We can't say enough about this book. Primarily focused on the creation and purpose of the Star of Bethlehem, it is a different but pure and truthful approach to sharing the Christmas story. It is both a scientific explanation AND an incredible testament of creation, AND is legal to read in public school! The illustrations are gorgeous, especially if you're an "outer space fan". The story is exciting, and there are optional flaps to open on each page that offer more biblical information on each portion of the story if you want to go further at home. This makes a great book for boys, and is for some reason very hard to find in retail stores, so get it here!

I have thoroughly enjoyed every single story in this book. Your vivid descriptions of those southern characters, both young and old, brought back so many memories of my Southern childhood. I laughed and cried as I relived so many episodes of my own life experiences. Thank you for giving this to all of us who have a southern past...and relatives and friends who loved us as much as we loved them.

This was a great book! Good for the little ones - as long as they know who REALLY "discovered" America. Garfield tells Odie it was really Christopher Columbuses' CAT that found America.

Jim Davis has been a great writer i have all of his books but this is the limit of fun this is the funnest book that u can buy its at a great price i would like to tell all of u two buy this. This is the greatest book that u can buy i respect Jim Davis. Hes the greatest.

Mike Davis is our premier bare-knuckled Marxist-savant polemicist, doing prodigious amounts of research on important topics and writing in a molten style that literally pulls your eyes down the page. For these reasons alone, attention must be paid. (This is difficult advice to a nation of "comfort readers," who--far from being provoked by their nighttime reading--love to curl up with a good Danielle Steele until the Sandman comes.) Whatever other functions a Davis book serves, it's an in-your-face test of the reader's mettle. ...

Davis paints what seems to me a more than plausible vision of a Hispanic/Latino future that I'll bet you haven't given much thought to (unless you live in SoCal or along the southern border). One useful thing about demography is that a simple extrapolation will get the analyst to several plausible hypotheses about things to come. This is one service Davis has performed. One of the useful mental exercises Davis sends you off on once he makes his preliminary case (of a Latino/Hispanic plurality by 2050) prompts you to comtemplate the coming contours of national level politics, immigration policy, relations with Central and Latin America--in other words, this book can rattle your mental universe. And his chapter on "transnational suburbs"--in which he analyzes bilocated Latino communities that, in our internet and cheap-transportation age, retain a deep involvement in both their native and immigrant communities--is, for me, worth the price of the book.

This is a useful tutorial about the drift of our demographic destiny in a "globalized" world, but the picture Davis paints is by no means inevitable. Second and third generation immigrant communities tend to assimilate to the dominant culture through a variety of means (although Davis tends to argue that contemporary immigrant communities are driven by walls of discrimination back upon themselves in ways earlier immigrants in the second and third generations were not). The future is seldom, in any significant respect, a straight-line extrapolation of any trend. And Davis's great hope for the mobilization of the heretofore inchoate political might of the new immigrant communities--a revivified labor movement--seems, at best, a pipe dream, but one that more than a few commentators see well within the realm of possibility, as income differentials widen and a pronounced underclass sentiment proliferates among the have-nots.

In all, a quick, stimulating, worthy read. And for those parents who wonder which language little Johnny should study in high school, or in his language immersion pre-school, David would probably say--and I'd have to agree--Spanish is a good choice. Venceremos!

I enjoyed this book as a quick summary of the "Latino/Hispanic Experience" in the United States. The writing was comprehensive and interesting, and the facts seemed well-substantiated. Some of the information provided was quite shocking, and served its purpose of creating awareness of the continuing inequalities in our society. Overall, very nicely done.

Although each chapter takes on a different topic--bilingual education, anti-Latino violence, the politics of school funding and the staggeringly high Latino drop-out rate, and labor divisions and income discrepancies, to name a few--a unifying theme is present throughout. Essentially, the book describes the Latino influx, particularly that of the past ten or so years, the effects it has had on U.S. cities, and the Anglo backlash to this "Latinization." Obnoxious back-cover review excerpts not withstanding, the "Magical Urbanism" is not about Jennifer Lopez and the new Anglatin popular culture; it addresses more substantial issues than such reviews give it credit for. The numbers Davis presents are disturbing, but the reasons for finding them so will depend on your perspective: For those who seek to preserve the current Anglo power stucture, the degree of Latinization that the country is undergoing (or simply the sheer number of Hispanics it is absorbing) will be terrifying. To those more sympathetic to the plight of people of color seeking to gain a foothold in this country, the details about the poor living conditions and antipathy toward Latinos will be equally disturbing. The book focuses primarily on New York, Miami, Chicago, and especially southern California, but it provides a good overview of the Latino Condition--though it is worth noting that Davis never loses sight of the heterogeniety of the various peoples encompassed by the term "Latino"--nationwide. Don't let the gravity of the subject matter throw you, though, if you're simply looking for a compelling read; Davis is a master of his art, and "Magical Urbanism" is as hard to put down as a good novel.

An extraordinary exercise in erudition. The breadth of Davis's scholarship to put this picture together is amazing. From his synthesis of meteorological science, historical geography and history over five continents Davis prosecutes the case of mass murder against the British ruling class. The callousness of the British rulers of India, (& the racism which underpinned it) extracting their surplus to keep themselves supreme in world finance which sentenced 10s of millions to death from famine and its aftermath are horrifying. British rule in India and the great powers' intervention in China, Davis argues are the origins of third world underdevelopment and mass poverty.
Davis's account is overwhelmingly convincing but the real sting is the similarity of the behaviour he depicts to the ruthlessness of the G8 and their determination to impose their "free trade" on the rest of the world through the WTO. Today's great powers care no more about mass starvation, death from disease and institutionalised poverty resulting from their detemrination to dominate world trade than the Bristish in India. And they will raise the same arguments about the poor's lack of initiative and self reliance and the demoralising effect of welfare as the British in India. Read this book and know how the future will unfold if we do not resist it.

From the substantive topics of LATE VICTORIAN HOLOCAUSTS, namely El Nino induced droughts and famines that brought on agricultural collapse and socioeconomic disintegration in the tropics, there can be no doubting that the real subject of this book is misery. It's presented here in such a well reasoned, thought provoking, and professional way that we don't notice how deeply we've dived into the miasma before we are too far gone and by then we can't put the book down.

To put misery into context consider that between 1876 and 1900 there were a series of El Nino events that Mr Davis estimates caused between 32 to 61 million deaths in China, India and Brazil. It was not all climatalogical (i.e floods and droughts), but also diseases such as malaria, smallpox, dysentry, and cholera. Mr Davis, in building the theoretical underpinnings for his book posits two explanations:

(1) These societies had pre-existing agricultural and social systems that were capable of ameliorating the effects of the natural disasters. To the extent that the systems were now failing in the late Victorian era, Mr Davis traces this to the policies adopted by the governments of imperial China, colonial India, and Brazil. In short the trade, finance and economic practices of Europe, Britain and America, had, - long before it became a buzz-word - effectively achieved globalization.

(2) This is not to say that Third World poverty is solely a result of imperialism. It is not, and that isn't Mr Davis' argument. It is instead, he says, an issue of "political ecology." This concept as developed by Mr Davis interestingly shows how individual actions are ultimately the principal causes but also how intricately they are linked to geopolitical factors.

In summary Mr Davis seems to be saying that neither the market (or the lack thereof), nor government influence, are solely sufficient in explaining the Third World. Political ecology offers a holistic approach and sees the individual as responsible, but with a nod to the influence of geopolitics. The political element of the equation is all the more important when you realize that in the the Third World, poor also means, poor in power.

Mike Davis' new book is a work of singular importance, offering a valuable new perspective on a disaster of horrifying magnitude. In the late 1870s and the late 1890s somewhere between 30 to 60 million people died in famine in India, China and Brazil. This does not count the many more who died from the Philippines to Angola, from Morocco to Indonesia. To the extent that people remember these famines it has been assumed that they were the result of an unfavorable climate. To the extent that larger social factors were involved, they were a classic Malthusian crisis, too many people on too little land, and they represented the failure of the Third World to adapt the industrial revolution.

Davis shows very clearly that the third world was ravaged by the El Nino phenomenon. But that is the only the beginning. They were also ravaged by the new regimes of imperialism and the world market. Had the responsible authorities distributed what food existed, most of the victims would have survived. Davis is well aware of Nobel laureate A. Sen's argument that they key problem with famine is not scarcity but maldistribution. He also point out that whether under the American occupation of the Philippines or the ravages of Mao's Great Leap Forward, the real problem was the lack of democracy and lack of influence of the very poor.

Davis starts off with a fascinating and horrific description of the famines, filled with damning facts. For example Lord Lytton and his bureaucrats in 1876 India were obssessed with the idea that relief would just encourage Indian shirking. Readers will not soon forget that the calorie/work regimen that Lytton did impose was worse than that of Buchenwald. Nor will they forget the judgment of the Famine inquiries in the 1880s whom, Davis notes, concluded that with millions of famine dead the main flaw was that too much money was spent on relief. Davis goes into how the famines sparked millenarian movements and political resistance from the Boxer rebellion to the extermination of the Catholic movement at Canudos discussed, inaccurately, in Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World. He also brings a discussion of how scientists found the El Nino phenomenon, and gives a thorough technical account of how it works. He then discusses how the famines solidified European hegemony over the Third World leading to their stagnation and decline.

Based on such scholars as Bairroch, Parthsarathi, Gura and Pomeranz, Davis brings forth many facts that shore up his argument. 1) In 1800 India's share of the world manufactured product was four times that of Britain, and China's share was even higher. By 1900 India was fully under British control and the ration was 8-1 in England's favor. 2) In 1789 the living standards of China and Western Europe were roughly comparable and it appeared that China was making even better progress with its ecological problems. Naturally, a century later Europeans and Americans were much better off. 3) Despite all the many claims made on behalf of British rule in India, Indian per capita income stayed the same from 1759 to 1947. And contrary to the Malthusian argument, its population didn't grow very much. 4) Indian and Chinese rulers actually had before 1800 a good record of mitigating famines, and one British statistician suggested that whereas for the previous two millennia there was one major famine a century, under British rule there was one every four years.

How had things gone so wrong such that the El Nino famines could have such a devastating effect? Here Davis provides a useful and valuable account. Whereas previously anti-imperialists had crudely claimed that Britain had got where it was by draining the wealth of the Third World, Davis' account is much more nuanced. The problem was not so much the absolute share. Instead, by having a captive markets in Asia, Britain in the late 19th century was able to maintain its balance of payments and its complex system of free trade as surpluses in Asia balanced its increasing trade deficits with Germany and the United States. Davis shows not only how India had to bear the military costs of empire, but also how British irrigation schemes were often poorly funded, inappropriate for local conditions and had pernicious ecological effects. China, by contrast did face a severe ecological crisis which, as Davis points out, it could not escape as the Europeans did by colonizing the Western hemisphere. Moreover the West forced China to keep up the opium trade and forced it into inequitable trading arrangements. This encouraged the Chinese government to concentrate on protecting the ports and its sovereignty while underfunding the collapsing irrigation system. Ecological and political crisis fed off each other, leading to revolution and continued ecological crisis to the present day.

The result is a work which provides a valuable alternative to David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. There are some minor flaws (for instance, Czar Alexander III, unlike his father and son, was not assassinated). But it also helps introduce to a larger audience the valuable work of Indian historians that has been too long confined to specialists. It also provides a valuable complement to such works as Sheldon Watts' Epidemics and History and Prasannan Parthasarathi's The Making of a Colonial Economy. In the end this is a very different, but very appropriate sequel to the Ecology of Fear.

This book is simple and does not bring any insight to the process - anything beyond common sense is missing. Keep copies of all paperwork, keep track of your letters, seek cooperation from your doctor and call once in a while (but not harrass) the claim adjuster. Well, but of course.

This book really helped me to get ssi. His email address is in the back of his book and he actually answered me in one day when I asked a question. I was doing the wrong things and sending stuff in that didn't help me. The book explains what you need to do and not a lot of theory-it's a real how to. Thumbs up!!

Mr. Davis's book - How to Get SSI & Social Security Disability - gives readers the focus and perspective of an experienced disability examiner, and therefore has great value to people who file Social Security disability claims. Claimants must gather copious amounts of evidence and deal effectively with disability examiners and doctors to win their cases. Mr. Davis helps them do this. The book's print is large and clear. The style is appealing. Though published in 2000, the book is far from out of date. It has the merit which is lacking in Social Security literature - Mr. Davis clearly and simply depicts how to prove your case. I recommend it highly.

While the author tried to maintain an air of fairness and objectiveness regarding the many controversial issues surrounding border enforcement, a subtle, liberal bias tainted his entire presentation. The conclusions were already made before the words were written; it is obvious that supportive facts were selectively picked.

This book has less original thoughts than you might think. The author looked at the "medium" picture and told us it was the "big" picture. Either he doesn't know the difference or is trying to promote his social agenda.

In our new era of concern over national security, this argument doesn't fly.

Don't waste your money on this one!

This book provides an excellent overview on the history of the US-Mexican border, and immigration laws that have been instituted over the years. The author is able to see through the propaganda the US government uses to perpetuate their "rationale" for the continued security buildup with regards to the border. Anyone with an interest in history and/or immigration should read this book, and become enlightened!

This book changed the way I think about the U.S.-Mexico border, undocumented immigrants, and border control. It provides a thorough and fascinating history of the development of the border, and practices and identities related to it. The perpespective of the author is certainly unique and provocative. He puts forth ideas and analysis that one rarely if ever hears or reads. I highly recommend it.

Whether it strictly is or not, Dead Cities feels like the third 'instalment' in Mike Davis' exploration of the nature of the modern and postmodern American city, sitting alongside Ecology of Fear and the superb City of Quartz. Once again, it is his vacillating love/hate relationship with the deserts and metropolises of California in particular, which forms the centre of his work.

Despite the fact that it's Preface would have you believe Dead Cities is a meditation upon post-September 11th urban America; it is rather a collection of essays and articles written during the last decade which each provide a broadly different 'take' upon the notion of the dead or dying city. Dead Cities examines the fragility of our urban infrastructures, threatened by man-made or natural factors, providing us with a fractured journey through parts of America in which the apocalypse has already taken place and where the destruction of the twin towers seems an almost inevitable climax.

The scope is vast, ranging from what some may find to be the rather dry economic and statistical data about corrupt town planning in LA; to fascinating and disturbing chapters on the expansion of suburban Las Vegas, and America's secret nuclear weapons testing. Davis also takes in the Compton race riots, extremes of weather in Canada, and there's even a chapter on the bombing of Berlin in WW2. What the spectre of 9/11 adds to this collective is a retrospectively portentous significance; the sense of an interminable social trajectory.

The one drawback of Dead Cities is that it is easy to lose sight of it's central argument. It is not, like Davis' previous works, a narrative which steadily gains momentum, but rather ponderings around a central subject. Whilst this means the strength of a core argument is at times obscured, is also serves as the text's strength, making it easy to dip in and out of. The subject matter in itself almost seems more suited to this layered approach, drawing together a montage of images and ideas, all held in place by Davis's remarkably acute eye for human pathos and contemporary social mores.

It's difficult to define exactly where Mike Davis's work should sit in terms of literary genre, for he is at once a geographer, an economist, a sociologist, a psychologist a journalist and an architectural critic. Where you will find him is under the rather vacuous heading of 'urban theorist' which in truth combines all of the above and more. It is however, this diversity which gives his writing its appeal, and it is admirably represented here.

Collections of the work of journalists or intellectuals can be a mixed bag, especially when the author is better known for a major work. Such is the case here for Mike Davis, author of the invaluable Prisoners of the American Dream, City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, and Late Victorian Holocausts. This is a collection of essays and articles that he has written over the past decade or so. There is a certain lack of unity as Davis discusses three major themes: disaster, ecological crisis, and gross injustice in the world the Sunbelt Republicans made.

Notwithstanding that, there is much that the reader will find informative and valuable. Carrying on from his chapter in The Ecology of Fear about Los Angeles' dystopias, the book starts with a chapter on the imagined literary destruction of New York. Davis quotes H.G. Wells' almost forgotten classic The War in the Air about the first aerial destruction of NYC: "They [New Yorkers] saw war as they saw history, through an irridescent mist, deodorized, scented indeed, with all its essential cruelties tactfully hidden away." While this is not entirely fair about New York, it is all too true of the Republican Party. Davis goes on to discuss the poisoning of much of Nevada and Utah by the military, as well as making model cities to practice bombing Axis civilians in world war two. (Davis reminds us that a third of the 600,000 civilians killed this way in Germany were prisoners of war and slave labor). There are essays on Los Angeles' Pentecostals, as well as how one Hawaian island remembers several devastating tsunamis. There is also an essay which discusses several fictional attempts to describe what would happen if most humans became extinct. The longest chapter is an article where Davis summarizes the revolution in earth sciences as geology and evolutionary theory has to come to terms with the prospect of asteroids hitting the earth on a devastating, if irregular basis.

But the book is most impressive in discussing the greed, selfishness and waste of the "conservatives" who have done so much to make the American west what it is today. A chapter on Las Vegas discusses how the city has no responsible water ethic, cuts down public space to the lowest in the country, disperses land over an enormous and wasterful area, while public transit is dictated by the car. 60% of water use goes to irrigate lawns and golf courses, while water use is double or triple that of other Western cities. But being in the middle of a desert Las Vegas' water requirements cannot be sustained by local sources so it greedily seeks water elsewhere. Meanwhile local government is deliberately fragmented and gerrymandered so that the most valuable areas are separated from the electorate that needs public services.

Los Angeles, as Davis shows, shares many of the same vices. It has only a third of NYC's public park area per capita. It has the same distorted local government. The worst incorporated city must be Vernon, which has 48,000 workers, mostly Latinos in sweatshops, and an actual resident electorate of 90 people, who do not use their tax revenues to help their workers but the property developers who run the city almost as a private fief. Other areas show white electorates ignoring hispanic minorites. Meanwhile Davis discusses Los Angeles' would-be subway system, where the relatively affluent 6% of the ridership who use the proposed subway get 70% of public transit funds, while the poorer, darker majority who use the bus face fare increases and reduced service. Davis also goes to the "city" of Compton, where before it achieved a black majority the white city council spitefully ran it down and sowed the streets with salt. Compton's attempt to get a tax base by annexing industrial areas was thwarted and attempts to attract investment with tax breaks only attracted those who took the money and run. Now the black council selfishly protects its own privileges over those of the increasing Hispanic population. Best of all is the chapter "Who Killed L.A." which discusses the systematic redistribution of income from the poorest inner cities to the wealthy suburbs. (The federal contribution to Los Angeles' budget fell from 18% to 2% from 1977 to 1985, while George Bush stuffed the 1992 riots aid package with a cut on luxury taxes on yachts, but vetoed it when it tried to remove the tax deduction on club dues.)

The final chapter discusses ecological crisis as global warning leads to increasingly erratic weather, while the spread of the market and corporate pressures leads to deforestation in Vietnam, ecological degradation in China and the extinction of the Grand Bank fisheries. The book could use more updates, and there are a number of annoying printing errors and misprints (most obvious, Alexandra Richie's name is mispelled as Alexander). But Dead Cities is a valuable work that produces an acerbic outlook in an intellectual world that is complacent beyond belief.

Don't expect any of Garfield's typical humor here. It's all very kiddy and the story of Garfield running away from home to an abandoned Elementry School only to learn that home is best is sooooo childish. Buy one of the comic strips books instead.

These are great chapter books for your early reader Garfield fan. My son loves them, I just wish there were more in the series. Unfortunately there are only four books in the series, so once they have read these four that's all there is.

As the title suggests, this story takes place during the second year of Batman's crimefighting career. At the start of the story, Jim Gordon has recently been elected Commissioner and the mobs that had such a large foothold in Year One and Long Halloween are ancient history. Batman's adversary this time around is the ghostly masked vigilante called the Reaper. He started out with motives similar to Batman, but he has now become a psychotic killer. The guy that killed Batman's parents is also back, the mob has hired him to take Reaper out. This answers two questions common asked by freshman Bat-fans: Why doesn't Batman use a gun, and why has he taken an oath to never kill anyone. And it sort of answers the question, why does he seem to avoid serious relationships with women. As a special bonus, we have artwork by Spawn creator Todd McFarlane. My only gripe is that NONE of the traditional enemies appear. Two-Face or Catwoman could've easily have made a supporting appearance. All in all, a good read, and when combined with Y1 and TLH, fits into the larger tapestry of Batman's earlier years, taking place after TLH but before it's forthcoming followup, Dark Victory.