This book was awesome! Like some others, I thought Harry Potter was the best, untill I read this book. It is a wonderful story that shows friendship, adventure, suspense, and magic. Emily just moved to Stonehill and is shy and kind, but doesn't have any friends. Adrienne is the loner and independent one and travels a lot( Her parents are artists). Kara is the snobby, spoiled, and popular one. They have almost nothing in common, except magic.
The story's plot is when a monster from another world comes to earth and poisons all the magical animals who live there. Emily has healing powers and has to help them with the help of Phel, a wonderful and magical creature. Emily, Adrienne, and Kara have to put away their diferences and work together to fight the monster with some help from the magical animals and Ozzie, an adventerous elf who is stuck in a ferrets' body. A fantastic book for all ages.

In this story there are 3 girls and each has magic in her and has to us there magic to save a wild life preserve and help magical animals that live in the perverse too. This book was so good I cant wait to read the next one a read other peoples review and they like Adriane but I like Emily and Kara...

many people r saying this book is better than harry potter well all i can say is ive never red anything like this b4, avalon is so good i can'r even discribe it. i luv harry but this is different, its so funny and has action and scarey and emotional parts that make me feel like i'm rite there. this book makes u feel a lot of things when u read it so i think its deeper than harry also i like the girls alot and they really come alive to me. i even like kara lol so both books are great but AvAlon makes me feel good when i read it

All I can say is wow.
Rachel Roberts has created a fantastic fantasy story, weaving it together from the last two books in the Avalon: Web of Magic series, Circles in the Stream and All that Glitters. each one features an exciting climax and interesting writing style that bring the charecters of this book into real personalities and real life.
Three girls, three powers, three mages, three unique talents. Emily Fletcher, Adriane Charyde, and Kara Davies are three girls who coundn't be more different- or the same.
Emily is a animal- crazy redhead, who has a fun nature and a love of pets. Her mom owns a vet clinic, and Emily likes to help out there for fun. She also gives her mom a hand in the Pet Palace, an animal hotel, and it was three dogs, Jellybean, Biscit, and I forget the third one's name, who first lead her to the Ravenswood preserve. Emily posses a special healing magic that makes her a favorite among the creatures at the Ravenswood Preserve. Emily and her mom just moved there, so Emily hasn't made any friends yet.
Adriane is a spunky, modern girl who doesn't have any friends. She never wears anything but black, and her parents are artists that travel around the world, so she lives with her grandmother, who is the caretaker of a wildlife preserve. Adriane is the first of the three to discover the animals and the secret of the magic. She is granted with the title of "warrior' and, indeed, is strong and brave. Adriane is bonded with a lone mistwolf, Stormbringer. She is really lonely on the large peice of land which is her home.
Kara Davies is spoiled, rude, and popular, a "barbie" in Adriane's words. She is the mayor's daughter, and is interested in fashion, clothes, phones, and boys. She is caught between her popular friends, and Emily, because she Adriane don't get along very well. Her title in the blazing star, and she doesnt have a power yet. Even though the magic likes her and reaches her, she still thinks she's better than Adriane and Emily. Her ideas for the preserve are good, though, and help alot.
An elf that's been transformed into a ferret, Ozzie, is sent by fairymentals from another world, Aldenmoor, to find three human mages. He helps them discover a portal, a path between the two worlds. There goal is to live in a place called Avalon, peacfully, away from the dark sorceress who will spread the black fire and kill all in Aldenmoor.
Stormbringer, Adriane's wolf, is the last of her kind. But soon she learnd there are more mistwolves in Aldenmoor, and joins them.
Adriane is heartbroken, but she can understand her friend's decision. So secretly, she follows Stormbringer through the portal to Aldenmoor, and is amazed by what she sees. She meets a young boy, Zach, and his griffen. Her adventures never end in Aldenmoor, but soon they might- her magic lets her meet up with the dark sorceress, and it may cost her her life.
Don't be suprised- this author isn't afraid to make anything happen to Adriane, anything.
Also- for those who love this series.... visit there website, its really cool!!!

If you have read the other Avalon books, you'd know the drift of the story but this is like the best book in the series! It is definetly the most interesting and I love it! It is written well and it made me get watery eyes when Adriane is getting attacked...It is the best because it is about Adriane and Storm and they are my faves!
-=Bye!
(Be sure to read my review on 'The Sight' By David David Clement-Davies!)

This book is my apsolute FAV. I love it.
If you've read the first two books you know that Adriane and Stormbringer are really close and you know that Storm thinks she's the last mistwolf. Key word: thinks. Well, Storm isn't the last of her kind. A pack of Mistwolves drop in for a visit at Ravenswood. Then they leave taking Storm with them. Adriane has to talk to her one last time. So she gets Kara to get the Dragonflies to open the portal. Instead of just talking to Storm she gets pulled into Aldenmor! Where she meets Zach a boy who never saw another human and his griffin. Zach has some secrets that just might mean saving Storm. She also meets the sorceress, sees Fairy Glen and the fairymentals who suceed in confussing her even more. and Meets a Dragon! But will that be enough to save Stormbringer?

I teach high school literature in a suburban school in the midwest. I bought Tisha for my daughter, then read it myself. It is a captivating read. There are few "challenges" for even students who read slowly, yet the story and heroics are attractive even to sophisticated readers. For years, I have offered "extra credit" to students who will read a novel of my selection over Chirstmas. In recent years, I offered books by Farley Mowat and The Catcher in the Rye. Kids usually have great intentions, take books, but return from the holliday having not finished the book. Usually I would have about 10 out of 25 who finished the book/s and liked it. This year I gave out Tisha. 35 out of 50 finished it. I had trouble getting the books back because kids had given them to their parents to read.

I've had this book for many years and I've re-read it many times and enjoy it each time. It is an amazing story of courage and love. I feel as if I'm in Alaska each time I read it. Currently, I'm reading Tisha for the 6th time.

I met Anne Hobbs Purdy in Junior High School. Her story captured my imagination and still does to this day. I have read Tisha many times and every reading captures my heart. Her courage to stand for what she believed to be right in the face of opposition, is a lesson that carries through almost 80 years later. Alaska, seen through her eyes, is a place of incredible beauty and harsh reality. Even though I wanted to crawl into the pages and do battle with some of the characters, they also earned my grudging respect. Anne's will power, strength of heart, and sheer determination to do what she knew was right, made her a formidable force. The book I own is a treasured possession, signed for my father. She writes, "Happy landings from the Land of the Midnite Sun, Yellow Gold, and Determined mosquitoes." A must read book!

Owls in the Family is a good book. This book is good because it has action and adventure. Owl lovers should read this book. It takes place in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. It is all the way in Canada. A boy named Billy wanted an owl and his dream came true. He got an owl. You should get this book now. You should get this book at your nearest bookstore!!

Read Owls in the Family. It is a great book because it has lots of information about great horned owls. This book is about two boys, Bruce and Billy. They go on an adventure to find an owls nest. The boys end up getting two owls who become their best friends. The two owls Wol and Weeps become best friends. Billy's dog Mutt doesn't get along with Wol, but gets along with Weeps. Wol is always stealing Mutt's bone and he gets so annoyed. It's very exciting, funny, and an interesting book. Borrow it or buy it at your nearest bookstore.

This warm, poignant, funny book is a wonderful demonstration of how even ONE person can help wildlife in trouble. Even better to think that little boy grew up to be a world-class advocate of animal and eskimo rights. Farley Mowat is a treasure. Thank heaven the grade school teacher at a school in Temple, Texas assigned Owls as a class project. Thank heaven the only book left in the library was "Owls in the Family." Farley Mowat has brought great laughter and poignancy to my family and is spoken of as a friend. We always say -- "Want to read a wonderful book (author) read "Owls in the Family" (Farley Mowat) !!

Bridging the gap between text and context, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook offers everyone a deep and refreshing look at what work can be and should be. The authors ground their stories, examples, exercises in five conceptual touchstones--personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking. And these disciplines accurately reveal three core tasks in leadership: looking at self, developing others, and seeing the larger picture in order to chart a meaningful course. Stories enliven the ideas while examples and exercises offer practical models to use in any organization. Generous side margins, different colored ink, and graphic icons are visual treats as well as immediate graphic guides. And the narrative references to related issues make reading the book more intuitive, more interesting.

In fact, these physical details model the whole point of the book--that learning is essential for sustainable growth, for organizational and personal development.

Everyone who reads THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE comes away excited about the benefits of having a learning organization. Yet many get stuck in a rut as they try to implement what they learned in that superb book. THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE FIELD BOOK helps fill in that lack of understanding with dozens of questions, examples and exercises. You'll have a ball with this, even if you only use a little part to focus on where you need help. A great related book for building a learning organization is THE 2,000 PERCENT SOLUTION, which teaches a new thinking process that simplifies and speeds up learning for an organization. It also shows you where you need to get rid of old thinking that is holding you back. You should read and use both.

The Fieldbook attempts at making the esoteric concepts of the fifth discipline more down to earth and contains a treasure trove of strategies, tools, methods and explanations on how to make the learning organization into a reality.

Thus people who have read The fifth discipline will gain the most from this book. It's a must read for people who want to make their organizations transition into a 'learning organization'

This is another classic Robert Ludlum thriller with all his hallmarks - unexpected twists, flashes of imagination, action and suspense and well-researched characters, locations and politics! IN this one, Michael Havelock, a former CIA/VKR(Russian special intelligence) double agent witnesses his girlfriend Jenna Karras murdered on Spain's Costa Brava. Then some time later, on a field assignment in Rome, he spots her at a railway station and decides impulsively and obsessively to track her down. The trail leads to France and a secret airbase near the Italian border where he sees Jenna again in the hands of some cold-blooded terrorists. His search reaches the US where a top-secret government operation is forming that could change the balance of world power as we know it for ever . . . who is behind this operation? Often very similar to THE POWER and THIS UNITED STATE by Colin Forbes, the villain is surprising . . .and who is the manipulative PARSIFAL character, the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle, or mosiac if you will! Well worth reading, but be warned, it is very long! But hard to fault!

This book represents Ludlum at his best, bar none!!! My only problem with this book is the dialogue which strikes me as unrealistic. I found myself repeatedly thinking that people do not speak to each other as the characters do in this novel. Having said that, I thoroughly enjoyed the characters, the plot development and, well, just about everything else. In fact, I have read this book at least ten times. For my money, I would strongly recommend this novel and the following: The Bourne Identity, Bourne Supremacy, Scarlatti Inheritance, Aquitaine Progression, Matarese Circle, The Holcroft Covenant and The Gemini Contenders. Please, PLEASE, avoid the following: The Matarese Countdown, The Road to Omaha, The Scorpio Illusion and The Bourne Ultimatum.

One feels almost shame in enjoying the works of Robert Ludlum. The dialogue steps out of the Stone Age onto the paper (the phrases "my friend" and "spell it out" are used overgenerously), the melodrama is suffocating (ditto the words "madness" and "insanity", always in italics and always followed with an exclamation point), and the characters are photocopies of each other from book to book. Meanwhile, the good-guy spy is over-romanticized, the stuff of a fourteen year-old girl's wildest fantasies. The problem is, Ludlum is so darned fun to read. And, as his novels go, The Parsifal Mosaic is among the best. This might be directly related to the sky-high body count, but it's Ludlum: get used to it. I felt almost guilty the first time I acknowledged to myself that the bloodbath trick--someone getting killed every four pages or so--never gets old. No one said this guy was Tolstoy. He's not even John LeCarre or Frederick Forsyth. But nor are they Robert Ludlum. If you want pragmatism, realism, and a spy hero who gets his hands dirty, eats corn flakes, and drives a Taurus, then read LeCarre (the master of characterization) or Forsyth (the master of the political thriller). But none of their work gives you quite the same thrill as sitting down with Robert Ludlum...

...while he blows away five hundred people with machine guns.

Suppressed in the early sixties, translated into English in the mid-eighties, and published under Gorbachev's rule, Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate is the most famous Russian novel of the Second World war. Historians such as Richard Overy, Catherine Merridale and Robert Conquest have praised it for its realistic account of Soviet life and its courage in Stalinism. Reviewers from Italy to France to Britain praised Grossman and compared him to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.

Now as Christopher Hitchens once pointed out, to be even compared to Tolstoy is no small achievement, so saying that Grossman does not meet this standard is hardly a damning criticism. Grossman, during the war a prominent journalist and later a novelists, was understandably horrified at the infinite cruelties and callousness of the Stalinist regime. That he is unsparing of the interrogations, the deportations, the tortures, the bureaucratic spite and viciousness, the way that political correctness encouraged cowardice and despair does credit to his courage. But courage is not enough, and one should beware those who believe it is a substitute for art. To say, as George Steiner, that Solzhenitsyn and Grossman "eclipse almost all that passes for serious fiction in the West today," is unfair. These subjects are powerful and moving is true, but beside the point. How could such they not be? Grossman must do more, and ultimately he does not do it.

Grossman suffers the vices of a journalist. His writing resembles romantic magazine cliches ("His love for Marya Ivanova was the deepest truth of his soul. How could it have given birth to so many lies?) The sententious title, all too reminiscent of War and Peace, does not help. Passages are suffused with rhetoric ("No, whatever life holds in store...they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man's eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that every have been or will be.") and the comments about freedom are particularly hollow. ("Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom?" "Man's innate yearning for freedom can be suppressed but never destroyed.") Behind the suppressed liberal, a middlebrow is waiting to come out.

Grossman writes at one point of how in totalitarian countries a small minority is able to bully or brainwash the rest of the country. This point has two flaws: it is a simplistic description of how modern terror works and Grossman does not bring it aesthetically to life. True, there are some stirring passages as the protagonist Viktor Shtrum finds all his colleagues at the scientific institute he works with drop away from him once he is criticized for supporting modern physics. But Grossman cannot portray the mind of an Anti-Semite or a Stalinist torturer. This failure is particularly damaging when one considers that Russian literature has no shortage of profound portraits of this sort of corrupt mindset (Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Chekhov, Tolstoy, even Nabokov's Humbert Humbert). While it is true that Hitler was not the product of a primordial German anti-semitism, Grossman's picture of the Holocaust where almost none of the perpetrators are actually anti-Semites, just cogs in an automatic system, is seriously misleading. (One thinks of Omer Bartov's Hitler's Army in contrast).

Stalinism per se seems to be a caste separate from the population. This is misleading because it does not deal sufficiently with the internalization of Stalinism among the Soviet population. Viktor Shtrum seems surprisingly calm and composed towards the Germans who murdered his mother because she was a Jew. What is really odd is that most of the rest of the Soviet characters feel the same way. On both sides there is stoicism, a sense of comradely duty, thoughts about loved ones. There is not on the German side violent racist loathing towards the enemy. Likewise, there is surprisingly little rage, indignation, heartbroken grief and anger or lust for vengeance on the Russian side, though God knows there was no lack of provocation from the Germans. It would have been very easy, indeed one would think it unavoidable, to show reasonably decent Russians consumed with rage against the Germans. But that would complicate Grossman's picture of evil flowing down from a totalitarian state. It also says something that the Communists never win an argument in this book. (When a Russian prisoner of Tolstoyan pacifist opinions speaks of redeeming the world with acts of spontaneous kindness, no one actually points out that a lot more is needed to stop the Nazis.)

A comparison to Aharon Appelfeld's novels, or Gunter Grass's The Danzig Trilogy, or This way to the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen, shows Grossman's weakness as a writer of character. He assumes that most people are like himself. (Consider the failure in his portraits of Hitler and Stalin). And so there are endless scenes of people thinking about their loved ones, because Grossman cannot provide much more. They are endless scenes of women portrayed as the objects of men's affections, rarely as subjects, and certainly without the depth of other writers. (One notices that in Stalingrad the German soldiers have love affairs with Russian girls. They do not rape them). Strikingly, Grossman's characters are overwhelmingly Russian. Although the Soviet Union was a multinational state, other nationalities are usually only mentioned as reminders of Soviet persecution. In the end one is reminded that whereas Dostoyevsky could convince a reader that it is just and humane for Dimitri Karamazov to suffer the punishment for a murder that was actually committed by someone else, Vasily Grossman is unable to bring many of his liberal good wishes to life.

Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate belongs the category of suppressed literature in the Soviet Russia. The author dared to submit the manuscript of this big book approval only after the death of Joseph Stalin. But the Party's cultural wing even then refused its publication for next 500 years! One night they took away all the manuscripts from author's apartment. Only in the 80's the manuscript was recovered and published in first time. This is a novel in a Tolstoyean mould. It has a lot characters. The story hangs in and around Victor, a nuclear physicist, and his family and friends. The events happened during the period of second world war, when Russia was attacked by the forces of Nazy Germany. The Russians called it great Patriotic War. Every problems of soviet system was swept aside in the defence of fatherland. The novel was conceived in the mind of Vasily Grossman during years of new purge against the jews in the USSR after the second world war. People were hunted down or isolated again by the soviet authorities in the name of race, religion and ationality. Vasily Grossman once a communist now understands he is a jew also. The Central character in the novel, Victor, is the alterego of the author himself. Victor works as a scientist.He has a wife and one daughter.Victor's character is always in clash with his wife.His tender relationship with his friend's wife is the only spiritual solace for him. When war broke out everybody starts speaking for the war against German forces is to protect freedom and honour of people. Vasily Grossman finds the irony of such a slogan. A People without a freedom and individual honour for many terrible years under Stalin now think they go to protect it. When Victor's political stand threatens his own existence he becomes fearful and starts to think of an apology before the authorities. Everybody treats him as an alien and people fear his arrest is near. In such a lonely and desperate night Victor got a telephone call from Joseph Stalin himself....

The narrative is simple. Victor's mother's last letter from the German concentration camp is one of the moving chapters in the novel.The scenes at the Russian labor camp are also interesting and informative. Life anf Fate gives a total, let me say, accurate picture of the Soviet Union. As some critics said, while other writers went out of the soviet system and wrote about it, Vasily Grossman lived in and through the troubles of soviet society and wrote about it. Like Dr. Zhivago this is also an important book for them who who love great fiction.

There's a decent proportion of readers whose reaction to a Russian epic over 600 pages called "Life and Fate" is to snicker. If that's you, probably best to pass on. That would be a shame however, because this is a book about people in a situation which is everything ours is not. Where we are safe, prosperous and secure, the characters in this book are all constantly at risk.

Grossman's magnificent acheivement is to allow us to empathise with these characters and explore a war of the bad with the worse. The pages do not "fly by" - but they do stay with you long after the book is finished. Grossman was a Soviet war journalist, and his coverage of everything from the battle of Stalingrad to the gulag is utterly gripping. It is not a feelgood book, or a "testament to the triumph of the human spirit". It is a beautiful, memorable tribute to how ordinary people cope with impossible situations. If you have any interest in life in an utterly different situation, this book is a purchase you should really, really not pass up. I cannot praise it highly enough.

Once I started reading this book I could not stop for very long. It was so good I did not want it to end. This book traces Emerson's intellectual and spiritual path in such great detail that it enables the reader to further investigate Emerson's sources if he or she so chooses. The biographical information was quite complete as well. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Emerson or Transcendentalism. I noticed that Richardson has also written a biography of Thoreau and I will likely read it. This book represents a very high degree of scholarship and a great effort on the part of the author. I also greatly appreciated the photos of Emerson and the people close to him.

Personally, I would have liked to have seen a few more photos of his second wife and his children. I would have also liked to have learned how his wife managed after Emerson died and perhaps some information regarding his descendants. However, these are my own personal preferences and are in no way meant to diminish the excellence of this book.

The material is well structured into about 100 brief chapters which I thought made the reading easy. I never felt bogged down due to the length of the book. This is not a short book.

I really came away from the book with a sense of the man and an appreciation of the events and societal pressures of his time. After reading this book I think anyone familiar with Emerson's writings would feel like sitting down with the man to have a discussion to clear up a point or two.

It's hard to believe that this biography of Emerson can be topped. It's dense - but truly gives the ins and outs of Emerson's life, his passions, relationships and what influenced his thought...even his reading lists...it was a pleasure to read such fine scholarship....

I must confess that I don't understand the reader review below who found this biography of Emerson to be a difficult read. Although not quite a page-turner, I managed to read this in very little time at all. I must also confess that I do find Emerson himself incredibly difficult to read. But what I find to be the case in Emerson himself, I did not find to be true in Richardson's biography. While I find that Emerson constructed one stunning sentence and aphorism after another, I generally find his essays to be slow going. Nonetheless, while I am not his biggest fan, he is unquestionably one of the four or five greatest figures in American intellectual history, and Richardson's biography does him great justice.

The great merit of this biography is that at the end of it, you feel that you have gained considerable insight both into Emerson and New England intellectual life in the 19th century. I was especially intrigued with Richardson detailing of Emerson's reading. Emerson was, without any question, a great reader. Great readers rarely read books from cover to cover. Samuel Johnson, who was himself one of the most accomplished readers in the history of civilization, once said that we have more of a need to reread than to read. But he also once quipped, "What, you read books all the way to the end?" Emerson did not read books all the way to the end. But like Johnson and other great readers, he had a genius for picking out the most important points. What Boswell wrote of Johnson is true also of Emerson: "He had a peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labour of perusing it from beginning to end."

One comes away from the book also enormously impressed with Emerson's character. He seems by any standard to have been a remarkably good human being. He was both a man of high principle, and a man of powerful attachments to other human beings. I found the accounting of his various friendships, many to equally famous individuals, to be of the utmost interest. Also, he seems to have met virtually every important thinker and writer in the English-speaking world, from Coleridge to Carlyle to Melville.

I heartily recommend this book to anyone who wants to gain a deeper knowledge of Emerson's life and work. By any standard, Emerson is one of the giants in American life. His influence on American thought is incalculable. Consider: not only was he the major influence on such American literary figures the magnitude of Thoreau and Whitman; he was a profound influence on artists such as Thomas Cole, Moran, and Bierstadt. America's deep-rooted environmentalism is steeped in Emersonian Transcendentalism. John Muir was a devoted reader of Emerson. One could make a case for Emerson having had perhaps more influence in the shaping of American thought than any other individual. This biography is an outstanding introduction to that person.

This revealing book covers a highly charged and controversial period of American investment history. George P. Baker and George David Smith study the emergence of the investment house Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts (KKR), and follow it during the decade KKR ruled the world of leveraged buyouts. The authors begin with the early days when the partners worked together at Bear Stearns. They track the men as they build their own firm and create their own success. In clear, straightforward language, the book presents KKR's intentions and the economics of leveraged buyouts (LBOs). It discusses KKR's role in structuring and managing the deals. We [...] recommend this book as a must read for anyone interested in LBOs or the history of KKR. Executives at all levels will find the KKR saga interesting and useful.

Baker and Smith have accomplished two objectives in their short book. On the surface, they have expertly captured the key elements in the development of KKR as the frontrunner of the LBO firm. However, on a deeper level, they have also captured many of the elements that managers and entrepreneurs should consider when running or starting a firm. In this regard, the Preface and Chapter Five are worth the price of admission. For anyone interested in the evolution and history of modern American finance, read this book.

When in 1976 Jerome Kohlberg, Henry Kravis, and George Roberts left Bear Stears to form KKR, Wall Street realized these three dealermakers might become a major force in the restructuring of American big business then beginning. What could not be predicted was the heights KKR would achieve. It has risen from the ranks of upstarts to become a major player in "The New Establishment." While KKR has been the subject of other books and articles, none could be considered "definitive," as is "The New Financial Capitalists." It is more than a history of a bank, however. Baker and Smith have addressed the problem posed by the separation of ownership and management delineated in 1934 by Adolph Berle and Gardner Means in "The Modern Corporation and Private Property," indicating how the leveraged buyout programs of the 1980s helped resolve it.

This book was not a typical day by day look at the missions this plane flew. It was a review of Bob Morgan's life before, during, and after the war. He analyzes, with humor, his life before he entered the Army Air Forces; the search for love after his mother died; his baptism to war; the endless tour of the plane and crew after their 25th mission; his role in the Pacific theater; and how he handled life after the war. The book is excellently written and has enough humor to keep the reader smiling. But, there is enough to make one know that war was serious and Bob Morgan certainly lets you know that war is deadly serious.

He tells how war changed his life and talks about the treatment the soldiers faced after the war. Finally, he describes the ghosts he chased and drowned in drink trying to forget. And, he sadly chronicles the near fate of the Memphis Belle and how the US nearly relegated the plane to the scrap heap.

Just an incredible book. I highly recommend it.

The life of Robert Morgan, the pilot of the Memphis Belle, reads like a cross between Flags of Our Fathers and a romance novel. He grew up in the mountains of Asheville, NC and his family were friends of the Vanderbilts. His mother's suicide starts him on a life long search for someone to replace her love. He tells about this search in very candid and blunt fashion that I found both wonderful and sad. The one lady he does fall in love with was the Memphis Belle(the plane and the lady) and the book follows both his missions over Europe with her(the plane) and her crew as well as what happens to her when the war was over. After his 25th mission he and his crew were sent back to the United States to sell war bonds and keep the home front morale up. This bond tour has one unintended side effect, it destroyes his love affair with the planes name sake (the real Memphis Belle). Needless to say, with women fawning over him, Mr Morgan's womanizing hits an all time high. After the bond tour he signs up for a tour of duty flying missions over Japan. He is invloved in several famous fire bomb missions over Japan.

No doubt some people will be turned off by his womanizing and cheating ways. However, if you can get past that you will find one of the most amazing war books I have read in some time. Mr Morgan saw as much action as any bomber in WWII and his casual writing style is really wonderful.

The books last chapter shows that you can go home again and you can find what you have been searching for. It is a touching ending. Mr Morgan is still alive and kicking and all I can say is I would love to sit down with him and just talk about his life. He is a true hero!

Robert Morgan had fame thrust upon him for being the pilot of arguably the first air crew to complete the obigatory 25 missions alive and in one piece. The Memphis Belle flew early on in the war, without the benefit of effective long-range fighter escort, a time of heavy losses for the US 8th Air Force, and the US government, looking for a way to publicize the successes of the US bombing campaign, decided to put together a film about one crew--the Memphis Belle was selected. William Wyler masterfully put together one of the finest documentaries of World War II, and a legend was born. In this respect, Morgan was somewhat of an accidental legend, as was his plane. However, Morgan's willingness to return to combat as a pilot of a B-29 in the Pacific when he could have taken it easy and rested on his laurels, proves him to be a man of true heroic qualities. This book deserves to be read, if for no other reason that that it is written by a man who experienced aerial combat in both theaters of combat in World War II. Morgan and his co-writer have done a masterful job of telling the story of what it was like to be a bomber pilot in World War II. The human element is there as well, as Morgan reflects on his personal successes and failures, on his agony at writing letters to the families of crewmen shot down, of his coming to know God after being a Hell-raiser, his problems with alcohol and a failed business, and eventual success and contentment later in life. The Memphis Belle and her crew are living legends, and the story Robert Morgan has to tell goes way beyond a surface treatment of that legend. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in the true story of the Memphis Belle, and anyone who simply likes a good biography, honestly told.