I had the priviledge to study with Frank X. Walker when I was a student at Ky Governor's School for the Arts. At the time, I knew nothing about black history--so shamefully little that I didn't even know what Malcolm X looked like. Frank introduced me to the richness of black culture and showed me what I was missing. He is a man of great power; that power forces bare words into tremendous fluidity of motion. His bare bones personality comes across in his writing and the heartfeltness behind his poetry, while expressing the emotions of an African American, transcends cultural barriers so that even I, the whitest white girl alive, can begin to understand.

if you can remember how that first taste of southern cooking sat in your belly warm with the love that prepared it. If you have never had a meal sit with you decades after it was consumed get yourself down south. If you cannot, then buy yourself a copy of this book it's the next best thing.

These are the words of a Black Southern Poet. His words stick to the bones. My favorite pieces include Wishbone and Crooked Afro because of their concise language and focus on family. Walker's work is that of a poet in keen awareness of history, politics and African tradition.

I also love the honesty of Hummingbird and Taking the Stares. These two poems examine the state of our collective humanity. Affilacia is an autobiography, a claiming of space and identity and a lyric love story to family (African and Affrilachian).

The poems in Affrilachia are like the Southern pecan tree: enduring, real and tasty.

Brand is an important and valuable asset for every company, thus creating a unique image for your brand and differentiating from your competitors are important issues in brand management. This book illustrated with examples the criteria, requirements and tools to build a brand successfully.
This book is easy to read and with suitable examples to help you understand more about the concepts. I found the most useful part is the ¡§brand slam tools¡¨ in which tools and guidelines are introduced for building a brand successfully.
If you want to start to launch a brand, read this book before doing so, I believe that this book helps you a lot.

This is a book that is very thought provoking but, like all good business books, simple in its message. It all comes down to a great idea, a brand slam. The author talks about marketing by committees, strategic plans and how they are frequently at the heart of brand development. The plan comes first and everything follows from there. He argues that this is totally the wrong approach and his reasoning certainly makes sense. What must come first is THE BIG IDEA. This could be a product idea, an advertising idea, a slogan idea and so on. This forms the core to be able to move forward. If a strategic plan is needed then it follows from the idea.

Brand Slam is divided into section that show how a brand slam can happen in different areas. For example, the slogans section show how the use of different words can contribute towards a brand slam slogan. The advertising section considers how brand slam ads are memorable and, ultimately, more effective than poor advertising. The sections are illustrated with a wealth of examples, some of which have their own dedicated section that goes into detail about how a brand slam business was built. One criticism is that the examples are primarily US brands or international brands in the US and the slogans and advertising may be unknown to an audience outside. However, this does not hide the lessons that are being communicated. The examples still work though.

Brand slam is inspirational and encourages the reader to think of other relevant examples and why they work. Each section concludes with a set of lessons to be learned. These can be applied to your own company or brand and help you towards your own brand slam.

"You're in for a stimulating read!"

One reason I picked up Countdown at Half-Price Books was because I remember Frank Borman doing commercials for Eastern Airlines when I was a kid. Although I expected more of his book to be about the Apollo days, I was by no means disappointed. This book is actually three books: One about Borman at West Point, the other about Borman in the Air Force, and the one about Borman at Eastern Airlines. The one I liked the best was about Eastern Airlines.

Like Frank Borman, I am an engineer myself (I grew up on NASA's back gate) and I really enjoyed his "tell it like it is" and get "back to basics approach" at Eastern. When Borman became President of Eastern in 1975, he got rid of the private jets, the fancy cars, the plush office furniture, and said "get to work." He also streamlined the middle-management and got rid of the "deadwood" and implemented a lot more "common sense." He thought Eastern buying SST's would be ludricrous on the Miami to New York route (because they would have to begin descent too soon), got rid of planes that were fuel inefficient (especially after looking at maintenance logs and finding that repairs were costing three times of what new planes were), and I don't know of any corporate president that had enough class to negiotiate leasing four Airbus aircraft at no cost. Leasing Airbuses was an awesome and risky move that paid off. Several airlines today use Airbus (Northwest, USAir, United) and Borman helped pave the way for America to buy these. Being a pilot and an engineer, Borman would even fly some of these planes himself. These are three examples of why engineers today are needed in higher management positions.

Borman also made the people of Eastern unite after he became President. He would visit them at airports and fly on planes with them, looking at "lets all work together and accomplish the mission. We have to earn our wings every day." Borman was always honest with his fellow employees about what was going on (no bulls--- )and followed through with "Duty, Honor, Country". Eastern Airlines profited more from 1976 to 1980 under Borman's leadership. What killed Eastern in my opininion was Airline Deregulation and the unions fighting against Eastern, primarily the IAM. Borman tells much of this story.

One thing that threw me off as I read this was how many airlines were in business when I was a kid that aren't there anymore (Braniff, Piedmont, Pan Am, People's Express, Air Florida, etc.) I know Braniff was an example of executives taking care of their own interests (fancy cars, meals, penthouse office suites,etc.) Frank Borman always had his head and his heart in the right place -EASTERN. I learned a great deal from Countdown-we need more executive officers like Frank Borman.

I have yet to see a better and more credible depiction of the upside/downside of astronaut persona. In his modest and understated way Frank Borman describes his career through the military, the astronaut program, and the private business sector. A genuinely honest man who embodied the best values of middle America, Borman commanded two of the most visible and critical flights of the early manned space program: the epic endurance flight Gemini 7 in 1965 and the stunning circumlunar Apollo 8 adventure of Christmas Eve 1968. Widely respected in NASA and government circles, he was selected to lead the investigation of the Apollo fire which killed his comrades Grissom, White, and Chafee. He was, in every respect, an upright military man who embraced the challenge of the space race with dogged tenacity.

So why, with every page, does the reader feel like he is moving inexorably toward a train wreck? Perhaps because Borman's candor compels him to chronicle the downside of his single-minded determination and doggedness. It is hard to say if the author intended to give us this psychological two-edged sword, or whether it is simply the fruit of honesty. In either case the clues are there: with every career choice, with every renewed commitment to NASA, Borman etched his name on the honor roll of American space heroes. And, in the process, insulated himself from family and society, with painful consequences.

Borman's personal world begins to unravel, ironically, at the time of his greatest triumph, the Apollo 8 mission to the moon. His wife Susan, already stretched thin by years as a dutiful military wife in the spotlight and totally unnerved by the Apollo 1 fire, drifted into the murky world of alcoholism. Borman admits that, totally absorbed as he was with the Apollo Program, he was completely out of touch with her drinking, relieved that at least his wife was not using prescription tranquilizers, then in vogue among astronaut wives. [Andrew Chaikin's "A Man on the Moon" describes Susan Borman's problems during Apollo 8 in much greater detail than Borman could bring himself to describe.]

Sadly unaware of the unfolding tragedy at home, Borman retired from the Air Force and proceeded to make the grand-daddy of all bad career choices, particularly considering the choices at hand. It is not clear from the text whether the author truly understood the complexities of Eastern Airlines' financial difficulties, or the character of the people he would need to do business with. Borman does concede that he knew next to nothing about unions, which would be his undoing at Eastern along with deregulation and a sagging economy. Despite his earnestness and hard work-and no one worked harder-the book ends at February 23, 1986, the night of the Eastern bankruptcy, a broken ex-astronaut crying in his wife's arms.

It is a troubling ending. It is also a reflection of the conundrum of the race to the moon. The United States would never have overtaken the Russians in the space race without men like Borman who sacrificed everything for the goal of national success. But this work reveals another side of the space race: how the race to the moon collected men like Borman, took those assets of steely self-determination, and turned them against the astronauts themselves. This is a cost of the Apollo Program that is rarely discussed, and we, like the dazed author at the end of the book, have to decide for ourselves if the cost was worth it.

This philosophical twist, perhaps unexpectedly, is the author's biggest contribution to space literature. Borman's account of his missions reveals little new material, and he remains too private a man to titillate the reader with his uncensored thoughts about, say, Jim Lovell, with whom he spent an eternity in the closest of quarters. As a narrative of the race to the moon, this is a superficial work from one so intimately connected to the space program. But my guess is that Borman's real interest in writing his autobiography was less about space hardware and more about figuring out just what the hell happened to him.

Borman's "Countdown" tells the riveting tale of his boyhood, his Air Force days, his immense contributions to the space program, and his airline career. His participation in the Apollo 1 fire investigation and subsequent Senate testimony were instrumental in getting the moon program back on track, for to everyone concerned - astronauts, Congressmen, and the press - Borman's integrity was unquestionable. This comes across immediately to the reader through Borman's narrative, but not through self-serving "Boy Do I Love Me" puffery. Indeed, Borman's sincere modesty immediately reassures the reader that this is a man who lives the motto "To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth".

Some of the ugly, goofball politics of the time come up as Borman and his crew are humiliated by Cornell students egged on by none other than Carl Sagan. I never really thought much of Sagan before reading Borman's book, and I think far less of him now; though in the interest of fairness I will say that Sagan's motivations were more selfish than political (he always objected to the expense of manned spaceflight, and instead advocated unmanned exploration as the best way to obtain the hard science he insisted on - this came up in a lecture Sagan gave in Seattle shortly before his death while undergoing cancer treatment), he comes across as the petty, self-serving geek he really was, not the "Mr. Friendly Scientist" he portrayed himself as in his works. Borman and his men deserved far better.

The wanton destruction of Eastern Airlines by the active sabotage of the Machinists Union is also well documented. Borman's no-nonsense, high-speed, low-drag leadership style was lost on the proto-human union bosses. It's really too bad Eastern went under, but having read what was truly going on, I now know that it wasn't Borman's fault. It speaks volumes for Borman's character that despite some bitterness and finger-pointing on his part (though his points were well-made), he accepts responsibility for his mistakes and shortcomings in the loss of Eastern, displaying the same integrity with which he has led all of his life. It's a really good book by a fine man. As another reviewer said, we desperately need more men like him. Sadly, in this politically correct, touchy-feely age, Borman's kind are a vanishing breed, and his book answers the question that titles this review. The battle to save Eastern was foretold decades ago by Ayn Rand. Borman didn't want to shrug, but was forced to. I hope the Machinists are happy now.

No, I'm not some high school kid forced to read this for freshman English who hated it on principle. I am middle-aged, usually love the classics, am a history buff, and volunteer at the site of a Revolutionary War hospital. So, when I found this in a used book store, I was looking forward to the read. What I found was the Seinfeld of historical fiction--a book about nothing.

Well, of course, ostensibly this is a book about the Revolutionary War as fought in upstate New York--at that time the frontier. The writing is good. The history is accurate and well researched, but I kept expecting something to happen at every turn, and very little did. Instead of actual Indian raids, there were usually warnings of raids, so that the folks got into the fort on time. There they spent long, dreary days doing long dreary things--realistic, probably--but not the kind of thing I couldn't put down. In fact, I put it down often, and for long periods.

This is a shame because Edmonds' use of words is quite good, and he did an excellent job whenever he was depicting the relationship between Lana and Gil Martin, a married couple caught up in the events. I wish, in fact, that the author had focused more on their individual story, rather than trying to bring in so many different couples and individuals that they were very diffucult to keep track of, and worse, to care about.

I give this four stars for the writing style and the history, but, for me, it was pretty boring.

This story of the Revolutionary War era settlers in the Mohawk River valley was excellent. Edmonds did considerable historical research and his characters come alive as he tells this tale of the conflict between the Tories who support the King and the farmers who are in favor of the revolt against England.

The story focuses on Gil and Lana Martin, two young settlers who work tirelessly to get a farm established in the valley.

Their hard work is repeatedly destroyed by the Destructives -- Tory and Indian raiders who burn the farms and crops and slaughter anyone who supports the Revolution. The farmer militias strike back at the Tories and their supporters and strike with equal savagery. As in Bosnia and Kosova, the conflict pits neighbor against neighbor.

The novel is about the people of the valley -- both the white settlers and to a lesser degree the Indians -- and their fight to survive in a very hostile environment. I found the story entertaining and I learned quite a bit about the people, the place, and the events that occurred there.

Drums Along the Mohawk is the story of families in the Mohawk River valley that cope with Indian and British attacks on their homes and families. Many of these people fight for the American cause and are very serious about it. This is a different perspective, the fighting on the frontier. It may be hard to find, but it is worth the effort for a challenging and emotional book. The characters and their jobs, no matter how minor they are, come to life in one of the best books I have read about the American Revolution from a Patriot point-of-view. I would strongly suggest this book for a history or war reader and an advance reader.

Eva Schloss's remarkable story of survival should be better publicized and used by teachers everywhere, especially since it allows young people to experience the Holocaust through the eyes of a teenager and her mother. Schloss's book is on a level with Gerda Klein's ALL BUT MY LIFE. The writing style is succinct and direct which adds to its appeal to young people.

As I read the book, I wondered for the thousandth time how such events could have occurred in "civilized" Europe in our lifetimes. The addition of a timeline of events related to WWII is especially helpful to students.

The remarkable relationship between this young woman and her mother is a testimony to the power of family relationships grounded in faith in a higher power. It stands in counterpoint to the somewhat strained relationship of Anne Frank and her mother while in hiding. Like Etty Hillesum's diaries and letters, it allows us to see the world through the eyes of a young girl who confronted evil "in the image and likeness of God," yet never lost her faith in humanity.

While I grieve for the author's loss of her father (Pappy) and her brother (Heinz), I rejoice that she lived to share her experiences with generations who may have a difficult time giving a human face to the Holocaust. Her mother's love for Otto Frank was certainly a factor in sustaining him as he dealt with the loss of his first wife and children.

I would love to meet Eva Schloss and her mother, if Mrs. Frank is still with us. The picture of mother and daughter on the back cover of the copy I received through our library really captures the spiritual strength and moral courage of these two incredible women. They have made the world a better place with their testimonies.

I also teach an extensive unit on the Holocaust and Anne Frank. I am always on the look out for survivor stories for teens. This book certainly makes the cut. It is easy-to-read yet does relate the horrors of her experience in the camps. Her relationship to her mother and others in the camps shows the definite role companionship played in survival.

Eva's relationship to Anne Frank is simply a plus for the book. To have lived so close to Anne and even played in her house with her cat makes Anne become even more alive. Eva's relationship with her brother parallels Anne's relationship to Margot. Interestingly, Heinz and Margot seems to have similar personalities as do Anne and Eva. ...Her courage to speak about this terrrible time in history is a reminder to us all to remember what happened and those who are no longer with us and have no one to remember them.

I've read the book and I think it was exellent. Exiting and very sad, sad because it was real everything, it was not just any story. What Eva told was real life experiences. But there nothing we can do about it now else than remember it and tell all about it to the kids when they grow up, it's really important to not forget what happend to the jews and other folk group during the 2 WW. I still pray for them.

Forget the animated series. It's heart is in the right place.

But this came before the series; it's the real deal.

An applecheeked, Bob's Big Boy-lookin' android teams up with a gigantic, old-school meca-robot to fight evil and save the world.

MEANWHILE: the dry, tongue-in-cheek humor and ultra-violence of Frank Miller teams up with the painstaking, intricate artwork of Geof Darrow to create a buddy comedy of epic proportions.

What's it like?

It's a little like if "Tintin" author/artist Herge read a bunch of old Marvel comics and decided to do a "Godzilla" story.

It's a little like Mutt and Jeff if they were nuclear powered crimefighters up against a bad guy from an anime adventure.

But mostly it's like covering your old model airplanes with rubber cement and torching it good. Then doing the same thing to your H.O. scale train set and your Tyco racetrack. (which nobody should ever do -- read the book, it's better and safer)

The first thing you'll notice is Geoff Darrow's knotty tight sublime hyper-etched artwork, lines running like veins into the architecture and broken glass that is Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot. This is not the Miller of Sin City or DK Returns et cetera,,,,watch him rip away the Chandler influence and dive into Japanese toy culture via Godzilla gggrraaaaaauu. This won't give you a typical Milleresque vision, whatever that means, but it's a cool trip through a world owned by toys and monsters. Great book for kids. Bedtime story and such.

I saw the cartoon version of this on the telly the other day, and it dawned on me that I have the originals in my basement. I though I was going to strike it rich for sure, by selling them on Ebay, but no dice. There was another guy selling them, and it looked like he was only going to get about five bucks for them. This made me real sad for the other guy, so I bid a million dollars. I hoped this would make the market catch fire, like my aunts house did when I tried to fix her toaster. Someone told me later that you should always unplug a toaster when you try to fix it with a butter knife. They also told me that the toast is supposed to come out only a little, and not shoot across the room like in the cartoons where one guy shoots toast at another guy like it was a cannon or something.

Okokok, so I found this comic book in my basement, but I don't think anyone would want it anyway, because my basement is really smelly and stuff, and nobody likes a thing that is really smelly, do they? Maybe a dog would. I don't like dogs much.

Buy my comic book, your dog will love it!

I just returned from a trip from Ecuador where I used extensively Volume II of Ridgely et als' book. Having already some acqaitance with both the birdlife of the Neotropics and the bird books on the region I found the plates and the text still very useful when identifying the birds I and my travel mates saw. The weight and the size of the book is, however, making its use very difficult out in the field. The paperback editions did not hold very well during the three weeks, and publishing the book in 3 rather than two volumes could have helped that a lot. Even though the plates do not live up to the quality of the standard dictated by Guy Tudor in the, yet, two-volume handbook on South american birds, but I still found the pictures very informative. The text on habitat, altitudinal distribution, call, and the range maps often helped to narrow down the number of look-alike-species to a manageable level, especially when identifying hummingbirds or tyrant flycatchers.
All in all (and getting back to the question in the title) I could not call this book a champion in the league of field guides for being overweight (just try to carry it on the 'D' trail near Bellavista), although it truly deserves the four stars for the text and the plates alike. If you use it as a 'hotel' rather than a field guide or need it as a reference work for your home library (or have the plates and the text of Vol. II rebound separetely, as I did) you will appreciate the amount of information gathered in this book.

What a set of books, no doubt about that! For the first time, there is a full set of very useful color plates for one of the core South American countries. It is certainly a great accomplishment to have all the species pictured in color and on a more or less consistent standard. However, I do not agree with other reviewers who rave about the plates. Too many of the bird pictures have an overall flat appearance, with the color rendition being too simplistic or too bold. And while a good number of the birds are depicted in good or even unnessessarily large size, others would have benefitted from a larger sized rendition. Just because a species is small does not mean it has to be depicted in a diminutive size, unless there are larger species of the same group on the plate. Thus, while the plates are most useful, it is nevertheless disappointing to see that the overall standard (except for the plates being all in color) is rather lower than what was already published decades ago e.g. in "Birds of Colombia".
The field guide volume has excellent range maps and very helpful comprehensive texts. A somewhat more compact layout would have allowed for a smaller overall size of the book, however. The way to do it is being demonstrated in the book itself. The texts facing the plates use the suggested compact layout most convincingly. Spanish bird names are given in the main text, but, unfortunately, there is no index for them. To conclude, this is by far the more useful field guide for the general area than the also new "Birds of Peru" with its almost non-existing texts, lack of range maps and much less satisfactory plates. (P.S. This is a revised review as I think my first version did not do the book justice.)

I just received my copy of the The Birds of Ecuador and am very
pleased with it. I think the plates are very good with a lot of
detail. I compared plates for the same species in the book: A Guide To The Birds of Costa Rica, an excellent book also, and
found the detail to be better in The Birds of Ecuador. I also
really like the distribution maps for each species. I am
planning to do a birding trip to Ecuador and the maps will help
in making the travelling plans.

Humans beyond the age of weaning don't need to drink milk. My doctor has been telling me that for years. If you want to know all the reasons why we don't need it, buy this book. I was expecting some sort of fanatical rantings, but the information is well balanced and researched.

This is a well-written book with good information and extensive sources. The chapters are concise and pretty well-composed, just really short. The whole thing would be better compiled in essay-format, since this is a pretty short book.

As a vegan, I still hand this over to friends and family when they ask me what I'm doing about my calcium intake, and it usually keeps them quiet.

This is a good referance to have, but you'll probably find the same information in any "Complete Vegan Guide" dairy-chapter. Buy it if you have the extra six bucks.

I found this book to be extremely informative. The information will definitely make you think twice before you consume any dairy products. The only negative to the book is that a list of alternative substitutes to dairy wasn't really listed except for soy which has it's own drawbacks. It's important to get Vit.D and calcium in your diet but no list was provided thus I was left hanging. Otherwise, the book was very informative and easy to understand.

I read other online reviews of this book and thought I'd get it for my dad as a present since he was also based in England. I ended up reading it instead of wrapping it and was very disappointed. Though I appreciate Mr. Mays efforts during WW II, that's where my appreciation ends.

I enjoy reading good fiction so maybe that was my mistake. The book is a poorly written. For example: "He had worked hard and given no quarters for his new friends." There is no character development. We hear about endless heartbreak over a fellow crewman's death while never having so much as a description of him prior to that. We have questions, maybe mysteries, which are never cleared up.

This is primarily an account of Mr. Mays' affairs with a variety of ladies (owing it all to Lifebuoy soap and 1940 phermones), his trauma over lost crewmates, and his ability to catch on quickly (thanks to a 160 IQ though little schooling). It seems the lack of schooling has caught up with him across these 300 pages.

It has been great fun to remain in contact with a crew member who wrote a book about the day in the 385th Bomb Group. Franks starts from day one and chronicles all of the 35 missions. Some were milk runs, some were terrifying and most were just plain tough, hope we make it variety. We all made it but two, the bombardier shot down over Berlin and the navigator killed in the air. The other waste gunner bailed out over Berlin and after a long session as P.W. was released by a forward American army group. The story of our navigator, Woodrow Wilson Dutt, "W.W." to us is one of stark reality, valiant crew members doing all they could to save him at 50 below in a battered airplane. The trip to Cambridge cemetary and the mournful playing of taps will not soon be forgotten.

And No Purple Heart is a powerful account of a young airman's struggle to survive 35 grueling combat missions over The Third Reich. B-17 ball-turret gunner Frank Reese Mays has written a great book, a stirring salute to the resilience of the human spirit. Feelings of fear, grief, and despair constantly plagued the young men of the 8th Airforce as they fought the greatest airwar in history and lost far too many friends in the process. But fear, grief, and despair lost. Life won. Darkness never lasts, and the pages of And No Purple Heart bear eloquent witness to that timeless truth.

This book was so humorous. Doesn't matter if your straight, gay, male or female. I loved how Frank describes his family members and his life. It was very touching, witty, and it really opened my eyes to what gay boys have to go through to try to feel excepted.

I graduated Passaic Valley with Mr. Decaro. Knew him well. He was different, but not a total freak. I'm surprised he didn't mention Michael Dick whom he knew. Mr. Dick had his own ups&downs too. He cheered opposit Mr. Decaro in the PV Donkey Basketball game. Shame Frank forgot him.

What I liked about this book is that it is a coming out story that doesn't get too heavy. Decaro definately went through some tough times but his attitude is refreshing. He does not dwell on negatives. Anyone can learn from that.