"Let Every Child Be Wanted" is an excellent book in story telling and history reviewing on world's contraceptives social marketing. Besides its vivid and detailed description of many interesting events, it is also a classic textbook on the development, the principles and the practice of the social marketing programs. This is a great book not only for those social marketing pros, but also I believe sales/marketing people, entrepreneurs, health professionals, social workers, government officials and even recreactional readers will find it very interesting and beneficial. I enjoy reading it very much.

If you are interested in social marketing, HIV prevention, or family planning (as I am), this book is a late night page turner. It contains plenty of description and discussion on the practical and concrete side of actually running a program - a must for anyone in the field - as well as a colorful history on social marketing. However, it goes beyond that to answer some of the academic debate on cost effectiveness, program efficiencies, and issues such as pricing, measuring results, and social marketing "models." Most of all, this book had me laughing out loud with anecdotal stories of Bangladeshi Presidents requesting that condom signs be taken down, descriptions of rotating heart-shaped waterbeds in the Philippines, and stories about condoms from around the world. A social marketing Bible.

Clear, concise, insightful with lots of anecdotes, "Let Every Child Be Wanted" is a book that I couldn't put down until finished. I recommend it highly!

Read this book in two seatings. First rate non-fiction from my favorite author. Vivid scenes put you in his shoes; sad and happy at the same time.

Just bought it for my father for father's day.

With the possible exception of Goodbye Columbus when you undertake a Roth novel you are in for some heavy reading and a major time committment. No so with this novel. At almost novella length, Roth spins a somewhat possibly fictionalized story of the elder Roth's late life which despite being the father of a famous author, he is also a man full of memories and regrets.

The most moving of scenes which will touch anyone who has lost a loved one is the trip to the Mother graveside. Ultimately no matter how you behave during the visit; if you talk to the deceased, weed the plot or whatever, you walk away the same as you came in...alone... to paraphrase Roth. This an other flashes of the master make this and all Roth novels worth reading over and over.

Patrimony is a non-fiction account of the last years of Philip Roth's father, Herman, covering as well the family history which was so important to Herman. Not only is Roth a fine stylist, but the sensitivity of this account transcends even the exceptional style. By turns tragic, sardonic, humerous and moving, this book is a window into the values of late twentieth-century America, both good and bad

There are a mere handful of insightful, non-dogmatic, loving authors who understand the vulnerability of children (we, who were children, and those who now are children for awhile), and who can open up for us those feelings which arose in childhood and mold us the rest of our lives. Mr Greven and Alice Miller are the two I admire most. This book is honest, insightful, non-judgemental and enlightening. Do not be afraid to question the wisdom of your forefathers in regards to punishing your children - read this and learn.

This book is a compelling rebuttal to all those who claim that corporal punishment does not harm children. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about how experiences in childhood can and do affect our adult selves.

This is a powerful book. It may be too strong for those who most need to hear its message, but for every parent who has wondered about corporal punishment it will be an eye-opener. In Greven's inspired hands the stories of battered Christians through the ages come to life in a never-ending tale of appalling woe. That all this pain was delivered to children in the name of God and with the apparent sanction of holy scripture makes it all the more poignant, almost unbearable in its awful human tragedy.

By VICTORIA TILNEY McDONOUGH for the Missoulian

Reading Philip Burgess' poems is like looking at old black-and-white photographs, the sharp grays and whites sun-faded with time, and yet the clarity of the faces and images so revealing that at times you have to look away.

"Badlands Child," Burgess' collection of poems, is full of ache. Though the poems take us from rural Montana to Vietnam, across the United States, over oceans and deserts and mountains to Spain, Morocco and Normandy, and then finally back to Montana, there is a common denominator of heartbroken lives, of silent observation and numbness, of hollow loneliness. And yet, there are moments of love and appreciation so ripe that all of that pain seems justifiable, redeemed somehow, the human condition as it is meant to be.

In "Weather Report From Home," the pull between away and home is like bare skin against cold metal - it is familiar, familiar yet wholly uninvited. Sewn together with big, loopy stitches, there is guilt and sadness, regret, relief:

Curious, that when you hear the old man
loud and hollow over the party line
tell of three days rain after a long dry spell,
even though you've been thirty years gone
from that lean, dusty place
you still feel the extravagant wetness
of those first few raindrops on a sun-tender forearm.

Far from Montana, "Saigon Whore" is told from the point of view of the title character, not of the soldier. She wonders and speaks, her questions perhaps not too far from those of the soldier:

I cannot see my life before me, I cannot see love.
I come into the bar where Mick Jagger sings
of dissatisfaction and I search each soldier's heart
for stars with which to create a necklace,
a constellation of a man and woman planting rice
beneath a sky of silent blue.

Burgess' collection is enriched with a small spattering of old photographs, the majority of which are from the Burgess family archives dating back to the Civil War. Each is beautiful and stark, reinforcing the images we have read of a dance below a "guillotine moon," fence posts guarding "the border of what's left of a man's spring dreams," an old Chevrolet truck resting "in the powdery cleavage of the hills," a stag with "three legs frozen in failed leap," and the sister, in the lounge of a mental hospital, who "sways like a metronome, arms trembling across her emaciated chest." These photographs, dropped seemingly effortlessly within the text, are like poems themselves - you squint, searching for signs, for truths, for a reason why when you know there are none.

The poem "L.A. Coyote" leaves us hearing the haunting cry of this desert creature, and perhaps seeing ourselves in the reflection of his unblinking eyes:

The L.A. coyote learns to find grace in alienation,
to bless betrayal through slightly bared teeth,
and to relish the chilly decay that rides on winds
blown through the nooks and crannies of worn cadavers.

The coyote learns that all passions are temporary,
that water can be tasted only as you die of thirst,
and that true warmth is never without cold.

Burgess was raised on an isolated ranch in eastern Montana. Currently, he lives and works in Missoula.

First a disclaimer.

I know nothing about poetry. In fact, as a general rule, I'd rather read an environmental impact statement or a brief in a federal tax case than try to decipher the higher meaning hidden behind the words and phrases of the most gifted poets.

That's why I was amazed by a book of poetry mailed to me recently from Touch of Light Publishing, a Missoula company specializing in works peculiar to Montana.

Without much interest - more out of a sense of obligation to at least take a look - I opened Philip J. Burgess' Badlands Child, a collection of 80 biographical poems.

From the opening offering, "The Caretaker," I was hooked. It may have been that the imagery was so familiar - the long expanses of near-desert that stretch north and south along Highway 2 on Montana's northern tier, groves of Russian olives planted as windbreaks generations ago and the railroad when it was still the Great Northern.

According to biographical material sent with the book, Burgess grew up on an isolated Eastern Montana ranch along the Missouri, and, as with anyone who takes landscape seriously, it left its mark in all that came after.

Even the powerful impressions left by his tour in Vietnam and on his subsequent wanderings around the world are tainted by the dust of a Montana childhood. (...)

(...)

The poet lives in Missoula now, where he spent 13 years advocating for and counseling veterans. The poetry collection represents 20 years of work, a lifetime of watching the chips fall where they may.

Great family activity book that offers new discovery and opportunities for discussion with every reading. Thoughtfully researched and written with beautiful illustrations. This is one of the treasures that your child will save to share with their own children.

For children, this is a super way to introduce Jesus' life and important events. It keeps their interest on every page as they must find important symbols of Christianity. As they look for the symbols many different things are discovered in the pictures to learn of what life was like when Jesus lived and how it can be compared to life today.

The emergence of "the child molester" as Public Enemy Number One -- or, conversely, as an image for hip audiences to snicker over -- is the topic of this book, and it examines how American society has responded to pedophilia over the past century. The author sifts through an enormous volume of evidence, and his tone is as sober as a judge.

He suggests that concern with the sexual abuse of children has developed in waves over the past century or so. In each case, public awareness has gone through a kind of cycle -- from reluctant awareness of the problem, to increased public attention, then to a period of intense fascination and horror culminating in the demand that the government move in to act decisively.

Jenkins argues that we have, for some time now, been in the final stages of the cycle. The expression "moral panic," which gives the book its title, is a sociological term. Those who coined it define moral panic as a state in which public reaction to a problem "is out of all proportions to the actual threat offered, when 'experts' perceive the threat in all but identical terms ... [and] when the media representations universally stress 'sudden and dramatic' increases (in numbers involved or events) and 'novelty,' above and beyond that which a sober, realistic appraisal could sustain."

What makes Moral Panic absorbing is not so much Jenkins' diagnosis of the present situation as his careful reconstruction of how medical and legal institutions came to recognize and understand the existence of molestation. "In the opening years of the twentieth century," he writes, "social and medical investigators argued convincingly that American children were being molested and raped in numbers far higher than had been imagined ... By 1910, social investigators were confirming the worst speculations about the prevalence of child sexual molestation, and panic about sex killers and perverts became acute about 1915." A similar pattern of increased attention and growing anxiety ran from the late 1930s through the early 1950s.

Conceptions of the nature and extent of sexual abuse changed from decade to decade. Extensive documentation -- from social-scientific works, newspaper stories, and mass entertainment forms like crime novels and film -- undermines the impression that pedophilia was only recognized a short time ago. Particularly striking are the parallels between the early years of the century and the present day: "In a foretaste of the 1970s and 1980s," Jenkins writes of the Progressive era, "feminists allied with therapists, social workers, and moral reformers in order to defend children, and the new ideas were promulgated by a sensationalistic media." The wave of concern that peaked in the late 1940s brought with it demands -- also heard lately -- that sex offenders be turned over to more or less permanent psychiatric hospitalization.

Following earlier patterns, the cycle of attention, anxiety, and legislation that began in the late 1970s ought to have burnt itself out by now. Clearly it has not. And some of the bogus "data" afloat about the menace suggests that "panic" is just the right word. "Far from marking a new era of indifference," Jenkins writes, "the year 1995 was characterized by the furor over sex predator statutes and the fear of cyberstalkers. The cycle has been broken in the modern era, when child abuse has become part of our enduring cultural landscape, a metanarrative with the potential for explaining all social and personal ills."

Philip Jenkins did it again. His previous book, 'Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain' talked about child-abuse hysteria that swept Britain some time ago. This new book is actually a history of the concept of child abuse and child abuser in USA in the twentieth century. The book talks in details how that concept looked like at the end of the last century and how it looks like now. I have never read before any book that is so accurate and detailed as this one. For anyone interested in the subject of how society viewed child abuse and child abusers and how is viewing it now, this book is must-have. And I am very happy that Jenkins decided to devote this book to the Joel Best who himself wrote similar book, "Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child-Victims"

Contents:

1. Creating Facts, 2. Constructing Sex Crime, 1890-1934, 3. The Age of the Sex Psychopath, 1935-1957, 4. The Sex Psychopath Statutes, 5. The Liberal Era, 1958-1976, 6. The Child Abuse Revolution, 1976-1986, 7. Child Pornography and Pedophile Rings, 8. The Road to Hell: Ritual Abuse and Recovered Memory, 9. Full Circle: The Return of the Sexual Predator in the 1990s, 10. A Cycle of Panic.

When Parents Become Partners does a wonderful job of being accessible to new parents and parents-to-be, while also providing well-researched information and recommendations for professionals who work with couples. Carolyn and Phil Cowan's research following a group of pregnant couples and a control group of couples who hadn't yet decided whether to have children is fascinating, and readers will certainly recognize themselves and their friends, family among the various "types" of couples that emerge. Given the enormous transition that takes place in a couples' relationship when a child is born, this book offers reassuring, realistic information about how to survive -- or help others survive -- the change.

This book is a study of 100 couples from pregnancy through their child's kindergarten years. It really put in perspective the challenges that one must meet to maintain a relationship and raise a child. It is not a how-to book (thank god) but studies of real people dealing with life. The conclusions not astonishing but interesting and occasionally surprising. I had trouble making the transition from lover-wife to mother-lover-wife and this book helped me to feel that I was not alone! A footnote: This is a scientific study, complete with graphs and charts. Although it is not dry and quite an easy read, the format might turn some people off. I still loved it!

The art of parenting - the transition from whiny two year old to responsible caring adult is the challenge of all parents. As an avid reader of parenting books, I found Dr. Phil's book not only easy to read and understand, but also a throrough guide to raising healthy happy children. Basic Parenting 101 demystifies how children learned to behave the way they do - (whatever it takes to get their needs met!). Dr. Phil explains how simple parenting techniques can easily shape your children's actions. The numerous stories and humorous cartoons throughout his book complement the comprehensive guide he provides beginning from the tantrums of toddlers through handling street drugs and teenagers. Teaching your children how to make good choices, allowing them to learn from consequences, understanding the difference between discipline and punishment - these seeem to be the tricky parts of parenting and this is where Dr. Phil's book excels over other parenting resources. As the mother of two children, I consider it's one of those must-have books.

Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State, is neither an anti-porn zealot nor an "anything goes" libertarian. He finds adult pornography tolerable, even believing that "The positive aspects of...legal adult material should be stressed." (p. 222). But he is clearly opposed to child pornography, believing that it should remain illegal and that we should take measures to reduce its existence to a tolerable level.

I was reminded of the war against agricultural pests because what Professor Jenkins stresses is that it is impossible to get rid of child porn on the Net completely without destroying much of what is good about the Net. In trying to completely kill all the pests, we may inadvertently kill all the beneficial insects as well.

This book is ostensibly about the "kiddie porn" culture on the Web, its extent and what can be done about it. Jenkins uses quotes from child porn Bulletin Boards to demonstrate the mind set of the traffickers. He describes a war between citizen vigilante groups and the child pornographers, each employing their hacker expertise in trying to shut down the Web sites and expose the identities of their adversaries. Jenkins does not describe child pornography other than in the most general terms. He claims not to have actually seen any child pornography himself, noting that it is illegal to view such material even for research purposes, and indeed intimates that had he seen such material he would deny having seen it.

The picture that emerges is of a deviant, global community populated by persons hiding behind nicknames and proxies who view and exchange pictures of children through sites and servers from many different places in the world. Jenkins believes that because of the differing laws in the various countries, child pornography cannot be completely eliminated, that it can only be controlled. He depicts the regular deviants themselves as savvy, elusive individuals who change identities and addresses as they stay one step ahead of the law. Only the amateurs get caught.

But there is a bigger issue here emerging out of the struggle between law enforcement and the deviants, and that is the issue of privacy. How can we simultaneously monitor the Web sufficiently to trap, expose and prosecute child pornographers while at the same time protecting ourselves from Big Brother?

Jenkins begins Chapter Six, "Policing the Net," with a revealing quote from Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, a man who ought to know what he is talking about: "You already have zero privacy--get over it." My feeling is that our government and the large corporations already have enough information about us to serve a totalitarian regime (should one ever emerge). Every key stroke on Web can be monitored, recorded and stored. Right now this information is being used mostly for commercial purposes, but we can see how such information could be used to influence, intimidate and control individuals for political purposes. Consequently what this book is really about is the war between the interests of society and those of the individual, the social good verses private interest.

This war is of course as old as humanity, going back even into the tribal culture. But never before has there been such power to coerce and persuade. The tribal leader may have been all powerful within his tribe, so that if you went against him, you would meet with defeat. But you could run away to another place in the world, as humans have always done. Today, and increasingly tomorrow, there is and will be no place to run to.

One of the fears we have of one-world government, now enormously augmented with electronic and computer technology, as Jenkins notes, is that of a totalitarian state from which there is no escape. Our fear is that we will conform to the dictates of that state or we will be punished and "retrained." The Orwellian nightmare in comparison seems limited and amateurish.

So the struggle against the very real and intolerable evil of child pornography becomes in this book a precursor scenario of the struggle of the state against the individual. What Jenkins wants to see happen is some kind of control placed on the invasive nature of the state while somehow maintaining the ability to go after anti-social deviants like the child pornographers. Somehow the state must be restrained but the bad guys controlled.

Finally! A simple, informative perspective on the complex office dynamics that so many of us face. The scenarios are well laid out and the examples easy to relate to. While other discussions of office dynamics tend to over-analyze situations, this book provided me with a straightforward roadmap to recognize and deal with daily personnel issues.

In an easy-reading format the authors have pointed out many office situations that relate to family situations. They give practical and useful suggestions for handling these problems. Worthwhile reading for anyone who works in an office setting.

This book is a must for anyone who has to manage people in an office, organization, and even on a committee. It is easy and interesting reading and a MUST to understand why the people you manage behave as they do.