Aquinas is one of those figures who I know that I should know something about, but his writings are (far too) long and complicated. This book provides an excellent and serious introduction to Aquinas's thought--and one that is also very funny. The book covers topics like Aquinas' views on God, abortion, sex, and war, and it shows how Aquinas shaped our current attitudes. I have similar introductions to Aquinas by Copleston and Chesterton; the Renick volume is by far the most accessible of the three and the one from which I learned the most. It should be required reading.

This destined-to-be classic deserves--nay, commands--an honored place on the bookshelves of any scholar or devotee of the American academy, village life, urban evolution, and U.S. history or politics. Masterfully illustrated with insightful analyses of time and place, this work represents an amalgam of the best in word and picture. I cannot recommend this work too highly: it should be REQUIRED READING for all who live in, move to, or merely dream of 'the Southern Part of Heaven'.

P. A. Neenan, Ph.D.

Dear Mr. Hill, I purchased your book,Circle of Deceit, at the Scottsdale Art Fair and really enjoyed it. I plan to look for Subject of Inquiry and The Nigerian Letter. I loved the intrigue, twists and turns you took me through. I live here in Scottsdale and played with your dog for a short period of time. What a cutie. Thank you for providing me with a few hours of good entertainment.Joan Champlin

This book has been a great supplemental text in my UCLA extension class. I had previously used Richard Henderson's book, Compensation Management, Rewarding Performance, but found that it was too technical for my students. This book, by Frederick Hill, covers all the pertinent areas of compensation that are necessary for an introductory course; presents all the information clearly and concisely, with relevant examples, sample forms and cases. I plan on ordering this book for my next class

Cortona is an ancient hilltown whose winding stone streets mount up and up until you can see out over the valley. A world apart, this medieval town enclosed by its original walls has changed little in several centuries: a church built by St. Francis's good friend Brother Elias still stands with Francis's own tunic preserved under glass and you can wander through the very piazzas walked by great men from long ago. The present day charm of Cortona which is intimate enough to see in a day has been praised by the writer Frances Mayes who lives within walking distance outside the walls, but historian Philancy Holder tells us how it got that way in a tour of the very streets and structures: the gates, the convents, the churches and their saints, the rows of medieval houses and crests of long gone, noble Italian families embedded in a civic wall. Illustrated with many evocative pictures from the stone arching city gates to the palazzos, it is a book to carry around with you as you walk back in history. A must have for anyone who wants to understand Tuscany history, and how one intimate town grew over the centuries.

okay, so i don't own the book, but the poem is exquisite, and i've been a fan of it since childhood. unlike the independent publisher, i don't think that children are ever too little to be exposed to poetry or art, and murray kimber's work is stunning. perhaps if they read the poem they'd figure out where the horse motif comes from. jeez, guys, maybe you could sound a bit more pompous and uninformed if you tried, but i don't see how.

Hill and Celio have done a remarkable job of summarizing over 15 years of various attempts to "restructure" urban public education systems. In this brief book, they (1) carefully outline the strengths and weaknesses of each particular strategy - from site-based management, to school "models," to vouchers, to contracting; (2) reveal what each strategy presumes but does not itself provide for, and (3) highlight the political and ideological assumptions that drive reformers to favor one particular strategy (or way to implement a particular strategy) over another. What oft has been thought but never so well expressed, Hill & Celio's articulation of "integrative capital" theory draws together numerous threads in the reform literature and, for my money, is worth the price of the book alone.

A short book but by no means a quick read, Fixing Urban Schools is about the one thing that can finally transform public education -- not more educationist gimmicks, new ideas.

Note: The description included in the Amazon.com advertisement for the Hill-Zweig edition is incorrect. Their description is of a different edition, edited by Allen Wood.

This is it, folks -- the point at which classical and modern liberalism began to diverge. Everybody in either camp is indebted, in one way or another, to the great Thomas Hill Green. And sooner or later, everybody in either camp will have to come to terms with him.

Now, in my own not entirely humble opinion, Green's criticisms of other liberal theorists are well-founded and he himself has gotten the philosophical foundations just about exactly right. Basically, his claim is that (my paraphrase) the source of our rights against one another, as well as the source of the state itself, is our possession of an ideal common end in which the well-being of each of us is coherently included.

He develops this account very painstakingly, and one of the joys of reading it is watching him make sense of Rousseau's tortured notion of the "general will." By the time Green is through rescuing this doctrine from Rousseau, it becomes something altogether respectable: that (my paraphrase again) there is an overarching ideal end at which our actions aim, and it is that end which we _would_ have if all of our present aims were thoroughly modified and informed by reflective reason.

I say "_would_ have" with some reservations, since for Green (as for Bosanquet and Blanshard, who followed him here) there is a clear sense in which we _really_ have this ideal end. But this point takes us afield into Green's metaphysics, which are better covered in his _Prolegomena to Ethics_.

As I said, this volume marks the watershed between classical and modern liberalism. Green is often associated with the "modern" side of the divide, but today's reader will be surprised to see just how "classical liberal" Green was (in, e.g., his opposition to paternalistic government and in a good many other respects). Why, heck, there are passages that could have been lifted from David Conway's _Classical Liberalism: The Unvanquished Ideal_.

It does seem, though, that in allowing a positive role for the governmental institutions of a geographically-demarcated State, he has started down the slippery slope to the modern welfare-warfare state. Like Hegel before him and like Bosanquet after him, Green usually means by "state," not the bureaucratic machinery of a territorial government, but the whole of society including _all_ of its "institutions of governance." But -- also like Hegel and Bosanquet -- he does not always keep these two things firmly distinguished, and at times he is clearly thinking specifically of the governmental institutions of a territorial nation-state rather than what some of us would call the "market."

He is also a bit unclear on the ground of "rights." W.D. Ross rightly takes him to task for this in _The Right and the Good_: Green writes on one page that we have _no_ rights until these are recognized by society, and then turns around and writes as though "society" is recognizing rights we _already_ have. To my mind Ross clearly has the better of the argument here, though the problem is not, I think, terribly hard to fix.

On the whole, then, it is probably no wonder that Green and his crowd set into motion -- whether inadvertently or otherwise -- a stream of "liberalism" that would eventually find a far, far larger role for the State than any that Green himself would have approved. But to my mind, these difficulties are removable excrescences, not the heart of his theory. (And it is also worth bearing in mind that Green provides moral grounds for _resisting_ the State: he acknowledges that no actual State is really ideal and, insofar as it falls short of the ideal, should be brought firmly into the service of our common end.)

The theory itself seems to me to be sound. In fact, despite the aforementioned disagreements and several others, I would nominate this volume as perhaps _the_ single greatest work on liberal political theory.

Again, at some point every "liberal" of any stripe will have to come to terms with Green's ideas (perhaps in highly mutated form). And if, with minor tweezing, Green's basic outlook is sound, it also -- suitably adjusted -- forms the proper basis for the classical-liberal commonwealth.

It therefore behooves classical liberals and libertarians to get the word directly from Green himself. Those other "liberals" aren't _entirely_ wrong.

This is an excellent book for anyone looking for practical information on marketing research. Lots of case studies that illustrate. COmprehensive in that it covers the topics in marketing research well, but organized and presented in a simple, easy to read format. Well-structured. More practical, less conceptual or theoretical... as it's an "applied approach."