Some quotations from Adam Starchild's wonderful afterword to this book are appropriate:

"Children today are starved for the image of real heroes. Celebrities are not the same thing as heroes. Heroes existed way before celebrities ever did, even though celebrities now outshine heroes in children's consciousness." "Worshiping celebrities leaves children with a distinctly empty feeling -- it doesn't teach that they'll have to make sacrifices if they want to achieve anything worthwhile. No- talents become celebrities all the time. The result is that people don't seem to care about achievement or talent -- fame is the only objective."

"... Despite immense differences in cultures, heroes around the world generally share a number of traits that instruct and inspire people. A hero does something worth talking about, but a hero goes beyond mere fame or celebrity. The hero lives a life worthy of imitation. If they serve only their own fame, they may be celebrities but not heroes. Heroes are catalysts for change. They create new possibilities. They have a vision, and the skill and charm to implement their vision."

"Heroes may also be fictional. Children may identify with a character because of the values projected. People tend to grow to be like the people that they admire, but if a child never has any heroes what images will he copy? Adults need heroes too, but the need is even more urgent for children because they don't know how to think abstractly. But they can imagine what their hero would do in the circumstances, and it gives them a useful reference point to build abstract thinking skills."

I came across this book as I was looking for material to help me write a presentation on the divine hiddenness for a philosophy of religion course, thinking it would be a philosophical discussion on the subject. It isn't, not directly.

It was originally a series of lectures delivered during the thirties, updated and revised for print in the fifties by the author himself. It talks about the role of the artist, the problem (described by Tillich) in modern culture of man being reduced to "a mere thing", the problem where the world has been arranged so that "everything is a means to ends which are themselves means", without any ultimate goal, and how the true artist offers mankind a vision to grow beyond this.

He also explores the relation between the various author's visions/philosophy and the Christian vision/philosophy towards life, at first mostly how it relates to virtue (courage, discipline), to the reality of evil as something that cannot be explained away, but must be confronted (this was hauntingly well done), to the experience of the eternal within the temporal (mostly Eliot), conversion (all the authors), the corrosiveness and destruction of rationalism of any sort (everyone but Hemingway), and redemption (mostly Warren). It wasn't overdone or proselytizing, it was a fair appraisal of the author's themselves (Hemingway is _not_ made into a Christian, etc.). I actually found it very corrective and illuminating for my own understanding of these things, it made them much more concrete, manifest, less obscure and theoretical.

The conclusion again briefly revisits the role of the artist within a society as one who offers you a vision of reality and explores it, helps you encounter it; whereas most of what passes for art today is really kitsch, a narcotic playing on assumed sympathies, entertainment rolled off a factory line that deadens the mind and dulls the wits. He notes how these authors bring the reader to a new encounter with reality, and the author himself did this for me in the process, while whetting my appetite for more of these authors.

This book keeps up the tradition of other books in this fine series. This volume describes the action which took place in and around the Marianas Islands in the summer of 1944. The islands of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam were successfully captured and turned into air bases for the big B-29 Superfortresses so they could reach the Japanese homeland. These battles were fought with great savagery on both sides. For example, rather then surrender to the American forces, many Japanese soldiers and civilians threw themselves from cliffs overlooking the Pacific on Saipan.

The Battle of the Philippine Sea is where the Japanese navy ultimately, for all intents and purposes, ceased to be an effective fighting force. However, at the beginning, it was the Japanese who sighted the Americans first. They launched four successive attacks against Admiral Spruance's carriers while Spruance was still searching for the Japanese ships. Thanks to murderous anti-aircraft fire and superior combat air patrol, the Japanese would end up losing over four hundred aircraft in what has become known as the "Great Marianas Turkey Shoot". Three Japanese aircraft carriers were also sunk by American submarines and planes. However, this victory was greatly scrutinized. Spruance was criticized for not finding the enemy ships sooner, and for conducting poor air searches. Many believed that the victory could have been even greater than it was had the Japanese been spotted sooner, or had the Americans done a better job of pursuing the fleeing Japanese.

This is a very good book, and the battle is explained expertly with the help of numerous maps and photographs. I highly recommend this book, as well as others in this series. They give the reader a first-hand account of the war at sea.

It is an honor to be the first to review this book by Admiral Morison for Amazon.com. This is the first book I've ever read by this renowned historian, and it is outstanding in both detail and clarity. Admiral Morison (as he is referred to in Stephen Ambrose's history of D-Day) tells this story clearly and with dramatic narration, as much as any history which strives to be complete can be. I intend to read his RISING SUN IN THE PACIFIC next, and I may try to read the entire series on U.S. naval operations in WWII, given time. This book is essential to an understanding of D-Day and, along with Mr. Ambrose's books, gives any reader a great deal of insight into the most dramatic day of the 20th century, and maybe in the modern history of the world.

A suicide always leaves lingering questions with those left behind and evokes deep feelings of guilt. So is the case with Eberhardt, Nameless's ex-partner, who commited suicide. Nameless is plagued by guilt and goes on an obsessive quest to find the answer as to "why" Eberhardt did it. What drove him to the edge?

While pursuing this question Nameless deals with an accidental death or suicide of a former client. His search for answers to that killing leads him into the realms of abuse and the question of whether justice is really ever served by revealing an interpretive truth. Are the victims sometimes the guilty ones even though they have been miserably abused? Is justice a cut and dried formula that we mete out indiscriminately without regard to the circumstances? Come and join Nameless on this painful quest as he attempts to get answers. This is Pronzini at his best in story telling.

Through the exploration of the lives and works of four profoundly influential American literary "insurgents," Zwerdling tells the story of their transgenerational fight to clear a space for the recognition of the worthiness American literature among English and European elites.

Engaging, thought-provoking and often surprisingly moving, we follow the expatriate careers of Henry Adams and Henry James in the mid to late 19th and early 20th century, followed by the modernist careers of Pound and Eliot in the early to middle 20th century. Zwerdling makes an extremely good case for cultural power's linkage to economic power by showing how Adam's and James cultivated reputations in both the U.S. and England, laying the groundwork for a idea of a shared Anglo-Saxon Literature just at the time when America was becoming recognized as having usurped England's role as the world's most vital economic and cultural power. Pound and Eliot build on the foundations laid by Adams and James, fully confident that as Americans they will no longer be treated as second-class literary citizens. They employ different strategies in their own "siege of London" but Eliot to a large degree succeeds in becoming the final arbiter of all literary disputes and grand critic of modernist literature. As America takes center stage at the end of WWII, American's version of world modernist literature and culture, not surprisingly, come to predominate forming the core of the canon of Modern Literature as taught in the University.

The literary insurgency takes it's toll on all four of our literary heroes, however. Adams comes to despise much of English culture and mores. James does his best writing after a long-delayed trip back to America after nearly a lifetime abroad, writings that imaginatively explore what kind of man he might have become had he stayed in his native land. Pound wears out London literary society in a few short years and abandons the field. Eliot adopts the manners of a high-toned Englishman to such an extent that he sets back the appreciation of other American writers thirty years (according to William Carlos Williams). Nevertheless, he too, writes some of his best later work after a visit to America.

In becoming expatriates they wander far afield of their original inspiration. In becoming accepted, they lose some of the insurgent edge. Of all of these James remains the most alive to the stirrings of new possibilities and the shifting relations of power between Americans and English elites.

The photography in this book is spectacular! It is what you expect from a Sierra Club book. Put together with wonderfully thoughtful and though-provoking texts by various writers, this book can give even a hard-core city slicker pause. Wilderness at its best....words to salve the heart.

this book would make an excellant gift for any vintage open wheel race car enthusiast

An excellent collection of works by the greatest philosophers of all times, from Lao Tzu to Jean Paul Sartre. Mr Deutsch edits, writes introductions and commentaries to the different subjects approached by the philosophers in their own lifetime. The book is organized in five areas: 1Who Am I? 2What is the aim of life? 3What do I Know and What is the Truth? 4What is Reality? 5What is Religious Experience?...Does God Exist?

These questions have a variety of philosophical solutions, from Eastern and Western Cultures, and Mr Deutsch provides a wise and ample variety of responses through the choosen works displayed. The language is clear and user friendly all throughout the book; the introductions to each of the five subdivisions of the book are concise and very helpful. This book should be in every good library, as well as in collegues and universities.

Buy this book! Learn to refocus the positive aspects of your type A personality for success. Don't let the title fool you. This is not about sitting back in a rocking chair after your first coronary event. Instead, this cardiologist who's as Type A as the rest of us explains how to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em in dealing with personal, professional and day-to-day social hassles. A great chapter on self talk and how it can frustrate adult stress. And a great chapter with quizzes on dealing with stresses. Take the quizzes on separate sheets of paper, date them, share them or have your significant other take them the same way as well. Periodic readings of this book got me from my first MI through 15 years of middle age, an angioplasty, and my recent triple bypass. The physical predisposition to coronary problems was genetic. My successful adjustment to the stress factors was all from the book, discovered as part of my original coronary rehabilitation in 1985. Read this book. Lead a better life. Buy copies for friends! Enjoy!