This is a very unique book, that for the first time puts forth a new theory on how a recent global flood as described in the Bible may have occurred, that is both plausible and scientifically sound. The author treats Noah's flood as a scientific mystery story which he then proceeds to solve by examining the clues found in the geological record and human history, building a theory that is in harmony with the biblical record of an earth wide deluge and with what we know about the geology of the earth. In this detailed and well referenced book, common objections to the biblical deluge are examined and answers are found that satisfy both a literal interpretation of scripture and a scientific examination of the facts. This book is compelling as the author proves what many have come to view as mere myth, is actually a historical event well supported by scientific evidence. The author also presents the results of his research on detecting recently deposited micro marine fossils left by the flood in soil samples. Presenting solid Paleoclimatological evidence of the deluge, this book may require rewriting many currently used textbooks. Sure to be considered very controversial, this is a must read for any one interested in geology or the biblical deluge. Written for the general public and the more geologically inclined as well, this book is a seamless merging of a literal reading of Genesis with what geology knows about the earth. 305 pages, 20 B&W illustrations, index.

This book really does solve the mystery of the flood. It is basically a geology book that proves the earth has had a recent earth wide flood as described in the Bible.

This is a great book for kids. Chuck Yeager is the type of role model more young people should aspire to be like. He's a true American Hero. The author does a good job of presenting him as a real American success story, too. Rising from humble roots to become a legend, Yeager is an inspiration!

The legends and folk lore embodied in the culture and values of Pacific island peoples are showcased in Pacific Island Legends, a single, easy to read volume that is beautifully illustrated with the woodcut images of Connie J. Adams. Educators Bo Flood, Beret Strong, and William Flood have successfully collaborated to present forty-four legends from all over the Pacific, serving to provide cultural access that will be appreciated by scholars and non-specialist general readers alike. Pacific Island Legends is a highly recommended addition to any personal, academic, or public library multicultural myth, legend and folklore reference collection.

There are lots of different kinds of people who live in Mexico. I learned that from this book. There were Aztecs, Olmecs, Mayas, and more! I liked reading about all of them, but especially about the big head statues of the Olmecs.

I first read the "Silver Kings: The Lives and Times of MacKay, Fair, Flood, and O'Brien, Lords of the Nevada Comstock Lode", because there was a family story that James G. Fair might be a lost relative. If he is it's quite distant, but the book was so interesting that I've since read everything I could get my hands on about the Comstock Lode and it's characters. Virginia City really did more as the birth place of the myths and truths of the Old West than did Tombstone or Dodge City. I am also an "Earp" buff and have read much available on the "Gun Fight" related characters. Even Samuel Clemens, later known as Mark Twain, was a reporter for the Virginia City newspaper during his early days. The book was fantastic. I'm glad to see it in reprint as I will give it as gifts to some of my friends. I had hunted long and hard for my old copy. If you like stories of the Old West you will enjoy this one. And the stories are true.
Senator Mike Fair
Oklahoma State Senator

I used this to do a report about Yasir Arafat. It was a great book! Good photos and information. Also, it was easy to read. I learned that Yasir means "easy going." Pretty cool. I can't wait to read more books by Colleen Madonna Flood Williams. Her name is long, but it's still a nice name.

This is a very good book for those interested in all the various accessories that the cowboy (and cowgirl) used. It is a good reference for old west living history groups that need to authenticate costume articles to a particular time period. The pictures are top quality.

It has a great number of photos that show details of western clothings, accessories, and other items. As a costume designer, I need to see the details for my research, and this book helped me a lot.
The book shows everything from hats, bandanas, leather cuffs, spurs, to boots. It also has a nice section on cowgirls.

I found the book both entertaining and informative. The photography and description of the material is excellent. As an amatuer historian on the subject, I found it to be educational as well as concise and pointing out subtle items which could have been overlooked by the casual observer. It is one of those books the reader can either read from cover to cover or open anywhere and dig right in.

It covers all aspects of turn-of-the-century attire and accouterments from the working cowboy to the Wild West Show performers. Excellent and entertaining.

Morris devotees will find it well worth reading (and the four stars are for benefit of those readers). Others may find it impenetrable. Those who have never read any of Morris' works absolutely should start with The Well at the World's End, which is his masterwork, and I'd hate for anyone to be discouraged from that experience.

The Sundering Flood is my favorite among Morris's fantasies, and was one of the last (if not the very last one) written. His earlier works (Wood Beyond the World, Well at the World's End, etc.) are modelled after the romances of the high Middle Ages and late medieval/renaissance works. In The Sundering Flood, Moris looks back further in time, and incorporates thematic and stylistic elements of the Norse sagas. This is particularly evident in the first part of this work. The overall structure does resemble Well at the World's End, but this work is not derivative. The action is tighter, more varied, and more detailed. It is the closest of Morris's fantasies to a modern novel. The language remains archaic, and might put off some readers; but if you persevere you will adjust to it, and find this a great story.

This is a very intelligent novel. Faulkner's style is very different from many other authors. I liked the characters' psychological description, very well done. However, for moments the novel was distracting because it was not easy to follow the story. Anyway, I found it worth reading to know Faulkner's style.

I love this guy Faulkner. I read another half chapter of The Wild Palms on the train.
Never read anything by him before.

Faulkner's characters don't sit around and examine their navel. They just Do. Yes act on their passions they Do. His characters are not beautiful people. They have scars, injuries, poverty, depraved morals, injustices, suffering upon suffering. What makes the Wild Palms beautiful is the passion of people living life right on the bone.

A married woman is planning on abandoning her husband and two kids and running away with another man. The other man asks her what about her two kids. On page 41, she answers, "I know the answer to that and I know that I cant change that answer and I dont think I can change me because the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated yourself." No Catholic saint-mystic ever said it better. Pretty good for a crazy Protestant drunk.

You hear talk about stream-of consciousness with James Joyce and Jack Kerouac and so on. This guy Faulkner captures the way our minds think and our mouths talk more realistically than anybody.

Of Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor said, "Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track when the Dixie Limited is roaring down."

Something about this book reminds me of the Stephen King material set in the south, the Southern-ness of it and the same kind of characters.

The omniscient author technique is frowned on in serious, modern literature. I don't knw if this aesthetic rule post-dates Faulkner, but he uses it to no ill effect. There's very little difference between when a character is speaking and Faulkner is speaking. It gives the effect of us reading the characters thoughts rather than Faulkner telling us what they are. It works perfectly.

Few to none of the characters in any of the standard, best-seller type books have any inner life. When most of the authors try it, they are quite pathetic at it. I suppose that's because the authors have no inner life themselves. Faulkner does not show us the inner life of any of his characters either. However, as Faulker presents his characters, the reader induces their inner drives from their actions. It works very, very well. Stephen King's characters are like this also.

Stephen King by the way is very steeped in American literary tradition. Essentially, he's New England gothic. He is to Nathaniel Hawthorne what the Frankenstein, the monster, is to Dr. Frankenstein. King is clothed in Hawthorne, bathed in Faulkner and inebriated with Poe. To look at the connection further, I suggest you read the short stories of Hawthorne.

Faulkner is not everybody's cup of tea, but he happens to be my favorite American writer. While the critics and all those "best books of the century" lists consistently feature "The Sound and the Fury", "Absalom, Absalom" and maybe "As I Lay Dying" as Faulkner's major works--and I too like those books--I have always thought THE WILD PALMS a gem. An underrated, forgotten gem. Perhaps it really isn't his best novel, but still it is a work of genius. I recently re-read it.

Very few novels on the world stage are composed of two completely separate stories. THE WILD PALMS consists of 1) a love story in 1938, taking place in New Orleans, Chicago, Wisconsin, Utah, San Antonio, and the Mississippi Gulf coast, and 2) the story of one man (a prisoner) and his mighty ordeal during the Mississippi River floods of 1927. Parchman State Prison in Mississippi is the sole physical point that joins the two tales, otherwise separate in time, place, class, and impulse. But Faulkner's genius is such that the reader soon understands that the theme of both stories is the same. Faulkner's novels often focus on Fate, how the individual is caught in mysterious, giant webs of 'outrageous fortune' beyond comprehension, helpless to oppose the powerful, hidden currents. The present volume is no exception. "You are born submerged in anonymous lockstep"--the main character of story #1 muses on page 54--"with the seeming anonymous myriads of your time and generation; you get out of step once, falter once, and you are trampled to death." In the first case, Wilbourne and Charlotte deviate from the usual path for love's sake, strive mightily to maintain and cherish that love, and pay an inevitable price. In the second, a convict is caught in a flood in a tiny boat when sent to save two people. He rescues one, but is swept away. He completes his mission, returning both boat and rescued woman, despite incredible hardships, only to face a certain ironic destiny. In both cases, other lives or other destinies constantly present themselves, but the protagonists refuse to alter their selected course. It is the antithesis to the Hollywood message that "you can be whatever you want in life, you just have to want it badly enough". Faulkner plumps for Destiny. A person might be, he says on page 266, "...no more than the water bug upon the surface of the pond, the plumbless and lurking depths of which he would never know..." one's only contact with such depths being when Fate is blindly accepted and played out to the bitter end. The forces of Nature, symbolized by the wild clashing of the palm fronds in the winds off the Gulf of Mexico, always outweigh the strength of human beings. The palms clash in the wind at the beginning and at the very end as well. Faulkner concludes that bearing grief, living with it, is better than suicide, better than obliterating the agonies of remembrance with a pill or bullet. Memory, however, bitter and painful, is better than nothingness. The two main characters end in prison, a most un-optimistic metaphor for life. A most powerful novel, a novel that speaks from the crocodile-haunted deeps of every person's psyche.

I watched the program "In search of Noah's Flood" on TLC and that led me to this book. The work of these authors truly sheds light on a subject that has puzzled everyone for years. Was Noah's flood story based on a real event, and if so where did it occur? Various sites have been proposed by scholars over the years, but Ryan and Pitman's work dramatically changes everything. Other workers including the one who found the Titanic, are starting to confirm what these scholars have done. It must have been the most dramatic, most catastropic event in human history, to have lived to see the Black Sea rise 400 feet in just a week, and to destroy all the civilizations that existed there. There is no doubt that this flood was the "mother of all floods," and the origin of the various flood legends of the world including that of Noah and his Ark.

Raja Bhat

This is one of the most exciting books of scientific discovery I have ever read. The authors make a compelling case that what is now the Black Sea was a fresh water lake in 5600 BC. As a result of a long period of dryness, the surface of the lake was 350 feet below the level of the Mediterranean-fed Bosporus. The Bosporus dam was breached and two hundred times as much water as flows over Niagara Falls today began to pour into the Black Sea at a speed of 50 m.ph. The noise and vibration could have been heard and felt throughout the Black Sea littoral. The authors argue, due the area's relatively attractive climate, that the littoral was probably populated. The flood must have struck them with awe and caused the survivors to migrate. The Sumerian "Deluge" story, the Akkakian "Atrahasis" epic, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and Noah's Flood are 7000 year old echoes of this awesome event.

What has fascinated me since childhood about the story of Noah's Ark is how similar it is to other (older) flood myths from the near east. A popular trend among Old Testament scholars has been to highlight the differences between the biblical account and earlier near eastern flood stories. (Yet, I would argue that while there are differences in the number of gods involved, the results for the human race were pretty much the same, regardless of the provocation). Ryan and Pitman do an outstanding job of gathering and presenting evidence from a number of scientific disciplines that bolsters the case for a major and memorable cataclysmic event in our distant past giving rise to the flood mythology in that part of the world. What I found particularly fascinating was their discussion of the origins of agriculture and its spread outward from the Black Sea region some 7,000 years ago. That the catastrophic Black Sea flood happened is now beyond question, and the fact that it happened at the dawn of human civilization would make it a ripe candidate for the origins mythology of any people. A fascinating and scholarly, yet very accessible, synthesis of science and cultural history. Highly recommended.