David Herbert Donald's "Charles Sumner" is an exhaustive biography touching all areas of the man's life. Throughout, Donald is balanced in his treatment of a controversial man who was described, quite accurately by another reviewer, as the country's first "politically correct" politician. As a person I do not think I would have liked Charles Sumner nor agreed with his extremism in many of the positions he took (most other people in the government did not either), but his life is well worth reading about for a fuller understanding of the decades immedaitely prior to and immediately following the Civil War.

Donald goes into many speeches, newspaper reports, letters, personal opinions of others, and proposed legislation to give one a real feeling for the man. His controversial life and opinions give one much to think about regarding the complex issues of race, reconstruction, and society in mid-nineteenth century America. Although this is not the most lively written of biographies, it is judicious and scholarly. Well worth the time.

Harvard historian David Donald applies his keen intellect to the life of Charles Sumner and writes a worthy biography of a man Americans should know more about. Sumner might be described as the first "PC" politician. If you're interested in the Civil War, race relations, or the perils (and triumphs) of a public life devoted to principle, you'll learn much from this book.

I thought that this was a very assured and informative biography of Thomas Wolfe, not only shedding light on his development and work as an author, but also bringing the reader close to getting a feel of what Wolfe the human being must have been like.

I felt that Donald, whilst being a fan of Wolfe's work, maintained a balanced assessment of him: Wolfe had highly unattractive traits - a heavy drinker, untidy and unkempt, intolerant (especially of Jews, which was ironic given the fact that he had a long relationship with Mrs Aline Bernstein, who was herself Jewish) and frequently overbearing.

Wolfe's early struggles to establish himself as a playwright and his emergence as a novelist are described in detail. Wolfe was essentially a "prose machine" unable to control the flows of words and thus the length and structure of his novels. I found the accounts of Wolfe's relationship with his editors, Maxwell E Perkins and latterly Edward C Aswell, fascinating.

A must for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of this interesting novelist.

Did you know that F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway all had the same editor at Charles Scribner's and Sons: Maxwell Perkins. Some critics have said that Perkins basically wrote Tom Wolfe's last novel because it was a too-long mess that needed to be edited into a cohesive whole. I read halfway through "Look HomeWard Angel" and "Of Time and the River". Both read like a hot day in Asheville, North Carolina. When I have time I plan to go back and reread these novels because Shelby Foote and Walker Percy spoke highly of them.

The author focuses his attention on Sumner's pre-Civil War years when his influence on behalf of the Union and the antislavery cause reached its zenith.

David Donald is renowned for his meticulous research and well written books. He used diaries, manuscripts, scrapbooks, family histories, letters, newspaper files, and valued secondary sources to flesh out his subject. Donald spent ten years on this book and during that time had to absorb the arcane knowledge of the 19th century in such subjects as medicine, law, politics, etc. His scholarship is impeccable. Though forty years have elapsed since the original publication of this book it still satisfies both the casual and serious reader.

If a theme can be assigned to this very good book, it would be, "Sumner was a man who wouldn't compromise his principles no matter the cost." Sumner believed, "...to sanction the enslaving of a single human being was an act which cannot be called small, unless the whole moral law which it overturns or ignores is small." He was convinced that the appeasement of slave holders was impossible; that the various compromises enacted by the Senate were abdications of Northern principle in order to placate the South and to forestall an inevitable constitutional crisis. Sumner pointed out that supporters of the Compromise of 1850 were in fact extreme sectionalists, while antislavery agitators were the true nationalists.

The author points out that slavery was the one great issue beginning in the late 1840s and continuing through the Civil War. Sumner battled the "peculiar institution" for years and made the abolition of slavery paramount. He became the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, a post which he made more important than that of any Ambassador and more influential than that of the Secretary of State of the United States. By 1851, Sumner was one of the most powerful men on the North American continent and was known throughout Europe.

When first viewing slaves Sumner said, "They appear to be nothing more than moving masses of flesh, unendowed with anything of intelligence above the brutes." This book clearly illustrates why his opinion changed and why this complex man fought the lonely fight to remove all legal barriers that sustained racial discrimination. Sumner believed such discrimination fostered racial inferiority and was psychologically harmful to Blacks. He believed the pledge in the Declaration of Independence for universal equality was as much a part of the public law of the land as the Constitution.

In this regard, Sumner continually excoriated the public to reform slavery and eventually influenced hundreds of thousands of Northern voters. When read today, his fiery speeches seem ponderous and stilted. Further, Sumner often used illogical reasoning and had a tendency to extend a principle to its utmost limits - he could be irritating and obtuse at time. Regardless, he was a powerful spokesman for the antislavery movement and his speeches solidified Northern opinion in the "great crusade."

In reading this book, its clear Sumner was insensitive to the power of his words. He really didn't care as he had a remarkable power of rationalization and convinced himself that expediency and justice coincided where the abolition of slavery was concerned. The author hasn't overlooked the part that fortuitous circumstances played in the selection of Sumner as one of the most powerful and enduring forces in the pre-Civil War government. (He led the Radical Republicans during the Civil War) While the borderline between myth and history is often blurred, the author proves that the myth in Sumner's life more often than not matched the real Charles Sumner.

Sumner's involvement in the slavery issue seems compulsive to 21st century readers but it was an outgrowth of his life and times. The humanity of a society can be measured by the quality of its compassion and its ability to feel the anguish of others. In contrast, the inability to feel the lash that strikes another's back is the most destructive trait a society can possess.

Sumner's moral compassion wouldn't allow him to act otherwise when it came to slavery. Sumner believed the issue was simple: Slavery was evil, stamp it out!

This is superb Americana.

Professor Donald provides insight into how the collective decisions of the past have led to so many of the problematic circumstances we face as a nation today. Professors Donald, Baker and Holt take the reader back to over twenty years before the beginning of the Civil War and continue through Reconstruction to examine the various factors and angles from which the entire history of the Civil War and Reconstruction is derived. The student of American History has everything needed in one concise volume to gain a working knowledge of the Civil war and Reconstruction era. This work is a well-documented, factual and detailed account of the most trying period of history our nation has seen to date. The work is accurate, comprehensive and concise. No doubt The Civil War and Reconstruction by David H. Donald will maintain a prominent place in any serious historical library for years to come.

The clearest expression of the Japanese genius is always found in the small...the simple expression of an essential character and insight. In that sense, this book itself exemplifies its subject; the city of Kyoto, Japan's cultural heart. A map on the inside cover with locations of treasured sites begins our orientation. A foreward by Donald Keene evokes his experience of the grace and pleasures of Kyoto and locates us in the poetic character of the city. The visual and tangible is the key to any understanding of Japan and for most of us it is the only route around the barrier of language. It is surprising, but perfectly appropriate, to find our next stage is not text but a series of photographs that rank among the best this writer has seen on the subject (if only as a collection of superb photographs this book would be a bargain). These photographs lead to text that gives us, clearly and succinctly, a brief history of the city.which, in turn, is followed by another series of photographs with examples of daily life and craft continuing the past into the present. A list of principal festivals, line drawings of selected costumes and artifacts, a chronology of Japanese history(on the inside back cover) interspersed through the book all follow the principle of focusing on the essential.. As an introduction to Kyoto this little book is exemplary; as a capsuled insight into Japanese culture it is indispensible.

Which is one author's name which comes to the mind of a patent law attorney for authoritative patent information? Donald Chisum is one of the foremost authority on patent law. His other book is a giant encylopaedia on patents. Honestly, many many of us are never going to read that big encylopaedia. But the same man along with Nard, Swartz, Newman and Kieff has written this casebook. This book is a must read for all those who want to get the best of Chisum's knowledge of patents.

It has the mandatory history part followed by philosophy and economics of patent law. There are two excellent chapters on Nonobvoiousness and and Utility. Cases are selected with care and properly edited. There are some sidebars too.

Simon-Smithburg-Thompson: Public Admninistration was my first text book in English - year 1968 at the University of Tampere, Finland. I have beeen professor of Public Administration since 1980. Still, it a classic.

Herbert A. David turned 70 in 1995. Much of his long career was spent as chairman of the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University. David is well known for his authoritative texts on pairwise comparison methods and order statistics.

He is known as H. A. at Iowa State so as not to confuse him with his colleague Herbert T. David who also is a Professor of Statistics at Iowa State. In fact at the end of this book Herbert T. David write a very interest review of the life and career of Herbert A. David.

H. A. David made major contributions to the theory and application of order statistics, biostatistics and the design of experiments. This is reflected in the topics chosen by the distinguished statisticians that contributed articles, most of whom are students or colleagues of David.

Noel Cressie write on a generalization of Akaike's information criterion for model selection. Dunnett talks about applications of the multivariate t distribution. Galambos and Xu discuss multivariate Bonferroni-type inequalities. Kale and Sebastian provide some interesting examples of distributions that are symmetric and have kurtosis equal to 3 (the same as for the Normal Distribution) but are non-normal. Some of the densities have very unusual shapes. These are a few of the papers under the general category of "General Distribution Theory and Inference". The articles are all entertaining and interesting and some contained discussion of David's contributions to statistics. Other anecdotes and appreciation letters were combined in the last chapter in this volume.

The volume includes six papers on general distribution theory and inference, six on the distribution theory of order statistics, five on the use of order statistics for statistical inference and applications, three on analysis of variance and experimental design and four on biometry and biomedical applications.

Smit comes out of the Reformational School of thinking, was greatly influenced by Abraham Kuyper, and studied under Herman Dooyeweerd. The driving force in his life--especially towards the end--was to articulate the Divine Mystery in History, the name of one of the papers which in included in this book. He desired, like his contemporaries, to see all of life placed under the Lordship of Christ. To this end he provides a critique of the thinking of his contemporary Catholic historians and philosophers of history, which, it is noted, was well received by both Reformed and Catholic thinkers alike. His mastery of the issues he deals with in the study of history is complete.

The Index:

Part One: Catholic Conceptions of History
I. Nature and the supernatural
II. Fall and redemption
III. Christianity and history.
IV. Dualism and connection
V. World History and progress
VI. The problem of Christian philosophy
VII. The problem of Christian historical science

Part Two: Towards a Reformed Conception of History

1. Protestant conceptions of history
2. The current crisis in Catholic thought
3. Calvinism and Catholicism on church and state
4. Nationalism and Catholicism
5. The divine mystery in history
6. The character of the Middle Ages
7. Salvation and culture
8. The sacred dwelling place
9. A turnabout in historical science?
10. The meaning of history
11. New prespectives for a Christian conception of history?

12. The value of history
13. The time of history
14. Approaches to the Reformation
15. The first and the second history
16. Towards a reordering of knowledge

rich

Who Owns America? is a collection of informative, challenging, iconoclastic and articulate essays on the nature of industrialism, corporate capitalism, the bureaucratic state, private property, the "good" society, and neo-Jeffersonian visions of a decentralized America. From David Cushman Coyle's "The Fallacy of Mass Production", to Frank Lawrence Owsley's "The Foundations of Democracy", to James Muir Waller's "America and Foreign Trade", to Robert Penn Warren's Literature as a Symptom", to Hilaire Belloc's "The Modern Man", these and many more observant and insightful commentaries deserve as wide a readership as possible and are highly recommended to students of American politics, economics, and history.