While "How to Reduce Interest Rates and Poverty" has good intentions, and claims to go beyond today's hodge-podge of capitalism, governmentalism and Keynesianism, the author's proposal for diverting consumption income to wage earners via a special 3% tax is simply another version of redistributionism based on the labor theory of value. Current social and institutional structures are left in place, and the ownership of productive capital remains concentrated. High marks for intent and effort, but low on effectiveness of the proposal in ameliorating the basic problem in how income is generated. Wages remain the primary means by which most people earn a living, while the currently wealthy retain a virtual monopoly on access to the means of acquiring and possessing property.

This is the book that began the "end of literacy" in our country. No wonder it is being sold for two bucks. It is worth less than that and in fact should be avoided as a poison.

I am a college student in history, and this is the second book on U-234 I have read. There has also been an excellent History Channel episode on U-234 and the possible use of enriched uranium captured from the German submarine, by the Manhattan Project.

The information in this book is lacking. It seems that there is a lot left out, and little data to support the authors conclusions.

Who ever postulated that the Japanese might have dropped a bomb on LA or San Francisco is not a historian. It would have been virtually impossible for Japan to deliver a nuclear weapon to the West Coast in 1945. In "Japan's Secret Weapon" it is well documented that if Japan had been able to construct a nuclear weapon, its delivery target would have been invading U.S. forces. That is why the ME-262 was on board the U-234. Anyone who believes that Japan would ever have invaded California during WW II neads to re-read Alfred Thayer Mahan. The lines of communication required to sustain an invasion force on the U.S. West Coast by Japanese Forces would have been impossible to maintain. The same wisdom needs to be used in suggesting a nuclear attack after May of 1945. That dog just ain't gonna hunt.

Looks like we have an historian and a novel writter for authors. Tear away the fiction, beef up more historical data, and you would have a great book.

Also . . . DNA extracts from a skull fragment in Moscow identify it as Hitler . . . . this is old news. Leave the escape of Hitler to South America to the novel writers.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch was Professor of English at Cambridge UK in the 1920s. Better known now for his opposition to admitting women students. His pamphlet on lectures is based more on his undoubted skills in rhetoric than on anything a modern lecturer should aim to emulate. It does however indicate what a long way we have travelled since then. Quiller-Couch was an outspoken character who provoked amusement and anger by his dogmas, but was an undoubted scholar in his field (which was not the study of lectures).

I can't recall ever reading a historical book as badly written as this one. The prose is choppy, often jumping between unrelated topics within the same paragraph. The analysis is incoherent or nonexistent. The author treats early history simply by recounting facts without any attempt to explore their meaning. His modern history is even worse: a litany of complaints about how crime, pollution, and ethnic conflict have made the city unbearable. It reads like a cross between an elementary school report and the stereotypes of someone who has never lived in Los Angeles.

Whether you love or hate it, Los Angeles is a tremendously diverse, complex city - in its culture, economy, politics, and geography. I hoped to read an account that would take a well-rounded, sophisticated look at the city, but was utterly disappointed.

Skip this one.

How this book is even organized I still have not figured out. You'd think he would have listed each plants attributes and uses but instead he uses some long-winded synopsis that does little to answer the reader's true questions. He also uses terms which must be archaic, because I haven't been able to find them in my unabridged dictionary or otherwise, throughout the book. There are much better books out there.

Something NOT being disproven[sic] doesn't make it true. Example: You can't prove there isn't a tooth fairy.

This book is written by Sherlockian Rolf Canton. He is obviously a huge fan of Holmes, and has put this book together with a great degree of enthusiasm. However, it lacks the most important ingredient: skill.

The book itself is a odd hodgepodge of things: the best thing is the opening essay, 'The Moriarty Principle', which looks at the role and importance of Moriarty in defining Sherlock Holmes. Then we have lots of photos of the Norwegian Explorers of Minnesota, a Sherlock Holmes fan club, poems (more or less - there is a lot more to poetry than just getting things to rhyme!), some essays of aspects of the Holmes canon and related matters (including an examination of whether Holmes' assigned birthday of 6 January really suits the astrological sign that would be his), some scripts and fiction.

Sadly, it really isn't worth the cost of the book overall.

If you were to buy one book of poems to say something to you about America, about place and our nervous moving about, and yearning; about kinds of love and yearning, and the grasp for meaning in the quotidian, this would be my choice for you. In these funny, touching, gritty poems of "the commonplace", Costanzo has put his finger on the soul of a place that puzzles and fascinates. I dare you not to want to read these poems aloud to everyone you meet

Postmodernist thought has its kernels of truth and insight, often afloat in a sea of verbiage only its writer may understand. Wouldn't some clear explanation of what is going on be refreshing? In this "Encyclopedia" one won't find discussions of ontology or deconstruction, however, but a loosely collected several dozen essays of mixed quality, ranging towards sickening. Very few are insightful, most are self-indulgently evasive, and some are infuriatingly fatuous. Nearly all will pick some notion read from a newspaper headline, a few minutes in front of the tube or a tabloid magazine, and then descend in cycles of increasingly tangled verbiage restating the same idea until the reader is completely frustrated. In few cases do the writers show actual understanding of their topic. The worst offender seems to be the editor himself, who is recognized even by dedicated postmodernists as one of their most mind-numbingly meaningless generators of confusing obfuscation. Many of the points he talks to death are cynical exploitation of postmodern themes, the kind of abuse that will drive it into the ground. He is an equal-opportunity ridiculer: trashing the innocent and unassuming along with the famous and pretentious. Few targets escape the splash of bile. It's enough to leave the reader feeling ill for days. This book has no significant insight, is uninteresting and barely understandable.

It is not even a good read.