There are times that I think my life was or still is hard. Well, I'm a black female who grew up in a middle-class home with two teachers as parents. College was as automatic as sleeping and eating. But, for these young men in the book "The Pact", college was as uncertain as winning the lottery. I always knew that our young black boys growing up in the inner-city had it super hard, but this book allowed me to see another side of our young brothas. They all have dreams as little kids, even though they don't see anyone in their neighborhood to emulate. Somehow, someway, Sampson Davis, Rameck Hunt and George Jenkins all found the determination to succeed and become doctors. Their positive story is proof that just one person can make a difference in a kid's life. Everyone needs someone to look up to; someone to follow.

We all have gifts we can share. Read this book and feel blessed that someone in your life took the time to mentor you and be there for you; not everyone has that in their lives. I am so proud of these young men! Not only are they smart and positive, but they are cute too! What a great combination! God has truly blessed them and their family.

What a refreshing book. Thanks to Tavis Smiley for recommending it on the Tom Joyner Show.

"The Pact" is an incredible book! I just finished reading the remarkable journey completed by Drs. Sam Davis, George Jenkins, and Rameck Hunt. It's an easy, quick read ~250 pages.

If you're not familiar with their story, they are 3 young, African-American men from Newark that establish a pact at 17-years old to become doctors. Over the years, they run into many obstacles (peer pressure, arrest, finances, and family issues) that tend to dissuade so many young people from pursuing their dream. With the "I got your back" support of each other, mentors they encountered throughout their journey, and God they become doctors despite how many people had presumed their future would turn out.

Dr. George Jenkins, probably the most focused in the group, knew at a very young age that he wanted to be a dentist. In high school, the three friends attend a college presentation offering full scholarships to minority students interested in the medical field. Knowing that neither he nor his friends could afford college THIS OFFER would be their ONLY way to attend college...the formation of the pact.

Surprisingly, after completing college and med school, Sam and Rameck were still unsure if they wanted to be doctors. Sam saw business/management as his future and Rameck wanted to be an actor (he'll settle on being a rapper). (If I didn't know the outcome, I would have been in suspense until the bitter end waiting to learn if they became doctors.) The death of an important person in each of their lives confirmed that medically helping others is what they were meant to do in life.

If you're in the education field or work closely with children in your community this is an excellent book to pick up when you...

- feel like what can I do to get through to this person
- need a testimony that success is not by luck but achieved through faith, perseverance, and support from others
- need a roadmap to better mentor a person in need

"The Pact" is an amazing story of inspiration and motivation to get (primarily) black teens to see beyond their environment, current situation, and look ahead with a plan for tomorrow. "The Pact" also displays the need for adults to begin mentoring children before they reach their teens. The book concludes with the doctors providing the "how-to's" to make a pact work.

This book is a must read for ALL ADOLESCENT MALES!! It is a strong testimony to the power of friendship and perseverance despite circumstances. Each young man had someone in their family who directly or indirectly motivated them to persevere. They had to make some very uncomfortable choices, but were able to keep their "eyes on the prize." Affirmative Action programs continue to serve a real purpose in our society. This book has become a mandatory read in my classes. To the one who still holds to the "...because I'm Black" statement. My question to you is "How long are you going to be Black?"

I have a gift basket business in Jackson, MS and am 5 months into it. This book has been a life saver. Not only does it help you start a business, it tells you in detail how to secure items in the basket. I just made a basket for mailing, and would have not been able to have secured it for shipping had it not been for this book. It shows different forms you can use for bookkeeping to keep track of your money. It doesn't show actual photo pictures of baskets, but by reading it you can determine how to make the basket. I would highly recommend it to anyone starting a gift basket business.

This book is a must read for anyone thinking of starting a gift basket business. It covers every aspect of the business in great detail and is very easy to understand. I highly recommend it.

Excellent book. Easy reading. Best of all after reading Shirley's book you can begin the process of starting a gift basket business. This book literally changed my life.

If you are the type of person whose spirit gravitates to the simple (not simplistic, but simple)answers to some of the most complex and seemingly unrelated questions, and those answers desired consist of the type philosphers, poets and artists/scientists have been looking for (with varied success) for millenia, then you just might enjoy this book. Camile Paglia's SEXUAL PERSONAE, heavily indebted to this and the major works of Freud by her own proud admission, is what led me to this pretty staggering work for its time. It is relatively easy to make someone's brain hurt with a lot of scholar talk, where one is saying nothing; this book is great because it is *sensational*, in the truest sense of the word. This is one of the first of the many books about religion and the history of man that put my stomach up in knots, as it simultaneously gave me the power to look beyond the fabrication of ancient Greek philosophical society and Judeo-Christian heritage as the summit of man's knowledge. (Not that that was ever a problem for me consciously, but unconsciously I doubt anyone without reading a book like this has moved beyond it.) This is one of the books that made a new approach to the understanding of man and a paradigm shift as to how we have mentally, emotionally and spiritually developed not only possible, but inevitable.

What could keep this monument from receiving five stars will be fairly obvious to any reader: the prejudices of his time. It is actually hard to look at what he says objectively in that context; before him I doubt anyone put two and two together to come up with what he did during a time when his racism and trivialization of non-Euopean peoples, and for more than the past fifty plus years after him, anyone who has read his work has had that tempered by the embarrasing revalations of Nietsche and Freud. That, along with the egocentrism of Victorian Europe that he projects onto ancient and prehistoric man, serves to keep the book from being perfect (and are sometimes annoying), but do not serve to really take away its importance and incredible effect.

If you are a Joseph Cambell fan, you will be powerfully challenged by this book. Frazer was not attempting to come up with the same conclusions for myth and ritual that Campbell, though influenced by him, was. But you will love it, and respect it highly because of it. In a way, where Campbell seems to say "this is what it all means," Frazer says "this is what it all IS," letting the wonder of unexpected knowledge allow you to come to your own conclusions. This book will start you on a great spiritual journey if you never read anything of its kind before, and this edition is a very good one to have.

Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) was a Scottish anthropologist; and this book, originally published in 1890, as the two volume, "The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religions", his best known work.

A short example of his writing style follows:

"On Midsummer Eve people in Sweden
"make divining-rods of mistletoe or of four different
"kinds of wood, one of which must be mistletoe. The
"treasure-seeker places the rod on the ground after sundown,
"and when it rests directly over treasure, the rod
"begins to move as if it were alive...."
(pp 367, with reference notes at the bottom of the page.)

This particular edition is the only unabridged, and illustrated re-printing of the classic, and while some modern scholars refute some of his conclusions, it is a Must Have for any student of folk-lore and magick.

Although it is trendy to slam The Golden Bough for its author's assumptions, nothing can take away the magnitude of the scholarship or the impact of the text. It was the first time any work of religious anthropology had made any sort of cultural impact, and its signifigance to artists of the Jazz Age and later decades is tantamount. Picasso's work is filled with images from The Golden Bough, and all of Hemingway's obsession with bulls and bullfights is explained by reading Frazer.

The work itself is an exhaustive reference for thousands of relgious ceremonies around the world, and their interrelated symbolism and meaning. Flying directly in the face of the historical philosophies of parallel, isolated cultural development in vogue in the 19th century, the book shows that human spiritual belief orbits around the same ideas, needs and urges across the planet and through the ages. The symbolism of worship in Iron Age Norway is the same as Middle Ages Mirconesia, with all the interconnectedness this implies.

It is very easy to work around the author's 19th century cultural assumptions and glean the information. Reading The Golden Bough, along with Joseph Campbell, will give a very good baseline for any historical religious study. Frazer's work also dovetails beautifully with Jung's study of archetypal symbols. The combination of the two wil go a long way towards sorting out the symbolism in any 20th Century literature.

I find this sort of biography of a novelist-of-ideas (or, indeed of any type of scholar) kind of odd. It seems to me that those who would be inclined to read a biography of George Moore are individuals who are attracted to his literary output and intellectual life. This lengthy book, however, is devoted almost entirely to the (to my mind only marginally interesting) question of whether Moore was Nancy Cunard's father. Neither the ideas that fired Moore's books, nor his luminous style is discussed either at length or with much insight. Did Moore obtain his theory (spelled out in "The Brook Kerith") that Jesus survived his crucifixion from Samuel Butler's "Fair Haven"? Did he subscribe to the conceptualism espoused in detail by Abelard in "Heloise and Abelard"? Was he, like Evelyn Innes, a fan of Saint Teresa-style mysticism? Did he ever recant the elitist anti-democratic sentiments in his early "Confessions"? There's almost nothing of any of this in Frazier's book. His search of Moore's writings is devoted almost entirely to looking for hidden messages to Lady Maud Cunard. Interestingly, Frazier's biography can be seen as a response to Tony Gray's equally shallow work on Moore of the mid-1990s, "George Moore: A Peculiar Man"--though the latter book is nowhere mentioned in Frazier's admittedly weightier effort. It was Gray's thesis that Moore "never kissed but told": that is, that -- in spite of his colorful stories -- Moore lived and died a virgin. Frazier spends a good portion of his work demonstrating beyond reasonable doubt that Moore was in fact sexually active. This kind of dispute may be of more than passing interest to those likely to want to read a biography of, say, Britney Spears, but one would think that Moore fans would prefer to see, e.g., early reviews of each of his books and the author's reactions to this press. I will give just one more example of the kind of critical gaps one finds in Frazier. In (I believe) the first volume of Moore's memoirs of the Irish literary revival movement, he mentions some correspondence with Edward Elgar regarding the possibility of the composer's turning out some incidental music for a play. Now, Moore was very interested in and knowledgeable about music: this is clear not only from his autobiographies but from several of his novels (particularly "Evelyn Innes"). But how did he get interested in Elgar (or D'Indy for that matter)? What pieces had he heard? Were his writings on early music performance accurate or did they reflect certain errors prevalent at the time? Was he - like many Wagnerians - hostile to Brahms and his followers? None of this stuff is discussed in Frazier. Hone's 1936 biography, for all its defects, remains the best work on Moore, and Frazier's new book, for all the advantages conferred by the passage of time since Moore's death, is little more than Liz Smith stuff for the Oxford set.

Unlike Yeats, Joyce, or James, George Moore did not have a strong and confident sense of his own identity, and has in consequence remained a rather dim and shadowy figure on the literary landscape of his time. Frazier has succeeded uncannily in getting inside Moore's skin, almost to the point of understanding him better than he understood himself. For the first time the many divergent facets of Moore's career come together in a coherent and gripping narrative. We see that though his enthusiasms, literary loyalties, and amorous propensities were as changeable as the clouds above Lake Carra, Moore was tenacious in a Quixotic quest for truth and freedom. His witty, indiscreet conversation, still so fresh in the pages of Hail and Farewell, Avowals, and Conversations in Ebury Street, was calculated to puncture many a pompous ego. A master of ridicule, he was repaid in kind. But a lifetime of struggle against British philistinism, Irish parochialism, and French cliquism cannot be written off as mere clowning. Moore often let himself down, yet his achievement as a whole deserves the epithet "heroic." Had Irish Catholics and Nationalists, in particular, listened to his enlightened critique, they might have spared themselves a century of repression, mystification, and violence. Frazier illuminates Moore's sexuality (especially his relationships with Pearl Craigie and Lady Cunard) with Starr-like thoroughness. This serves to enhance our appreciation of his fiction: masterpieces such as Muslin, The Lake (1921 version), and In Single Strictness take on a new glow as we discover the erotic humus from which they spring, while the lesser or flawed works take on new interest as fragments of a great confession. Frazier has buried the George Moore of stale gossip and caricature and replaced it with a portrait as distinguished as Manet's on the front cover -- a portrait securely grounded in wide-ranging historical research.

Deborah George has written a fairly comprehensive guidebook detailing most of the hot springs of Colorado. She gives in-depth history of the springs and interesting facts. _Colorado hot springs_ Entries should be approached with care; George has fallen into a guidebook trap of only saying good things in her book. From her glowing descriptions of each spring, it is very hard to separate the great springs from the mediocre ones. The few negative things she has to say are vastly outweighed by the positive thus making the entries far from unbiased. Of course, everyone has favorites and is keen to embellish a bit, but every spring in Colorado is George's favorite.
George's book also lacks reliable directions and locations. While this isn't usually a problem for developed hot springs, the undeveloped springs have proved a bit harder to find. The entry for Penny Springs has quite good directions up until the last moment, advising Hot Springers to watch for a "well used turnout [with] a very small 'C.R. 11' sign." Locating the 'well used' turnout proved to be quite a challenge requiring three laps up and down the road and another guide book. Upon closer inspection, the C.R 11 sign appears to no longer exist. This type of experience is typical of George's directions.
Deborah George provides history, folklore and some interesting facts concerning Colorado's hot springs, but don't rely on her opinion of what is good because to her they're all great.