Finally, a book written by insiders in regard to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Certainly a rare find. This book is actually a compilation of papers/essays/letters written by numerous authors all of Israeli Jewish decent. Noted authors include Uri Avnery who fought in the '48 war and served in the Knesset, Ishai Menuchin who is a Major the Israel Defense Forces reserves, Dr. Yigal Shochat who served as a fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force during the War of Attrition, as well as numerous well-known and published professors of Political Science, all of whom teach at universities across Israel.

The book subverts many myths about Israeli politics in the OPT, but it does not do so in a black and white manner as so many other books do. It is a critical analyses of how certain decisions by those in power are creating a threat not only to Israeli citizens within Israel proper, but also a to Israel's democracy itself. This book criticizes key flaws in Israeli politics in regard to the Palestinian issue and provides solutions in their place; rather than simply attack Israel for all it's worth.

In addition to the logical, critical, thought-provoking, Jewish-perspective information this book provides, it also serves to effectively undermine anti-Semitic attitudes towards Israel. Many other books simply criticize Israel without providing alternate solutions given from Israeli Jewish perspectives.. those types of books end up in the hands of some anti-Semites who use the text (most often taken out of context) as metaphorical ammunition. This book is no such source for such idiocy.

To criticize one's own government is nothing new, but to do so in such a well-articulated manner, without ostracizing 1000s of years of Jewish culture, and all the while defending democracy while putting your public reputation on the line is not only genius; it's heroic. Read this book!

A book that challenges so much that one hears about the "justice" of Israel occupying Palestinian land is an important, necessary book. Although the title makes somewhat grandiloquent claims on the part of its individual writers (there is no risk whatsoever to these people, in terms of social position or even income, in writing these articles), it is important for Americans to hear other perspectives coming from Israel. Most of the articles are worth reading, although Anthony Lewis's contribution to the volume unfortunately shows his characteristic clunky prose and banality of polemic. But that is a minor quibble to make. This is a fine book.

I have read many great books that adequately cover the Israel-Palestine conflict, but this is one that achieves a high position on my list of books for those who also want an intro to the topic. Besides the fact that it thoroughly covers and exposes many myths, it also does it from an Israeli perspective, hence perhaps removing discomfort of anyone who might be tempted to read some truth but question it's source.

The book absoutely redefines Pro-Israel as something that is tied together with Pro-Palestine. The two are intertwined. What the American media projects as "Pro-Israeli" is really in the worst interest of both the Palestinians AND the Israelis and the book covers this quite well.

The book is split up into sections dealing with the rise of the conflict, escalation and so on. For example, a section is dedicated to purely military dissidents (very brave men) who speak out against crimes that they may have been forced to help once.

All in all, this book is recommended to the nth degree.

Trollope was a master of the domestic situation. There is a scarcity of dialogue in Orley Farm, but the detailed explanations of the emotions, surroundings, and background of each character offers so much more than dialogue ever could. Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm is by far the best fictionalized trial drama that I have ever read. One would be hard-pressed to find another like it.

I would offer the warning to those who dislike long, tedious readings that this work would not be for them. It is nearly 850 pages with very little action/dialogue. It more a study into the human psyche as it relates to guilt, pity, law, and the moral implications of all these things.

Orley is simply timeless. Just as in the Palliser series, the characters are the people all around you, in the office, in the news, and on the tube. Trollope's ability to understand the subtle differences that shape the mind of men and women is simply uncanny. If you are a truth seeker, this is a book for you. Anyone with exposure to a legal system with its basis in the English common law will understand the perceptive analysis it is subjected to in Orley Farm. The distinction between evil deeds and the often sympathetic humans that are their authors is one that modern American culture often forgets to make. Orley Farm is here to remind us. As a trusts and estates lawyer, I can not believe that I practiced for fifteen years before someone told me about this gem.

Orley Farm is Trollope at his most profound, and his most entertaining. It is difficult to ascertain what is best in this novel: the subtle, incisive examination of how legal systems cannot be impartial and, more fundamentally, how humankind looks after its own regardless of right and wrong; or the episodic journey with some of Trollope's most memorable (and always three dimensional) characters - the 'wrong' but completely empathic Lady Mason, the fiercely honourable Sir Peregrine Orme, the virile young Peregrine Orme and, most memorably, the gentle overwhelmed but staunchly loyal Mrs Orme - undergoing the pangs of Trollope's drama amidst ancient piles, undulating hedgerows and sequestered English fields.

I love this book.

As a study of the mind of a top-notch musician, the writer has done a superb job of capturing an intimate portrait of how Casals thought about music, and the production of musical performance. Through a series of well-organised chapters, the reader feels as if he/she is undergoing a masterclass with Casals: diminuendo, stress, meter, mythology, feeling . . . by revealing Casals as a philosopher of orchestration, this book shows the microscope of Casals mind when viewing a score. We benefit from his incomparable insights, spoken off like night-time chat, and we learn from his conductor's sensibilities, like we're sitting in the string section in front of him.

This book is invaluable to musicians--of an instrument--composers, conductors, and amateur enthusiasts such as myself who'd like to experience the workings of a keen sense and ear in a genius like Casals.

This book, like few others, have deeply enriched my understanding of music--as a thing of time, shape, and expression.

From Blum's first discussion of the "First Principle" through his Casals-inspired revelations about melodic shape, dynamics, and rhythm, this book is invaluable as a guide for true artistic expression. The line between music as a set of performance skills and as an interpretive art is clearly drawn, and the spirit of Casals beckons all of us who would be truly inspired musicians

David Blum writes an insightful and rewarding text based on notes taken from rehearsals, master classes, and personal conversations with Pablo Casals. According to Blum, the idea for the book came from Antony Hopkins who encouraged him to take his notes and memories and document them so that other musicians could benefit from Casals' musicianship. The book provides a study of the "laws of music" or "laws of nature" which Casals considered to be the essential elements of meaningful interpretation. The text serves as a guide to musicians, conductors, and music educators on the art of music making.

Most musicians know of Casals the cellist. Unknown to many, his conducting career spans a period of over sixty-five years. During his career as a conductor, rehearsals clearly revealed his ideas about music interpretation. The text records the oral statements and the aural interpretations made by Casals during his rehearsals.

Five chapters divide the text with each chapter representing the main areas of Casals' interpretive ideas. The last chapter serves as an application of the elements of interpretation combined to produce a performance. Every chapter includes printed music excepts, detailed notations of performance practice, insightful commentary from the author, and compelling statements made by Casals during the rehearsal of a particular passage. Topic areas covered in the chapters include The First Principal, Finding the Design, Diction for Instrumentalists, Perceiving Time Relationships, Insights for String Players, Casals and Bach, and A Casals Rehearsal: the Pastoral Symphony.

A unique aspect of Blum's book, the reader is encouraged to study and become involved in every music example. The music examples are excerpts from his performances on the cello, lessons with cello students, and rehearsals with the orchestra. Transposed to the key of C for easy reading, all excerpts are in treble or bass clefs. They have notated phrases, articulations, dynamic nuances, and other stylistic attributes illustrating the points of Casals' concepts. Blum tastefully adds Casals' vocal statements to enhance the music examples, "Casals cried out, Here is the anguish! - Let it sing at the top of the phrase!"

David Blum's book is well written and informative. The music examples with Casals' statements allow the reader to easily and quickly gasp the details of interpretation. This scholarly book with practical applications and insights is invaluable.

For many people, Trollope is a writer to stay away from. They assume he wrote terribly twee novels about vicars and tea cosies (which is half true). But anyone who has read "He Knew Was Right" will know just how progressive and real Trollope is. This incredibly insightful study of a marriage reveals a great deal not only about Victorian society but about the eternal struggles between men and women. It's a mystery to me why this book is not better known.

In his autobiography, Trollope zips past this story. I couldn't put it down, and read the last 40 moving and exhausting pages aloud to my wife. The Pallisers can get a bit wearying at times, though I love them all. But there is nothing tiresome in here; this book roars with its two intersecting plots and the relatively unique idea of making a sympathetic character, one whom you truly care for and about, a complete, irredeemable fool.

Several strong secondary characters, all just a little more complex than they seem, combine with a knock-out plot and vivid main characters, to make this my favorite Trollope novel. The man who will not accept the good around him but prefers to see the bad...? How's that for an eternal theme?

The Penguin Classic edition of He Knew He Was Right has a wonderful introduction. Frank Kermode provides a fascinating explanation of how the constraints of Victorian society limited the ways in which Trollope could write about "sexual jealousy," and how a relatively mild (by today's standards) incident (here, calling a woman by her "Christian" (first) name) could be the basis for suspicion of "infidelity." Kermode also provides an illuminating discussion comparing hero Louis Treveylan's obsession and jealousy with that of Othello. Finally, Kermode relates the novel to others of the period, both those by Trollope and those of his contemporaries.

While the focus of the novel is the main character's mental deterioration resulting from his unreasonable jealousy and increasing isolation, both from society and reality, Trollope also provides a cast of interesting women faced with possible marriage partners. At a time when a woman's only "career" opportunity was to make a successful marriage, the women in He Knew He Was Right each react differently to the male "opportunities" that come their way. Kermode notes that Trollope was not a supporter of the rights of women, yet he manages to describe the unreasonable limitations on, and expectations of, women in a sympathetic light.

The "main story," of Trevelyan and his wife, is actually one of the least compelling of the man-woman pairings in the novel. What I mean is that while their story IS compelling, the others are substantially more so. This is a wonderful book. And, personally I'd like to note that I laughed out loud while reading it. This was on a cross-country airplane flight, and I got some strange looks for laughing at what appeared to be a thick "serious" novel.

Black and white was never so gray, and gray was never so vibrant as it streams across the pages of David Anthony Durham's new historical novel, "Walk Through Darkness."

While contemporary activists seek slave reparations, Durham explores the complexities of slavery from a modern black man's perspective. It's not a rant, but a contemplative journey in which good is always tainted, bad is never pure, and black and white blend to gray.

The desperate condition of African-Americans before and after the Civil War is Durham recurring theme.

In "Gabriel's Story," the protagonist is a 15-year-old African-American boy in the empty middle of the continent after the Civil War, caught between youth and manhood, naiveté and wisdom, family and flight. It was a classical bildungsroman - a novel about the moral and psychological growth of the main character -- told in masterful prose reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy.

In "Walk Through Darkness," Durham retraces his literary steps in a different landscape and a different time: That troubled slice of America between Virginia and Pennsylvania where slavery and abolition collided in the anxious twilight before the Civil War.

William's story also traces through complex historic and cultural issues. If you were expecting Durham, by virtue of being an African-American, to oversimplify an issue that split America down the middle, you've been reading too many racial polemics. We glimpse extraordinarily humane slave owners, mercenary blacks who gleefully profit from trapping runaways, and a wide array of men and women who are unexpectedly - and refreshingly - conflicted about human bondage.

As he did with his first book, Gabriel's Story, Durham has provided readers with a book that works on many levels. First of all it's a hell of a story. This is an exciting adventure, an intelligent page-turner. Interesting, well-drawn characters, who, like people in "real life," can act in unpredicted ways. These characters rank with those created by Charles Frazier in "Cold Mountain."
If you've ever grappled with imagining the lives of slaves in 19th century America, their struggles and the response of whites to them, reading "Walk Through Darkness" will help.
The story concerns a slave, William, escaping a cruel master and his search for his pregnant lover. Durham intersperses this tale with relentless pursuit of the protaganist by a tracker.
While spinning this fascinating yarn, Durham offers a hard look at a time and place not so distant and the attitudes that pervaded American life.
This is Durham's second book, following the fantastic "Gabriel's Story". He is two for two, having hit both out of the ballpark.

Walk Through Darkness is a powerful tale of the trials and tribulations of slavery in early American history and how the forces of love, truth and redemption can at times work to right the wrongs of that hateful period.

In his novel, David Anthony Durham tells a story of William, a fugitive slave, who places his life in danger to find his pregnant wife and deliver her to freedom. With little knowledge of his surroundings and only occasional help from random strangers, William travels from down South to Philadelphia. During his travels, William encounters many hardships, which force him to grow into a stronger man. First, he is tricked, then captured, by a group of slave traders and prepared for sale. Forced to endure the cramped quarters and debasing actions of his captors, he begins to lose hope of his goal, only to be freed through a violent uprising, which results in the death of his captors. On the run again, William reaches Baltimore and stows away upon a trading ship, only to be found and once again returned to shackles. It is here, while befriended by the ship's Captain, that William begins to learn the larger lessons of life. With one more chance to reach his goal, he is given the opportunity to escape, and through a stroke of luck, finally ends up in Philadelphia. Hungry, tired and lost, William succumbs to yellow fever and would have died had it not been for the help of a stranger. This Samaritan only asks that he understand her altruistic ways and her desire to help him become a free man. Fully recovered, he discovers his wife's whereabouts and makes plans to rescue her from her surroundings.

Throughout William's journey, we follow a parallel story of a Scottish tracker, Andrew Morrison, who is hired to find, capture, and bring William back to his master in one piece. While his motives are unclear at first, it becomes obvious that Morrison's past history within America has created a man who is at odds with his identity and is wrestling with his quest for redemption. With his trusted hound at his side, Morrison eventually ends up in Philadelphia to find and capture the fugitive slave.

The book ends with a suspenseful account of the various forces that are working for and against William in his quest for freedom. With violence an everyday possibility, many lives are ruined because of their participation in helping an innocent person seek his dream. However, even with powerful currents working against him, William ends up on his way to freedom through the help of many of those who were opposed to the evil of slavery that flowed through American veins.

Walking Through Darkness is a heavy read that yields an enormous amount of satisfaction. It is clear that David Anthony Durham has become a literary force to reckon with and is among the new cadre of African American writers like Paul Beatty, Guy Johnson, and Colson Whitehead, who have brought new stories into the mainstream literary world, without sacrificing their integrity. Once again, Durham has used his deft literary brush to create a tale complete with vivid pictures of life and death during this most turbulent time in American history.

Very helpful for devout Catholics, returning fallen-away Catholics, and for anyone interested in understanding the Catholic religious tradition. I especially like the biblical references that show the scriptural source of the sacrements and religious practices. This book will answer any questions you have about the Catholic tradition. The only reservation I have is that there are no answers given to the questions at the end of each lesson. Other than that, it's a great resource.

This book was recommended to me by my Spiritual Confessor as a book to be studied on a daily basis. He said that is should be well understood and memorized. What I really love about this book is that it's question and answer format along with commentary and Scriptural references makes our Catholic Traditions easily understandable. Since it is a question and answer format I can also take a couple of questions a day and memorize them. This is an ideal book for New Catholics as well as Cradle Catholics. This is a great investment for the price.

A previous "reviewer" obviously has never seen this book since it is not intended for use with children. It is clearly aimed at young adults who already have an understanding of the basic truths of the Catholic faith. These catechisms are styled after Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, which is universally recognized as one of the greatest philosphical and theological works ever! For those wanting an introduction to the Catholic religion, I would suggest the first book in this series, which is geared to children and catechumens.

Be careful what edition of this book you get. The original edition was a large, useful collection of primary sources. However, another edition was put out which, while still a collection of primary documents, was much shorter and could not be considered definitive at all. The latter was the one I wound up with, and I didn't get much use out of it.

This compendium of battle studies and reports was written by commanders of all levels: Grant, Sherman, Lee and Longstreet down to lieutenants commanding companies for points of clarification on minor skirmishes or segments of the battlefield.The accounts were set down when the war was still fresh in their memories, yet when enough time had passed for reflection.

The fact that several viewpoints, some conflicting, are given for each major battle and campaign adds immeasurably to the value of this work. Of course recent "scholarship" has eclipsed and corrected many of these accounts. However, you get the immediacy and vigor of the post-war controversies and the finger-pointing --- the first early exposition of the rift between Longstreet and the Jubal Early faction for example.

Battles and Leaders was for a long time THE source for the early critical historians of the war such as John Codman Ropes, W. Henderson (the pre-eminent biographer of Stonewall Jackson) as well as the generals themselves who wanted to cross-check their accounts. This was the case until well after the release of the Offical Records some ten years later.

There were inevitable lapses of style and critical ability in the original multi-volume edition; these for the most part have been weeded out from this accessible one-volume version.

The great part about this book for me is that one can get the flavor of the passions still raging, even though the writers attempted a detached and clinical tone for credibility's sake.

Johnson and Buell made a concerted effort to elicit a well-rounded picture for battles and episodes which were the subject of intense debate.

If you have any interest in the Civil War, and lack the time to sift through the voluminous post-war memoirs of the commanders, you'll want to keep Battles and Leaders handy.

This book is a veritable dictionary of the civil war. It holds everything one ever wished to know about the war and its leaders. I recommend it!

I've owned this field guide for quite some time. The pictures and text are all good. I believe it would have been a better book had it had actual maps of of the birds distribution though. Describing where a particular bird is located geographically just in words without a map is not what I like. Other than that, this is more than an adequate guide for any person who enjoys birding.