This is a very evenhanded, exacting overview of an intriguing subject. The basic story Richard Deacon is investigating here is an old legend, that America may have been reached in the year 1170 A.D. (the year Henry II apparently had Thomas a Becket slain in Canterbury Cathedral), by a Welsh prince named Madoc. This is one of those tales that is just so exciting that people seem to latch onto it, and draw upon it for their need for Mystery in life. People who want it to be true call the legend "controversial." People who disagree with it call it "a heap of rubbish." Deacon's survey of the evidence is cooler-headed than many books out there, although he does ultimately want the tale to be true. He talks about the Mandan tribe of North Dakota in a fairly dispassionate way -- they, for the record, are brought forth most often as candidates for being the descendants of Prince Madoc's colonists. Some authors start from a point of being convinced that this story is true, and write in a very angry way. You can almost hear them yelling at the detractors of their legend. Deacon does not do this, and his book is basically quite informative. I also recommend looking at the cover story in the January 2000 edition of the "Atlantic Monthly", and at the fictional work "Children of First Man" by James Thom, a speculative tale of what the lives of these putative settlers may have been like. Two thumbs up.

I know, microwaves are fairly common, you've had one forever and why would you need a cookbook? Because, more than likely, you're not using your microwave to its full capacity - you're just nuking tv dinners or making popcorn without realizing there's so much more you can be using it for - such as bread pudding. Yes, you can make yummy bread pudding in your microwave and have it anytime you want, or even fix it for a special someone.

Or how about Chicken Divan? or Veal Chop Suey? Mr Deacon takes you throught a 5 day microwave cooking course, originally designed to make fols feel more comfortable with their microwaves. Now his instructions show you how to broaden your view and your usage of a microwave oven. There's even a test to tell if your microwave is properly calibrated so you'll be able to cook more efficently. There's even a "calorie counters" section.

I recommend this book to all of you who just use the microwave to make popcorn or heat up water - find out how time saving and efficent a microwave can be by using this book.

I read the 1987 edition of Richard Deacon's book and I found it both interesting and very informative. The author is one of the leading writers on intelligence and has written many other books on intelligence, especilly on Russian/Soviet intelligence organizations. What the book does show is that Russian intelligence organizations do does not change very much in their mission be it the service of Ivan the Terrible,the Oprichniki, Catherine the Great, Peter the Great or the Soviet Cheka, NKVD or KGB. All these organizations have concentrated a great deal on suppressing internal dissent and to a certain extent in countering foreign intrigue seeking to exploit Russian/Soviet weaknesses. Russian intelligence seems to operate in a hidden way but paradoxically, it has always had a very open existence. Unlike in the West, Soviet citizens were aware of the existence of a huge State bureaucracy devoted to intelligence gathering. It is an integral part of the lives of the citizens of Russia. At the same time, it is characterized by deviousness and the use of terror.This is shown very clearly in Mr Deacon's fine book. There is also detailed description of the type of tactics used by Russian services. Two stand out: the Use of" Agents Provocateurs" and of "Disinformation" Also of interest are the portraits of intelligence officials who have contributed to develop Intelligence in Tsarist and Soviet Russia ranging from aides of Ivan the Terrible to Yuri Andropov, who ultimately ended up as leader of the USSR.Ussian and Soviet spies such as Richard Sorge and their actions are also covered in detail. Mr Deacon's book is a valuable reference and introduction to anyone interested in knowing more on Soviet and Russian intelligence.

"Kempei Tai: The Japanese Secret Service Then and Now" is a straightforward narrative, probably the only of its kind, on the history of JapanÕs modern intelligence activities. Although Richard Deacon is not a historian of Japan, his book is a good supplement for anyone interested in JapanÕs history, especially the period 1904-45.

The most intriguing aspect of the book deals with Japanese intelligence in China before 1941, which includes a more genuine account of the conspiring associations Sun Yat-Sen, Yuan Shi KÕai, and ChinaÕs last emperor, Henry Pu Yi had with Japanese agents. Also discussed at length is the history of intelligence on both Imperial and Soviet Russia, with a particularly interesting story about Japanese agent involvement in a plan to rescue the Romanovs from their Bolshevik captors. As for intelligence on the United States, Deacon of course devotes part of the book to covert activities, especially for naval intelligence, before 1945.

In its weaker moments, two major problems standout in "Kempei Tai." First, although Deacon rightly discusses the influence of right-wing extremism on the Japanese intelligence services, he never addresses the inherent weaknesses in the system or the brutality it inflicted in Asia in 1941-45. Second, Deacon sometimes strays from the subject of intelligence in the postwar period, trying to tie in too many political and economic issues. Since this volume of "Kempei Tai" is a revision of an earlier book, material in the later chapters is often irrelevant to the original title.

In summary, however, "Kempei Tai" is easily readable and recommended to anyone with an interest in modern Japanese history or affairs of State.

This volume is strictly aimed towards lay persons serving as elders in various Christian denominations. With the exception of a brief biblical history of the diaconate, it is of little if any use to Deacons or postulates to the diaconate in the Episcopal, Roman Catholic, or Lutheran traditions.

Very helpful...WELL worth the price....Amazon.com has the lowest prices on all the books I have searched for but this book was the best bargain!

This is a deeply prejudiced, homophobic book which is written without a background grasp of the intellectual and academic world to which it refers. It repeatedly makes unsubstantiated assertions, its critical apparatus is unprofessional and its use if language often misleading. One example of his bias is that the author maintains that Eddie Marsh was more influential in the world outside the Apostles than Maynard Keynes in unspecified fields but including, by implication, the arts. No mention is made of the fact that Keynes established two major arts organisations that still exist, namely, a theatre in Cambridge and the Arts Council of Great Britain. Likewise his assertion that the cultivation of religious and philosophical doubts by members of the Apostles led to "the loss of the will to govern" in Britain!

Interest in The Apostles, a secretive club of Cambridge University dons and undergraduates, was aroused after the exposure of Anthony Blunt as leader of a Soviet spy ring that included Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean (who defected to the Soviet Union in 1951) and also the infamous H.A.R. (Kim) Philby. Their point of connection was Cambridge, and a further connection was The Apostles, to which Blunt and Burgess belonged, and to which it was alleged Maclean belonged (although Richard Deacon finds nothing to suggest he did). Blunt's and Burgess's homosexuality also figured into the luridness of the reports: what was this cenacle of sodomites and traitors?

As Richard Deacon makes clear, The Apostles - the Cambridge Conversazione Society - was both more and less than this. In the atmosphere within which it existed at Cambridge, heterodoxy and homosexuality flourished more-or-less openly. Cambridge had long been hospitable to the evangelical or low-church wing of the Church of England, and had sided with the Puritans during the English civil war. The Calvinist doctrine of election (the notion that certain individuals are predestined to be saved) easily metamorphoses into gnosticism (the concept that an elect or élite can have a special and superior insight into the purposes and ways of Deity) and antinomianism (the belief that individuals so filled with grace are above the ordinary laws and manners of society). It has a fondness for compulsory righteousness, as evidenced by the rule of Calvin himself in Geneva, Cromwell in England, and the Puritans in Massachusetts. Such views are tailor-made for the encouragement of arrogant self-anointed élitism.

Single-sex environments such as those involuntarily present in prisons and (in the past) on shipboard, encourage homosexuality faute de mieux; environments that are rigidly single-sex by choice (as the recent scandals in the Roman Catholic church show) attract those who are homosexual by preference. Even though Protestant in theology, the great English universities retained well into the nineteenth century their monastic/clerical character, and were such environments. Fellows of colleges (dons) were typically in holy orders, and it was not until 1882 that Cambridge fellows were allowed to marry. Deacon describes an atmosphere of misogyny which found open and ugly expression amongst many homosexuals, who justified their behavior on the grounds that men were superior to women, hence the love of one man for another was a superior form of love to that of man for woman. Much classical learning has been adduced to this point (see the twelfth volume of the Palatine anthology). This constitutes the "Higher Sodomy" to which Deacon devotes a chapter of his book. Conservative proponents of classical education and single-sex schooling might well take cautionary note!

Communism had many adherents at Cambridge, even in the late nineteenth century, and reached an apogee in the between-the-wars period. British universities until quite recently drew exclusively from the upper and upper-middle classes, amongst whom trade and commerce were scorned as unworthy of the attentions of gentlemen. Marxist hostility to capitalism found an oddly congenial fit with this aristocratic disdain for business as an occupation. It also fit well with Cambridge's low-church enthusiasm for reforms involving shaking-up the social order and chucking-out forms, manners, and institutions that persisted out of longstanding custom. Santayana, speaking from the experience of a proper Bostonian upbringing, remarked that liberalism was what remained after Christianity had been excised from Calvinism, leaving only the latter's fanaticism. Such was the background of university leftism at Cambridge.

The Apostles refined and concentrated the expression of attitudes widely present in the larger setting of Cambridge. To be sure, there were many Apostles who were neither communists nor homosexuals. Certainly very few were Soviet spies. But those who were, were entirely predictable products of their surroundings, nurtured and encouraged by the closed society of the Apostles.

I discovered this book because of my interest in élites and their institutions. Much that is in print on these subjects is conspiracy-theory claptrap, typically from the point of view of one or the other political extremes. Judeo-Masonic, Illuminati, Satanic plots abound in the screeds of right-wing authors, while evil collusions amongst rich WASPy denizens of the Bohemian Grove and Skull & Bones to grow richer at the expense of the working class characterize the polemics of the left. Richard Deacon's book fits neither mould, realistically describing a secret society the members of which influenced world events in a genuinely collusive fashion. Unlike the participants in Bohemian High and Low Jinks, the Apostles did not meet for just a few days each year, they lived together in a collegiate setting. Unlike the Yalies of Skull and Bones, the Apostles numbered amongst their active ranks numerous fellows (i.e., faculty members) as well as undergraduates, some of whom were artists or intellectuals of the first rank, like Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ludwig Wittgenstein, or John Maynard Keynes. Ideas and their consequences, rather than crude fraternity stunts and pranks, were of real interest to them.

Deacon's book is sometimes ill-digested and repetitive. Also some of its obiter dicta raise fascinating unanswered questions. The papers delivered by members are said to be placed, with formal ceremony, in a trunk called the Ark. Christopher McIntosh, in his book "The Rosicrucians" (one of the few sane treatments of that subject) says that in sixteenth-century Germany there existed an Orden der Unzertrennlichen whose members stuidied alchemy; "[t]he results of successful alchemical experiments were recorded and placed in an 'Archa,' a secret chest whose contents were continually being added to." The resemblance is striking, and it would be interesting to know how much farther back than the nominal foundation of the Apostles in 1820 its customs and practices really go.