This book should still be in print. Consider yourselves lucky if you own a copy. Keep it for posterity! My wife picked up a copy for $1.50 at a thrift shop - she had no idea of its worth, neither did I until I read it! One man's trash is another's treasure. I treasure it.

Graham states in the preface "...I have attempted to portray something else which does not depend on the latest decisions of the United States Supreme Court ...the endeavors of the Framers, a set of timeless principles ..." Graham meets his objective, and more.

To meet his objective he goes as far back in history as the Magna Carta, he includes real cases that resulted in the formulation of English common law and Blackstone's commentary on it, he includes much of Virginia's pre-Convention Constitution and brings us to the period of the Constitutional Convention. Then he explains, in detail, every issue faced by the Framers. How those issues were resolved by background understanding, rhetoric, compromise and, often, consensus. He explains the struggles faced over "the awful question" - including (speculating over?) what "might have been" had certain people, places, and things not intervened. He explains the post formulation period in terms of events up to and through the awful Civil War and finally the Reconstruction.

Concerning the title of the book, Graham has the founders understanding of "confederacy" - he states it well. It is sans the emotional connotation some place on that term today.

Graham, as he admits, "stands a defender of the South in the American Civil War, doing so as a son of Minnesota, because, after a careful study of this whole problem, I must concede that John Calhoun and Alexander Stephens better understood the design of the Philadelphia Convention than Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln". As he claims Graham made a careful study. As a defender he is not in anyway defending slavery, he adamantly opposes it, then and now. He merely defends the South based on their right to secede. Whether he intended to or not he also wards off attacks of the righteous (my term not his and I am a son of Iowa, the North) as he points out how slavery would soon have ended without the calamity, including 600,000 lives, of the Civil War.

The book's only drawback, as far as I was concerned, was due to my own lack of a classical education - I have no understanding of the Latin. So Latin judicial terms used frequently throughout were both an annoyance and a reminder of my lack of that education.

I am fortunate to have a copy of this great book. Graham instilled in me a further understanding, and a concomitant increase in my admiration, of those who participated in the formation of our Constitution - both pro and con - and some members of Congress, both North and South, in the periods up to the Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction. He also convinced me of, what I can only call, the evil intentions of others, most notably Stanton. And he neither worships nor despises Abraham Lincoln - he merely points out "the good and the bad" as those terms relate to the Constitution. Graham is not a "debunker"!

Graham lived up to the promises conveyed in the title "Principles of Confederacy", the sub-title "The Vision and the Dream & The Fall of the South", and the preface.

"Quick" should be required reading for anyone losing faith in the humanity of physicians. John Graham-Pole, M.D., a pediatric oncologist, exemplifies the marriage of art and science. His poetry touched my core as he introduces us to the small patients who have won such a large part of his heart.

This text is a collection of essay by some of the most notable and widely received theologians in current cultural/Postmodern discourse. The essays cover a wide spectum of thematics, from sex to the city, music to body, Christian orthodoxy to radical phenomenological takes on materiality. Most importantly is the robust manifesto that peals large over the postmodern, nihilistic terrain: it is a call, in the first place, toward a radical alternative of a people that can no longer be defined by the vulgar liberal/conservative categories. These people--the mystical body politic of Christ--can be prescribed as a movement toward and into a Trinitarian de-centered body that resists captialist strategies of control and opens out acts of anarchic charity--the life giving participation in God. Radical Orthodoxy is the global movement in which all Christian are called. They are called because through Radical Orthodoxy, the idols of both the liberal and conservative are fully revealed: the idols of ideological control shot-through a pious or "inclusive" (and always bad) reading of Holy writ.

R.B. Cunninghame Graham (1852-1936) is one of the great neglected literary geniuses of the last hundred years. Scottish folklorist Hamish Henderson summed up his fate perfectly in the title of a 1952 book review: "Who Remembers R.B. Cunninghame Graham?" Even today, Graham -- writer, socialist, South American traveler, anti-imperialist, horse-trader -- is far less appreciated in Scotland, his own home, than in Argentina, a land celebrated in many of his writings and where he died in February, 1936. Yet the aura of Scottishness that hangs about him is impressive. A direct descendant of the Scottish king Robert II, he would have been king of Scotland himself if the Stuarts and England hadn't barged in. As an MP in the House of Commons (1886-1892), he was such a vocal supporter of progressive ideas like universal suffrage and the 8-hour work-day that he was often reprimanded and once, after the Bloody Sunday demonstrations in 1887, spent six weeks in prison. Finally, as first president of both the Scottish Labor Party (1886) and the Scottish National Party (1928 [aged 76]), he pushed for Scottish Home Rule.

Yet the most interesting thing about him, his writing, is even less well-known than his political career. As John Walker, the editor of several Graham anthologies, points out, he "is one of those writers [some] people claim to have heard of, but have never read." Compared to Graham's usually lively South American sketches, his descriptions of Scottish life and landscape are more densely written and "mellow". Yet the quiet scenes of the Highlands and Islands he conjures up won't fail to viscerally grip you.

The lyric sketches at the beginning of the book are some of Graham's best. "Inch Cailleach" (1927) describes the wooded Island of the Nuns, a place "stranded like a whale upon the waters" of Loch Lomond, near Graham's home at Menteith, in Dumbartonshire, just north of Glasgow. Graham muses on its monastic past: "The voices of the sisters singing in the choir must have been scarce distinguishable from the lapping of the wavelets on the beach, or, blending with them, made up a harmony, as if nature and men were joining in a pantheistic hymn. Nuns may have lived upon the island with, or without, vocation, have eaten out their hearts with longing for their lost world ... but the dim sisterhood has left no record of its passage upon earth except the name Inch Cailleach [Island of the Nuns], beautiful in its liquid likeness to the sound of the murmuring waves, and the wind sighing in the brackens and the bents."

Later, he describes a grey chapel, burial place of the McFarlane and McGregor clans. "Quietly they lie, they who knew never a quiet hour in life ... Bitterly they paid for the slaughter of Glenfruin, with two hundred years of outlawry, and with the hand of every man against them. Well did they deserve the title of the 'Clan Na Cheò' [Clan of the Mist], for the mist rolling through the corries was their best hiding-place..."

While the passing of time is palpable here, the nuns, McGregors, and McFarlanes "have left an aura that still pervades the leafy isle. Nothing is left of them but the vaguest memory, and yet they seem to live in every thicket, every copse." Graham exhorts at the end of the sketch, "Let them sleep on. They have had their foray, they have chased the roe and followed the red-deer. The very mists upon the mountains are far more tangible than they are now..." Yet in a dramatic swoop, Graham conjures up a heroic Last Day, when all this island's dead shall gather again: "Under their rude tombstones men whose feet, shod in their deerskin brogues, were once as light as fawns, are waiting till the shrill skirl of the Piob Mor [the great Highland bagpipe] shall call them to the great gathering of the clans."

An immensely impressive book. 5 stars.

"To Mamma with Love" it is dedicated, and this is a love story, of growing up well loved at Pinedale. Mrs. Graham has put on paper most thoughtfully her story of growing up in a big family with an artist father in the wonderful north Georgia hills. Her mother, Mamma, was surely little short of an angel, raising almost a dozen kids on a most uncertain income, teaching the children at home in addition to canning and cooking, keeping them all in well-mended togs, and catering to the needs of her husband who had the temperament said to be typical of artists, up in the clouds to down very, very low. The milk cow, the dogs and cats were all pets. If a baby bird died there was a funeral planned and carried out by Brenda and little sister Suzanne. The seasons of the year come to life under Brenda's deft pen. Some problems have solutions and some mysteries are solved. There are some good laughs and some good cries, too! And a big dose of faith in God when death strikes the busy Knight family.

The Romans how can you not love them! This book gives you the reason why. It covers all aspects of the Roman livelihood, their homes, jobs, lands and customs. I think it is one of the better general informative books about the Romans out there, and would give a real good education for the general reader. For the skilled professional or student of the classics, this book will help touch up what you don't know and secure what you do. It is worth the read, and you will be able to tell why it is a standard classic used to teach in so many universities.

Iain Sinclair knows the mythical paths of London like no-one else. In poetic often painfully intense prose, he conjures up the half-dead spirits that stalk the streets of this seedy town. The landscape is dominated by dodgy second-hand book dealers skulking in the shadows obsessed by the Ripper murders, and by the vicious presence of Jack himself, the embodiement of powerful evil forces embedded in the fabric of the city. If you only ever read one novel about Jack the Ripper, or never wanted to read one, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings is a must. A warning though: it is not for the faint-hearted.

This is the second book by Graham Greene that I have read, and found it to be a wonderful book. The symbolism, while at times a bit too obvious, aids Greene in communicating his message - that being, as other's have said, the struggle between "good and evil". While the character's of Pinky, the 17 year old gangster, and Rose, the 16 year old girl who becomes embroiled in Pinky's life, are used to contrast good and evil, Rose and Ida Arnold are utilised by Greene to juxtapose innocence and experience, another of the novel's central themes. I would recommend this book to anyone who appreciates the talent's of Greene, and for those who search for more than just a "story" when they read.

I enjoyed BRIGHTON ROCK. I had never read anything that Graham Greene wrote before picking up this volume, and I was very impressed by so many aspects of it. On the surface, it's simply a gangster story set around the racetrack of a bustling English vacation town in the 1930s. But there are so many little touches and details that Greene adds that all raise this story up and make it more than just another exciting and gory tale of mob violence.

The plot is perhaps the weakest element of the book, but this is not a story that revolves around its plot. The plot points are merely the catalysts that propel these wonderful characters forward. We meet Pinkie, a mere seventeen-year-old, who has found himself in the unenviable task of becoming the head of a criminal organization that is embroiled in a power-struggle with an even larger, better-funded gang. In his world, Pinkie is fighting not only for dominance in his gang, but also battling for territory and control in the town of Brighton. However, he also encounters a strange conflict from an unlikely source: a fun-loving, cheerful, iron-willed woman by the name of Ida.

Ida comes into the story by the most unlikely of coincidences, and is determined to investigate what she feels is a grave injustice. She plays a great foil to Pinkie's character, even though the two of them rarely meet. The only downside that I saw to this fascinating person was the fact that after her fantastic introduction she seems to be coasting through the rest of the novel on autopilot. For a normal book, this would be perfectly expected, but Greene set the bar very high for himself here, especially with this character's motivation, and it just seems a bit jarring when not everything maintains an equal level of excellence.

Greene brings in quite a lot of thought to this novel. Religion, love, spirituality, and death are not things that one expects to undergo detailed analysis on the pages of a crime thriller, yet Greene approaches all of these with maturity and understanding. Each character (bar a handful) is given believable motivations. There are some plot pieces that are predictable, but that only means that I was daring the characters not to go the way that they did, and genuinely upset when they did unfortunate things, even though I had anticipated them. Greene draws on so many ideas to breath life into his novel. He places familiar concepts into irregular characters, and unfamiliar concepts into regular characters; the results are often wonderful and thought provoking.

As I mentioned, I'd not read a Graham Greene novel prior to this, but I certainly plan on doing so in the future. Greene packed quite a bit of careful thought into this intelligent thriller, and the outcome is as exciting as it is reflective. Gripping and spellbinding, this is definitely worth reading.

Graham Greene writes crisply, and the colours and textures with which he paints an inter-war Brighton are vivid, if uniformly gray and brutal. The story is simple enough: I don't think it's what the characters do as much as what they stand for which interests Greene - for this reason the protagonists are not especially lifelike: Pinky is all brooding, anti-social and violent; absent even a hint of redemption (Greene uses the word 'poisoned' a lot in relation to Pinky), whereas Ida is drawn as a libertine Dickensian harlot whose only motivating moral is the pursuit of fun ' and, somewhat incongruously, really ' justice, for the forsaken Hale. The opposing forces or good and evil are far too contrary to have been meant to be taken at face value.

For all the solemnity of Greene's main object, at times he pulls some surprises: just when the going begins to get truly rough, there is a delightfully comic scene involving a lecherous but repressed lawyer that had me laugh out loud. I haven't seen the film version, but the lawyer, Prewitt would be a peach of a part for some hammy old Shakespearean actor fancying a break into the big time.

The narrative didn't really rivet me; Greene's writing is a bit too artful to be truly exciting, and in places I found Brighton Rock rather too easy to put down. Having said that, what I really admired were the backlights and figurative plays with which Greene makes his point - they exist alongside the plot, so that Greene can say his piece without having to shoehorn it into the story as bluntly as a lesser author might.

Whoever picked the title "Titanic Survivor" for this book apparently hoped to cash in on the Titanic bandwagon from the "Titanic" movie. Despite the title, the book does not devote much time to the actual story of Titanic but instead details the life of Violet Jessop, the survivor. There is more description of the Titanic's sister ship, the Britannic, and that sinking. At times the book appears to be disjointed. It is a good read overall, especially for anyone interested in history from a personal perspective. Definitely worth recommending!

Violet Jessup is an articulate, vital, resiliant woman who has written a thoroughly enjoyable account of her fascinating life. I read this book primarily (although not exclusively) because of its tie-in to the TITANIC disaster - Jessup being a stewardess on that ill-fated ocean liner - but I found myself enthralled by her life story from the first page. In fact, her too-brief TITANIC memories are only a part of her amazing life lived. Editor John Maxtone-Graham does a first rate job of filling in the blanks in Jessup's narrative. While I am not convinced that Jessup was a "titanic survivor" in more ways than one - the title, I'm sure, is meant to imply as much - she certainly proved herself to be a remarkable one.

I know that many people will buy this book for the fact alone that Miss Jessop survived the Titanic sinking. That episode, however, represents only a tiny fraction of the entire tapestry of her life, and it is that "saga", recounted here with invaluable editing and background information, that is truly riveting.

Prior to reading this book, I was familiar with Miss Jessop's White Star collision and sinking experiences onboard the Olympic, Titanic, and Britannic, but had NO idea of the rest of her work, background or personality.

What a life! And when you finish reading this, you will be hoping that there are more memoirs hidden somewhere! I did a marathon read of this book, not being able to stop until I finished.

This book is truly a winner! I am so thankful that it has been published.