By the then (UK) Sunday Times Bureau Chief in Washington, a former defense correspondent, I found this book somewhat disappointing but never-the-less worthy of consideration. Although the author concludes that the end of the Cold War should have produced a massive upheaval and did not, leaving "too many of the old practices intact with little evidence that the intelligence community is ready to face the fast changing, frightening world that lies ahead," my impression was that the author was completely taken in by the party line and overlooked most of the really trenchant intelligence reform literature, including the open source revolution. It is, however, replete with useful references, especially to what then DCI Bob Gates was thinking and talking about, and for that reason I would tend to include it in any serious intelligence library.

James Adams (a well connected and experienced intelligence journalist) introduces the new roles & missions of the worlds top intelligence services (CIA, SIS, SVR) and hints on further changes to be made. His insight, and unrivalled access to top intelligence chieftans provides the reader with a stark reality of intelligence organisation and beaucrasy of the guardians of our nations intel. He examines how, in post cold-war and post Ames, the intel services define and promote their roles to those who hold the respective governments purse-strings. Considering the access to heads of these services, it should be defined as a "must read" text for those with an interest in the spy businness who`s reading stretches to more than just the usual novel. Although much factual data (such as heads of department and reorganisations) has changed since the release (and subsequent re-release in UK), it should still be thought of as a cutting-edge text on the intelligence groups. Well reccomended

Those who know Gillian Adams will learn more about her in this, the fourth novel, because Gillian Adams has come home. And while she's home she meets up with old friends and old wounds. Gillian is lecturing at Stanton College near by and living with her mother Estelle and a cat named Rumpole. A student from her class is found dead and the result is murder. When an old acquaintance is arrested as a suspect Gillian doubts his guilt and goes in search of the truth. Her mother who has a weak heart can't help but put in her two cents and later Gillian receives a visitor who also can't help but get involved.

I enjoyed Old Wounds it was well done. Suspects are pointed out one by one as the twists and turns take us through this academic whodunit. I think readers will identify with Gillian as she remembers her past, deals with forgotten emotions and makes plans for the future. I found her relationship with her mother interesting. In Chapter 12, there is a scene where they discuss something they do have in common, solving the mystery, and Gillian has come home boasting of a clue and Estelle becomes indignant and reminds her that she is playing the part of Watson, not Holmes. To me, that moment was very poignant as to how we try to hold on to the parent role no matter the age of our children. Poisoned Pen Press will publish Gillian Adams first three mysteries. In the Shadow of King's was put out in August; Bad Chemistry will be out in 2000; My Sister's Keeper will also be out in 2000.

It's a very good read.

After holding the chair of her school's history department for a year, Professor Gillian Adams plans to take a sabbatical. She wants to spend time in London with her significant other Edward. However during a break, Gillian returns home to assist her mother who recently broke her hip. Gillian is shocked at how fragile her mother has become. Because of a weak heart, Gillian figures her mother has little time left. She changes her plan to spend time in Upstate New York with her mother. Gillian accepts a teaching job at nearby Stanton College.

However, the serene upper Hudson turns deadly when two students find the corpse of a peer, Nicole Bishop, in Dee's Pond. It initially appears that a hunting accident occurred, but soon evidence surfaces that someone deliberately murdered Nicole. The police find a semi-nude picture of the victim inside the home of the town's weirdo. Witnesses place the eccentric individual at the crime scene. In spite of the mounting proof, Gillian feels the prime suspect is innocent because she knows him quite well. However, as Gillian investigates, the police arrest someone else, who Gillian also thinks is innocent.

OLD WOUNDS is a slow moving, pondering academic mystery that challenges readers with each twist and turn. Action is not a by-word associated with this tale. The story line allows the delightful characters to show their true disposition and motives that dictate much of their behavior. Reminiscent of Joanne Dobson's style of writing, Nora Kelly has provided fans of academic cozies with a pleasant novel.

I bought this book for a friend of mine a few years ago when she was dealing with her husband's alcoholism. Since then I've ordered it for another friend who also found it comforting. Now years later I searched to find it for myself. No particular reason. It just always stuck in my mind because of its simplicity and quiet meaning. If you like inspirational books, this is a keeper and makes an excellent gift.

This special little book is such a joy to read. I have been in family counceling with my family, the world becomes a very difficult place to live in sometimes. Very often we get away from the person we are inside. Things go by us so fast. We run to get on the merry-go-round of life and forget about the child we left on the side. We all have a child within us, recognizing that is such a wonderful eye opener, this little book helps you get in touch again with the child. The world and its creations are again wonderous and the simplicity of life returns again. I recommend this book to anyone who maybe riding the life merry-go -round without the inner child.

Burke points out the things all around us that we take for granted but which really are absolutely amazing in his discourse on the sublime. A galloping stead, the expanse of a starry night, or a range of towering, snow-capped mountains. Burke points out these awe-some sights which in themselves provoke us to ask of their origins.

This book can be repetitious as Burke attempts to make, especially on taste, his point absolutely clear (I've got one of the later editions - 1772.).

Additionally, some of the lines in the book are near-timeless and are good to have around to reference from.

Edmund Burke's 1757 treatise, "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful," is a clearly written, well-argued, and variously inflected work of philosophy. Coming out of and contending with the traditions of philosophies of passion, understanding, and aesthetics from Aristotle and Longinus to Descartes, Hobbes to Locke, and Shaftesbury to Hume, Burke would seem to be taking on a world of difficulty at the tender age of 28. However, Burke manages to maintain control and exercise great wit in his treatise by confining his "Enquiry" to the ways we interact with the physical world, and how in this interaction, we formulate our aesthetic ideas of sublimity and beauty.

Burke's "Enquiry" is divided into five parts, with an introduction. The introduction is perhaps his most witty segment, as he tries, as Shaftesbury, Addison, and Hume before him, to formulate a standard of Taste, a popular subject of conjecture in the 18th century. Physically, and not without some irony, he chooses to speak of Taste primarily as a feature of eating. In response to his predecessors, though, he does say that since our attitudes toward the world come from our senses, that the majority of people can see (sight being very important) and react; thus all people are capable of some degree of Taste. Education and experience, he must admit, though, do refine Taste. In Part One, Burke examines the individual and social causes which arouse our sense of the sublime and the beautiful, those being the primal feelings of terror/pain and love/pleasure, respectively. Throughout the "Enquiry," Burke insists that these are not opposites strictly speaking - that pain and pleasure are mediated by a neutral state of indifference, which is the natural state of man. (Compare that idea to Hobbes and Locke!)

Parts Two, Three, and Four find Burke explaining his notion of the passions in relation to his basis of the physical world. Grandeur, potential threat, darkness, and ignorance for Burke excite our nerves and produce the sublime, a feeling of terror which is simultaneously delightful as long as it does not cause immediate pain. These he finds both in the physical world and in tragedies of literature and history. Smallness, softness, clarity, and weakness delimit the beautiful, which produces affection and sympathy. The contrasts and interventions that Burke makes throughout the "Enquiry" on these bases are variously inflected with issues of anxiety over gender roles, race, and power. Burke's politics give the work a joyful and troubling complexity to the literary minded.

Part Five, then, is a look at the effect that words, language, and poetry can have in influencing our affect in regards to the sublime and the beautiful. In it, he gathers together statements he sprinkles throughout the treatise on the nature of poetry - that its emphasis on representation of emotion, rather than imitation of objects, gives it a power that is perhaps unequalled even by nature. In Burke's "Enquiry," one can see a nascent fascination with landscape, mystery, and sensation that would find its flowering in the Gothic and Romantic movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His insistent break with earlier philosphers who combined aesthetics and morality is a serious challenge to moral philosophy with regard to art and Taste. His physical descriptions of emotional response prefigures Freud's psychological ponderings in "Three Essays on Sexuality" and "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," as well as linguistic theory. In all, a fascinating and complicated work for being as short as it is.

This review is dedicated to the memory of Vernon Lau. Unfortunately, Burke did not deal in the "Enquiry" with the pain or terror of immediate personal loss. One can only wonder if Burke's obsession with philosophical distance between people and fear wasn't motivated by a loss of his own.

"The Pornography of Meat" seems largely to be a condensed version of Adams's earlier volume, "The Sexual Politics of Meat". The general premise is the same, as are many of her arguments; however, "Pornography" is much shorter and easier to wade through.

With its informal writing style, "Pornography" reminds me of a journal-slash-scrapbook as opposed to a more scholarly piece of literature. Adams's writing style can be somewhat disconcerting; she shifts gears rapidly, leaving the reader with the feeling that she's jumping from topic to topic without fully resolving (many of) them. Her arguments are sometimes so abstract and theoretical that they seem enigmatic. Additionally, Adams does provide references, but not in an especially organized manner; as a result, it's hard to tell what information she pulled from which sources.

Don't get me wrong, "Pornography" is not without its redeeming qualities. Every few pages, Adams does hit the reader w/an excellent point, making all the other jargon worthwhile. The pictures (and there are many!) are the book's single best feature - but unfortunately they're all reproduced in black and white, many of them shrunk down to a fraction of their normal size so that the critical details are obscured.

One more minor gripe: as one of the leading AR organizations, PETA bears the brunt of anti-ARA criticisms, not all of them invalid. Though Adams does mention PETA's "exploitation" of women in their ads, the discussion is unfortunately very brief. As PETA is seen as the Church of the AR movement (and leader Newkirk as its Pope), I thought a more detailed discussion would have been appropriate (after all, what's more ironic than sexism in an organization designed to eradicate "ism"s?).

Adams is one of the few feminist writers that tackles the topic of "parallel oppressions" (speciesism, sexism, racism, etc.). There are painfully few books that deal with such issues, so "Pornography" is a must for anyone interested in the subject. If you'd like to learn more about feminism in relation to animal rights, this book is certainly worth the price - and is actually one of the few options out there.

if christopher guest ever set out to do - in a book about intellectuals - what he has done on film to rock bands and dog shows, The Pornography of Meat would be the result. here is a book that is so bizzarely and feverishly "leftist" that it seems to defy all reason. the book is a carnival of anti-meat, anti-porn, and anti-man rhetoric that may or may not be true. but, honestly, i can't tell you whether or not it is, because i can't wade through this text seriously. it looks SO MUCH like it was written to act as a parody, that i have a difficult time approaching it as actual scholarship. the basic idea seems to be something like this: there is a distinct and provable relationship between the consumption of meat (or at least media depictions thereof) and the consumption of pornographic movies/magazines, etc.. this all presumably builds from the logic of her first book The Sexual Politics of Meat, which i do not own.

the unquestionable highlight of the book are the many pictures that are offered up as evidence of this sordid relationship between porn and meat: the adult video cover where the female character is "hunted" by lustful men, the 30 year old ad for turkey where the bird carcass is layed out in what we are assured is a purposefully lurid pose. the whole thing is really sort of - excuse the pun - undigestable from the point of view of the skeptic. of course, if you're already a zealous, fervid, wild eyed supporter of these sorts of ideas, then this book will be very gratifying. girls with hairy armpits at liberal-arts colleges in vermont are going to be carrying this around like it was the Bible. the only thing that's missing (though perhaps it's there and i just missed it) was a way to tie all of this in with good old fashioned socialism. you know, the oppression of the masses by the ruling elite? the great future that is bound to come when the terror of property is destroyed and we all live on a big hug-a-bear commune and make arts and crafts and uncomfortable itchy hemp shirts? well, other than that, this book is an angry liberals wet dream.

look, let me speak honestly: i'm a man. i don't think of myself as a part of a patriarchy, or as an oppressor or rapist, or even as a good speller. and i do eat meat. plus, i'm a libertarian, which means that everyone regards me as a "conservative". so, you know, this book obviously wasn't written for me. i appreciate and identify with feminists, but books like this give them a bad name. maybe a book like this is supposed to be so "revolutionary" that it shocks everyone out of their dogmatic slumbers, but it just comes of as fanatical and - worse - flaky. so, take my ill-informed phallocentric egodriven opinion for what it's worth. read this book. if i'm wrong, WHICH EVEN AS A QUASI-CONSERVATIVE I CAN ADMIT THAT I MIGHT BE, then this book will be very informative. if i'm right, then you're bound to find this as entertaining as i did.

This edition has "some" of Erasmus' most influential works; namely, "The Praise of Folly", the political "Complaint for Peace", "Forewords to the Latin New Testament", "Julius Excluded from Heaven", the "Colloquis", and excerpts from his finest letters. These works are selected more to understand the humanistic side of Erasmus rather than the scholarly doctrinaire who labored for the peace of christendom. With these selections - entailed by fotenotes, the editor's prefaces, and critcical commentaries - this edition will invariably enhance a more intimate impression of the mind of Erasmus at the dawn of the reformation.

I managed to stumble across Erasmus while reading William Manchester's "A World Lit Only By Fire", and was beyond intrigued by such a character as described that I had never even heard about. Of course, Erasmus had been mentioned in my presence often, but never in a direct context. So I pick up this book, hoping to find out what the deal was and what I was missing.

My entire view of the middle ages changed practically overnight. Do not miss the fact, people: Erasmus was THE deal. Erasmus makes Luther look like a limp little hothead. Erasmus is Jim Carrey to Voltaire's Carrot Top. Erasmus drows the candle of Aristophanes with a roaring torch. The ultimate critic, the ultimate wit, and the ultimate reason in an age of insanity. Without this fantastic book I may have passed a second 18 years without Erasmus as an inspiration. The pure genius and subtlety of truly the most underappreciated scholar of all time is laid out glowingly. Why did I waste my time with "Mandrake" and "Candide" when "In Praise of Folly" does the same job a thousand times better? Why on earth do we pay attention to Martin Luther, the most incompetant and ridiculous "reformer" of all time, when Erasmus was doing everything twice as good at exactly the same time?

Get this book, people. Understand Erasmus and understand a wisdom that defied an age of stupidity.

As a student with no previous knowledge of Mesoamerican archaelogy, this book was, at times, too detailed for me to appreciate. However, I still loved it! Beginning with the first immigrants to the Americas, and continuing through the Aztec, every period of Mesoamerican prehistory is covered in detail. The author explains and includes different theories and opinions on debatable issues, then states his own findings and reasons for believing what he does. This is an excellent book, covering a lot of time and territory, and a good resource for anyone interested in archaeology.

This revised edition is indeed a great book. Well written. Loaded with facts and interpretations but not overloaded. It reads really nicely, and furthermore, it can be read by sections if one wishes so, though it would be a pity. Some minor editing problems (e.g. some numbers seem unbelievable and are likely typos). Enough illustrations to rest the eyes of the reader, and adequate maps. But for this reviewer the best feature of this book is that the author tries to integrate the history of successive cultures of Mesoamerica. For example, if you want to know what happened to the post classic Mayas you will need to go to another chapter than the main one on Mayas. This way the mutual influences of cultures can be better understood, at least when those influences did take place. Very likely the best all around book on Mesoamerica that one could have on the bookshelves. My only grip is the title, slightly misleading since it suggests prehistory. If history is defined as from the time when a cultures can write its history, then what about the Mayas who had a complete writing system? Not very "politically correct" if you ask this reviewer.

In New Zealand, where I live, haere ra is a Maori term meaning more than goodbye. It expresses sorrow at the departure, regret at the necessity for parting, hope for a reuniting in the future.
Adam Hall, creator of Quiller, is no more. Quiller has performed his last service with his usual stoicism, his acknowledged courage, his down-at-heel humanity.
I've enjoyed meeting with Quiller on a regular basis; I regret that he shall tell me no new tales.
However, I have his old tales to refresh my mind as to what an extraordinary character he was.
Haere ra, Quiller.

Adam Hall's Quiller is the spy who makes other literary spies look like kids playing Spy vs Spy. And with the passing of Hall (real name Elliston Trevor), this will be the last Quiller book, and for that the world is a poorer place.

Quiller Salamander contains all the elements that make reading Quiller delicious: the pragmatic, thoughtful, scarily capable Quiller faced with an impossible mission in impossible circumstances, in a story populated with genuine, solid characters, in an authentic-feeling world. Some spy stories delight in their improbability; Quiller's work is real, in the actual world we all live in. Quiller doesn't rely on gadgets and tricks; he doesn't even routinely carry a gun. But he accomplishes more in a single mission than most of us could in a lifetime. Hall's writing style packs more action in a paragraph than most Hollywood movies can fit in two hours.

Re-reading (for example) Ian Fleming's James Bond books just makes me feel embarrassed. But I will enjoy re-reading Quiller all my life, as I enjoy Sherlock Holmes. If you want to immerse yourself in another world, meet Quiller.

Marcia Adams offers you a chance to create your own cookbook with this inexpensive and beautifully illustrated book.

She has tucked in a few of her favorites and left plenty of pages for you to write in your recipes. An excellent gift to a fellow cook or baker. You could also fill in old family favorites and present them as gifts to siblings at holiday time.

I looked at several other versions of write in recipe books and was not at all interested in plain boring pages, Marcia's book makes it fun!

I'm still filling mine in, but since I have three children who will all want a copy when the go out on their own, I should be making duplicates. What a great way to pass on their childhood to them as adults. There are places to add pictures too.

Amazon has an unbeatable price- I recommend buying more than one!

This is the cutest book in the world. The book starts out with a photograph place so you can put a picture of your family. The book has spaces to write your favorite recipes. It has places for your mother's recipes, your father's favorite food, specialties from your grandparents, wedding memories, holiday recipes, family gathering recipes, birthday celebration traditions and their recipes, the book goes on and on! It is a great gift. Make sure to pick one up for yourself! I great gift to give your child one day!

This is an excellent little book. Posen, an increasingly influential monetary economist, gives us his view on what is wrong and what needs to be done in Japan. While this effort was published in late 1998, the diagnosis and medication prescribed are the same now as then.

In Posen's view, all but one of the economic stimulus packages unveiled in the 1990s was equivalent to pouring money down the drain. Government money either wasn't spent at all because regional and municipal governments are bust or money was thrust at wasteful construction industries which add nothing to GDP. Also, monetary policymakers have decided that their new independence means they should do exactly the opposite to what everyone outside the BOJ thinks they should do. So policy is in a state of paralysis.

Posen argues that Japan needs aggressive stimulus, both through fiscal and monetary policy channels. In his view, there is nothing terribly wrong with Japan - a very different view from consensus. He also shows that BOJ fears of igniting inflation if they loosen monetary policy aggressively are complete nonsense.

This isn't a happy read for amateurs. It's quite in depth and needs some knowledge of the dismal science. It's very mainstream or Keynesian, just in case you were wondering. But it's a good read nonetheless.

Posen does a good job of presenting his case that the Japanese recession can be alleviated through the effective use of fiscal policy. He supports his argument well by employing statistical evidence and economic tools.

I believe, however, that Posen fails to address the psychological effect the current recession is having on the Japanese government & people. Structural Reform is being instituted rapidly because stagnation has brought about the realization that the current system needs serious overhaul.

It also seems to be the case that fiscal policy needlessly pours money into the inefficient construction sector, leading to undesirable consequences in terms of sectoral allocation.

Overall, Posen makes a strong argument in favor of fiscal policy. Hopefully he will update his book to explain the current apparent recovery of the Japanese economy.