This book is extraordinary in its ability to inductively deal with some of the toughest questions we have.

We thoroughly recommend it.

There could be more hotels listed, but naturally this would make the book thicker and it would cost more.

The authors really pick out the best. The only caveat: the places they choose are so good that you have to book really early to avoid disappointment.

The book is divided into regions and has good maps showing the hotels proximity to one another. Each hotel has a color photo and a detailed description of its history, ambience, and accommodations as well as the cuisine for which some of the hotels' restaurants are known. Many of the hotels listed in this book are in Relais & Chateaux.

Where the book really shines, however, is in the consideration of atypical questions, including the importance of parental information networks on the success of choice and the impact of school choice on the formation of social capital.

As Stanford professor of political science Terry Moe writes in review, Choosing Schools is a "tour de force." I encourage anyone interested in the theory underlying education policy and privatization of public goods to read this book.

Utilizing information culled from hundreds of residents in four school districts (two each in New York and New Jersey) the authors of Choosing Schools furnish empirical answers to long-standing questions in the school choice debate: What do parents value in education and do parents choose schools based upon these valuations?; How much do parents really know about their children's schools?, and; Does choice increase parental involvement in the schools? Devoid of hyperbole (a downfall of many self-styled policy pundits) and underwritten by careful theorizing and analyses, the bottom-line is clear: While school choice is not the sole panacea for all that ails the educational enterprise in this day and age, it is a powerful antidote to the sluggish, generally moribund public education system in America.

Choosing Schools is, in a nutshell, exemplary social science and this well-reasoned book deserves a close read, especially by those who matter most in the school choice debate - parents, educators and politicians looking forward to the November polls.

There is so much to learn, even for amateur students of American architectural history. We hear about Palladio, Robert Adam, Christopher Wren and others who influenced the American Federal style, but we also learn what was going on in the American colonies in a religious, economic, and legal sense--all of which helped to affect the shape and style of American architectural and decorative tastes.

One of the most interesting things is learning how American craftsmen, builders and architects (many of whom were slaves) were influenced by the latest European styles. American styles in everything, from dress to furniture to homes, tended to be more plainspoken and stripped down to the bare essentials than were their European counterparts.

This is an absolutely fascinating read, and a visual treat for anyone who is even remotely interested in the American Federal style.

Clotel would have historic interest simply by virtue of the fact that William Wells Brown appears to have been the first African American to write a novel. But it's not merely a literary curiosity; it is also an eminently readable and emotionally powerful, if forgivably melodramatic, portrait of the dehumanizing horrors of slave life in the Ante-bellum South. Brown, himself an escaped slave, tells the story of the slave Currer and her daughters, Clotel and Althesa, and of their attempts to escape from slavery. The central conceit of the story is that the unacknowledged father of the girls is Thomas Jefferson himself.

There is an immediacy to the stories here--of slave auctions, of families being torn apart, of card games where humans are wagered and lost, of sickly slaves being purchased for the express purpose of resale for medical experimentation upon their imminent deaths, of suicides and of many more indignities and brutalities--which no textbook can adequately convey. Though the characters tend too much to the archetypal, Brown does put a human face on this most repellent of American tragedies. He also makes extensive use (so extensive that he has been accused, it seems unfairly, of plagiarism) of actual sermons, lectures, political pamphlets, newspaper advertisements, and the like, to give the book something of a docudrama effect.

The Bedford Cultural Edition of the book, edited by Robert S. Levine, has extensive footnotes and a number of helpful essays on Brown and on the sources, even reproducing some of them verbatim. Overall, it gives the novel the kind of serious presentation and treatment which it deserves, but for obvious reasons has not received in the past. Brown's style is naturally a little bit dated and his passions are too distant for us to feel them immediately, but as you read the horrifying scenes of blacks being treated like chattel, you quickly come to share his moral outrage at this most shameful chapter in our history.

GRADE : B

Overall, it was a good book on the subject.