Having had back problems for almost 15 years, I have read just about every book available. Back Pain for Dummies is by far the best. It delivers very practical and easy-to-understand advice and practices that helped me more than a dozen chiropractors ever did. This book should be in the waiting room for every back specialist in the country. If I ever get to meet this Dr. Sinel, I'm going to give him the biggest bear hug ever (keeping my back straight, lifting with my legs...)

As far as pain mgt books go, usually they are overally verbose and ridden with medical jargon that makes it difficult to understand the reason you are reading the book in the first place...why does this hurt and how can I make it stop hurting? Back Pain for Dummies was so practical and to the point that just reading it made my back pain lessen. I highly rec this book to anyone who experiences back pain, especially if they are fed up with the pain associated with some doctor try to over-explain something that could be done in 10 words or less. Back Pain for dummies definately implements the K.I.S.S. method for understanding back pain. Keep it simple and make the #@*! pain go away.

Sinel and Deardorff take a refreshingly humorous approach to dealing with one of the most pervasive medical problems in our country. This book is easy to read and provides a very comprehensive approach to dealing with back pain. I would consider it one of the best resources available in the field.

I believe that in addition to turning the life insurance industry on it's ear and creating a revolution of sorts by buy term and invest the difference, A.L. Williams also did much to clean up the tainted image of MLM or Network Marketing by promoting without hype but with integrity.This book is very inspirational and motivational and a must read for anyone who wants the most from life.

Take it from the man who made the impossible possible. Starting with a $10,500 salary and outselling the Insurance giants like Pru and Met! Educating the general public to the folly of cash value insurance, "buy term and invest the rest" great strategy.I particularly like Art Williams philosophy of being devoted to a cause, having a goal that is bigger than yourself.Great book. All sales and network marketing people must read this book.dell-ites@wbtv.net

This book should be mandatory reading for anyone tired of the hype and "free lunch" philosophy of most MLM ventures. A judge in this province has ordered several young offenders to read this book and write a book report as "punishment" for their crimes. Art's message that you can overcome obstacles and achieve all of your dreams without compromising your integrity and values impressed me so much that I joined the company!

The first part of this coffee-table sized book gives an overview of Vincent Price's life, as well as his career. Obviously not a believer in reincarnation, this section concludes with a quote from Vincent Price himself. "You only get one time around, so why waste a minute of this glorious life?" The remainder of this book discusses every feature film connected with Vincent Price, whether he was the star, co-star, narrator, had a brief cameo or did the voice of an animated character. All 100 entries give the release date of the film, the film studio that made the picture, the running time, whether it was filmed in black and white or color, the cast, the director, the producer, the writer, etc. The next section gives a synopsis of the plot, sometimes followed by quotes from the man himself or other actors appearing in the film, and all concluding with contemporary reviews of the movie. Each entry has at least one photo from the actual film or a candid picture taken on the film set or, at the very least, the accompanying movie poster. Two things struck me while reading this book. One, Vincent Price was a versatile actor who excelled in every genre of film he appeared in, not just horror movies. Two, every actor quoted mentioned his wicked sense of humor, how great he was to get along with, and his professionalism. Of the latter, Gregory Peck summed it up best. "You get a bad piece of material, you do everything you can to improve it...That's what you're supposed to do. That's what Vincent did. I'm sure that he never, in his life, phoned it in, so to speak, or did less than his utmost best..." If you're looking for a book that dishes dirt and recounts gossip, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a comprehensive book of all of Vincent Price's movies, look no further.

Fans of Vincent Price have much to rejoice over in The Complete Films of Vincent Price. It's hard to believe that for the first time a book provides not only COMPLETE coverage of each of his feature films, but also a wonderful 50+ page biography of the man we loved to have scare us.

In each of the feature film summaries, author Lucy Chase Williams not only gives us complete cast and credit listings, but also charming ancedotes provided by fellow cast members. This distinguished list includes Charlton Heston, Angela Lansbury, Jane Russell, Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, and many, many others.

But what really makes this book a joy for all Vincent fans is the biography. Almost everyone only thinks of Vincent Price as "that horror film actor", but he was so much more than that. Williams warmly reveals Price as the well-known, well-schooled, down-to-earth human being his fans knew him to be. We see the art lover, the fine cook, the author, the "special guest star" on HUNDREDS of television series, and... the practical joker who knew how to enjoy life and have fun.

The Complete Films of Vincent Price is a wonderful book. More appropriately, it is The COMPLETE Vincent Price. The multi-faceted gentleman everyone should get to know.

To me, Vincent Price was always the ultimate movie star. His best roles were always those of someone on the brink who was pushed over the edge into soul-crushed madness, best seen in "House of Wax" and the Corman Poe films. Williams describes each of Price's 100 feature films in detail, with the focus on Price's performance. Each entry also quotes contemporary reviews of the film and there is usually an anecdote or two from Price or a costar. Not only is Williams' text good, but the book is full of fantastic publicity photos, stills and advertising art that are treasures in and of themselves. Horror fans can discover some of Price's other roles, like his hilarious comic performance with Ronald Colman in "Champagne For Caesar" (Forget "Quiz Show", check that one out!) At the end of the book Ms. Williams states that she regrets that she didn't have space to cover Price's extensive work in radio, TV, and the theater. So, come on, let's have volume II! (Though we might want to conveniently overlook the "Love Boat" appearances...)

In the summer of 1967 the USMC found itself engaged in a battle that caught them by suprise and cost them over 180 soldiers KIA and many more WIA. Vietnam was a war where many restriction were placed on American fighting forces, those restrictions were even stricter in the strange terrain of the DMZ. Like other books by Mr. Nolan (Into Laos and Into Cambodia come to mind) there is rich detail and information woven into a story by a chronological telling of event leading up to and through the battle. While there is a very good and informative sitrep of American (particularly USMC) involvement in Vietnam the strength of this book is it's "put you in the foxhole" eyes view of the fight. I had never read an account of where almost an entire American Company was overrun by large NVA forces, it is not pretty. I have read that ear collecting was something that happened in the war to dead enemy soldiers, the NVA put their own sick twist on this sort of war atrocity by collecting USMC tattoos from fallen grunts. There are graphic descriptions of the early M-16 problems which ended up causing the USA and USMC many casualties. This book contains some things that really suprised me, NVA soldiers equiped with flame-throwers looking for suvivors of the initial ambush, NVA artillery support which was accurate and protected from US airpower hitting American forces with a sustained barrage, NVA use of USMC gear such as flak vests and radios, American tanks being blown away like toys. There are many sad twists, if you are looking for a John Wayne type combat read stick to a novel, this one hurts the heart. I can't say enough about this book, if you are a student of the fighting in Southeast Asia get this book, Mr. Nolan really puts things together in this clear and painfully vivid book.

Operation Buffalo should be made into a Movie as it the best written book I have ever read about what the Marines and Corpsmen of Northern I Corps endured in Viet Nam. Time and again the men of the First Battalion Ninth Marines found themselves fighting against numerically superiour forces with very little support available at critical moments. Mention is made in the book that the First Battalion Ninth Marines was marked by the North Vietnames Army for destruction. I can't say for sure that this was true, but "The Walking Dead" nick-name was was paid for in blood. Keith N. Price Former HM3 Disability Retired Bravo Company, First Battalion Ninth Marines

First heard about the prime day of the book from a fellow MARINE who had been there and described it as similar to a firefight we had both been in, except there was no rear. I knew many men who died during the operation, and know many who survived. To a one they say it is accurate, and are proud to have their story told. My first thought was that NOLAN had been there. Oddly enough there is a quote on the liner notes from an upcoming 3 star Gen Libutti. He doubts the statement from McNamara" that all is quiet on the DMZ" Operation Buffalo is a book that men pass from one friend to another.

The Complete Works of Shakespeare edited by David Bevington

Bevington's edition of Shakespeare's plays is a popular choice, and not without good reason. But that doesn't make an ideal choice. The introduction to this one volume edition is ample with chapters on life in Shakespeare's England, the drama before Shakespeare, Shakespeare's life and work. These are good, but they tend to rely on older scholarship and they may not be current. For example Bevington repeats Hinman's claim that there were 1200 copies of the 1623 Folio printed. However later scholars think the number was quite a bit lower, around 750. It should be said that we don't know for sure how many copies of the 1623 folio were printed and either number could be correct.

Bevington's edition prints the plays by genre. We get a section of Comedies, Histories, Tragedies, Romances and the Poems. He puts "Troilus and Cressida" with the comedies, though we know the play was slated to appear with the tragedies in the 1623 folio. The play was never meant to appear with the comedies, and all the surviving Folios that have the play have it at the beginning of the tragedies.

Let's get down to brass tacks. You are not going to buy an edition of Shakespeare's works because of good introduction. You're going to buy one because the quality of the editing of the plays. Is it reliable? Is it accurate? For the most part this edition is reliable and accurate, but that does not mean it is accurate and reliable in every instance.

Modernized editions of Shakespeare's plays and poems are norm. Since the 18th century (and even before) editors of Shakespeare have modernized and regularized Shakespeare's plays and poems. There are good reasons for this modernization. There is the reader's ease of use and the correcting misprints and mislination. I have no problem with this regularization of spelling or punctuation. But when an editor goes beyond normalizing and modernizing--when an editor interferes with the text then I have a problem.

Let me give two examples of the editorial interference that I am writing about:

King Lear 2-1-14 (p. 1184)
Bevington has:
Edmund
The Duke be here tonight? The better! Best!
This weaves itself perforce into my business.

The Folio has:
Bast. The Duke be here to night? The better best,
This weaues it selfe perforce into my businesse,

Even allowences made for modernization of punctuation and grammar would not account for Bevington's "The better! Best." Bevington glosses this to mean "so much the better; in fact the best that could happen." Nice try, but "The better best" of the folio is a double comparative, (which is a regular feature of Early Modern English) and not two separate adjectival phrases. Interestingly, the Quarto printing of Lear prints this scene in prose, and there is no punctuation between "better" and "best" in that version either.

A few lines down Lear 2-1-19 Edmund continues
Bevington has:
Brother, a word. Descend. Brother, I say!
Enter Edgar

But Bevington has reversed the order. The Folio has:
Enter Edgar.
Brother, a word, discend; Brother I say,

Bevington does not say why he changed the order, though to be fair other modern editors have done the same thing.

These two changes just a few lines apart go beyond regularization or modernization. They interfere with the text as presented in the 1623 Folio. And Bevington does not explain the changes. So next time you pick up this or any other modernized edition you should ask yourself "am I really sure what I'm reading is what Shakespeare wrote?"

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE. Updated Fourth Edition. Edited by David Bevington. 2000 pp. New York : Longman, 1997. ISBN 0-321-01254-2 (hbk.)

As complete Shakespeares go, the Bevington would seem have everything. Its book-length Introduction covers Life in Shakespeare's England; The Drama Before Shakespeare; London Theaters and Dramatic Companies; Shakespeare's Life and Work; Shakespeare's Language : His Development as Poet and Dramatist; Edition and Editors of Shakespeare; Shakespeare Criticism.

The texts follow in groups : Comedies; Histories; Tragedies; Romances (including 'The Two Noble Kinsmen'); Poems. Each play is given a separate Introduction adequate to the needs of a beginner, and the excellent and helpful brief notes at the bottom of each page, besides explaining individual words and lines, provide stage directions to help readers visualize the plays.

One extremely useful feature of the layout is that instead of being given the usual style of line numbering - 10, 20, 30, etc. - numbers occur _only_ at the end of lines which have been given footnotes - e.g., 9, 12, 16, 18, 32. Why no-one seems to have thought of doing this before I don't know, but it's a wonderful innovation that does away entirely with the tedious and time-wasting hassle of line counting, and the equally time-wasting frustration of searching through footnotes only to find that no note exists. If the line has a note you will know at once, and the notes are easy for the eye to locate as the keywords preceeding notes are in bold type.

The book - which is rounded out with three Appendices, a Royal Genealogy of England, Maps, Bibliography, Suggestions for Reading and Research, Textual Notes, Glossary of common words, and Index - also includes a 16-page section of striking color photographs.

The book is excellently printed in a semi-bold font that is exceptionally sharp, clear, and easy to read despite the show-through of its thin paper. It is a large heavy volume of full quarto size, stitched so that it opens flat, and bound, not with cloth, but with a soft decorative paper which wears out quickly at the edges and corners.

If it had been printed on a slightly better paper and bound in cloth, the Bevington would have been perfect. As it is, it's a fine piece of book-making nevertheless, and has been edited in such a way as to make the reading of Shakespeare as hassle-free and enjoyable an experience as possible. Strongly recommended for students and the general reader.

Last year for Christmas I asked my parents for some William Shakespeare's plays.Boy was I suprised!Not only does it have all of the plays,but also his Sonats,poems,and illistrations.Despite the fact that it's a large valuem and will need quite a bit off book space from you're self.You wont regret getting it.You will never need to get another book on William Shakespeare's plays and everything else ever again.It also has a list of dictonary for understanding the words better.

My Father bought Up Front when it was released and I read the cartoons numerous times. Later, I read the text. This book does more to capture the human experience of war than any other of its time. It prefigures and anticipates the recent oral history books such as, "The Good War", "D-Day" and most recently, "Citizen Soldier". The last two, by the way, are well worth the read. Through Willy and Joe, Maulden protrayed the absurdity and the eternal human spirit in the everyday events that make up so much of the experience of war. The cartoons alone make this a book which even the most casual student of WWII should read. His text captures the experience on the ground, the mud and cold, the rain and heat, the boredem and fear and the workman like approach to war that made up the GI's life. Get it. Read it.

Cartoonists have an incredible ability to capture human situations with simple drawings and a bit of text and Bill Mauldin was one of the most unique. He is best known for his drawings of Joe and Willie, two combat veterans slogging their way through WWII. In his drawings, you see the despair, fatigue and determination of dirty, tired men who always seem able to take the next objective and move one step closer to the end of the war. Whatever they are doing, there is a perpetual slump in their shoulders, clearly demonstrating an overpowering weariness with the war and what it all means.
Mauldin was drawing from personal experience, having spent a great deal of time on the bitterly contested Italian front, particularly at the Anzio landing. The book is a combination of narrative and cartoons that he drew while in the field. To his credit, Mauldin also ran afoul of some superior officers, which fortunately did little to alter his tactics. As one of his editorial superiors told him, "If you aren't making somebody mad, you're probably not worth reading."
This is a view of the war that is not about combat as much as the deprivation that the fighting foot soldiers endured. Days of being wet, eating cold food and sleeping in water were routine for the men who fought. His description of their joy in being able to bed down covered with hay in a barn is a classic definition of a simple pleasure.
Many books have been written about World War II in Europe and more continue to be published as additional material is released from the archives of nations. This is one that will not be improved upon as it does not involve decisions made by political or military leaders. It is about the simple soldiers who fought their way across Europe and endured because they had to.

Over half a century has passed since it's initial publication and it arguably remains still the greatest book ever written about the dogface infantryman. With his brilliant cartoons serving as the book's illustrations, Mauldin explains in wonderfully clear language, life as experienced by the regular frontline infantryman. This book is a must have for all World War II infantry buffs. That it hasn't ever gone out of print since it's appearance in 1945, I think says volumes for it's staying power.

One last note: Mauldin went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for his work in 1945 at the tender age of 23, not too shabby.

I also heartily recommend Mauldin's complete World War II cartoon collection, "Bill Mauldin's Army."

The utopian idealist Wendell Berry has blessed us again with a book that lambasts "progress" and whose main character lives a life most would deem too ordinary. But the limits of Jayber Crow's ambitions and his avoidance of authority give him the space to observe the human condition, and these observations hold the sincerity of the philosopher and the awe of the innocent. Berry is the master of the synechdoche: the microcosm represents the universal; the universal is in the details. I'm not quite sure how he does it. His use of the language is elegant, yet straightforward. His faith permeates every line. This is a craftsman writing at the top of his game. The reader may need some perseverance to reach the point at which Jayber Crow finds his destiny in Port William, but once he's in his chair, compromising with ego, and studying the community he loves, the reader will be hooked. By the time Jayber moves to his cabin in the woods, the reader will want to stay alongside him, to live deliberately and with Thoreau-like simplicity.

I have read Wendell Berry's nonfiction, but I am a newcomer to his fictional Port William community. Reading this book is like a visit to a simpler life in rural America. Set in 1986, this novel tells the life story of Jayber Crow (1914- ), orphan, doubting preministerial student, bachelor barber, grave digger, church janitor, and progressive pacifist. Although an ordinary man, Jayber is a truly memorable character who, from his later years, reflects upon his life with clarity and poetic insight. "I am a pilgrim," he says, "but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a staight line to me has been a circle or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order" (p. 133).

This book is about many things, but should be read mostly for the sake of experiencing Berry's really fine writing. It is the story of Jayber's unrequitted love for a married woman, Mattie Chatham. It is a fictional memoir about faith, loss, farming, and finding one's place in the world. "I will have to share the fate of this place," Jayber writes about his declining community. "Whatever happens to Port William happens to me" (p. 143). It is also about bearing witness to dying farms and small businesses.

Jayber's memoir is filled with page after page of profound insights. For instance, about growing old and loss he writes: "I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured in our hearts. Grief affirms them, preserves them, sets the cost. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of the loss) found everything, and is ready to go" (p. 353). Examining marriage, Jayber says: "I saw too how a marriage, in bringing two people into each other's presence, must include loneliness and error. I imagined a moment when husband and wife realize that their marriage included their faults, that they do not perfect each other, and that in making their marriage they also fail it and must carry to the grave things they cannot give away (pp. 193-4). About the pace of modern life, he observes: "The people are in an emergency to relax. They come for the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. Their eyes are hungry for the scenes of nature. They go very fast in their boats. They stir the river like a spoon in a cup of coffee. They play their radios loud enough to hear above their motors. The look neither left nor right. They can't slow down" (p. 331).

Although somber in tone, Jayber's story reveals that wonders do happen in life. Jayber learns we live our lives with questions, the answers to which must be lived out "perhaps a little at at time" (p. 54), or which may take longer than a lifetime for us to find. "This is a book about Heaven," Jayber explains. "I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see through the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like a reflection of the trees on the water" (p. 351). This book is Berry at his best, and one of the best novels I've read this year.

G. Merritt

I bought this book because I like everything that Berry writes, but I wasn't expecting anything too great. A story about a barber in Port William? Seemed a little strange to me, but because it was by Berry, it was worth a read. This book turned out to be a great surprise, true to Jayber Crow's observation that all of the good things in life have come as a surprise. This novel follows the thread of many of the stories we have read about the Port William membership. Many of the familiar characters are here. But it seems that all of the threads of Berry's many works are woven here into a fine and beautiful tapestry. Berry's major themes about stewardship, sense of place, the importance of caring relationships, sense of scale, etc, are all here in a great story of learning, love, and forgiveness. This is a book about much more than just Where. It is also a book about who, what, why, and especially how. Jayber Crow chronicles the changes that modernity and industrialism bring to small town America. Country people were trying to get away from "demanding circumstances." But they "couldn't quite see at the time, or didn't want to know, that is was the demanding circumstances that had kept us together." The changes that are chronicled here apply to urban life as well as rural life. Great neighborhoods and family/neighbor networks were also part of the life of the great pre-industrial cities. A very large part of the answer to modern decay is the restoration of rural life, but we cannot ignore the cities. The question for us is how to follow Jayber and "lay our claim" on a place, rural or urban, and make it "answerable to our lives." Right living, in all of the details laid out by Jayber, is a large part of the answer to modern problems. A barber turns out to be an ingenious stratagem for storytelling and the dispensing of Berry's distilled wisdom. And it is a most unusual and gratifying love story as well!

Don't expect to learn Windows 2000 by reading this book cover to cover. It's not really designed for that. It is better used as a reference guide for commonly performed system tasks. In that regard, it serves its purpose quite nicely providing solid organization and simple advice.

This book serves a definite purpose. It's designed to be the book on the shelf that you use when the inevitable "How Do I Do This?" question pops up. It fulfill this purpose well. What this book is not designed for is to fully explain the features of Windows 2000 and Active Directory. There are other titles that do a much better job of that.

When and if you find yourself wondering "how do i do that again?" or "how does that work?" you will need this book. Its small enough to place on your desk and big enough to contain all the information about Windows 2000 as it relates to an administrator.

This book never comes up short in the help department. You cant remember it all and you dont need an 900 page book to remind you. Pick this up and keep it handy. You wont be let down when you need it most.

It's a very very usefull book to administrate the windows 2000 Network

"Brazzaville Beach" is a very well constructed novel weaving together two stories from the life of Hope, the heroine: in Africa, her work at a chimpanzee research center in a country in the midst of a civil war, where she makes a discovery that is "inconvenient" for the center's alpha male director; and in England, her doomed marriage to a brilliant but frustrated mathematician. There's lots in this book: love, sex, ego, war. Boyd very effectively portrays both the sciences and the scientists of primate research and advanced mathematics, as Hope learns what humans and chimpanzees have in common.

I adored this book from start to finish. Hope Clearwater is in worn-torn Africa observing chimpanzee behavior when she notices a startling trend that conflicts with everything her boss and mentor believes. Her integrity - and perhaps much more - is threatened when everyone at the camp seems to turn against her. Interwoven with flashbacks to her previous life in England with her bizarre but brilliant mathematician husband and the story of her Egyptian mercenary lover who flies a Mig for one side of the civil war, the story draws powerful parallels between the two primate societies, human and chimp.

How can a novel that discusses the difference between turbulence and topology in mathematics be a page turner? You'll have to read this book to believe it. Other than the name of Hope Clearwater - a bit too much in this otherwise subtle tale - Boyd writes deftly and passionately, sometimes with horrifying precision as he describes what is happening among the chimps.

This suspenseful and intelligent novel deserves a wide readership. I only wish I had learned of it sooner!

Hope Clearwater sits on Brazzaville Beach, contemplates her past, and narrates the events of this novel. One strain of the story concerns her failed marriage to a mathematician whose unquenched thirst for revolutionary discoveries and their attendant fame drove him to madness. The second strain concerns the animal research that Hope had fled to Africa to participate in. Grosso Arvore Research Center is run by the renowned chimpanzee expert Eugene Mallabar, who was just putting the finishing touches on his master work, describing the peaceful ways of our close animal relatives, when Hope's own observations seemed to indicate that all was not quite as idyllic as had previously been supposed among these primates. But the evidence of aggression that she finds between two competing colonies of chimps threatens the carefully constructed image that Mallabar has built up over the years, and, most importantly, threatens to make the animals less attractive to charitable organizations which fund the project. Meanwhile, thrumming in the background is a guerilla war which threatens to swamp this African nation at any moment.

William Boyd takes these various threads and weaves them together, along with a variety of brief comments on scientific and mathematical ideas and issues, into an exciting and intellectually compelling novel. With its Edenic setting and themes of Man's search for knowledge--and the madness the search can bring--the book taps into our primordial myths and some of the core questions of our existence. If it sometimes seems to be almost too consciously striving to be a serious novel of ideas, that ambition is justified, if not always realized, and the philosophical failures are more than offset by the good old-fashioned African adventure story that unfolds simultaneously.

The shelves fairly groan beneath the weight of books warning that when a little of the veneer of civilization gets stripped away in the jungle, Man must face the fact that he has a dark heart. And there are elements of that here, particularly in the way that Mallabar treats Hope and her discovery, but Boyd has much more to say besides just this. Perhaps the most exciting message of the book lies in the contrarian stance it takes to the modern age's tendency to romanticize Nature. It is always well to recall Thomas Hobbes's famous description of Nature as "red in tooth and claw." The reader of this book will not soon forget it.

GRADE : A

I thought I knew my American history reasonably well until Henry Mayer taught me how much I had missed. Garrison certainly was far more than the hot-headed crusader on the nut fringe I read about in one text after another. But this book also is more than a correction of an historial footnote; Mayer breathes life into the moral arguments about slavery before the Civil War and weaves America's history from the signing of the Constitution to the passage of the 14th Amendment into a colorful, lively tapestry. This is biography raised to its finest form.

I cannot recommend it highly enough. A rich read about a great American hero for all times. Mayer obviously loves and admires Garrison, but this did not keep him from portraying this hero with his blemishes as well as strengths. The most startling thing about this great read is just how important Garrison was to America's most tumultuous time --- the abolitionist of all abolitionists, a leader who appreciated how deep religious beliefs and moral politics go together, who believed in the power of the written and spoken word, who helped perhaps as much as anyone in our history to move our nation and free it of slavery. Truly a companion biography to go with the best biographies of Lincoln --- no understanding of the Civil War can be complete without knowing about Garrison, and this is definitely the way to know about Garrison. To say it simply: no one can claim to be a Civil War buff without knowing about Garrison, and no one can know about Garrison any better way than by reading this book. Highest kudoes to Mayer!

Henry Mayer has written a definitive account of the life of William Lloyd Garrison, the great abolitionist. While I have a Master's Degree in American History, and have read extensively about 19th century America, I had not until now read anything of this power and scope about this great central figure. In many ways, the Garrison portrayed here is the epitome of an American ideal: fierce and unswerving in the constancy of his views about great and weighty matters, willing to not only stand up for his convictions, but to live them every day of his life. Mayer does a particularly good job in delinieating the early days of Garrision's life and the surprising--at least to me--roots of both his background and his passion. While we can learn a great deal not only about the conduct of an intellectual life from Garrison, we can also learn a great deal about the conduct of family life as well. Gentle, kind, loving and doting, Garrison at home stood in marked contrast to his public personna of "Garrison the Madman," as he sometimes introduced himself. We also find a cast of peripheral characters in this biography (William Herndon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, etc.) which enliven it and give it the necessary depth required for a weighty and detailed biography. Taken in all, this is a terrific biography, and one of the best books I have read in some time.