The Fiftieth Gate is a 'journey into memory' integrating the author's parent's stories of the Holocaust and their survival with historical fact. He exchanges their stories for historical facts of the Holocaust, discovering that his mother is the lone survivor from her village.

Baker searches to find out the events of his own background in order to find his own identity and family background. A totally honest and thought provoking book which allows its reader to wake up and realise the disasters of human hatred in Hitler's persecution of Jews. Very upfront and in your face.

a good find. wish that the rest of the titles are also availble in audio cd version. my kids, who are audio-visual learners, love it. they are slowly developing an interest towards the reading of books.

A provocative and genuine portrait of Americans exploring their sexuality in their own words. They reveal their most intimate thoughts and feelings on everything from losing virginity to coming out, from what makes a good lover to the pros and cons of adultery, sex after marriage and sexual practices both ordinary and bizarre. Candid anecdotes show sex in all it's variety- accompanied by love, jealousy, anger, joy.

The conspiracy theorists are right: the government is hiding something from us. According to Christopher Buckley, the big secret is this: the government is responsible for the reports of alien activity. The super-secret organisation known as MJ-12 flattens fields and abducts lonely housewives.

One night, Nathan gets fed up with his lack of advancement. Drunk, he decides to abduct John Oliver Banion, a successful political talk-show host. After the second abduction, Banion goes public with his experiences, resulting in the loss of his entire life. Banion is approached by other UFO abductees, all of whom he vaguely feels as if they're just lonely people who need some excitement in their lives. However, he can't deny his own experiences, and continues to attempt to force Congress into conducting hearings. Finally, he organises a march on Washington.

Watching the monster he has created, and disgraced from MJ-12, Nathan tries to fix the situation. He and Banion team up and take on the government's only secret.

In this book, Buckley skewers everyone from the government to UFO fanatics. Although his targets are relatively easy to take to task, his deft handling of the story has laugh-out-loud results. I devoured this book overnight. When I was finished, a friend immediately borrowed it after noticing how hard I was laughing. It is a great light-hearted read.

Thanks to TV shows and movies like The X-Files and Independence Day, public fascination with conspiracies and aliens has probably never been stronger. Naturally, satirist Christopher Buckley would turn his talents towards spoofing trend that is long overdue for parody after so cleverly mocking the tobacco industry and Washington D.C. politics in his brilliant "Thank You For Smoking".

Buckley's protagonist is pompous Sunday morning talk show host John Oliver Banion, whose arrogance annoys a government employee whose job is to arrange for the government to kidnap average people and make them believe they were abducted to spread hysteria and justify the defense budget. Abducted, Banion becomes a believer in the abduction cause and fights to expose the government's complicity in the abduction conspiracy. From politics to the media to the conspiracy-theory ridden alien abduction movement, Buckley's targets for ridicule richly deserve his wrath.

"Little Green Men" isn't quite the laughfest of "Thank You For Smoking", but it is still a richly entertaining book that will entertain admirers of Buckley to no end.

Unlike Christopher Buckley's "The White House Mess" and "Thank You for Smoking", "Little Green Men" is a book that goes beyond Washington into the world of paranoia that is the modern-day UFO/abductee movement.

Much has already been written about the transparent nature of the Will/Banion character, but there are other Washington heavies being satirized here, particularly Vernon Jordan as a fixer more concerned with protecting his long-term power base than any short-term friends. Not to mention Pamela Harriman, Strom Thurmond, and a few others (such as a few shots at Buckley's arch-nemesis Tom Clancy, both under Clancy's real name and at a Clancy-like character with a quite off-color name).

Buckley's work is clearly the product of a lot of in-depth research. Those familiar with UFO lore will recognize the Stanton Friedman (the goateed nuclear physicist), Budd Hopkins, Shirley MacLaine, and Colonel Phillip Corso characters, though Friedman is portrayed as much more diabolical (plus Buckley mixes in a bit of Jim "face on Mars" Hoagland).

He understands the fringe of the UFO movement quite well (Linda Howe, under her real name, and her obsession with supposedly alien-caused cattle mutilations provide numerous comic moments).

I found myself laughing quite frequently throughout this book, because Buckley knows his both his central topic as well as the power game that is played in Washington.

Without spoiling the plot, I can say that Buckley posits a comically realistic (if untrue) scenario where the abductees aren't all crazy and there aren't any greys or Nordics running around grabbing people off the road and invading their nether regions. The book climaxes with an OJ-style trial, with a Gerry Spence character representing the defense.

Among the highlights are the explanatory footnotes, some of which are useful, others of which are comic. For instance, recounting an attempt to smear a witness by implying that a murder victim had a copy of a porno mag called "Juggs", Buckley adds the following footnote: "* A glossy magazine devoted to large-breasted women, begun as a color insert in the Atlantic Monthly".

For those liberals out there, relax, none of Buckley's novels push any sort of conservative agenda and all three may be read by those across the spectrum without any concern about the politics inherent in the book.

Read this book. You won't go wrong. Then go to your library and find "The White House Mess", a strangely prescient set of White House memoirs written 6 years before anybody ever heard of George Stephanopoulos.

I picked this book up off the shelf at my local book store because the cover and title caught my eye. The story, however, was not so great. Jackson Tate, the main character, lost his wife and two children in a terrible accident. The story starts with them already gone and goes on to tell about his life the during the following year. They do flash back a few times to talk about the accident and funeral so you know what how it all happened. Overall, the story is a little bland and you don't feel like you really get to know any of the characters. I finished the book but it definitely wasn't a page-turner.

I'm a little bit embarrassed at how much I enjoyed this book. The plot is predictable and more than a little bit sappy. But something about the development of the mood and of the characters pulled me in. I read it a week or two ago, and keep thinking about it. Anybody who loves a highly emotional story will surely enjoy this book.

I guess I'm the odd (wo)man out here, because I believed Mr. Mark's book to be quite intriguing. Having always had an acute interest in the sciences (an avocation rather than occupation, lending to the fact that I'm not keen on all the technical facts..), I found the author's use of scientific quotes, theories, and terminology relatable, interesting, and magical. Yes, maybe the plot is lacking in originality, but considering the odd-numbered "basic" plots rumored to be the only thing is use, a writer has to make up for the "used" plot in an appealing story. I think this was done. This is the only book I have read of Andrew Mark's (and the only he's written, to my knowledge) but I wonder if he wrote again that it might be better than the Nicholas Sparks' used used used plot I keep seeing? I'm probably the odd man out there, too.

There are so many sites listed on the internet which are available for free - why shell out almost twenty bucks for something which can never be as up to date as celebs change their agents like they change underwear! There was no rating option for 0 stars. This is also directed to every other autograph collecting address book out there....not this one in particular. Use your resources at hand before digging into your wallets :-)

Sent for 4 autographs; one was returned deceased and two were returned for expired forwarding order.

This 352 page step-by-step guide to celebrity authographs contains everything you'll need to know to enjoy this hobby. There are more than 950 black and white photos of celebrities with their autographs, and more than 7,000 listings and updated addresses of celebrities. Simple, detailed instructions show you exactly where to write, how to write and who not to waste your time on. Each celebrity is rated, as to their responsiveness to requests. An absolute necessity to succeed in this hobby. It will save you much time, energy, and postage and help you develop an enjoyable, and valuable, collection. There's even a list of winners and losers from 1996 to 2000 and the top ten best and worst signers. Contains a wealth of information. Add it to your library.

The authors claim that just because average real return (after inflation) on the stock market has averaged 7% this does not mean you can count on this in the future. Let's take the most pessimistic scenario of long term economic downturn leading to the next few decades of extremely poor return on stocks - though again this is without precedent in our history let's assume the possibility all the same.

Public companies are nothing more than productive assets - investments in people and equipment - that help create a valuable product (good or service) for cash. The value of a company is determined by its ability to produce cash flows from now out into the future. From these cash flows companies reinvest and grow making stock price appreciate, paying dividends, paying bondholders and paying salaries. Social Security taxes come from these salaries. If there is a long-term economic decline - stagnant or decreasing cash flows - then salaries and accompanying tax revenue will also fall. So if the economy takes a long-term slide downward where will the government get the tax revenues to pay for Social Security?

The authors fail to show how the current social security system will pay out less than 20% of what young participants (those under 40) contribute over their working careers. And this ridiculously low return on contributions (adjusted for inflation) does not even allow those participants to get any "real" return on their investment. Putting money into a passbook savings account will at least return close to the rate of inflation so that over the long haul you'll get back something close to what you put in. The authors fail to show how badly shortchanged the young contributors are by the current system. For this reason I don't recommend anyone under 40 to bother reading this book if they want to get the truth on social security.

Social Security PRIVATEERS tell us that in 2029.or 2032...now 2050 (notice that the date has to be constantly readjusted BACK every year) it is "calculated" by a Government advisory commission that Social Security won't have enough income to cover more than 75 percent of the benefits it must pay to aging baby boomers.

But the authors point out, the specificity is illusory, all lever-pulling and smoke-blowing from the Wizard of Oz. The projections aren't economic but actuarial extrapolations based on assumptions that the all the actuaries know are fictitious at best. Tweak them ever so slightly--lift real wages by a quarter- or half-percent per annum, or immigration by a little--and the so-called "crisis" disappears entirely. But according to the apparat-niks at the CATO Institute and the attack dogs at the OUT-Fox-ed Network--you might think the numbers have come down from Moses. They haven't. Social Security isn't in trouble and the criticisms of it are not logical as the authors of "The Phony Crisis" point out.

First of all, Social Security is an INSURANCE System, not an "investment". When you factor in the cost of buying disability and survivor insurance and "invest the difference"...the performance "advantage" of equity markets gets razor-thin at best. It turns out that Social Security yields the same as nice safe government bonds, which any intelligent investor knows should form the basis of an investment portfolio.

Secondly, the so-called performance advantage of the markets has a whole lot of IFs that the PRIVATEERS conveniently fail to mention.

Forget hyper-collapse 1929-style for the moment. Since the Crash of October 1987, U.S. markets have been on a nonstop charge; but if you'd gone into the same markets in 1970, you were worse off by 1980--not to mention where you'd be today if you'd bet on Japan in the mid-eighties or Southeast Asia's "sure thing" markets a couple of years ago. Will you do all right in the long term, as brokers and economists insist? Well, probably yes--but then as Keynes observed..."in the long run, we're all dead."

Here's where the income and wealth distribution effects of privatization turn very ugly. For millions of Americans--who bet on Kaypro instead of Microsoft (oops), Pan Am instead of American (sorry) or cattle futures without the skill and connections of Hillary Clinton (smile, please)--life at 75 could mean not "golden years" but working for the folks at the golden arches, or even being out on the street. A FACT of life that the young people who invested in the dotcom bubble are learning the hard way.

How many of us realistically will beat the averages? If 120 million workers are turned loose to bet the markets---40 million of whom are marginally literate or numerate--as the privateers recommend---it turns out that most will lose. The mutual fund industry's dirty little secret is that three-fourths of funds under-perform market indexes. Yet such funds have millions of naïve investors in them; in one recent survey, a majority of mutual fund investors couldn't even distinguish between a "load" and a "no-load" fund.

There is another issue, so far undiscussed in the debate. For the first time in nearly thirty years, the federal budget's in balance. But it's in balance because each year the Treasury borrows $80 billion from the Social Security Trust Fund surplus, and "covers" the deficit in the rest of the federal budget. If a big piece of Social Security contributions go into private accounts, the trust fund surplus will disappear and the federal budget will plunge back into deficit. Which federal programs are we supposed to cut to make up for it?

If you count the cost of the so-called "free market reforms" over the past twenty years--to a once-viable savings-and-loan system, to Mexican workers and peasants (who've paid for bailouts not once but twice), to the world's poor as they've worked off the global debt crisis. Think about the lives of Indonesian peasants, or Korean and Thai workers today--all set to pay for the "can't miss" marketization of Southeast Asia, just as Americans have so wonderfully benefited from downsizing, capital-gains reduction and globalization.

The folks that brought you ALL these disasters are the ones telling us that now it's Social Security's turn to face the "free market reform" just because it doesn't meet the ideological test of a handful of right-wing zealots.

Social Security is not a disaster. Benefits are moderately progressive, meaning that the bottom 60 percent of retirees get more back than they paid in. More than 90 percent of us pay into it during our working lives and more than 90 percent of us can count on its benefits when we retire. The minor adjustments that are outlined by the authors are all that is necessary to save Social Security.

I realize that this collection of interviews wasn't designed as a whole that transcends the sum of its parts; however, more guidance of any kind was needed here. I'm not asking for a beautiful puzzle whose pieces fit together perfectly, but don't just give me a pile of pieces dumped on the floor carelessly. There was no flow to Bad Guys, and even the chapters don't do much to sort things out- everything is sort of clumped together under the heading of "CRIME," which is too huge a theme not to be subdivided. Creatively, very little was required of this author, and he could have spiced up what little original writing he actually added to this compilation.

Some of the tales are interesting, but the book plays like a series of quotes instead of a tapestry that tells something (incidentally, many of the quotes are quite funny or insightful). It was hard to sort out who was saying what, with almost no details provided about the speakers, who blended in seamlessly in absence of distinguishing characteristics. Not to mention that most of these career criminals had no shortage of offenses to talk about, to the point where there was no use in parsing out their stories into chapters organized by crime. As a result, you gain no more insight into the psychological profile of the murderer than you do of the card sharks.

It is galling how the (criminal) narrators feel they are resigned to their fates, and powerless to stop their lives of crime. Most often than not, it was boredom that drove them to their crimes. There is not a lot of enablement here, which is nice, but nor is there any penitence. There is a lot of self-righteousness on the part of the criminals, many of whom immersed themselves in their seedy worlds because it was easier than securing a lower-paying real job. Many spoiled rich kids got involved in crime to fuel drug habits, and because they weren't used to having to work for things. Many criminals felt that rich folks had it coming when they got robbed- as if possessing money through hard work were more of a crime than beating people to acquire financial gain. Many felt that society in general deserved to get plundered because the system was so vulnerable, and made it so easy for them to get away with their despicable acts.

In general, the only sorrow expressed was precisely due to the fact that these guys and gals got caught and are being interviewed from prison- instead of due to any moral clarity- and it is quite maddening to read.

It is a wonderful book! The words from the criminals is what we call "Right from the horse's mouth! Their words make your skin crawl!" A must read for crime story fans.

Taking Peri to visit Kew Gardens, the Doctor's long list of enemies comes into play and the TARDIS is drawn off track to a mining village in 19th century England. And there not one but two renegade Time Lords are laying down their plans...

This story is probably best remembered for introducing the Rani, a renegade Time Lord of the female gender (I really don't like to call her a Time Lady because she certainly isn't a lady!). Played with great panache on TV by Kate O'Mara, here in the novelisation by script writers Pip and Jane Baker she comes across very cold - perhaps colder than on TV. While I generally like the Rani, I do have a problem with the fact that the Bakers can't seem to show us that she is a genius - they have to have people tell us she is again and again and again...

Also on Earth, and the reason for the TARDIS being knocked off course, is the Master. He draws the Rani into his plans for revenge on the Doctor and Peri, using her genius (about which he waxes lyrical on several occasions) by hijacking some of her inventions.

The story suffers a little at the hands of the continuity craze that held the Doctor Who production team in its grip at the time. For instance, in speculating about who could have interfered with the TARDIS' journey, Peri suggests the Daleks might have been behind it. Peri hadn't met the Daleks at this point, and it seems unlikely she's know about their time travel technology.

However, once out in the English countryside, the story settles down into a more acceptable state, and we get the spectacle of three Time Lords trying to outthink each other. A good thing which we rarely have had the opportunity to observe.

The Bakers' writing style is OK, but I suspect it reflects their unfamiliarity with novel writing.