This book is a must read for football fans, coaches, players, and for anyone interested in how to succeed in sports competition. Although it is his life story, one can garner many pearls of wisdom about how to succeed, how to compete in an honest and sincere way, and the values that must be instilled in any sports players, young and old. You can find out why a man would turn down a 1 million job to coach at Penn State for 100K. Or why Joe Paterno rolls up his pants for games. Most of all, you can find the nuances and ideals behind the most successful college football coach, and the most successful college football program, in history.

This is a pretty good book and doesn't deserve to be out of print. The author's writing technique isn't scintillating but the book is very readable nonetheless. I was a little disappointed by the lack of biochemical details of how the pill works but other readers may see this as a blessing. The book does a superb job of making the people involved come alive. The descrption of a pre-birth control pill world which is unimagable to most people is simiarly excellent.

A wonderful account of the scientific, medical, political and social contexts surrounding the research and development of the oral contraceptive pill...something I realize that we take for granted and revolutionized our view of ourselves and our way of looking at the future.

Through the generosity of one of my fellow Amazon reviewers, Jonathan Kelly, I was able to have this wonderful book. From the beginning, I was taken with the writing style that Gerald Amster used to tell his story. It allowed the reader to become engrossed in the novel. If you enjoy great reading, humour, and adventure, you will love this novel.

This novel tells the true story of Gerald Amster. Amster was an American who was caught smuggling drugs in the USSR. This would be wrong and stupid today, but even more so in Amster's day. He then proceeds to tell of his "trial", and life in a Russian prison. This tale is told using great writing, with few flaws. It is a rare and wonderful book.

If you manage to find this book, pick it up. You will enjoy it, and will want others to read it. Amster's tale is well told, funny, touching, and thought-provoking all at once. It is a highly recommended and rare find that comes with my highest praises.

A surprisingly humourous book about an American caught for heroin smuggling in 1970s Moscow. Whilst the main character is unsympathetic (he is headstrong, commits stupid crimes for thrills and uses others to gain advantages) the story is an interesting aspect of "Labour Camp Literature" and worth reading. This book was written long before the collapse of the USSR, so I wonder if Gerald Amster has found what became of his friends and adversaries in the Gulags.

If I were going to pick something really stupid to do, I'd say that smuggling heroin through Moscow in the days of the Soviet Union would surely qualify. This book lets us see the typical consequences of such rash activity.

I found it full of humourous incidents (probably more so for the reader than for Amster), very valid and fair in its take on Russian culture, and almost always credible. All this adds up to a very entertaining read. Amster is a semi-sympathetic character at best, but this doesn't detract from the book, because the portrayal we see adds to its credibility: no one would make up some of the experiences he details, yet he does not portray his captors as being particularly better or worse than he. He and they are just *there*, and have to deal with one another, and all the expected variety of human qualities is present.

The only persons I can possibly think of who would not like this book would be those who hope to use it as a source for the brutality of the Gulag system. Solzhenitsyn's _Gulag Archipelago_ would be the far better choice in that case; Amster definitely wasn't in the Four Seasons Hotel, nor even a Motel 6, and his life was definitely unpleasant, but he wasn't dragged to a torture chamber every day. Moreover, as an inmate in a 'foreigners'' camp, he didn't see a clear picture of the mainstream Gulag system of the times. Probably the two above points are correlated to a degree.

For everyone else, this one is worth a search. Adventure travel fans in particular will probably enjoy it even though it's not precisely in that genre.