This book is a decisive history of Thurgood Marshall's actions and the effects that he had on the civil rights of African-Americans while he worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His successes, failures, and discussions of his effects make it a very informative book. It is quite obvious that the author spent a great amount of time researching his topic of choice. The book is absolutely full of quotes from people of the time and very detailed factual accounts of events. Unfortunately, the content is not written in an extremely appealing matter. It tends to drone on and on about various cases and actions which have no major significance in history nor in the life of Marshall. If you can read through the dry spots, though, its a great book. You can really get a felling for the social climate of the era as well as the thoughts and feelings of Marshall himself. As a research tool, this was definitely the most valuable book I came across. If I was rating this book based on its information it would be an easy five. Ultimately, it is a good book for pleasure reading but not the best. I would have to say that Juan Williams' Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary is the best. If you are interested in Marshall's career, though, you want to look at Tushnet's other book Making Constitutional Law : Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1961-1991.

Seven years ago, the book would have been much more useful, but many of the contacts listed have gone out of business. I did manage to mine a few gems, however.

The book is highly idiosyncratic, which is itself not an argument against it. However - this will sound harsh - it's oriented to the young Canadian, Aussie, or Kiwi recent college graduate with a useless liberal arts degree, whose only real prospects for employment here are teaching English to people who won't learn it, or the would-be gaijin model or club hostess.

For someone who ostensibly spent a few years here as of the writing of the book, Gauthier dwells unnecessarily on "strange foods" few of us consider strange. Most of the anecdotes are of the tired "culture shock" variety more appropriate to a traveller back in the 60's or 70's.

Stick to fj.life.in-japan.

Well, not one of Mark Twain's finest, but The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg is a good book. It deals with the temptation and corruption that occurs in everyones life. A couple receives anonymous money and is forced by reputation to do the right thing. Whether they and the town do is another situation. Eventually the whole community becomes involved and the righteous owner of the money is to be determined. Although it is a little confusing, it makes the reader think just how much money is the greed of all evil.

This is no doubt an academic study of some note. however, Pamela Crossley's "Orphan Warriors", which is very similar, is far more accessible.
Not for the faint-hearted.

Sam Benbow is a reluctant lawman , having been inveighled into the post of Marshall in the town of Elk City ,Montana on the promise it was to be a temporary state of affairs ,his real ambition being to become a rancher .It turns out to be a somewhat more long term position ,to his disgruntlement .
His deputy is the bibulous Skofer ,once a Divinity lecturer ,now a voluble and cynical drunk with a nice line in orotund utterances.
Complications arise for Benbow and the town with the presence in it of Cain King ,a bounty hunter ,a man scarred emotionally by his Civil War experiences and given to rants where he proclaims himself the Destroyer ,and Killer.
This is not the extent of Benbow's problems -his brother has been killed in error by Cain ,and the town movers and shakers ,especially the banker and lawyer acting in concert ,set him up on a murder charge as they see him as the main barrier to their scheme to carry out a major land scam in the area.

The figure of King is vividly drawn-a giant of a man whose contempt for the human condition becomes partly redeemed by love for the refined Jean Louise .There is another strong female character too ,the feisty Sally.

Strongly written and enjoyable but I cannot reseist a complaint about the blurb writers who describe it as a "Western mystery "
It is nothing of the kind -it is a traditinal Western and any mystery elements are so well hidden that I could not locate them.

This book goes into good detail with analyses of Mark Twain's different looks and the different takes on racism from him. He talks about the racist ideas that Mark Twain used in his writings and some of the more enlightened views Mark Twain had about racism. It was an all right buy, I guess.

This book includes simple props that you could easily make or obtain elsewhere. The magic and the quality of instruction are fine, but the value of the book is severely down graded because of the high price compared to the Mark Wilson Complete Course In Magic, which contains all of this book and much, much more. Make or buy your own props, and get the Complete Course instead.

Like most Anchor editions, C.S. Mann's Mark is the product of considerable time and effort expended to produce a translation superior to those commonly found in generally used Bibles (NIV, NRSV, NEB, etc.) and to include with that translation a thorough commentary on why the translation was rendered as it was. As most of the authors in the series are experts in the subject of the specific book they translate and edit, the level of writing is considerably high. The draw-backs are that if the reader is not at least passing familiar with the ideas common to religious studies and translation of ancient Greek, Aramaic, or Hebrew, much of the information included will be beyond their understanding, and with the discoveries of new material in the Judean desert as well as manuscript collections around the world, some of the material can become dated rather quickly. Indeed, there is already a new partial translation published in the Anchor series, Mark 1-8 (27A) by Joel Marcus.

These things taken into account, Mann's effort is to be commended, if not relished. Admittedly, his writing style in the commentary is unduly pedantic (he even uses the long discarded "in the opinion of this writer" construction) and makes the very complex material presented more obscure than it needs to be. He does have the intellectual honesty to declare that there are many sides to particular issues and to let the reader know just which side he chooses for himself.

The translation itself is not a bad one, and is certainly better than the commonly known Bible versions. Its accuracy may disturb some readers who never stopped to consider that there may be more than one way to interpret the Greek texts; however, most people who have not considered this are not likely to be reading this book in the first place. Take the opening where John the Baptist is quoted. The common translation of the famous line is "...a voice crying in the desert, 'Prepare the way of the Lord!'" Mann renders it, I think rightly "... a voice crying, 'In the desert, prepare the way of the Lord!'" As the original texts contain no punctuation, only the understanding of how Mark's Greek is structured and common writing patterns of the period must be used as clues for punctuation. Mann clearly demonstrates that he is keenly aware of these subtleties.

In the end, the work is commendable. It is a valuable tool for those who wish to face the daunting task of truly understanding this gospel commonly called Mark. It is thoroughly annotated and commented. The only criticism I have is that the Greek, when cited directly, is transliterated into the Roman alphabet rather than left in the original Greek. This is a flaw not only limited to this volume, but to the entire Anchor series. There is no doubt that Mann knows his subject, he just seems to experience difficulty expressing that knowledge in print.

For readers with little or no experience in networks or Windows NT, this book introduces the basic concepts on how to plan and set up a small local area network using Windows NT. The written style is folksy with plenty of diagrams and simple English rather than technical jargons. In short, an excellent introduction to the Windows NT operating system.

This commentary possesses much good information. It is exigetical and interesting, and is of great help to the student of the Bible. The single flaw in it, however, is the format. This commentary uses much parenthetical notation, sometimes lasting for several lines. This makes for difficult reading. One does not know where the commentary ends and the notation begins. In addition, the reader is forced to hop from parenthetical notes to footnotes and back again. The format makes reading difficult, but the content is excellent.