"Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America," by Lyle W. Dorsett for the "Library of Religious Biography" series and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company is a short, yet well rounded and objective, biography of Billy Sunday.

A first-rate biography covering Billy Sunday from A-Z in less than 160 pages: no small task considering the importance of Billy Sunday and early 20th Century evangelism.

However, Dorsett subtitle is somewhat misleading: "and the Redemption of Urban America," as he only devotes one chapter to it and its mainly regarding Billy Sunday's pitfalls regarding his enormous financial success in from 1908-1920. Very little detail on Sunday's most historically significant reform movements: movements heavily tied towards his Midwestern background and Mid-America's fear of industrialization and urbanization in the early 20th Century: temperance and prohibition legislation, Sunday closing laws, gambling, card playing, reading love novels, Saturday and Sunday drives in the county with members of the opposite sex in that devilish automobile when you should have been going to church, non-religious dancing and music, liberalism, evolution, alleged decadent dress and loss morals of modern women and the general discontentment of masculine Christianity in early 20th Century America. Topics covered in greater detail in Roger A. Bruns', "Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big-Time American Evangelism" and in Robert Francis Martin's "Hero of the Heartland: Billy Sunday and the Transformation of America."

Regrettable too is the lack of footnotes or endnotes in his text: only a brief section towards the end of his book on sources.

Included in his biography are two complete sermons of Billy Sunday in the appendix titled, "Heaven" and "Get on the Water Wagon." Two important sermons of Sunday that Dorsett believes have been misquoted by other biographers and historians.

While it is lacking in significant detail concerning these reform movements, it is still a first-rate and objective biography of Billy Sunday that can be read in a short amount of time.

The book chronicles the life and ministry of Billy Sunday (1862-1935), the most popular American evangelist at the turn of the twentieth century. It does not avoid sensitive aspects of Sunday's life, such as his sumptuous lifestyle at the height of his career, the personal and financial scandals of his children, and his swift decline from public favor. Dorsett was one of the first scholars to use the Sunday Family Papers, in addition to press coverage of Sunday's evangelistic campaigns and previous Sunday biographies, to present a critical account of Sunday's life and ministry. Dorsett describes the context and setting for Sunday's ministry, from the rural Midwestern communities of his early days to the sprawling urban centers at the peak of his career. Most of all, Dorsett attempts to capture Sunday's complex personality, a man caught between a genuine desire to bring sinners to salvation through Jesus Christ and the allure of fame and fortune in American society.

Excellent book - ideas for all who want to understand the Bible from the point of view of Liberation Theology - a gospel for the poor and oppressed. Book is quite technical and very researched but may be difficult for those who do not have Scriptural backgound and higher studies. I was very impressed and felt that many new insights were attainted. I have read the book three times.

At the end of his preface, Ched Myers writes, "I pray that this study might help Mark to speak, and the reader to have 'ears to hear', the good news that promises yet to overthrow the structures of tion in our world." Although he is nobody's seasoned Greek scholar, the author lives up to his end of the bargain. Myers serves up, in this reading of the earliest gospel, a much-needed focus of radical discipleship -- i.e., Jesus as exemplar of nonviolent resistance to the powers-that-be in his day, and ergo in ours. Myers wrote this groundbreaking work not in the effete ivory tower of liberal intellectualism, but while living in seven intentional faith communities over the course of several years ... and yet, it's a remarkable piece of scholarship. Finally: a serious application of the socio-literary approach to a book of scripture, by an author who beckons us not to worship and adore a tall-steeple bourgeois Jesus, but to follow the itinerant rabbi he really was!

The Birthmark written by Nathaniel Hawthorne examines the need for the main character to always be perfect. He tries to make up for his less then perfect self by changing the one quality that is not perfect about his wife. This has a very sad ending. His obsession for being perfect is what was his doom in the end. It was a good book to read and I recommend it. It has a conflict between nature vs. science.

[H]e was confident in his science, and felt that he could draw a magic circle round her within which no evil might intrude.
-The Birthmark

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Bhagavad-Gita, July 16, 1945, Alamogordo, New Mexico

Eyebrows were raised and feathers ruffled this week, when Leon R. Kass, appointed by George W. Bush to head the President's Council on Bioethics, asked the newly chosen members of the Council to read Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, The Birthmark, prior to their first meeting. Even the English majors among us were sent scurrying to find this less well known work, which thankfully is available on-line. And what do you find when you track it down? Well, it turns out to be a well turned American Frankenstein tale that obviously appeals to Mr. Kass for its portrayal of a "man of science" with more than his share of hubris. Condescending sniping from libertarians and the Left has already begun.

The scientist, named Aylmer, is married to an almost perfectly beautiful woman, whose one slight imperfection is a birthmark on her cheek. Despite her near flawlessness :

[H]e found this one defect grow more and more intolerable with every moment of their united lives. It was the fatal flaw
of humanity which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they
are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain. The crimson hand expressed the ineludible
gripe in which mortality clutches the highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with the lowest,
and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible frames return to dust. In this manner, selecting it as the symbol
of his wife's liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death, Aylmer's sombre imagination was not long in rendering the birthmark
a frightful object...

Convinced that his mastery of science will surely allow him to remove this blemish and bring her to perfection, Aylmer convinces his wife to allow him to experiment on her, to improve upon nature :

'Aylmer,' resumed Georgiana, solemnly, 'I know not what may be the cost to both of us to rid me of this fatal birthmark.
Perhaps its removal may cause cureless deformity; or it may be the stain goes as deep as life itself. Again: do we know
that there is a possibility, on any terms, of unclasping the firm gripe of this little hand which was laid upon me before
I came into the world?'

'Dearest Georgiana, I have spent much thought upon the subject,' hastily interrupted Aylmer. "I am convinced of the perfect
practicability of its removal.'

'If there be the remotest possibility of it,' continued Georgiana, 'let the attempt be made at whatever risk. Danger is nothing
to me; for life, while this hateful mark makes me the object of your horror and disgust,--life is a burden which I would fling
down with joy. Either remove this dreadful hand, or take my wretched life! You have deep science. All the world bears witness
of it. You have achieved great wonders. Cannot you remove this little, little mark, which I cover with the tips of two small fingers?
Is this beyond your power, for the sake of your own peace, and to save your poor wife from madness?"

'Noblest, dearest, tenderest wife,' cried Aylmer, rapturously, 'doubt not my power. I have already given this matter the
deepest thought--thought which might almost have enlightened me to create a being less perfect than yourself. Georgiana,
you have led me deeper than ever into the heart of science. I feel myself fully competent to render this dear cheek as faultless
as its fellow; and then, most beloved, what will be my triumph when I shall have corrected what Nature left imperfect
in her fairest work! Even Pygmalion, when his sculptured woman assumed life, felt not greater ecstasy than mine will be.'

'It is resolved, then,' said Georgiana, faintly smiling. 'And, Aylmer, spare me not, though you should find the birthmark
take refuge in my heart at last.'

How perfectly Hawthorne, even 150 years ago, captures the deluded pride of the man of science, certain that this figurative mark of Cain (it is even shaped like a hand) will yield to the ministrations of reason and science and that he will be able to improve on God's work, will be able to make a perfect human. That peremptory "doubt not my power" is particularly devastating.

As Aylmer whips up concoctions that even he doubts the ultimate wisdom of using, Georgiana can't help but be alarmed :

He more than intimated that it was at his option to concoct a liquid that should prolong life for years, perhaps interminably;
but that it would produce a discord in Nature which all the world, and chiefly the quaffer of the immortal nostrum, would
find cause to curse.

'Aylmer, are you in earnest?' asked Georgiana, looking at him with amazement and fear. 'It is terrible to possess such power,
or even to dream of possessing it.'

Note that her warning is not simply about the power of such an elixir, but that the very ambition to possess it is "terrible."

But, of course, having opened Pandora's Box, Aylmer will not be deterred from his course of action, so he foists a goblet of some foul liquid upon her and, sure enough :

The crimson hand, which at first had been strongly visible upon the marble paleness of Georgiana's cheek, now grew more
faintly outlined. She remained not less pale than ever; but the birthmark with every breath that came and went, lost somewhat
of its former distinctness. Its presence had been awful; its departure was more awful still. Watch the stain of the rainbow
fading out the sky, and you will know how that mysterious symbol passed away.

'By Heaven! it is well-nigh gone!' said Aylmer to himself, in almost irrepressible ecstasy. 'I can scarcely trace it now. Success!
success! And now it is like the faintest rose color. The lightest flush of blood across her cheek would overcome it. But she is so pale!'

Ah yes, except for that 'pale' part, well might he be ecstatic. But as the reader will have guessed by now, all is not well :

'My poor Aylmer,' she repeated, with a more than human tenderness, 'you have aimed loftily; you have done nobly. Do not repent
that with so high and pure a feeling, you have rejected the best the earth could offer. Aylmer, dearest Aylmer, I am dying!'

The key here is the "more than human" and its suggestion that such perfection is not compatible with humanity. So did one of the great American authors warn us, at the dawn of the industrial age, of the dangerous allure of science and, more specifically, of the belief that mankind is perfectible by Man's own hand and mind.

You'll never read a book the same way again after "The Birth-mark"--you'll wonder about all the spaces, dashes, deletions and marginalia that didn't make it from manuscript to print. For Howe that's where the wild voices hide, dangerous figures like Anne Hutchinson, Mary Rowlandson and Emily Dickinson who threatened "civilized" male control. Howe samples texts like a hip-hop DJ, switching between voices to prove her point that editing was a typically male response to the wilderness that women (and the New World) represented.

Howe's passion for her subject is obvious, especially in the interview at the end. But the essays sometimes felt to me at least more like a display of cleverness than an effort to understand the figures she writes about. Like Charles Olson's "Call Me Ishmael," Howe's model, "The Birth-mark" squats a little uneasily between scholarship and poetry. The poet's own voice and sense of style tend to muffle the more distant Puritan voices, male and female, she's out to recover. Maybe this is the danger of not editing one's voice as a historian. Still, I'm glad I read this book--yet another reminder of what doesn't get into history and why.

For those who have read Susan Howe's poetry and marvelled at, but did not fully understand it, this book is compelling in its explanatory power. The quotations in the preface alone are worth the price of admission, for it is here than one can see how impressive is her understanding of Emily Dickinson's writing. By exposing the manuscript story behind Dickinson's works, Susan Howe has made a lasting contribution to American literature. Her essay on Cotton Mather is a charmer, certain to drive readers to find a copy of his Magnalia. The essay Incloser is a stylistic dynamo. There is also an interview with the author that sheds new light on her works.

But what will make this book immortal is Susan Howe's essay These Flames and Generosities of the Heart: Emily Dickinson and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values. To anyone who has read Emily Dickinson's poems in a "standard" or "variorum" edition of any sort, this book is a must, because you will soon learn that you have not, in fact, been reading Dickinson's words, but instead an editor's (inaccurate) version of them (whether Johnson or Franklin). Susan Howe demonstrates with a clarity and perception unmatched by any editor how the only way to understand and fully appreciate Emily Dickinson is by reading her manuscripts, some of which are reproduced in this book. And the manuscripts only make one appreciate more intensely the achievement of Emily Dickinson. If you've read Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, you must buy this book, as it completes the true story. It is a staggering achievement that will long be remembered as a landmark event in the understanding of America's greatest poet. American academia owes Susan Howe a debt of incalculable magnitude for this essay alone.

(Note on the other review of this book: how anyone can give this book fewer than 5 stars is a mystery. Susan Howe is a marvelous storyteller with a breadth of interests that cannot fail to intrigue even the most casual reader.)

I have just returned from Sicily where I visited Maria's shop and saw the convent where her childhood was spent. I wish I would have read the book before my visit. The smell of almond pastries led me right up the narrow street and to the pastries and candies in her shop, and they are marvelous. The convent is just a short walk up the street from her shop, in the square. The recipes she shares in the book are uncomplicated and simply delicious. Her story is not embellished. There is no polished prose. It is as she saw it and lived it and has told it with her unique Sicilian expression. I enjoyed reading it and I will continue to enjoy her recipes.

I believe this is one of the most underrated cookbooks in terms of awards (Child, Beard, etc.) and public attention. I LOVED the story, and I feel like I was allowed to have something very personal, special and unique in the recipes which are exquisite. Had I not known a wonderful Italian lady (Carmel Anthony) and tasted her special cookies, however, I may not have known enough to get this book. You'll love it!

Too old info, there is too much New greenhouse information left out here. It seems the author has a desire to help but does'nt know of any of the new break-threws in this industry. Greenhouses have changed 100% from the wooden A framed house. Now they have many different designs thst can save heating cost 50%. Get some new info on greenhouse and you'll have more FUN.

Fun and informative reading. Many ideas to increase you excitement while growing your own food and herbs all year and selling the extra, for a good profitable hobby. See also "Secrets to a Successful Greenhouse and Business"

The Burnt Stick is about what most of the stolen generation went through when they were taken away. The tribes were desperate to keep their children from the authroities. I think that this leaves the readers with the ever growing knowledge that the Abourignies of Australia have been terribly mis-treated in the past and still are in the present.

This story is about a young boy named John. He is Aboriginal but has light coloured skin because his father was white. His mother becomes very worried when their is word of a man coming to take all the white children from the Aboriginal camp, to teach the children the white ways. The mother decides to use a burnt stick to make her sons skin dark. Will this work? This story touched me and i think it will touch you or your childs. the story is wonderfull and so are the illustrations.

The book is good in that is has lots of b/w pics, but, I would have wished for color and for it to have included more models. Not bad though.

The book should have had some color pictures and covered more of the different models of each year and why was there nothing about the 62 models

It is often said that being a parent is no easy task. So just imagine the difficulties involved with raising a child that is not your own. Further complicate matters by raising a child that is the son or daughter of a relative, and now you have a challenge. This is the task that Rene Parson and her husband Mark took on when they decided to become the foster parents of her two nephews, Deron and Jeff. The decision to raise the boys was because of her sister's inability to raise the children herself as a result of her drug addiction and the lifestyle that goes along with being an addict.

The Parson's faced any number of challenges along the way but their faith in God provided the strength they needed to provide to the best of their ability, the care that the boys could not get from their own mother. The book profiles the difficulties of relative foster parenting, using their own life as the example. Further, the book explores how the children's lives were impacted by the continued substance abuse on the part of their mother. While this book is not a "happy" read it is a necessary one because it makes everyone more aware of the challenges that are faced by many youth in this country.
Parson shares how the foster parenting impacted her relationship with her husband and siblings (especially her sister, Deron and Jeff's mom). But more importantly, she shares Deron and Jeff's story. As I read about the adversities that these boys have encountered in their short lives, I could only shake my head in disbelief.

Rene and Mark Parson are truly an inspiration. As I read this book, I was moved by their deep commitment to God and the great effort they went through to encourage the two boys to develop a relationship with God. I was further moved be the challenges that she and her husband faced as foster parents, and those that the two boys faces as a result of being foster children. I respected Rene and Mark for not choosing to do what was easy, instead choosing to do what they felt would be best for the boys. This is an emotional read, it will have you cheering one minute and tearing up the next. I highly recommend this book and especially recommend it for anyone that works in a profession relation to, or has an interest in child welfare.-Reviewed by Stacey Seay

I am sure that we all have heard of the foster care system in the United States and in the state where we reside. There are many stories, some good and some bad. What has not garnered much attention is caring for a child that is a relative, which is called relative foster parenting. Yes, you must deal with the child welfare agency that placed the child with you, but with relative foster parenting you must deal with the child welfare agency and other relatives that, for what ever reason, were not willing to care for the child. They too have a lot of opinions.

The recently married Rene' and Mark Parson take on the challenge of raising Rene's nephews. Their mother Monica is addicted to drugs and living basically hand to mouth. Rene is asked by her siblings to take the boys from Denver, her hometown, to Kansas where she is currently residing, to provide a better environment for them.

What evolves throughout this account of relative foster parenting are the inconsistent attitudes of the child welfare agency, the resentment of relatives and the continuation of negative behavior among Rene's nephews. Rene' and her husband Mark learn a few lessons about the state of the family, the child, the public school system and what role environment plays in raising children. The grass is not always greener.

Rene' has presented her story of relative foster parenting in a clear and realistic manner. I was able to empathize and grasp her reality with the presentation of the prose and the dialogue. What makes this account so emotional is the Parsons' faith in the Almighty. Their faith is examined throughout this account and is played out many times over. Rene' ends this story with a very strong example of her nephew's thoughts that we only get a glimpse of throughout the novel. This is very good account of caring for our relatives in trying times.

Reviewed by Dawn R. Reeves

Nothing spectacular. at some parts even boring. It's worth reading while if you only read one TPB then this shouldn't be it. IT stars Captain America and the terrorist organization known as Hydra in a "personal plot." It's kinda sluggish through the main part of the book but the end portion is worth it. Brings on a good plot twist. The art and highlights drag you in though and is one of the better styles out there. (in my personal opinion). You get a quick glance at a few members of the Avengers too but don't overflow in the story which is nice. Decent read. -I say pick it up. Not becuase its a better one but becuase its a not so good TPB and I personally believe that to have true "Comic Knowledge" one must take in the good with the bad. Not to say that this is a horrible title. (I liked the sheild touch myself also).

Ok, to be fair, I don't actually own this particular trade paperback. I bought all the original issues (including variant covers, 'cause I'm a sucker for Cap). But this book collects Captain America Volume 3 (don't ask) issues #1 through #8. It's a great run, too. Mark Waid does a better job with Cap than any author I've ever read. He strikes a fine balance between American Icon, and the guy who says stuff like "Golly" and "Jeepers". Really makes Cap seem like a real person. A sub-plot of Cap's shield get's started in issue #2 and it's conclusion in issue #19 or so is obviously missing, but it's great all the same. If you like Cap, or even if you're only mildly interested, this is the single trade paperback I would recommend. Well, maybe "Man Without a Country", too... But trust me, I've got a collection of Cap that dates back to the WWII stuff, and this is some of the finest material you will find.