Throughout history, no presidential administration needed to be given more benefit of the doubt than that of Gerald Ford. While other administrations had to come into existence as a consequence of death by natural causes or assassination, only Ford had to follow a person who resigned in disgrace. The political atmosphere was forever changed by the actions of Richard Nixon, as the American public no longer took the word of the president on faith. Jimmy Carter, who defeated Ford in the next election, made a simple, effective campaign pledge, "I will never lie to the American people."
However despite all of those problems, the sheer resilience and strength of the American political system was demonstrated, and that is the main theme of the book. Yes, Ford had his faults and probably could not have otherwise gained the presidency, but he is a good man and was the right person for the times. As someone addicted to the political theater, I was mesmerized by Watergate, disgusted with Nixon and sometimes laughed at Ford. And yet, I still liked him, and do so even more now that I have read this book. Given all the political problems, Ford did many things about as well as could be done. His downfall was the one really big mistake that he made, namely the premature pardon of Nixon.
Had he waited longer to issue the pardon, more could have come out, tensions would have been eased and the act would not have been quite so controversial. While I know why he did it, I will never understand why he felt he had to do it so soon. The behaviors of Nixon even as the pardon was being discussed and described in the book are amazing, showing a man who was still contemptuous of the political system. A delayed pardon may have altered that.
Gerald Ford was not a great president in terms of great accomplishments, initiatives or rhetoric. However, he was and is a decent man who was forced to pick up after an indecent one. For that reason he needs to be respected for what he did, helped make the political system work. This description of his presidency is a tribute to that decency and I encourage you to read it and pay a little more attention to him the next time you see him speak. I know I will.

Gerald Ford is not the most popular of presidents to write about. He's almost forgotten in studies of America after 1945. This book gives him his due. Profesor Greene does a fine job of examing the important issues that faced Ford, like "stagflation," the Mayaguez incident, and dealing with the Cold War. It's a balanced account and written for scholars and the general reader.

Greene adroitly recognizes that Ford's domestic legislative proposals faced staunch opposition from a Democratically controlled Congress. In foreign affairs, Ford failed to get SALT II ratified and an Egyptian-Israeli accord never materialized during his term. In addition, the author acknowledges that Ford used assertiveness in the Mayaguez incident. Furthermore, Greene avers that Ford received bad publicity from the press. Finally, Greene argues that Ford did not make a secret bargain with Nixon for a Presidential pardon. This book gives a balanced account about a much maligned President.

I just ordered a number of the Andrew Lang books from Amazon. The Blue Fairy Book arrived yesterday, and I could not have been more disappointed. It came in a very plain blue hardback. I opened it up, and NOWHERE inside is Andrew Lang mentioned, nowhere are any of the illustrations, from either of the two other versions I know. The production quality -- the paper, the binding -- is poor, and the "author" is listed throughout as "Anonymous." The publisher of this book is IndyPublish.com. I don't know the deal, or how they get listed under Andrew Lang, but I recommend that if you want a real Andrew Lang book, don't buy one of the IndyPublish books.

Andrew Lang's series of fairy-tale books are some of the fundamental children's reading of the twentieth and late nineteenth century. The stories are not "original": there's no such thing when they were almost without exception passed down orally; but they are in old, not very modernized tellings.

Many readers who have only seen or read modern, Disney-fied versions of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty or Snow-White will not recognize some of the darker twists in these tales. For example, in Sleeping Beauty, when the Prince wakes the Princess and marries her, the story is by no means over. The Prince's mother is an Ogress, whom his father married for her wealth, and it's suspected that she likes to eat little children; that "whenever she saw little children passing by, she had all the difficulty in the world to avoid falling upon them". The happy couple have two children, named Day and Morning, and the Ogress decides to dine on them one day when the Prince is away. Yes, it still has a happy ending, but Disney it isn't.

The illustrations--8 full page, plus 130 smaller ones--are all from the original 1891 edition. They're black and white woodcuts; very atmospheric, and I think most children will like them.

The only thing that might have to be explained to a child is the occasional use of vocabulary that is no longer current. Most often this is the use of "thee" and "thou"; but a few other words will crop up. However, they're usually inferable from context, and the stories are marvellous entertainment regardless.

"The Blue Fairy Book" is amazing. I am planning to collect all of Andrew Lang's color fairy tale books. It has an excellent group of stories from different fairy tale writers, including Perrault, d'Aulnoy, and Grimm. This book was originally printed in the 19th century. It has not been abridged, nor have any of the original pictures been taken out. (Be warned, they're *artistic*) These are the original, unaltered by Disney versions, and contain the nightmarish plots they were meant to have. Anyone who collects fairy tales should have this.

This book contains a great deal of information about John Ford, including interviews that the author actually conducted with Ford. This is great because Ford was such a difficult interviewee. There are tons of stills from the film. However, a great deal of time was devoted to the film They Were Expendable and just a few sentences to the Ford film that won more Oscars than any of the others - How Green Was My Valley.

However, the thing I found most difficult, which was not the author's fault, was the typesetting and such. I had the paperback edition and feel the type font size could have been one point larger. In addition, paragraphs and paragraphs were printed in italics to indicate material added at a later date. This was very difficult to read and some other solution should have been found as italics should only be used for emphasis. I just found the book very difficult to read because of the format.

I haven't read this book yet

I've just finished this, and I have to agree with a critic who reviewed "About John Ford" for the Times of London: 'One of the best books published by a filmmaker on a filmmaker'. It certainly is. The author, Lindsay Anderson, was himself a distinguished director("O Lucky Man!"; "If"), a longtime admirer of the films of John Ford-and a damn fine writer on the subject. Anderson uses clear and thoughtful prose and a great, copious selection of stills to illustrate his take on many Ford movies-from his classics such as "The Searchers" to less often discussed titles("They Were Expendable"; the silents). Not a dull page in the book(not always the case with film studies!). Lots of humor. Great frankness. And best of all, several chapters detailing interviews and encounters Anderson had with "the old man"-priceless stories that give the reader a real flavor of Ford-for better or worse. Reading this book produces two tremendous urges: first, to watch all the films discussed again; and second-to make movies. A classic.

This is a convincing look behind the scenes at Ford, as Robert S. McNamara makes his mark in big business, after figuring out how to manage logistics for the U.S. Dept of Defense during WWII. It was novel of these guys (the Whiz Kids) to insist that they all be hired by Ford as a group. Kind of a Japanese team spirit at work. Then different ones fell by the wayside, and one even committed suicide (no Japanese connection intended).

The counterpart to any given U.S. whiz kid for the British during WWII was one Lord Leathers, appointed as material and logistics chief by the war cabinet, whose exploits were referred to by Churchill in his 6 Vol. history of WWII.

For the Germans, we had Albert Speer, seeking to wring gasoline form coal while still promising the Fuhrer that he could still have his new boulevards and buildings in Berlin. I'm not sure who ran this end of things for Stalin, but whomever that was, they must have been pretty smart as well.

The interesting thing is the way the Whiz Kids took what they had learned about moving material to feed soldiers and blow things up, and transferred those skills to rescuing Ford from the predations of Henry I just in time to save the industrial neck of Henry II (since in this tragedy we skip over Edsel I as irrelevant, since Henry I pretty much snuffed him out, emotionally anyway).

This is all living history, and envy of the Whiz Kids is probably what drove GM to hire Peter Drucker from Vienna to analyze itself, leading to Drucker's first major work describing management of a major public corporation. This in turn egging on Alfred Sloan to reply with his less readable "My Years with General Motors."

So a lot happened after these Whiz Kids hit the scene in Detroit. Overall, their quantitative streak seems to elevate them well above trivial "guru" status achieved by so many modern management consultants. McNamara had an interesting feedback into government, by rejoining DOD as a Kennedy guy, from which I guess he repented after the fact to assuage whatever damage he did to his soul by egging on JFK and LBJ beyond the limits of American power, if not authority. That's a lesson for businessmen, too.

Just ten men -- all relatively young during the war -- were responsible for Corporate America's decline after the post-war boom? "Yes -- to an extent." is John Byrne's answer to that question in this unflinching look at how the "whiz kids" (originally called the "quiz kids" for reasons explained in the book) landed jobs at Ford Motor as a group and then proceeded to skillfully consolidate their power by using "new" numbers-based analytical methods to promote their agenda and dismiss others'. Eventually, as they occupied executive suites at Ford, several went into other business and government postions, spreading the "gospel" of "if it's not in the numbers, it's not real." As we now know, this "dispassionate" method's shortcomings become painfully evident when a field is open to increased competition (the auto industry) and/or faces an adversary who doesn't desire to "play by the rules" (the Viet Cong). Byrne takes the time to tell the story of all 10 men to varying degrees, and lays out a vivid picture of how we **will** fall short if we mindlessly follow management styles that have been around for so long that they are ingrained in some companies' cultures, but still are no more effective today then they were 30 years ago.

I was pondering when I read this book. I have read this book for many times. Every time I got different feeling. From this book, you can feel the cheer, and the tear of them. These guys, we can call them "Blue Blood". They got the power of how to control this world, changing this world. The problem is, some of them, for example, Robert Mcnamara, was plug into the data, statistic data and lose humannity. That is why he loose in Vanem. That is also a lesson to all of us, who are at the edge of IT evolution. Don't be a robust, computer is only a tool, there is a lot of beautiful things outside this data matrix. Don't be slaved by it.

Author did give a clearer picture of this ten guys. And intrigue me to know more about them. This is a rather interesting books, also a good lesson to those in "Internet" fever.

Don't lose your humanity!!!

GURPS Y2K seems poised to be a good sourcebook for post-apocalyptic role-playing. Don't be put off by the name - this book contains much more than just the millennium bug.

Starting with a chapter on Y2K (which we know on 20-20 hindsight never became the calamity that some were predicting), there are ideas in this book for everything from a complete world-wide computer shutdown, to "Mad Max" type worlds, and even the biblical "Judgement Day", along with several others. There's also a section on a super-hero world suffering from post-apocalypse blues.

The "sidebars" (sections of the book along the sides of each page) contain even more material that can be used to put your game world in a state of chaos. Some of these sidebars beg to be put into whole worlds of their own.

But the book suffers slightly when it reads a little like a collection of articles about post-apocalypse scenarios in gaming, rather than a single world presented in RPG terms. The =nine= authors each contributed a section or two to this book, and only the excellent effort by Sean Punch to put it all together under one roof keeps this book from being merely a collection of unrelated after Armageddon articles.

I'd still recommend this book for people wanting to see what their campaign world would look like after a major catastrophe, or for people wanting to explore what happens after.

Well, overall the book was pretty well made. It touched upon many of the common topics and settings for a post holocaust envirnoment including everything from minor computer glitches to the Biblical apacalypse and "Mad Max" and "The Postman" type situations. Even alien invasion was discussed in the essays. All seven authors of the book provided well written source matterial. Y2k also gives information on realistic rioting and anarchy.

There was one point I did not like about the book though. It would make many references to other GURPS source books, some of which were out of print, for more material on a subject. I feel that some of the writing was judt put in a advertisements and "plug" for other books.

Personally, I wish they had touched more on the "Mad Max," "Postman," and "Fallout" (a post-apacalyptic computer game) scenarios, but I do realize that the book was created for post Y2K campaigns and that everyone does not like what I like.

Overall, though, the book provides good post distaster material.

I just picked up a used copy of this yesterday and read it last night. It contains three stories that take place in Liavek, the backdrop for a series edited by Emma Bull and Will Shetterly in the 1980s. One of the three stories already appeared in the series, but the other two are new. I was thrilled to find new Liavek material, and enjoyed it very much. The stories are engrossing and go in directions you would not expect. Wonderful! I only wish I'd found this years ago.

good in depth. Goes well beyond setable limits

The trouble shooting of the motor

The Ford Escort Automotive Repair Manual is a great guide to all the specifics and important details that the owner of the Ford Escort must have to hand. It has detailed explanations of all the operations and internal wiring of the Ford Escort and guides you through al the changes that need to be made to changes or repair any parts within your Ford Escort. I very good guide.

It can get your hopes up for easy stuff, but the hard stuff is left out. It lacks the real stuff that shop mechanics' manuals have for each specific year and model changes. I know you; "get what you pay for!"

I would like to know why you state that the oil pan can be removed from the Crown Victoria without removing the motor. I have a 1992 and I followed the manual and the oil pan will not pass between the frame and motor. I even removed the cam covers but there is not enough clearance. Am I doing something wrong or is your manual wrong?

I have a 1997 Mercury Marqui Does Haynes have a manual for m