Too long out of print, this paperback is a beauty. A compulsively readable book. Addie Pray and Long Boy take the South by storm. It's fun and fast, but also weighty and moving. The amazing movie was based just on the first third.

This is an excellent book. Having long been a fan of the movie, what a joy to discover the book that started it all. Addie Pray is a hilarious and charming narrator and her adventures pulled me happily along. A real treat. For anyone who likes stories of sassy girls growing up.

First of all, I was befuddled with everyone talking about a book titled "Addie Pray." I saw the film "Paper Moon" and later read a book with the same title and picture on its paperback cover, never realizing that Addie Pray was the original title of the book by Joe David Brown: they changed the title to coincide with the film in re-published versions of the book after the film became popular.

I love both the novel and film. As usual, the novel makes more of a social statement. If you check IMDb for the tagline to the film - "As P.T. Barnum put it, 'There's a sucker born every minute.'" - you get a sense of the difference between the point of view of the book's author as opposed to the producers of the film. The film producers are after the carnival-like novelty of a crooked bible salesman and his too cute daughter, who's also a thief at heart and, by the way, a better one than her father, who is basically a loser. The reason for this is clear: films are basically hi-faluted carnival acts. Apparently, the audience member is just another sucker.

The novel, on the other hand, carries a great deal more compassion for the human condition, particularly human frailty. Not to say that the film wasn't at all sentimental in this way. Ryan O'Neill's character, the loser father, was treated sensitively by director Peter Bogdanovich. But he (Bogdanovich) is unique, a prime example of the kind of compassionate intelligence that flourished to some extent during the Let It Be trend of the early 1970s, a trend that could do the human race well if it was allowed to continue forever. The producers/distributors reveal, with their tagline, a more Hollywood-typical ruthlessness. Like "Ha ha, people. You're all jsut a bunch of suckers ripe for the taking."

True, the overt theme of the story & film is basically about how hilarious it might be to watch such father/daughter con artists, especially when these con artists are working in 1930s territory where stupid, faithful Christian farmers etc. (middle America) dwelled. But the most important part of the story happens toward the end, when the thieves are confronted with their toughest mark: a more experienced thief (Mr. Robinson?, can't remember).

This character is far more developed in the novel. He's great fun in the film. But in the book he's downright Marxist. Indeed, one of the greatest anti-capitalist epigrams ever written, in the tradition of Wilde and Twain, is spoken by this succesfully affluent crook, in what is otherwise merely a silly/fun little dark comedy of a story (paraphrasing): "Anybody can make money. It doesn't take any great talent to do so. No, people who make money are merely people who can't do anything else. But it takes real talent to be a fine musician, or an artist..." Something like that (I don't have the book with me now). But you get the point.

Clearly, Joe David Brown, like John Steinbeck, was an author with an important, righteous opinion on the weaknesses of our capitalist system. He died a few ears after the movie was made. Too bad it wasn't Reagan who died and Mr. Brown, instead, the "great communicator" of the 1980s.

For anyone who struggled to understand why the nephron concentrates, then dilutes, then concentrates again the urine, this book will do much to ease your pain. Since medical school I've purchased Editions 1, 3, & 5, just so that I could keep up with my interns & residents. Here's how he does it:
#1: short book, (you know how intimidating those tomes can be)
#2: lots of diagrams
#3: end-of-chapter questions (with answers & explanations)

If you want to understand the Kidney, no matter where you are in your studies or practice, I wholeheartedly recommend this text.

Renal physiology can be very difficult to truly understand, and yet an understanding of it is essential to understanding so many aspects of physiology, pathology, and pharmacology. Studying diuretics for cardio pharm is nightmarish unless you understand the physiology of the loop of Henle. Vander takes this difficult yet important subject and makes it easy to understand. The book reads extremely quickly, and the flow-charts and diagrams are amazing. I never even opened Berne & Levy for renal phys--I read Vander's book (which is no longer than B&L's renal chapters) and cruised through renal phys. I am writing this review now, a year after I took physiology, because I am now studying for the USMLE Step 1. I have not looked at Vander's book in a year, but I still remember renal phys, and reviewing it now is the easiest part of my studying (the only easy part, in fact). That is because, thanks to Vander, I actually understand renal physiology. A great book!!

For any medical student that needs a comprehensive, but easily understood explanation of the structure and function of kidneys, I highly recommend Renal Physiology by Vander. It is very well written, and covers all the basic principles that you will need to know to understand pathologies associated with the kidneys.

First a word about the edition that I read. It was the Oxford World's Classics paperback. It claims to have modernized the spelling. I don't know about you, but as far as I am concerned doth, hath, belongeth is not modern. It wouldn't have been very hard for them to change it to does, has and belongs. Many people complain about the way it was written, making it hard to read. I found that if you read the difficult parts aloud, as if you were giving a lecture, they are easier to understand the first time through. Definitely not for speed-readers.
Hobbes was a remarkable man. He published Leviathan when he was in his early 60's. For someone of his age he was very much in tune with the science of his day. One can only speculate that if he were to have been born 400 years later, with modern science at hand, he would have been considered the greatest philosopher of all time.
The first part of his book, "Of Man" goes about providing definitions of what must be virtually all of humankinds various behaviours and emotions. He also goes on to define what is basic human nature. It is here, without the benefit of modern science, where his philosophy, indeed the cornerstone of his philosophy, gets off on the wrong foot. Thanks to modern archaeology we know that humans are not solitary creatures by nature, but social animals.
In the second part of his book "Of Commonwealth" he spells out why we form commonwealths, and how a commonwealth should run. Again he is very thorough in looking at all aspects of a government and what it needs to do. He defines the power of the sovereign, the making of laws, the consequences of breaking these laws, and where the sovereign gets authority to carry out the consequences. I felt that he gave the sovereign far too much power, and he is there, it would seem, for life. The people only make covenants between themselves that this person or peoples are to be sovereign. Once a sovereign is declared, there is no covenant, or constitution, between the people and the sovereign; the sovereign is given Carte Blanche powers. One must remember that this book was written while Hobbes was in "exile" in Paris during the English civil war and the subsequent government of Cromwell. And while he is careful to call the sovereign "a person or assembly of people" it is quite obvious that he prefers the singular.
The third part of the book "Of a Christian Commonwealth" was for a large part just skimmed over by me. Some people suggest that Hobbes, because of some of the things he says in the first half of the book, was really an atheist. They say that he wrote this to fool the church to thinking otherwise of him. After skimming through this part I feel that Hobbes was more likely a reformer, someone who definitely believed in God but didn't agree with the way the church and the Pope were behaving back then. I myself am an atheist and cannot imagine writing so copiously on a subject that I do not believe in, never mind doing all of the Biblical research that Hobbes must have.
The fourth part, and the conclusion really don't have much to say. He is busy blasting the Pope, the Catholic Church and Aristotle.
All in all some good philosophical points. His definitions of free will and spirit I think should be more widely taught. The fact that this edition could have been modernized a bit more, as well as the last half of the book being pretty useless today, leads me to give it three stars.

Hobbes Leviathan is an essential read. Firstly I admire Thomas Hobbes for his bravery during the 17th century when this book was written and secondly for his grim view of humanity. Atheism during the height of the Catholic Church was strictly taboo and he had to write this piece very cleverly. Leviathan is a must for those whom are interested in the philosophical ideology of who we are and what makes us strive for things that we do and generally what makes us as men tick.

This book is complex. The common "run-on" sentences used in philosophy and the Old English style makes the book difficult to understand at times. It almost seems to be pure thought with no organization which has been jotted down in 728 pages.

In all, I like to call Hobbes Leviathan the "Atheists Bible" (though perhaps Hobbes would not like this type of name for one of his works) and I truly believe that this work is just as essential and important to philosophy as Plato.

Leviathan brings up several questions to the minds of those who read it. Hobbes arguements about human thought, euthanasia, true freedom, God, the Devil, government, etc. are strong and thought provoking. The reader will discover that Hobbes book influenced the writers of the constitution. Anyone seriously interested in politics and theology should read this book.

Don't be misled by Peter Matthiessen's forward, this one is not for the ecologically friendly faint-of-heart. Totch was a one man ecological disaster, constantly on the move wrecking havoc on the wildlife wherever he went. His life of slaughtering animals for personal profit was a willful life choice, hardly dictated by the times, as he claims in his self-serving attempts to justify his pogrom against nature. His self-indulgence was carried to the extreme by illegally poaching thousands of alligators in the protected Everglades National Park in defiance of the laws of man and nature. The purpose for his illegal acts was personal profit, to skin the animals, only using their hides. Their dead carcasses, several hundred in a period of a few days, were dumped into the water to rot. This was hardly an act of survival. He did this because he wanted to, not because he had to. There are several other books, more accurate, better written, and less self-centered, that better describe the early pioneers of Southwest Florida. Rather than augment Totch's bloody legacy by buying his book, I encourage readers interested in the Everglades to look elsewhere, and leave Totch's book describing his carnage against nature to rot, like one of his skinned alligator carcasses, on the ash pile of despicable acts by the self-indulgent.

Any south Florida history buff will want to add "Totch' to their collection.

Totch is a fascinating book written in a natural writer's style illustrating how it really was down in the islands.The chapters not only offer us the life of Totch Brown but share photos and history unmatched in any other source I have found. Any reader interested in Florida history and/or anyone who was mesmerized by Peter Matthiessen's trilogy (Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone by Bone) will revel in this book's information. The photographs add so much to the story offering a glimpse at this rather mysterious corner of Southwest Florida (where else, for example, can one see a photo of Ted Smallwood's store as it looked at the turn of the century?). I read it cover to cover without putting it down, and I turn to it often for Florida history/environmental/sociology information. A great find for any lover of Florida history! Totch offers us all a real glimpse into the lives and lore of inordinately tough, brave people who were real pioneers in a little known and enigmatic part of America.