Well, any buff of the US Civil War knows there is a BIG question on just how much Matthew Brandy actually shot with his camera. There is little doubt he often took credit for those working under him, and showed a bent at making the Brady name linger in history as the first to photograph a war from beginning to end. But that question pushed aside, forget who took what pictures, unless arguing that particular point, and simply sit back and get blown away by the sheer numbers of photos! Over 500 pages (often with half a dozen or more photos per page) of portraits, landscapes and even some illustrations in colour plates, this is a wonderful companion to the writings of Bruce Catton or Henry Steele Commanger.

Instead of just reading about the people and places that were the stage of the War Between the States, see them! Pictures of People, informal and formal portraits, pictures of encampments, riverboats, fortifications, bridges, of troops and the bloody aftermath of war. Brady and his contemporaries were often accused of 'stage' pictures, but it does not take away the power to move you. It was sad, 'the battles lost' often depicted Confederate dead, showing a distinct bias to further to belief the Union was invincible and the South doomed.
Regardless of the taint or copyright/ownership of the period, regardless of the yellow journalism of staging the photos, you cannot deny the value to casual historians, to writer of the period or to people wishes to see these places and the people that created some of the bloodies battles in history.

A wonderful collection.

This volume of Matthew Brady's Civil War photographs, history, and battlefield accounts is for the very serious Civil War historian. First published to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the great war, it was given as a gift to my Great-great grandfather, John T. Quick, by General Ulyssis S. Grant, in appreciation for his supply and management of horses and mules for his army throughout the war, particularly in Kentucky and Tennessee. My mother possesses this book, autographed by General Grant. It's value is undetermined. It's content is fascinating. It is probably the best and most accurate account of the Civil War, written as close to the time of the war as possible. It is my opinion that, like the history books of the Holocaust, Matthew Brady's Illustrated History of the Civil War should be included in every public and school library in our nation. The sobering photographs sear into one's mind, teaching us important lessons about man's inhumanity to man,.....the great tragedy of human conflict. Triumphantly, it leads one to further appreciate the sacrifices that were made to keep us as one nation. Once the reader opens this book, they will be hardpressed to put it down. Get a copy. Read it. Share it with your children, and teach them well. -- Mrs. Elizabeth J. Hansen, Hudson, OHio.

In the 1840s Benjamin Lossing visited the site of almost every event of the American Revolution. His resulting 2 volume "Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution" has never been surpassed for historical accuracy or general readability. Lossing made the Revolution come alive through his interviews with aging veterans & patriot ladies, many of whom guided him over the battle sites, locating points of interest. Lossing's vivid descriptions & woodcut sketches of battle sites and historic homesteads, many since destroyed, are invaluable to later students of the Revolution. Lossings work is living history, filled with first-person accounts & anecdotes from surviving eyewitnesses & descriptions of colonial artifacts recovered before the era of archeologist & land-developer. Despite a tendency to pontificate on everything from religion & temperance to race & culture (he is a product of Empire Era America), Lossing's work is lucid, accurate, and pleasant reading.

What is the value of Benson John Lossing's 3 volume work--titled: WASHINGTON AND THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, with original tin plates --no publishing date, but published by Worthington, NY NY.

I purchased these 15 to 25 years ago at a garage sale. Green hard covers and almost mint condition.

John Benson's annual is always a trend ahead and has been for years. It gives me the overall perspective that I need to prepare for the draft. The insights into a manager's thinking are important and something I don't find elsewhere. Not just a projection but the reasons for the projection.

I have been reading books on the assassination of John Kennedy my entire life. Then I came across this book, "Who's Who in the JFK Assassination", I couldn't beleive it. Never before did I read through a book so fast and when I was done, I had to go back and start over. It's not really meant to read cover-to-cover, though. When I am reading a book on the assassination, and see a name I don't know, I can flip to it in this book and know just who this man is. For anyone who has looked at the assassination, they know you come across hundreds of names and you can't remember them all, thats where this book came in. Let's say I see the name Ruby Henderson; I can look her up in this book and find out she saw TWO men in the 6th floor of the TSBD, one of whom had a rifle, but she thought they were with the secret service. Anyway, I would tell ANY person looking for information on the Kennedy Assassination to get this book anyway they can. What else can I say, Michael Benson did a GREAT job.

A comprehensive book which examines the farm systems of each major league team. It evaluates the talent and the chances for success at the major league level. There is an organization chart and a drafting record for each team. This is the best book of its kind on the market but it needs to focus on how the major league affects the minor league system and evaluate the organization as a whole in future editions.

This is the "cleanup hitter" in the lineup of John Benson baseball books. The scientific approaches used in this book to evaluate young minor league talent are validated by the excellent track history of his future predictions for success at the major league level. The success of my annual league drafts has improved greatly during the 3 years I have used this book. Unfortunately many fellow managers are now onto this book also. This book is perfect for finding some little known player to pick in the lower draft rounds and to watch him become a star. Its an excellent tool for ranking the annual crop of rookies.

John Benson's Future Stars 2001-2002 provides excellent, detailed information on hundreds of little-known minor league players, and does a good job of projecting how they will perform in the Majors. His introductory chapters explain the methods he uses - and it's not just guesswork and hunches. He approaches player evaluation as a science and has a long track record for identifying future stars. Highly recommended!

This coffee table book has some absolutely beautiful pictures of Salt Lake City, the Wasatch Mountains and surrounding areas. The photographers did a fantastic job capturing light, and the pictures are extremely well printed. This would be a great book to have on hand while watching the olympics.

It is also a good book for people who want to have a coffee table book about Utah.

The book itself starts with a brief overview of the Salt Lake Bid, and the resulting Olympic bidding scandal. It then takes us on a tour of the geology of Utah and the mountain west. The book includes pictures of both the mountains in Northern Utah, and the Colorado plateau in Southern Utah. It provides a summary of historical and cultural information about the Salt Lake Valley.

In the last quarter of the book, we get into sports photography, and we can see some high quality shoots of skiers and other athletes.

All in all, it is a well made and designed coffee table book. The main reason to buy it is the high quality photography. You will definitely enjoy having it on hand while you watch the Olympics. The book covers a great deal of information, mainly at a summary level; so it really would not serve as a reference book.

Finally, having been written before the Olympics, there are no actual pictures of 2002 Olympic events. My guess is the book was written before 9/11/2001, and there is no mention of the international tensions which will be in everyone's mind during the events.

This is a great overview of the Salt Lake Olympics and Salt Lake Valley. If you want one handy reference book with information all in one place, this is your move.

There are people who truly reflect their time, or at least a period within their life, and what they believed about it. Steinbeck is one of those people. This book presents some of his best work. It also shows a change in the times and the man. Steinbeck's time, at least the time he addressed in his best writing was the depression, World War II, and some of the fifties. Unfortunately, he did not quit then, and some of his later work is the writing of a man grown disillusioned and sad.

This book takes us through many years, and many places. Much of it is well known. It's really great when the topic is a personal friend, or an unsuspecting stranger (the article written after the death of Ed Ricketts, or the article about a French village in the Alps shortly after World War II). It gives a consistent voice to the views of one man and his reaction to the world around him. Much of it has been popular from time to time, and much of it has always been unpopular with a certain group of people. It would be easier to pick out the 'good' from the 'bad' is they were arranged chronologically, but they are not. If you are a fan of good writing, the whole book is 'good.' If you want to admire what Lee (in East of Eden) called 'clean thinking' skip the end. By the time I got to the middle of 'America and Americans' (about the last quarter of the book) it was getting old, and frankly I love Steinbeck's fiction so much that I could not finish it. By that time, it had become a litany of the complaints of my father, and the music was gone.

Critics argue about how great a writer Steinbeck was. One of their greatest criticisms was that he was too popular, or that he wrote for a popular following. That may be a valid criticism, and it may be one of the best reasons for reading his work. Which ever it is for you, it is here in abundance. The intimate details, the exacting prose, and the popular viewpoint. Whatever else we think, there is a Steinbeck voice that is unique, and worthy.

The strongest point in Steinbeck's writing is the sense of place. This book of non-fiction presents the land and the people. The real people and places who became Joad's, or Trask's, or sheriff's, are here in vivid detail. The Salinas of his youth, New York, France, Italy, traffic in Rome, and seaside villages are all vivid and inviting.

If you have read "The Harvest Gypsies" "The Log From the Sea of Cortez" "The Grapes of Wrath" or "East of Eden" many of the things in here will be familiar. If you have not, read this book. It may make them more appealing.

John Steinbeck (1902-68) wrote newspaper columns for two years during the 1950s in addition to reporting on the 1956 presidential nominating conventions and stints as a war correspondent during World War II and the Vietnam War. He also wrote some articles for magazines and the ruminations on America for a book of photographs that was his last book (and which fills about a quarter of this collection).

Always he wrote about his impressions, primarily of people. The best pieces in this collection are not accounts of foreign wars but of people in distinct places. Like Steinbeck's life, the book begins with Salinas, California, continues through San Francisco and New York City to Sag Harbor on Long Island, where Steinbeck lived in the 1950s and 60s. In the "Journalist Abroad" section there are strong pieces on people in Positano and Ireland. And there is a section on friends (all male, of course) including a long memoir of his idol and naturalist mentor, Ed Ricketts, and short but very illuminating memoirs of the popular WWII correspondent Ernie Pyle and the photographer Robert Capa (who accompanied Steinbeck on his Russian visit), plus concise tributes to Adlai Stevenson as an orator and to Henry Fonda as an actor.

The section "On writing" is regrettably short, and the selections of WWII colums from _Once There Was a War_ (a book which is in print) are mystifyingly missing the best ones, which Steinbeck wrote during the invasion of Italy. The Vietnam reports are unconvincing propaganda from what he presented as a war against Mao. (Brezhnev, perhaps, but not Mao!)

Many of the pieces are entertaining in the mock heroic Steinbeck manner of _Tortilla Flat_ and _Travels with Charley_ and some are moving. The text "America and Americans" had little impact. It certainly has not supplanted Tocqueville's analysis of democracy in America, but is not without interest. As generally for Steinbeck in fiction or nonfiction, the description of particular individuals is more interesting than the generalizations.

The editors provide useful introductions to the sections, but must think that Steinbeck's ideas and craft of the 1960s was the same as those of the 1930s. It is difficult but not impossible to find out when a particular piece was published but this vital information is not included in either the table of contents or with the title of the pieces.

As an educator interested not only in John Steinbeck's literature but also in his function as a cultural critic, I find this wonderful new edition, put together to coincide with a series of Steinbeck Centennial events going on all around America in 2002, to be a marvelous source of information. This will bring one of Steinbeck's lesser known and later works, "America and Americans," to the attention of many more people, and that text, which is both a celebration of the American experience and a cautionary warning about where we were headed, as Steinbeck saw it in the 1960s, would be a great selection for book club groups to read and discuss in this centennial year.

This 400+ page collection also has seven thematic chapters that explore Steinbeck's nonfiction and journalistic writing in these topic areas: places he loved, socio-political struggles, the craft of writing, friends and friendship, travel abroad, being a war correspondent, and miscellanea. This is great bedside reading: something delicious to dip into, eloquent and thoughtful, and one can jump around.

The editors are both noted Steinbeck scholars who are making this man accessible to the common people (we, the salt of the earth, whom he champions and celebrates in so many of his writings). Perhaps I am partial to John Steinbeck because I live in "Steinbeck Country," but I still think his works deserve our attention and study in the 21st century. He had a lot of significant insights--this book is a wonderful follow-up for those who have only yet experienced his fiction.

I don't normally read "books of the film" but after reading Benson's other two original Bond novels ("Zero Minus Ten" and "The Facts of Death") I decided to give this a try. I did not care much for the film. Benson, however, must have added his own bits (unless they were dropped from the final film) which made the book much more entertaining than the movie. The characters were more fleshed out and the plot made more sense. Not as top-notch as Benson's two original books, but still a surisingly good read. Well done!

Raymond Benson really makes the story and characters of "Tomorrow Never Dies" his own in this adaptation of the script. He adds tons of background information on the rather thin characters from the movie, including a wonderful chapter introducing Wai Lin, the Michelle Yeoh character. (It makes you wish EON would let him write a novel just about her!) Compare this book to "Goldeneye," a novelization written by John Gardner. Gardner just went through the motions, didn't inject any style or substance into the script, did your basic awful movie adaptation. Benson, on the other hand, goes above and beyond and makes a wonderful book out of the script. In my opinion, very few novelizations are worth reading. This one is an exception. It adds to and embellishes on the movie. Read it!

It is rare that a movie/novel tie-in matches the movie's quality. Action scenes don't usually translate well and obvious plot holes and inconsistencies become more apparent than ever. Raymond Benson's Tomorrow Never Dies adaptation is an exception. Using the framework scripted by Bruce Feirstein, Benson pulls off an in-depth, intriguing, action-packed novel that actually surpasses the movie it is based on. One of my main problems with the movie was the total lack of character development for the main characters. Stamper, Elliot Carver, Paris Carver, and Wai Lin all had little to no background which made them seem fake and uninteresting. With Benson's version, they all have detailed histories and are far more intriguing people to read about than they were to watch on the screen. Wai Lin, for instance, had an entire chapter devoted to her in the beginning. It detailed her involvement with the Chinese People's External Security Force, her training, her skills, and many other facets of her life that made her a real person. Her relationship with Bond is also much more realistic. From their first meeting at Carver's party, there is sexual tension between the two. Later in the novel, there is a mixture of mutual admiration and trust. Inevitably this leads to lust, but even that is done tastefully. Benson also fleshed out one of the biggest questions left in my mind after seeing Tomorrow Never Dies: just who was General Chang and what was his purpose. In the movie he was seen for about five seconds and talked about briefly. In the novel we learn that he was a high-ranking official who, before he defected, stole a large amount of stealth material. This is what Wai Lin was investigating when she went to Carver's party and met Bond. It was later revealed that he was working for Carver, not with. All these facts would have made the movie far more interesting. Another issue I had was in regards to Stamper. He came across as an inhuman freak that enjoyed pain. With no more background this seemed ridiculous; however, the novel reveals that his pain and pleasure sensors were actually reversed. As a boy, he was hired to kill Carver's real father whom he did with a sick pleasure. Ten years later he becomes Elliot's henchman and almost his child. Again, with more development, the character of Stamper works. By using the screenplay merely as an outline, Benson is able to create a novel that seems like it was never a movie. The plot is exactly the same as the movie, but much of the dialogue has been changed, as have the action scenes. The BMW car and motorcycle chases are still in there, but their content has been changed. Benson also took quite a few creative licenses and added fight sequences while cutting others; for example, Bond dukes it out with Stamper on top of the speeding Sea Dolphin II. Finally, the novel cuts out much of the in-poor-taste innuendoes that filled the movie. What results is a witty, well-paced novel with far sharper dialogue than its cinematic counterpart. Very well done! Power to the Bond fans!!!!!!!!