about the United States and the non-western world, and what is happening now e.g. US policy is really that of Britain before 1942!
Must read for all us old hippies!

Edward W. Said convincingly argued in his 1979 masterpiece, Orientalism that the West (mainly America) traditionally had a rather monolithic view of the East. This perception, according to Said, was based more on fantasy than in fact - and that the West saw the East in terms of the `other.' MIT Literary Professor Christina Klein re-visits Said's conclusions in Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961. In this work, she successfully argues that "while many American representations fit comfortably with Said's model of Orientalism, many post-war representations of noncommunist Asia do not, although they do not contradict it entirely"
(p.11).

Essentially, Klein illustrates that various cultural mediums in post-WWII America actively engage Asian topics to bridge the cultural divide between East and West. In her powerful and well written work, Klein masterfully explains "the relationship between the expansion of U.S. power into Asia between 1945 and 1961 and the simultaneous proliferation of popular American representations of Asia" (p. 5).

There are numerous examples cited in this work that provide evidence to support her main claim that America and the Orient (the East) "could learn to understand each other" (p. 200.). For instance, she brilliantly illustrates that America reached out to post-WWII Asia through films such as The King and I and The Bridges of Toko-Ri; and through magazines such as the Readers Digest and Saturday Review. These cultural mediums, asserted Klein, educated America about Asian topics - and advanced the American Cold War interest of "economic globalization" (p. 268).

Although Klein wisely stops her study in 1961, her conclusion draws parallels between recent U.S.-Asia relations and those of post-WWII such as the revival of the King and I in 1996 and a 1991 speech by Dole Foods CEO who "praised Asian Americans as a National Resource" (p. 269).

A cursory query of reviews for Klein's work resulted in an abundance of praise and admiration for her scholarship. Klein, noted one reviewer, "is not content to simplify the complexity of the time period in order to schematize things too neatly. Rather, she seeks to dig into the richness of America's expectations for Asia, including the countervailing currents within that relationship" (review by Jespersen T. Christopher). The blend and overall comparisons between cultural mediums provides the reader with a rich and compelling story.

The passages, scholarship, anecdotes, and readability of this work are impressive. But the real value of this work is that it advances a new understanding of the East and West during the Cold War - where the former educates the latter in a mutually beneficial platform. In this reviewer's opinion, there are no obvious weaknesses to this work, nor are there any harsh criticisms from other reviewers about Klein's overall thesis. This is an important work for students of the Cold War and expands nicely on Said's research on Orientalism.

Christina Klein contends that the paradigm of the Truman Doctrine can not offer a complete understanding of Cold War American culture or policy. She juxtaposes its policy of global communist containment with a 1957 speech by American diplomat Francis Wilcox that harped the need to educate Americans about the world beyond the national boundaries. This contrasts what the author terms the "global imaginary of containment" with the "global imaginary of integration." Both of these are educational projects. The first teaches the global politic as a heroic crusade against communism, the latter teaches it as a sentimental connection with the cultures of non-Americans. While acknowledging the abundance of quality scholarship that investigates the former project, Klein positions Cold War Orientalism as an investigation of the policy of Cold War internationalism and its related trope of "sentimental education." In doing so, she aims to dichotomize the discourse of history by proving that integration of the capitalist world went hand-in-hand with Soviet containment.

Klein begins by documenting the Federal policy initiatives that promoted cold war internationalism in the American populace, like the United States Information Agency's people-to-people program. These initiatives rose in the wake of McCarthyism because the Truman Doctrine had a basic rhetorical disadvantage when promoted to the American public. As shown in her analysis of National Security Council directives, a foreign policy of communist containment has the public relations problem of being defined by that which it opposes. The integration of "free" people and commodities becomes the necessary positive to imbue the ideology of containment with original purpose.

The author then considers how "middlebrow intellectuals"-the author's term for the editors of mass periodicals like Reader's Digest, claimed Cold War internationalism as a public pedagogy and instructed readers about the American commitment to cultural difference. The text importantly contends that "middlebrow"-an adjective and Klein's subtitular term-has roots in cultural populism of the 1920s. It functionally describes a process of repackaging diverse culture for mass consumption. This "offered [upwardly mobile immigrant] consumers the cultural capital that would make them feel more secure in their new class identity (Klein 64)." It also appropriates the cultural inadequacy that permeated the Untied State's post-WWI uneasiness with the global mantle. It translates this inadequacy into a call for individuals to claim the authority of widely informed knowledge. Finally, Klein contends that the "middlebrow imagination" conflated education with enjoyment and moral purpose, ironically couching human difference in the trappings of soothing universalism. To show the connection between Cold War Internationalism as public policy and middlebrow cultural project, the author compares novelized travel accounts (like James Michiner's The Voice of Asia) to policy documents like NSC-48. Both envision an Asian communism that is rabidly expansionist and interstitial states that teeter on the verge of being "lost" or safely preserved in the bloc of the free world through cultural understanding (Klein 126).

While Klein's scholarship is original, taking policies that have been discretely engaged by multiple works and disciplines (like, for example, the propaganda policy considerations of Jacques Ellul), her lexicon of sentimental internationalism also offers a fresh critique of liberalism. It remains an unfinished project to extend this exciting paradigm into wider considerations of American conflict and axes of difference.

I purchased this book as part of my research to a follow-up book, Don't Weep for Me, America: How Democracy in America Became the Prince (While We Slept). I wanted to see if the Cold War was the same big fraud as today's War on Terror. Thanks to author, Thomas Doherty, I learned that not only was McCarthy THE chief propagandist for the "red scare", but that television was almost invented for the purspose of providing its platform. The blacklist that author Doherty details in his excellent chapter, "The Gestalt of the Blacklist" is an incredible story that a reasonable person would have trouble understanding could happen in a true constitutional republic. But it did happen. And today, the level of crime committed by the state, through planned and systematic propaganda has reached its...zenith...

The author should take a bow. He has written a wonderfully balanced, anecdotal-rich account of the simultaneous evolution of the Cold War, TV and political culture in the Age of McCarthy (which is, in all too many ways, an age we are still in.) That the junior senator from the cheeshead state was a craven opportunist is as well known now as it was even then, but what he exploited via the new electronic medium was the pervasive fear that subversion lurked behind every vacuum tube as well as behind every State Department desk.

Cold War, Cool Medium is a terrific and compulsively readable study of McCarthyism in the context of the early history of television. Doherty astutely establishes the way televison worked in its formative days. Then he shows how its weaknesses aided in the rise of McCarthy and how both its strengths and weaknesses aided in his fall. Superb and easiy to read history.

We take trips by car every summer on the east coast, and try to work in as much education as we can for the kids, while still keeping it entertaining for me and my wife! For our trip to Williamsburg this year, we had a hard time choosing a guide, but we took this book with us along with our maps and a more general guide to Virginia. We were suprised to find that Clint Johnson's book provided all the general information we needed, along with things that weren't in the regular guide. It was a great resource for recommendations on places to stay and eat during our trip, that were really the type of authentic places we were looking for. It's also full of color photographs. We highly recommend it for anyone looking for a thorough companion on a trip to Williamsburg.

For Colonial America:
I'm a history NUT, and this one feeds the addiction well. It came with me on a lengthy trip recently and was pretty much my guide throughout. Excellent for finding the right B&Bs and unique Colonial accommodations that I wanted.

I recently read this book and only wish I had more time and money to travel! The author is very detailed about so many different sites, even some lesser known locations of great historical significance that I had never been aware of. I have seen other books specifically about Rev. War sites, but this book goes much further back in time with many colonial and pre-rev. war sites, such as the Lost Colony at the North Carolina coast. Another thing I like is that when listing nearby lodging, the author rarely mentions the average modern hotel chains, but instead lists the small bed & breakfasts or country inns that best invoke the mood and feel of the time period of the specific historic site that they are near. This is a great way to travel. I would highly recommend this book to history buffs out there planning their next vacation/historical tour.

Forget R.L.Wilson, this is the book you want. Adler is a fine writer and authoritative on Colt single actions. Some of the best photos of old Colts and factory engraving anywhere.

I must say I expected a good book following the purchase of Metallic Cartridge Conversions, what you get with Colt Single Action: From Patersons to Peacemakers is a superbly produced book covering this genre. Not only informative as you would expect but written so well, not over technical just sheer good interesting subject reading, add the brilliance of Dennis Adler's photography you have one of the best books on the market. If you are a devotee of R L Wilson's books as I am, he now has some very serious competition.

This book is chuck-full of information; the opening chapters, particularly those pages dealing with Patterson rifle conversions are unique in my experience! Mr. Leavett has some fascinating pieces.

The illustrations are of the highest quality; I was happy to see the coverage given to the engraved versions of the "second-generation" black-powder revolvers, having owned a few myself.

This is right in there with the best $19.99 you can spend on a gun book.

This is such a well structured and informative guide that I do not make my numerous trips into wine country without it.

Its one great failing is that the publishers have not seen fit to update it in over 7 years!

I shopped around extensively at local travel bookstores to find a good wine country book, and I think this one is the best. It has beautiful color pictures on almost every page. Many of the pictures show the wine labels, which helps make the book a nice souvenir for you to remember the wine/winery later. The pictures are supplemented with insightful commentary on the wines, history of each winery, and even pictures/descriptions of the restaurants, lodgings. The maps are also in color, and are detailed for each town. Also included is an events/festivals list and analysis of wine vintages by year. All that, and it's still small enough to carry with you when you visit the wineries.

My wife and I were completely delighted following the "tours" in this guide. The maps, directions and winery descriptions were second to none! Anyone contemplating a trip to the California wine country should consider this book a MUST. Of course, if your not planning a trip, you will be after reading this! We stayed at two different B&B's recommended by the book and were very pleased. The book accurately depicted the quality of the rooms and hospitality of the staff. Again, I highly recommend this wine country guide.

I have many books on identifying trees and I return to this book time and again. I have bought this book as a gift for tree lover friends twice.It's method of identifiing is very user friendly. Color picture books are nice, but many times I feel that I need more, this book will give it to you. Great book!

Finally someone has reprinted this essential tree ID, natural history guide. I have the 1987 edition and find it indespensible as a Certified Arborist. The range maps are especially helpful. I am buying the present addition as a gift for a Landscape Architect.

Within the pages of this volume you'll find 725 entries for all known native and introduced species of trees within North America. The book even mentions some hybrid and ornamental varieties you might not find in other guides. A tree common to southern Arizona, the Casuarina, or Australian Pine, was difficult to identify using other field guides, but this book contained quite a bit of information about it. Along with each tree description, the author has included a short narrative on the history and use of the tree; that's more than the average field guide can offer. Since this book is nearly two inches thick, one would be smart to pair this book with a more pocketable guide (such as Golden's "Trees of North America - A Guide to Field Identification," one of which I am personally quite fond.)

The only drawback to this book is that all illustrations are in black and white, another reason to purchase a field guide with color illustrations to go with this more exhaustive work.

I just did not want this book to end, so I tried to take it slower then I normally do. That was NOT easy, as this book race's along, keeping you hooked and needing to pick it back up. Thank goodness there is another one coming soon. As like the first book in their series, you try to figure out where "it is going", but you will not be able to. Since there was such an incredible review by the Seminole Tribune (Freelance writer Ms. Kiyoshk) I will not give detail's away about the plot. The Munson's have again put relationship's "on the line" and character's that honestly I found myself "laughing out loud" quite a number of time's. What a treat for a "legal and suspense thriller" and to also have some of the character's as such "missfit's". All of this kept me on the edge and thoroughly involved in the personal relationship's of the different couple's and their extended famlies's, AND as they tried to work through their problem's. All of this taking place in the middle of the biggest bunch of secret's, lie's, and back stabbing in the crime and judicial system...AND with it's politic's. (still don't know "who" some of the bad guy's are, but maybe in the next book)???? Thank you Diane and David. I would be remiss not to say how many time's you could see God working with each person, even the "misfit's", me included. I feel truly blessed with each book I read by the Munson's. What a rare combination in a book!!!! Mary from Keizer, Oregon

This is the second book I've read by the Munsons. They have an impressive resume' for writing a legal thriller due to David Munson being a former Federal undercover agent and Diane Munson who is a former Federal prosecutor. While Grisham does well in courtroom scences and Clancy is good with the law enforcement side, the Munsons make both the legal and agent action work. In Confirming Justice the Munsons create characters and situations that are realistic and believable. A must read!

Seminole Tribune commissioned free lance writer Ramona Kiyoshk to write a review of "Confirming Justice." Ms. Kiyoshk, who also writes reviews for the New York Times, wrote the following review which appeared in the Seminole Tribune on 10/13/06. It is provided by the authors in its entirety. WARNING!! "Confirming Justice" is a legal thriller. Ms. Kiyoshk's review may tell you more than you want to know about how the book ends.

"The latest book by husband-and-wife writing team Diane and David Munson is an exciting romp in American political intrigue that takes the reader from the gleaming halls of justice in Washington, D.C., to the gator-infested swamps of southern Florida and points in between. The Munson team draws on their expertise and insight as former inside players in the high-stakes and dicey game of White House law enforcement. Diane Munson has been an attorney for twenty years, and is a former Federal Prosecutor with the United States Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Her husband, David, is a retired Federal Special Agent, whose career included positions in the DEA, U.S. Customs, and the Naval Investigative Services, often undercover.

Their understanding of human nature, and especially the criminal mind, gives their writing depth, heart and velocity. Their keen knowledge of their subject matter and their skill as suspense writers, make for a truly delightful read. I am a fan of the mystery and suspense genre, but I find that many books are simply clones of each other. This book is made memorable by the very believable characters that are developed as the story moves along. Their plights elicit sympathy, rage, laughter and curiosity. You want to join them on their quests for justice, peace, love, happiness, or whatever. In Confirming Justice, the players feel like old friends by the end of the book, something rare in the modern pulp fiction novel.

The central story is about Dwight Pendergast, a judge who is nominated for Justice of the Supreme Court by the President after another candidate is bullied into withdrawing by a vicious press and Opposition members hostile to his beliefs. The book opens with Judge Pendergast trying a Cabinet member¹s son for conspiracy to bribe and embezzle when a key witness disappears. FBI Agent Griff Topping, who is sent to recover the AWOL witness, finds himself in a quagmire that includes former Soviet spies, restless Native Americans, a deal-making petty felon with big ideas, and family skeletons that insist on popping out of long-locked closets. One thing is certain: If you want every detail of your life dragged before the public, become a candidate in a Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

The chase scenes are fast and filled with surprises. This is refreshing in a world where almost everything has been done at least once somewhere else. Small-time criminal Skeeter's leap through a pane of glass when he recognizes an FBI undercover agent and his subsequent trek through the swamp with alligators and manatees is too real. The houses and the landscapes are described through textures, smells, and senses rather that just adjectives. This has the effect of drawing the reader into the locale. It becomes very authentic.

The loving relationship between Judge Pendergast and his wife, Christine, is developed through action and flashbacks. This gives the reader a better understanding of the strength of their commitment to each other and to their children and their goals. The President's Special Assistant, Barbara Jo Houston as she conspires to topple anyone in her path, could be modeled after any number of angry, ambitious people in politics today. Bernie Spritzer, Pendergast's former law partner, is a brooding foil for the rising star and his wife, Rita, with a festering paranoia about an imagined love affair, could be any Washington wife who has been too long in her husband's shadow.

My favorite character is the FBI agent, Griff Topping. His role is to keep the story tied together as he moves in and out every situation. He is a widower and a loner who flies small airplanes for fun. His friends are always trying to match him up with a mate. He is also a skilled investigator, and is approached by Judge Pendergast to find his long-lost siblings, who were sent to foster homes when their parents died. Pendergast himself was adopted and his search for his family is instigated by his need for a kidney transplant.

The search for the lost siblings places Agent Topping face to face with cocaine smuggling desperadoes in the Gulf of Mexico. Skeeter¹s shrimp boat is recruited to move a load of cocaine, and a seizure by agents from the FBI, DEA and Customs, is engineered. This is presented with all the tension and logistics gleaned from David Munson's experience in the field. By now, Topping has determined that Skeeter, who was raised in foster homes and lives off petty crime, is really Pendergast¹s brother. Hyper and insecure, Skeeter is a perfect foil for the self-contained FBI professional.

With the drug bust wrapped up, Topping and Skeeter travel to the Big Cypress Seminole Reservation where they meet the last lost sibling, a sister, Eleanor. From here on, except for a few hair-raising twists, you can bet there will be a happy - and very satisfying ending.

The Munsons obviously are spiritual people and this is evident throughout the book. There are numerous references to the Scriptures and to the relationship of the characters to their Christian God. Volatile issues hinted at include abortion, eminent domain and creationism vs. evolution. This is done tastefully, without the battering ram effect present in many Christian publications. I also noticed they seem to promote the belief that good Indians are Christian Indians. There are those who might find the support for the Christian Right a bit obvious, but it is personal and should not detract from the story itself. If it bothers you, ignore it. After all this is America and FaithWalk Publishing is a printer of Christian books."