The author presents the information in concise snips headed by quotations pertinent to the topic. It was surprisingly easy to read.

In our check and balances system of government, the three branches -- Presidency, Legislative, and Judicial -- are equal in might and stature. To many this may not appear to be the case. Part of this is due to the intense media attention the Presidency and Congress enjoy. Part of this is also due to misconceptions within the public about the role of the judiciary in general and the Supreme Court specifically.

In the outstanding A Year in the Life of the Supreme Court, editor Rodney Smolla -- a professor of law at William and Mary College -- has put together a work that should go a long way towards educating the public. This collection of essays by experienced Supreme Court observers concentrates on the 1992-1993 term of the Court. While other terms may have had bigger cases that the public would recognize, several fundamental issues were addressed by the Court. For example, how does one balance the issue of free speech and access to protected services in the case of abortion? How much discretion does law enforcement have in searching an individual without probable cause? Does Title IX allow an individual to sue for monetary damages? Does Brown vs. the Board of Education require Mississippi to equalize its state-run university system? Can hateful speech lead to additional punishments when done in concert with another crime?

In each of the cases chosen for review, the method by which the case reached the Supreme Court is detailed giving the case the human component that each has initially (and is sometimes eventually lost). In addition, a justice who was pivotal in the resulting decision is highlighted along with a good explanation of the constitutional issues.

For a reader interested in understanding the Supreme Court1s function in our society, A Year in the Life of the Supreme Court is not only a good introduction, it is a definitive profile of the Court from the perspective of a trained observer and should not be missed.

But with Lukacs¡¯s help, you can manage to read Hegel with much more ease. I think Hegel¡¯s contemporary readers had no such difficulty in reading his works. Kant¡¯s propositions and the problem of British empiricism and continental rationalism were the common sense to them. But that kind of knowledge should be obtained, to us, with hard work through reading history of philosophy. Moreover, we can¡¯t sense the historical events like French revolution as vividly as Hegel and his contemporaries felt. We can¡¯t share the same horizon with Hegel. To overcome such obstacles, Hegel¡¯s time should be reconstructed. To do so, Lukacs traced back unpublished manuscripts from Hegel¡¯s gymnasium days to just before writing ¡®Phenomenology of the Mind¡¯. And that, he links Hegel¡¯s personal history to his contemporary events, to show why Hegel thought so. Lukacs¡¯s illustration is easy and graphic enough to grasp who Hegel is. It¡¯s the touch of master. As you know Lukacs is a celebrated Hegelian Marxist philosopher. He opened up the track Frankfurt school and other Hegelian Marxists followed. This book is so much aged. Lukacs wrote this book when he escaped from the hand of Nazi to Moscow. But I haven¡¯t heard of any big name with Hegelian trait since World War II. Only Marxist reads Hegel now. And in the field of philosophy, Hegel and Marxism is out of fashion. So you can¡¯t expect any master like Lukacs write a intellectual biography on Hegel. If you try Hegel, this book is ¡®must¡¯.

The book also covers the best places to shop (and there are SO many in Rome), where to get good deals on leather and other wonderful things. The book give you wonderful ideas on how to see the city in a limited time or really enjoy it if you are there for more than a few days. The book also covers things to do that many tourists might over look as well as telling you what is worth your while and what to skip.

The book also covers customs, money changing, travel information - you name it! This is one of the best guides available on the market.

The Guides are well organized in a logical and easy to follow manner. They are beautifully illustrated, well developed with accurate information (it is unusual for hotel and restaurant information to be that accurate), have enough history to help the reader understand the people and cultural background, and have a lot of useful travel information and useable maps in the appendixes.

Specifics:
The guides are organized as follows:

How to use this guide
Introduction to Historical and Geographical information
Geographical Regions
............Introduction / History of Rome
............Specific City Areas
........................Introduction to street by street area
........................Detailed pictorials of area buildings
........................Architectural drawings, pictures, cut-aways of buildings
........................Specific stops, historical monuments, churches, buildings, etc.
............Six guided walks

Travelers Needs - includes full list with rankings and notes
............Hotels
............Restaurants
............Shops / Markets
............Entertainment
............Rome for children

Survival Information
............Local Info.
........................Tourist info., Etiquette, Personal Security and Health
........................Currencies, Telephones, misc info.
............Getting to Rome
........................Planes, trains and automobiles, signs
........................general map, sectional maps with index
............Travel Info.
........................Maps, tours, currency, etc.
............General Index
............Phrase Book

Discussion:
The book begins with "Introducing Rome", including a complete map, a review of Rome, Rome's history, and Rome thought the Year - including events, etc.

Areas with an "At a glance" overview, then has subsections of specific blocks, or forums, then specific locations, churches, historical monuments, bridges, galleries, etc.

The really great attraction to this book is several fold; it is:
............Very complete
............Easy to read
............Beautifully and artistically completed
............Good shopping, safety and other tips
............Gorgeous photographs too numerous to list.

Architectural reviews include various views, and cutaways; given greater understanding and better perspective. They are all attractive, if not works of art - honestly.

The travelers' Info. offers good and valid info. on prices, currencies, customs, important words, etc. I used the reviews on hotel's restaurants and nightclubs, etc. and found they were useful and accurate, and helpful with my touring and site decisions

The books are so well thought-out that it has multiple maps, with various lookup tables, and the book's flaps are designed to be used as bookmarks for map pages.

Conclusion:
Each book in this series is a great help, and beautiful collectible resource. As the President, CEO of an International Meeting Planning Corporation we have many resources and techniques to learn about places we have meetings / groups at as well as the cities and sights. But, as a traveler, this book really is top notch and I would recommend it to anyone going on a personal trip, or wanting to learn about a city, or location. We have used some of these books to augment our research to investigate cities for our groups.

Additionally, no review of Transmetropolitan would be complete without praise for Robertson's art work. He does some of the best work out there today and is a perfect compliment to Ellis' writing!

If you are not inspired and given food for thought and prayer about your journey with God after reading this book, then check your pulse!

His message, like the message of the Gospels, when truthfully proclamied, is not easy to hear. He writes something to the effect of "When Christ calls a [person] he bids them to come and die...that they might gain new life." That is the radical message of Christian discipleship in a nutshell- Christ calls us to give our ALL for Him.

The first step of discipleship is putting Christ first, and following- no matter what the cost may be. For Bonhoeffer, his faith cost him his life. He was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp for his open opposition to the tyrrany of Nazism, where he died helping others at the age of 39.

If you have not done so already- READ THIS BOOK- it WILL change your life! Or should I say that through this book Bonhoeffer's witness to the transformational power of Christ will change your life.

* "Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession...grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate." * "Christianity without the living Christ is inevitably Christianity without discipleship" * "The life of discipleship can only be maintained so long as nothing is allowed to come between Christ and ourselves--neither the law, nor personal piety, nor even the world."

Bonhoeffer was willing to practice what he preached. He had opportunities to escape from the prison where they kept him (for his part in an assasination plot of Hitler), but he stayed and was an example to everyone, even the guards. Himmler had him killed soon before the war ended. Too bad. It would have been nice to have had Bonhoeffer in the latter half of the 20th century. Whether or not I agree with every doctrinal idea he had, though, this is a book that has been a challenge in my own life, and it's one that I ought to reread more often.

Now, with his first book, I can finally incorporate his vast knowledge into my life. Yoga: The Poetry of the Body is an excellent guide for beginners (like me). based on 45 basic yoga positions, the book has helped me build a foundation for my yoga life.

The useful photos and exercise descriptions, alone, would make this a 5 star book, but with all of the added content from Yee and co-author Nina Zolotow, the book is a must-have. The teacher-student dialogues sprinkled throughout the book are engaging, intelligent and realistic, Yee and Zolotow answered a lot of my questions and recognized some of the insecurities I had about starting yoga (even though I didn't know I had them!!)

And for the expert practitioner, the philosophy is uniquely Yee and the book can become an excellent way to hone th craft. I can't say enough about how great this book is!!

Church leaders and theologians would do well to read this book and ponder for themselves. For the thinking person who is open to arguments that actually use numbers in an intelligent way (no Bible Code here!), this is a book that offers insight into the mechanisms of church growth, the practical consequences of sexual immorality, and the positive effect of having a high value on women.

The first two-thirds of the book constitutes the scientific mystery. It begins with unexplained fish kills in the tanks of North Carolina State veterinary school. Unable to solve the mystery themselves, the fish biologist called on a young North Carolina State aquatic botany professor, Dr. JoAnn Burkholder. Eventually she and her assistants make an amazing discovery of a new and extremely dangerous organism. I found this portion of the book to be very engaging and exciting. I had a hard time putting it down until the mystery was solved. In addition to the mystery, the reader receives a crash course in the world of college politics.

Approximately the final third of And the Waters Turned to Blood examines the political controversy surrounding the environmental protection of North Carolina's waterways. Because of her fame after the discovery of "the cell from hell", Dr. Burkholder joined several of the state's water committees. This portion of the book details her fight for recognition of environmental problems and her fight for funding to study Pfiesteria piscicida. I found this section less interesting than the first, simply because I am not as interested in politics as I am in scientific research.

Still overall, I found the book to be very interesting and educational. It will definitely make anyone think about what we are doing to our environment and what our environment might be doing to fight back. I recommend this book to anyone interested in biological research or the environment.

To what degree were everyday Germans responsible for the Nazi Holocaust? Similarly, to what degree are the recalcitrant American media responsible for not covering wildly important stories such as the Pfiesteria plague, wholly preventable if greedy industries were forced to comply with precepts of human decency by being fined heavily for polluting? (Only a self-interested beaureacratic bimbo would deny the link between industrial pollution and the explosion of Pfiesteria blooms.)

Last week the Chesapeake Bay area was decimated by fishkills and Pfiesteria. Next week it will be some place else. Meanwhile, the media largely ignores the topic to avoid "mass hysteria" and to keep the profits flowing. To what degree are you, dear reader, responsible for not learning more about Pfiesteria by reading this book and then by making some irate phone calls and writing some irate letters because you'd enjoy a healthy America for future generations?

Our greatest living novelist, Kurt Vonnegut, suggests in an essay that carved on a Grand Canyon wall in great big letters for the flying-saucer people who arrive in a hundred years and find a dead planet with no people should be these messages: "WE PROBABLY COULD HAVE SAVED OURSELVES BUT WERE TOO DAMNED LAZY TO TRY VERY HARD. AND TOO DAMNED CHEAP." Rodney Barker's superlative book certainly supports this idea.

Richard Rhodes' DEADLY FEASTS, about the American Med-Cow disease cover-up, also supports Vonnegut's idea: we are too lazy and cheap to save ourselves