I'll be honest. I really like Joe's MIND TREK (the personal and RV parts are fascinating, though occasional RV-brainy parts are a bit thick). I feel Joe's REMOTE VIEWING SECRETS is hands-down the best how-to work on psychic function likely to be written in the next decade or two -- a classic standard from day 1. But for THE ULTIMATE TIME MACHINE my feelings are mixed. Prophecy is my least-favorite aspect of psi. I do admit the book is very interesting, despite this topic not really being my bag.

McMoneagle (a long-time soldier and then science-researcher) in his second book has improved on his writing of complex material without sounding like a military report. So it's more readable even in the more densely-informative areas, and extremely readable in certain others that are darn-interesting. The outline of topic-date-prediction is more organized/logical than anything I've seen done in the psi arena, but I actually found this less pleasing. I think had the book been done in a more narrative fashion it might have made it less practical, and less referenceable, but more fun... easier reading for the general public. I suppose it is up to readers to decide what they prefer. McMoneagle is, as anybody who knows him or has even met him would vouch for, one of the most practical, logical (not to mention brilliant) human beings around. So, it's his book, he did it his way.

Some of his predictions have proven out; others have not. Some predictions seem vague, while others are very specific. Some others, even at the point where they might happen, are likely to require historical perspective to get the real facts. Most of his personal interest seems to be about humanity. In other words, I think he was a lot less interested in the sound-bite "volcano erupts by Tuesday!" approach to predictions than he was the questions "What is our world going to be like? What will we be like?" Sometimes that includes quite specific descriptions, and sometimes it's a general commentary on changes or tendencies.

The author does a nice job in talking about psi, time, some related difficulties and more. If I were going to read a book by anybody about psychic predictions, it'd be McMoneagle, since he's so far the only person who's demonstrated accurate, under-controls, in-public/gov't/military/science-lab remote viewing -- including of future events. Since he's one of the only people with actual credentials in the Anomalous Cognition field, his work deserves being approached with respect, whether or not this particular book is as exciting for most as his other two.

For those into cultural anthropology the book is fascinating. He talks a lot about life in the future; a different manner of living (from how we'll eat to the kind of physical structures our culture will favor), and many other things. Even if you take the psychic equation out of it, the book is good food-for-thought and discussion-group-inspiring. Which as even Joe would say, until one gets feedback on the facts is all it can be.

One thing -- Joe covers from now out until a certain point in time, and then jumps to much farther in the future. There is a large gap there. Given the changes from one part to the other, what he does NOT say but I got the impression of, was that at some point the planet is going to lose an awful lot of people and have some massive changes in culture and perhaps even physicality. Like I said, he doesn't really spell this out, but thinking about what he does say would kind of lead to this conclusion. I wasn't sure why he did that. Maybe it was just limited space.

I think if you are interested in psychic work and/or psychic predictions/prophecy, this is a good book to have. The author's a real-world expert, and there is tons of material here. If you are more interested in personal psychic development, I recommend Remote Viewing Secrets instead. If you would just like an interesting book that contains both narrative autobiographical story and intriguing psychic sessions and some hands-on advice, Mind Trek is a very good introduction.

Like all Joe's books, you might believe in psychic ability or not, you might like the book or not, but there is no disputing his intelligence, his down to earth, no-nonsense approach, and his intriguing ability to conceptualize a lot about aspects of reality most people just never consider. In the end, other than being an thought-provoking read (which is enough on its own merits), I suppose the primary value of this book will have to be proven the same way its contents will -- from considerably into the future, looking back.

Remote viewing is a specialist type of psychic/clairvoyant technique, that can be used to assess other areas of space and time. Mcmoneagle travels into the past and future and predicts the reality he finds there. Whether remote viewing actually works or not is debatable, I haven't seen the scientific evidence, so I will remain open minded, until I do. Mcmoneagle claims a 60% success rate, validated by a scientific review board whilst he worked on the Stargate project for the U.S. government. Even if you can't accept the idea of remote viewing as a genuine phenomenon there is a great deal of interest in this book.

If a panel of experts were asked to assess the shape of the future, within the next 100 years and beyond, they would be hard pressed to come up with more original ideas than Mcmoneagle does. If you compare this book to Nostradamus's prophecies you will find that they are much more specific and are fortunately not encoded, as Mcmoneagle unlike Nostradamus does not have to worry about religious persecution for his views. All that remains is to wait and assess the accuracy of the predictions. Judging by the large amount of material, it won't be until about 2030 that enough predictions can be evaluated to give a valid statistical rate of accuracy.

If Mcmoneagle is correct about some of his major predictions then it would create a great deal of interest in remote viewing. The major predictions include Iraq invading Iran to eliminate alleged Kurdish terrorists before the end of 2003. A silver bullet cure for most cancers and the development of an aids vaccine by 2008. An earthquake in upstate New York in 2050, the most expensive natural disaster in the history of the U.S.A. and a coherent signal from space, from another planet in another solar system in our galaxy in 2008 which no one is able to decipher.

Mcmoneagle also remote views the year 3000, which is almost a utopia. He is very optimistic about the distant future of humanity, with 600 years of peace after two great wars before 2400. The author goes back into the past,in order to check on humanity's origins; He finds a race that is seeded on the planet by an alien intelligence ( a la Sitchen, Marrs, Clow, Von Danicken et al) 30 to 50 million years after the dinosaur age. The race is similar to a cross between a sea otter and a human and lives close to the shore line, exploiting natural resources from the sea and close to the shore. This creature eventually moves inland as it evolves into humanity, Mcmoneagle doesn't mention anything about tree climbing, although this could have happened if the ground cover was very dense or there were a great deal of predators on the ground, forcing this species into the trees. This prediction is a bit out there, but not totally beyond the realms of possibility. Mcmoneagle has put his head on the chopping block with the amount and level of detail in the predictions, at least you can't accuse him of being too vague.
( reviewed by Melchizedeck )

This book is a must read for anyone who understands and desires knowledge in the field of Remote Viewing! McMoneagle, with a clear and concise prose, gives the reader a good duplication of the beauty, the power, and the theory, of movement through time via Remote Viewing. After reading this book, I searched for the closest place and the best method for learning RV with the handful of people that were directly connected to the project from the beginning. This science, RV, could truely be the vehicle that helps "mankind" evolve to the next level. For me, it gave me hope and a method to accomplish those goals. I hope I'm up to the challenge.

I first read "Missing Joseph" back in 1996, and recently re-read it. This is classic Elizabeth George--gore, sex and murder in a small town. This story is unusual in that the reader always know "whodunnit"; the question is why. All of the characters--even minor ones such as Josie--are well-drawn and fully fleshed out. And the dangling ends of the plot are tied neatly into a bow at the end.

Havers doesn't play much of a role in this one. The spotlight is shared by Lynley and Simon St. James, with minor roles played by Deborah St. James and Lady Helen Clyde. The reader sees quite a bit of Lynley's troubled personal life, including his relationship with Helen (I like the "soap opera" aspects of the series), and gets a brief taste of Havers' troubles in moving out on her own. The Deborah/Simon sub-plot is compelling. It's hard to believe that these characters have all experienced so much in fairly short lives (Simon's accident, Deborah's affair with Lynley, etc.), but it makes for good reading.

All in all, this is definitely worth reading--and re-reading!

Missing Joseph is testimony to Elizabeth George's ability to take the reader through the complex web of relations that constitute social life in an English community while keeping him/her enthralled with the mystery at hand. Missing Joseph is the story of the death of a small town priest. George has Lynley and St. James together with the indubitable Havers solve the problem of who killed the priest while conducting a very complex sub narrative about Deborah St. James' struggle with her preoccupation with having a child of her own. I read George's novels because I am a dedicated mystery buff and she is among the best. However, I also read her because of her downright honest sometimes brutal portrayals of women. To the already initiated, this book is a must read, for those new to the author or to the genre, it is a masterful introduction

Elizabeth George has some of the best prose in the business. It's elegant and evocative. But it's so long winded! A lot of it's unnecessary, when she could have got the same effect using far fewer words, and much shorter sentences.

However, i still really really enjoyed this book. As a long-time devotee of Agatha Chrisite, i have yet to find anyone who comes close to being a modern day model of her. George's novel are of the right style, the right topic, the right mood, and always feature the right sort of mystery. I have no doubt that if Christie was still writing today, these are the sort of books she would be writing.

George is able to craft great mysteries, with great well drawn plots, and always manages to create a cast of colourful and realistic characters. That is why i like her books so much, i think. Her intricate and puzzling plots, and how well she draws her characters. You may not like them all, but they are still interesting and colourful, human and well developed. She concentrates not just on the mystery, but on the lives of the characters as the mystery goes on around them. Which is what i admire, because while a mystery effects lives, it does not stop them.

Here she goes back to A Great Deliverance country with a "whydunnit" rather than a "whodunnit". We know from the start who killed him. There is a little room for doubt, but not serious doubt. The mystery is more focused on why the killer did what they did.

With her resolutions and solutions, George is a master. Always has good motives and an unexpected and clever answer to the mystery.

She falls down on one point. Always.

Her depections of English life.

Her books are similar to Christie, and a bit too similar. they not only follow some of the same principles, but they seem set in the same time zones as well, when George's novels are supposed to be set in the present day. The English life she depicts may well have been that of fifty or sixty years ago, but it is very rare you find things like this now. We simply don't live as she writes we do.

However, her English way of life may not always be realistic, but if you just forget it's supposed to be set in the modern day and think of it as being a novel set in about the thirties, then you'll be fine.

I read this book in a few hours and while I wish it had provided more detail as to the experiences it presented... it was certainly refreshing to read a story about college students told from a perspective not typically encountered. I understand this was Mr. Green's first novel and he shows much promise. Overall, the story was entertaining and I'm sure many African Americans will be able to relate to the topics presented.

I attended Stanford several years ago and this book is indeed a very interesting read for someone who is familiar with Stanford's unique campus environment. I am not African-American, and the best that I can say about this story is that I wish Mr. Green had had a more enjoyable college experience not so heavily influenced by issues regarding race relations. I do recommend this story to others--as it can certainly go a long way in helping to promote a dialogue that seeks to improve the college educational experience of ALL students.

Well, perhaps I should say that all students, particularly those students of color, should read this book -- as I just gave it as a gift to my cousin who is having a difficult time adjusting to a freshman year at a predominately white college. As some of the other reviews have indicated, the book touches on many themes that have nothing to do with what students should be concentrating on while in college--ACADEMICS! I applaud the author for a story that accurately represents what it can be like when issues of race play too primary of a role when one struggles to pursue an education. I was especially pleased with the portrait of Jason who is so lost after the death of his friend who also happened to be the leader of the Black Student Union. The story is simple, the characters are real and within the novel's simplicity is the harsh reality which I suspect (heck, I know!) plenty of students of color are still facing today -- even in this so-called new millennium.

There are those who would like to limit the written history of individuals like Hitler and Goebbels as a conclusory "EVIL," and try to suppress anything that would portray them in shades of grey, with good points and bad points, which of course all human beings have. This mindset, I believe, was what led to the well-known efforts to suppress publication of this book. It's too bad, because this is a work for which the author should receive acclaim, not slander. In the end, isn't is wiser to let all the information and opinions flow- or how are we to really understand what circumstances could lead the "next Hitler" or "next Nazi Germany" to arise?

David Irving's brilliant research and writing style put the reader into Goebbels' shoes and allows a real understanding (and not necessarily a sympathetic one)of what motivated this man and how he became what he did (My conclusion- cold, corrupt, narcissistic, hypocritical, and casually murderous). For those who are truly interested in preventing another human tragedy of the magnitude of what went on in the 1940's, I suggest that you open your minds and read this book. It is a classic and you won't regret it.

I found Irving's book to be well-informed and highly readable; criticisms of Mr. Irving's interest in Goebbels' private life fail to take into account the often crucial bearing Goebbels shortcomings and problems in his private life had on the decisions he made in his capacity of minister of the Third Reich, and are thus unfounded. Certainly anything which helps us to understand how a man can perpetrate such cruelty and suffering is welcome material. Also, Mr. Irving is criticsed for not adhering to the orthodox views passed down by historians on many crucial issues of Nazi history, but his conclusions are certainly supported by evidence (as his embarrasingly copious notation attests) and should be read widely and commented on, if only to refute with stronger evidence by other capable historians, not effectively barred from publication, as his book has been here in the U.S.A. After all, wasn't it helpful to have Daniel Goldhagen's book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners," published so that other learned men (e.g. N. Finklestein) could forcefully demonstrate the folly of Goldhagen's ridiculous thesis? For this reason alone, if not for many others, Irving's book deserves to be widely read.

This is fascinating treatise! It is the first book by David Irving I have read, but there will certainly be others. Although the dust jacket pays the obligatory homage to Goebbels' "evil genius" and the "holocaust," the book itself is a highly refreshing and readable account. Irving is the first to actually use Goebbels' personal diaries, and what emerges is a picture of a quite understandable, albeit rather sad individual. Of far more interest to me personally, is the study of others in the Third Reich such as Hitler, Strasser, Streicher, and others as seen THROUGH GOEBBELS' EYES! Irving is a true objective historian who writes a well-researched and documented book without feeling he must dish up the sort of pap usually provided by the dominant media to those interested in this period of history in Europe.

In November 1999, The New York Times Magazine heralded Senator Joseph McCarthy 's "rehabilitation," and author Arthur Herman, an adjunct professor at George Mason University, recently weighed in with this book, which seeks to portray the early 1950s Wisconsin politician as a well-intentioned participant in public discourse about a legitimate issue. We must be careful with facts and terms. Herman is absolutely correct in writing that "most of what people ordinarily mean when they talk about the 'red scare' - the House Un-American Activities Committee; anti-Communist probes into Hollywood, labor unions, and America's schools and universities; the Rosenberg trial; blacklisting in the media and schoolteachers fired for disloyalty - had nothing to do with McCarthy." Herman is equally correct that McCarthy's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations "had a specific duty to investigate communism in the federal government and among government employees." The essence of Herman's interpretation is that, when that narrow record is carefully examined, McCarthy and McCarthyism were not as bad as commentators of the period and many historians contend.

In some respects, McCarthy's rise was remarkable. According to Herman, his life was "a typical American success story: son of a poor Wisconsin dirt farmer...to U.S. senator." Unlike many of the government officials against whom he latter battled, McCarthy was a product of hard times and conditions: McCarthy "left school at fourteen to start his own business, raising chickens and buying a truck to drive the eggs to market." In contrast, opponents such as Harry Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the leader of the informal group known as the "Wise Men," formed "the core of America's foreign policy establishment." What resulted, according to Herman, was "a cultural clash." The feelings were mutual. For the Wise Men and their allies in Washington, D.C., according to Herman, "there was no opponent they despised more than Joe McCarthy. He was working class: they were varsity class. He was hairy, loud, and sweaty; they were cool, clean, and antiseptic." According to Herman: "The furor over McCarthy and McCarthyism obscured the fact that the Wise Men made more than their share of mistakes," including the Berlin crisis and blockade, China, and the Korean War. That is fair. The error of McCarthy and his supporters was the lurid deduction that these mistakes evidenced a widespread Communist conspiracy within the federal government. For McCarthy, at the very least, the policymaking elites were not taking the international-communist threat seriously enough. According to Herman, McCarthy believed "[t]here were those who were soft on issues like communism, and those who were not," which "was reflected in McCarthy's fight against the 'silk handkerchief liberals' who frustrated his efforts to ferret out Communists in government." McCarthy obviously seethed with class resentment. McCarthy's anti-State Department campaign began in November 1949, when he accused it of being "honey-combed and run by Communists." On February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy gave his now-famous speech, declaring: "I have here in my hand a list of 205 - a list of names that were made known tp the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working for and shaping policy in the State Department." In the ensuing controversy, McCarthy insisted that he had "the names of 57 people identified as Communists and security threats in the State Department." Herman acknowledges that the "confusion McCarthy fostered over whether he was talking about 205 Communists, or 57...gave birth to his reputation for recklessness, obfuscation, and untruth." On February 20, "McCarthy went to the Senate floor to deliver a formal denunciation of the State Department's security program." The six-hour speech created a furor. Herman bluntly acknowledges that "McCarthy found himself on very shaky ground" in claiming that "he had found a cabal of Communists in the State Department,"and "the bald truth was that McCarthy did distort several ['bald summaries' of an investigation of security risks at the State Department] in order to make his point." Nevertheless, McCarthy ran rampant for the next three years. Hoever, beginning in early 1953, according to Herman, McCarthy "had a long spell of choosing poor targets for his public anti- Communist campaigns, each of which served only to antagonize the White House and even fellow Republicans." By the end of 1954, McCarthy was finished, and after the Senate voted 67-22 to "condemn" him, McCarthy became "an institutional pariah." The sociology of McCarthy's support has been long debated. Herman rejects the theory that the McCarthyite core came from "'a coalition of the aggrieved,' men and women who had never come to terms with the world created by the New Deal or World War II." Herman writes that McCarthy's supporters, "[f]ar from being aggrieved or resentful...had found fresh opportunities and prosperity in postwar America," and "were anxious about whether those opportunities could continue and what America's future would be if Communists and their sympathizers were allowed to dominate the world outside." If McCarthyism was revolutionary, in this view, it was a revolution of rising expectations. Herman explains that McCarthy's core was in the rural midwest, the south, and ethnic neighborhoods in northeastern cities. According to Herman, "American Catholics were more inclined to support McCarthy than any other group," because many Catholics felt that "anticommunism was their issue."

In my opinion, this is the ultimate issue: Did McCarthy act in good faith. If McCarthy had an objectively honest belief that the Truman administration was insufficiently concerned about internal security, especially in federal government agencies, some of McCarthy's excesses - such as what Herman refers to as the "crude mishandling of sensitive information" - might be excused. But, if McCarthy recklessly or intentionally disregarded the truth, he deserves history's judgment as "America's most hated senator." Herman's "reexamination" of McCarthy is carefully researched and extensively annotated, but most of the sources are secondary, so there is practically nothing new here. Readers sympathetic to McCarthy, or at least to the possibility there was a genuine internal threat to national security in the early 1950s, may be convinced by Herman's argument. I was not.

The knee-jerk loathing of Joe McCarthy is so universal and deeply entrenched that it's not likely that Arthur Herman's effort to bring to book the intellectually dishonest and inform the historically ignorant will make much more than a dent -- hard-hitting and courageous though his effort is.

Mr. Herman has done an outstanding job of research and of articulating the results of his research for anyone open and curious enough to want to know the truth about Senator McCarthy and his times. To be sure, the burly Wisconsin senator had his faults and made a lot more than one or two mistakes. The true villains of the piece, however, were Soviet agents, home-bred Communist sympathizers, and addle-headed dupes. Communism was a genuine and significant threat to the national security interests of the United States and to the American way of life. Senator McCarthy and his allies made a significant contribution in bringing this threat to the attention of the American people and in battling it tooth and nail. Those who denied the reality of Communist infiltration and subversion were fools or knaves; those who continue to deny that the Soviet Union and its American-born handmaidens ever constituted a danger must also be considered either fools or knaves.

I thank God for Senator Joe McCarthy, Francis Cardinal Spellman, and all those who fought the good fight. If only we had men like that today, as our culture sinks ever deeper into a sewer of depravity. I also thank God for Arthur Herman. He has written an important book. With a few insignificant caveats -- e.g., the editing leaves something to be desired -- I highly recommend it.

This is an extremely interesting and well-written book. The premise is that, despite his faults-and there were many, Senator Joseph McCarthy was correct in his underlying premise: that the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations were riddled with active Communist spies, knowing Communist sympathizers and Russian dupes. Making perhaps the single greatest marshaling of facts to date on this subject, Herman demonstrates that these spies and fellow travelers damaged the foreign policy interests of the United States in a variety of ways. Worse still, he demonstrates conclusively that high ranking members of the two administrations knew or should have known about the Soviet infiltration and did nothing about it. Herman, whose fact-dense writing clearly shows his background as a professional historian assembles proof from many sources, but relies heavily on the more recently declassified information and the materials released after the fall of the Soviet Union. Not a fact is stated that is not supported by an original source, all of which are documented in the book's extensive end notes. If you've ever been in an argument with anyone over whether or not Alger Hiss was a Communist spy, you need this book to settle it once and for all.

Rather than trying to rehabilitate McCarthy, Herman is at pains to demonstrate McCarthy's mendacity, sloppiness in making allegations and his many other flaws on nearly every page. Nonetheless, Herman points out that since the liberal establishment could not disprove McCarthy's allegations and , in fact, was mortally embarrassed by them, it diverted attention from the charges by attacking McCarthy himself. The effect of this was to obscure the underlying truth of what McCarthy was saying and of what had really occurred. This "crust" around the issue has lasted for nearly fifty years so that as soon as anyone starts to discuss Communists in the government during the 40's and 50's, liberals deride them using McCarthy's name.

I highly recommend this excellent book to anyone with an interest in the era or in the liberal-conservative dialogue in the U.S. since World War II.

I've read all of Joseph Wambaugh's books, from THE NEW CENTURIONS to FIRE LOVER, and this was the least enjoyable.
FIRE LOVER probably doesn't measure up because there's not a whole lot of suspense. We know from the synopsis that arson investigator John Orr may have been the most notorious arsonist since Nero. Orr was a brazen offender, setting fires in the middle of the day when customers were in the stores, leading to the death of four at Ole's Home Center in South Pasadena. But he makes one big mistake, leaving his fingerprint on yellow legal paper that was used, along with a cigarette, a rubber band and three matches, to start a fire similar to the one at Ole's Home Center. The fingerprint was almost ignored because of the jealousy between firemen and police arson investigators.
Much of the book involves courtroom gymnastics. There are so many closing statements that you tell yourself, "this must be the last one." But you're wrong. There are more of them during the penalty phase and Wambaugh cites them all, practically verbatim.
Wambaugh is also famous for his irreverent narrative tone. This works in CHOIRBOYS, where we assume the narrator is a man in blue, but here he's supposed to be an objective journalist. He refers to jurors, lawyers, and judges as "...strange fish that lazily glide, blowing gas bubbles that pop ineffectually on the surface of the litigation tanks in which they live and breed." He likes this strange fish motif so much he uses it over and over again.
All of this said, I'm still looking forward to Wambaugh's next fictional tome. It seems an eternity since FLOATERS.

Joseph Wambaugh said a couple books ago that he would never write nonfiction again since he always got sued. I'm glad he decided differently, because I really enjoyed FIRE LOVER. The writing is good, it's gripping, and a good character study, too. It does slow down a bit during the trial, but obviously the prosecuting of the crimes is going to be less rivetting than the actually comitting of the crimes. An inadvertant red herring is thrown into the mix, that disappoints in the end. But Wambaugh couldn't change the facts just to suit me. But overall a fine book. I thought the GOLDEN ORANGE was so bad, I'd given up on Wambaugh and didn't bother to read FINNEGAN'S WEEK. But I'm glad I bothered to read FIRE LOVER. In reference to a previous comment of why didn't Wambaugh include photos and diagrams; Wambaugh has always based the style of his nonfiction books on Truman Capote's IN COLD BLOOD. When Wambaugh asked Capote why he didn't include photos, Capote said he wanted IN COLD BLOOD to read like novel, and have the narrative alone serve the reader, and Wambaugh has followed Capote's lead ever since.

I have always enjoyed Joseph Wambaugh. It seems a few years ago, he went through a "dark" period when his books were almost if not actually depressing. But "Fire Lover" is a very good book. What I like about Wambaugh is his insight into people and organizations. The interplay between the police departments, the fire departsments, the Federal Arson invesigators, etc, is very very interesting. Fire lover is a true story about a serial arsonist who is also the arson investigator for Glendale, California. He may have been the most prolific arsonist of the 20th century.

My only complaint is that the trial part of the book might be too long. But as usual, Wambaugh shows his insights into how the system works, or sometimes does not work. The system worked here, but it was a very long journey.

I think over the writing career of Joseph Wambaugh, we owe him a debt for telling us outsiders how police departments and now fire departments actually work. I feel we owe them a debt that they do work. The book is a very good read.

This book was a fun read. I especially liked the interviews with the session musicians and touring personnel. I have always been a fan of Chicago's music but I must say that I never knew much about the band other than the fact that they went through numerous changes through the years, both with musicians and in styles. I was somewhat disappointed in the recent VH1 profile of the band in that the show seemed to focus all it's attention on the death of guitar player Terry Kath, which was quite tragic, but the rest of the information was dealt with rather quickly. I discussed this show with a neighbor who happened to mention the book and I am quite pleased that I found out about it and took the time to read it. I especially enjoyed the writer's in depth analysis of the albums. Reading this book also led me to the record store, where I was able to catch up on several Chicago albums that I never bought the first time around, including some recent work that I was totally unaware of, namely the Christmas album, which is fantastic. It's truly remarkable how much music this band has made!

Over the past 25 years I have seen Chicago in Concert over 50 times. I simply love their music and I am truly amazed at the fact that they have been around for over 35 years.

I bought this book because I thought it was going to be a history lesson on the band and it is but it is also so much more.

Covering the band from the beginning with members Terry Kath and Robert Lamm to the days of Peter Cetera to the lastet members Tris Imboden adn Keith Howland.

The book covers every album including Chicago 26 "live in Concert". I am most impressed and hope as the band continues another edition will come out.

If you love Chicago Like I do, then you have to get this book it is as sweet as the music of the band.

Chicago has certainly been around for a long time, and as this book points out, they've gone through a lot of changes in the process. Unlike many other supergroups, Chicago has always chosen to stay out of the media and there really hasn't been a whole lot of press on this band. I was glad to finally see that someone made their story available in print. I was also unaware of some of the albums, especially the Japanese Live album and the Andre Kostelanetz album, which I understand is extremely hard to find.

Although Chicago continues to make music, The original band is still my favorite. Reading the book brought back many fond memories of concerts and songs from my past, and it did, as the author says, "make me smile."

Overall, this was a good, light read. The book is, in essence, a long, witty personal essay about snobbery in America. As some other reviewers below have noted, it's slightly redundant, and it seems like it could have been trimmed down a bit to make a pithy 50 page article. But Epstein's tour though snobbery was enjoyable.

The book has three main parts. First, Epstein reviews definitions of snobbery, considers how it has changed over time, and then he delves into the various areas that are used by snobs today as bases of status. What follows is a summary of the book's main points:

The essence of snobbery is that you want to impress people, to make yourself feel superior at the expense of other people. The dictionary definition is one with an "exaggerated respect for social position or wealth, and a disposition to be ashamed of socially inferior connections; behaves with servility to social superiors, and judges merit by externals; person despising those whose attainments or tastes he considers inferior to his own." Snobs live in a world of relentless one-upmanship; his only standard is one of comparison, competition, and rivalry. The snob is always positioning himself, trying to gain ground on his superiors, distancing his perceived inferiors. A snobs high standards are tools used in an attempt to impress others, rather than as ends in themselves. Snobs respect the trappings of status: social class, money, style, taste, fashion, attainments, prestige, power, glamorous careers & possessions, memberships in exclusive clubs and groups, name-dropping, celebrities, socially favorable marriages.

Ironically, however, the snob's quest for status leaves him powerless, for status is not in the possession of it's holder, but in the eyes of the beholder; you cannot convey status on yourself, others must do that. Snobs hope that others will take him at his own extravagant self-valuation; he needs confirmation, acceptance, and fears rejection. For snobs, the wrong opinion, family, schools, connections, clothes, taste, or manners is more than stupid - it's a disqualification.

Epstein also asserts that the basis of snobbery has changed over the last century. The old WASP-ocracy, with its emphasis on lineage, Ivy League schools, exclusive neighborhoods and work at law & Wall St firms, has declined for a variety of reasons. In its place, Epstein asserts, the emphasis on taste, style, and being "with it" has increased. Consumption patterns began to replace social class as an organizing principle of society. Taste -- in politics, food, clothes, culture, opinions -- betrays social class, personal aspirations, self-conceptions. These are the remaining grounds for snobbery today.

Finally, why does snobbery persist? Snobbery thrives in democracies, in fact, because social mobility allows one to rise, as well as fall. The quest to rise and do better than one's parents is a central part of American culture, and the societal hope is that quest for prestige will drive people to higher levels of achievement. Fear of falling, as well, drives many to snobbery. Until we reach the day when society is fair, kind an generous, and nobody needs reassurance of their worth, then snobbery will exist. Epstein also reminds us, however, that status is a side dish of life, not the main course, and that the best way to gain prestige in a snobbish world not to care about it at all.

Northwestern University professor and writer Joseph Epstein's latest book, "Snobbery" is a highly entertaining and well-considered look into the world of the snob: the upward-looking, the downward-looking, the 'virtuous,' and the reverse types (to name but a few). His coverage is by no means comprehensive, for snobbery is truly a broad topic, but Epstein touches well on those aspects of "the grave but localized disease" that are frequently encountered, and that he is most familiar with.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part (chapters one through ten) seeks (and finds) a fair definition of what snobbery is, explains how it works, and traces the history of snobbery in America from its revolutionary origins, to its classist WASP height, and finally to its omnipresent state in our current "egalitarian" times. Epstein makes especially good use of his popular self-deprecating humor in the first chapter, "It Takes One to Know One." The second part (chapters eleven through twenty-three) describes several prominent varieties of modern snobbery, such as college snobbery ("Jimmy goes to Rice, Jane goes to Vanderbilt"), club snobbery, intellectual snobbery, political snobbery, name-dropping, sexual and religious prejudice, celebrity hobnobbing, food and wine snobbery, and trend-following. The book is closed with a final chapter, the "Coda," where Epstein explains why he believes that snobbery, though it is a deplorable social practice, is here to stay. The mock reviews printed on the jacket's back cover (from Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, and Noel Coward) provide some good laughs for the familiar reader.

I know that I gave a rather critical review of Epstein's earlier book, "Ambition" (c. 1980), but this new volume (though it addresses a related topic) is quite different. Epstein's writing here is very much of the current times, and his narrative never loses the reader's attention. Quotations are always brief and used to explain a point, not invoked merely for pedantic decoration. Rather than spending time on describing famous historical snobs (as was done in previous "snobographies" by Thackeray and the Duke of Bedford), Epstein concentrates more on exposing the practice of snobbery as it is seen in everyday life today, among his colleagues and acquaintances, in contemporary magazines, and (most insightfully) within his own thoughts. As he rightfully suspects, his detailed look at major types of snobbery lets very few people off the hook, and there is scarcely a reader out there who won't find his or her own pet version(s) of snobbery described within the book's pages. I have seen Epstein field questions from audience members during a book talk featured on C-SPAN2's "Book TV," and the identification of secret snobs through the Q&A session was remarkable. It truly "takes one to know one." For the reader who is observant and curious of snobbery today, and who is not ashamed to admit that s/he too may be a snob of sorts, this book is one to read soon.

Epstein gets extra points for being an equal-opportunity skewerer of snobs. Whereas the traditional view of Snobbery was that it was an upper-class WASP phenomenon, Epstein rightly points out the endemic snobbery among left-leaning intellectuals and the various self-appointed groups of Victims as well as the country-club set. This raises an interesting dilemna for Professor Epstein. The very people who purchase and read books about ideas are the ones most guilty of intellectual snobbery. Is it wise (or, in the long run, economically viable) to point out (at times in a not very complimentary fashion) the foibles of one's target audience?

Epstein writes with humor, analytic clarity, and efficient prose.

Buy this book...but first consider if you want your own snobbery exposed to such a sharp-tongued writer.

I finished reading this book just to see how bad it could get by the end. Released in September 1999, the author should have known that Y2K was already big news, even with the Everyday Joe. He writes about embedded chips (that have no need for any date or time information) failing and causing massive systems failure. He has nuclear reactors failing or being taken offline. In perhaps the most egregious error, he suggests that the NY subway could fail due to computer error -- when in reality, it is well-known that the display board at Jay Street was never correctly wired, and all switches and signals are mechanically controlled.

The plot is severely lacking. Four geeks rewrite the entire city infrastructure in two years -- and are stuck on some control passwords! A multi-billionaire wants to cheat the bank whose systems his company is rewriting!

This book has no basis in reality. Any similarity to Planet Earth as we know it is coincidental.

Mark Joseph's new novel raises some startling and often disturbing questions about the potential effects of the Y2K "bug" and the very nature of millenialism itself--all within the framework of an entertaining narrative. Joseph writes to romp here: the action is crisp, the characters are believable (due to some good research and detective work)and the plot flows full steam ahead to a conclusion we should all expect( that IS why we bought the book). There's even some interesting insight along the way. Take it for what it is, kick back, and learn a little about the "bug." All in all, a fine novel by an author who knows how to make us think "techno." Three Stars!

The book Deadline Y2K is about what might have happened on January 1st 200. It describes two interesting characters. One is a computer programer who wants to find a solution to the Y2K computer bug, and the other is a successful businessman who's only interest is making an ungodly amount of money. The story is very well written and some of the events described are very realistic. However I think that this book was prompter by some public fears that the Y2K computer glitch would do an extreme amount of damage to peoples lives. Maybe the author could have taken a more realistic approach to the situation. Overall I think it was a good book and it certainly was very interesting to read, it was hard to put down.

I read the book carefully and the it's a real shame that the authors did not spend more time on research! Many reviewers complained about lack of information of Bee Gees main asset, their music, I regret to say that it's true. Now, should we wait for a Bee Gees Anthology? Official, Authorized and Informative?

Tales of the Brothers Gibb achieves its purpose, being a great bio-graphy about the life of a family dedicated to music, a journalistic account of their sharp "up and downs" in the public's preferences and final, long-awaited redemption, when a new generation of fans and artists, who never danced their hits on discos, decided that they were a legend.

The book fails to deliver, though, one of the promises made in the first pages, where the authors state that the main focus will be in the musical aspect of their lives. There is not that much discussion about the chords, harmonies, musical significance of their works or a detailed anylisis of the great albums, as it should be. The Bee Gees are, after all, more about music than anything else.

But that shouldn't stop us from enjoying a good biography or even from learning many, many facts about the music, about the way it was made, about the historical context that gave birth to Odessa or Main Course. I can only begin to imagine now what a song like "Really and Sincerely" must mean to Robin. Or Robert Stigwood's insane obsession with the Beatles, which the Brothers Gibb suffered too and still suffer. A very unhealthy obsession that led them to make unforgivable mistakes like their Sgt. Pepper movie and album.

The book is also too "clean" because the Bee Gees always appear like saints, and I somehow suspect they are not. The part dedicated to Australian years is too long and the final stage of their career (1981 and up) is too short, but I enjoyed the book a lot anyway.

And it gives us all a very important lesson: No matter how bad it looks, be always like the Bee Gees and never give up.

I had already ordered the book when I started reading some of the reviews on here. Some people did not like that the authors wrote about the Bee Gees family or about their younger brother Andy. I tend to disagree with this popular mode of thinking. In order to understand their success and failures, it was their families that were always there for them. The support and love of their families is what molded and shaped them into the successfull and well-rounded individuals they are today. I truly enjoyed getting a glimpse into what life is really like for the Bee Gees.

This book was very well written and researched. In many cases, it will give many views from different parties to a particular story. And if the authors felt that some of the stories were embellished or untrue, they would further research the stories and give their opinions to what really may be the truth.

This book may not give die hard Bee Gees fans any new information but it is a great book for those just discovering their music. It is a very realistic book that not only follows their success but show each Bee Gee as an individual person, not just as a group.