I bought this book used from a library, along with a dozen others, a decade ago without much thought of what I was buying. Wow! I ended up with a lifetime of excellent reading. I've since had this book at my bedside, off and on, for the last ten years. So much excellent information is packed into this book that you can keep coming back to it and learning the most important writings of civilization.

This book summarizes the works for you. With just a little reading you can say something like, "What Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity did was radically change our perspective of time and space, and matter and energy. He showed that all motion is relative, and that the velocity of light is independent of the motion of its source. The implications are profound. To illustrate..."

Or, "What Socrates means by his definition of love, as written in Plato's Symposium, is that love is the pursuit of the beautiful; a desire for the immortal though reproduction. This, at its highest state, is manifested in a generalized love of universal beauty - beautiful souls, thoughts, laws, institutions and the immortal afterlife."

Everyone needs to read these works, and here is a condensed way to do it. It's a small investment in your education.

I recently had the pleasure of taking a class at Missouri Southern State College in Joplin, MO that used the Downs book as a textbook for the class! At that time, I had not read, nor even heard of many of the works Downs discussed. However, after reading his insightful summaries on these classics of political, social and economic history, I felt I owed it to myself to pick up the full length versions and devour them!

I have been reading an average of 2 books a month. Yet I throw most of them away after reading. This is one of a few books I keep in my library. And it is the third time I bought it because every time someone borrow the book, I never got it back. Books That Changed The World summarizes the influences of the great books to the way we believe in things, some of which we take it for granted now. Things like the solar system, gravitational force. I hardly give a five-star to any book reviews, but this one well deserves it.

This book explains how a political systems works. Democratic and non-democratic political systems are analysed deeply in their structures, processes, forms and institutions, and afterwards are compared in order to check the main diferences between them. A fantastic book!

Open City consistently publishes great stories, poems, essays, and artwork. I look forward to each issue, because each one is so different, and because this magazine continues to be vital and relevant, esp. because many literary magazines are so staid and dull....

This book consist primarily of multiple-choice questions about economics. I have used it during my undergraduate studies and it helped me significantly. Although it is not sufficiently challenging for postgraduate study of economics - I can recommend it to anyone who is still undergraduate.

This first and sadly last novel by the deceased Author Robert Bingham begins as an absolute chore to grind through. However if you stick out the first quarter or so you will be rewarded with some fine writing. It is sad that the drug that plays a role in this book caused the death of the man who wrote it, for there was a great Author being introduced.

The book's theme is not new and that is largely responsible for the slow start. I also don't know that readers are comfortable and familiar enough with Cambodia and its Politics for that aspect to be anything more than confusing. The story is dark, and if the word sardonic were the equivalent of a color, the end of the spectrum approaching black would be the reference point.

Asher who is our protagonist is probably the most annoying persona, think of a whining Nicholas Cage character. (It would make a great movie) His life has been one long series of almosts and not quites, and his scam to return to normalcy and home requires he use and abuse a variety of characters. And there is a wide array to enjoy. Ever had your luggage lost and wished you could take it out on the Airline. In one of the book's purely comedic moments an Asian Crime Boss does just that, and it is brilliant. Asher's sometimes soul mate, Harvard Graduate, and living on the fringe is very well done. What could have been a hopelessly cliché bimbette role, become a street-smart woman of letters who has a savage wit, and is said to be full of, "Verities". She also wields a MAG Light with finality. This is not the only character that starts with the expectation of being hopelessly derivative. The Author seemed to enjoy taking what others have done, and then reworked them to show just how well he could write.

The end of the book allows Asher a shot at redemption perhaps even nobility. However when he says, "I would prefer to stand", it's a powerful statement and a brilliant close to the book. I really do wish the Author were not consumed by that of which he wrote, he was clearly a man with a potentially great future of literature still before him.

This is a book about heroin, Cambodia, topless bars, bad relationships that you cant get out of, and the New York Racquet Club. I am willing to bet that Robert Bingham was familar with all of these. We will never know for sure since Robert Bingham died of a heroin overdose in 2000.
The story is the fairly usual tale of a drug deal that goes wrong. Asher, working for the press in Cambodia, is looking to score one last deal to help facilitate his travel and adjustment back to the USA. He involves his old girlfriend in New York and an unwitting straight laced courier to make it happen. In the meantime, he has to borrow some cash from a Cambodian crime boss to make things happen. Things dont go as planned, and there are complications, both in the US and in Cambodia.
This is not Robert Ludlum. The plot is a bit erratic and so are the characters, but that is why I loved this book. Bingham did a great job of keeping me in that mindset that left me thinking I knew what was going to happen, but wasnt sure. The characters comments and insights about Cambodia, drugs, even the New York Racquet Club made me feel like I was hearing from someone that knew about the nasty side of all three.

Having read the review in the New York Times that compared this book to the work of Robert Stone, I was waiting for its release anxiously. When I saw the blurb on the cover that mentioned Conrad, I couldn't make it home fast enough. Let me tell you, I was not disappointed. Although not as edgy or quite as well written as Stone, it was up to all my expectations. It is very impressive for a first novel. In fact, I literally couldn't put it down and read it in one day.The author has a great style and was able to describe a number of different locations very well. His plotting and people in Phnom Penh were very vivid and colorful. His descriptions of the New York Racquet Club were so good they made me laugh out loud. I didn't think his characters were quite as edgy or manic as Stone's. He was able to create alot of suspense in the plot because you knew that something bad was about to happen at any minute. This kept me turning those pages. The obvious comparision is to Stone's Dog Soldiers, but I saw some of his A Flag For Sunrise in it as well. If you like this book and haven't read those two, please do so immediately. I'm not sure what happened to Mr. Bingham, but it is a real shame that we will not have more from him.

I loved Robert Bingham's " Lightning on the Sun " ( 5 Stars ), and the title of this book caught my eye, but I was rather dissapointed. The book is a collection of about a dozen short stories. The stories are mostly dark and often center on characters for whom a general malaise and casual indifference to everything is the norm. Several of the characters are young and successful people that are supposedly the " winners " of our world, so their indifference is meant to be more poignant. There is also frequent unpleasant endings as the characters' weakness, be it addiction, stupidity, laziness, leads him/her to disaster.
I choose this book becase I wanted negativism, so I was not dissapointed in the themes. The stories, however, just do not hit that nerve or give one that zing of recognition or discomfort that one wants from a short story. For example, one is about a man who joins his dysfunctional family at a post funeral wake and briefly makes out with his attractive first cousin. Another about a man who secretly visits an old lover while attending an out of town wedding with this finacee. A third about a man who realizes how he looks as he dances on the edge of an affair with an older, soon to be divorced woman. None of these stories really grabbed me. In fact I found that I was the one who was casually indifferent.
My favorite story was the one that gave the anthology its title. It is in fact, not a negative story at all, and is a bit out of place with the others. Perhaps I was expecting too much after reading " Linghtning on the Sun ", but I cannot really recommend this anthology at all.

When I read in New York magazine that Bingham was "probably the best writer about New York living in New York," I had my doubts but after finishing this gloriously disturbing debut I left those doubts in the trash. This is the best collection I've read since The Puglalist at Rest

We thought we had ordered the textbook, Microeconomics: Principles, Problems, and Policies by McConnell and Brue. This book however is Selected Material from Microeconomics. The Table of Contents is the same as the textbook, so this is really confusing. Be sure you get what you want.

Microeconomics by McConnell and Brue is a great text book. The explanation is very clear. I especially like the way they explain the graphs and concepts. It's very easy to understand. They give very good examples in each chapter. I use it for my class and I found the reading is very enjoyable. This textbook is definitely good for people who want to do self-study of microeconomics.