This book should still be in print. Consider yourselves lucky if you own a copy. Keep it for posterity! My wife picked up a copy for $1.50 at a thrift shop - she had no idea of its worth, neither did I until I read it! One man's trash is another's treasure. I treasure it.

Graham states in the preface "...I have attempted to portray something else which does not depend on the latest decisions of the United States Supreme Court ...the endeavors of the Framers, a set of timeless principles ..." Graham meets his objective, and more.

To meet his objective he goes as far back in history as the Magna Carta, he includes real cases that resulted in the formulation of English common law and Blackstone's commentary on it, he includes much of Virginia's pre-Convention Constitution and brings us to the period of the Constitutional Convention. Then he explains, in detail, every issue faced by the Framers. How those issues were resolved by background understanding, rhetoric, compromise and, often, consensus. He explains the struggles faced over "the awful question" - including (speculating over?) what "might have been" had certain people, places, and things not intervened. He explains the post formulation period in terms of events up to and through the awful Civil War and finally the Reconstruction.

Concerning the title of the book, Graham has the founders understanding of "confederacy" - he states it well. It is sans the emotional connotation some place on that term today.

Graham, as he admits, "stands a defender of the South in the American Civil War, doing so as a son of Minnesota, because, after a careful study of this whole problem, I must concede that John Calhoun and Alexander Stephens better understood the design of the Philadelphia Convention than Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln". As he claims Graham made a careful study. As a defender he is not in anyway defending slavery, he adamantly opposes it, then and now. He merely defends the South based on their right to secede. Whether he intended to or not he also wards off attacks of the righteous (my term not his and I am a son of Iowa, the North) as he points out how slavery would soon have ended without the calamity, including 600,000 lives, of the Civil War.

The book's only drawback, as far as I was concerned, was due to my own lack of a classical education - I have no understanding of the Latin. So Latin judicial terms used frequently throughout were both an annoyance and a reminder of my lack of that education.

I am fortunate to have a copy of this great book. Graham instilled in me a further understanding, and a concomitant increase in my admiration, of those who participated in the formation of our Constitution - both pro and con - and some members of Congress, both North and South, in the periods up to the Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction. He also convinced me of, what I can only call, the evil intentions of others, most notably Stanton. And he neither worships nor despises Abraham Lincoln - he merely points out "the good and the bad" as those terms relate to the Constitution. Graham is not a "debunker"!

Graham lived up to the promises conveyed in the title "Principles of Confederacy", the sub-title "The Vision and the Dream & The Fall of the South", and the preface.

As a real estate investor I often refer to this book when I am in need help making a decision. It is the next best thing to having a seasoned partner who has been through many market cycles. As a Licensed Commercial Real Estate Appraiser and Broker I am impressed with the material as well as how it is presented. While lifetime of practical knoweledge is somehow reduced to a single 900 page plus book, it is not "dumbed down" for mass appeal purposes. Although I was introduced to this book through a course at Boston University I found it's format more interesting than academic.When investing your money in real estate it is better to read a book like this and learn than, to "just do it" and learn the hard way, believe me. This book is a keeper for your professional library.

Peter John Raposa takes us on a adventure on how it feels to sudddenly be out of control of ones body. His anxiety consumes his every thought and daily activities when he first experiences a heart arrythmia (benign skipped beats). I found this book by accident, looking for advice on how to cope with the same condition. PJR conveys his feelings, fears and eventually his acceptance and coping techniques through easy to read pages. Highly recommend this book. Also references other books and nutrition.

This book is the most condensed, accessible discussion of genetic manipulation techniques and methods around. Armed with this, one can move on and understand any other text in the area.

I think that this book is a all time favourite, my friends have recommended it and i do to. The Best.

Adriano

An excellent autobiography by one of the great boxers/fighters of all time. Gives an insight into his own and other fighter's training methods at the time, his approach to his big fights and how he felt during these fights. A view of how the world was and how the fight game was in his era.

This is a well-done study of an important question, the legacy of Zen and its political colorations, most tragically during the World War era of this century, that in the process provokes a deeper series of questions about religion, the histories of such, and their relations to social states. If Zen wishes us to escape time then the times and places to do this might end by preventing this, being timebound, reaching nowhere, as a destination. In the end some must have slipped away, but the form of the religion succumbs to history, with the ambiguous or sad ending here described. The Chinese-Japanese legacy of Buddhism is a brilliant creation, unique beyond anything in the more ideological monotheistic religions, but in the end the preemption of Zen by the Nationalist state during the twentieth century requires careful study, not only by historians, but by students of religion. For there is a point after which religions, intended to help people, cease to help them. As the book details the control of Zen by the state began very early, and as with the Constantinian version of Christianity we have an ambiguous cultural entity, distancing itself from the forest renunciations of the original Buddhism.
The studies in this book are invaluable food for thought, and very scholarly snapshots, with an interesting essay on Daisetz Suzuki, the Zen missionary to America. He seems to have sensed the whole problem, and in his detachment slipped away with the treasure to the land of the disorderly and too zany Americans, the next to try their luck with this religion.
It may not be meditation to read this book, but it is worth reading anyway, for it is clear that the history of a religion is not a spiritual reality. One hitchhikes on the form, to slip away in the end...
There is of course a dialectical antithesis: Buddhism, beginning in a forest, became in short order the Indian State...How so?
Perhaps the state might need protection from this other state...

This is a great book for kids and adults alike. It has wonderful artwork that depicts periond clothing and settings.
Even some good general information. If my children were interested in samurai's, I'd buy it for them.

I am the registrar of a small educational institute that teaches courses on, among other topics, world religions. _Scriptures of the World's Religions_ is one of the two central texts that we use because of the high quality of the text.

"Shakespeare and Joyce" will open your eyes! Did you know that "riverrun" is the first Shakespeare reference in "Finnegans Wake"? You'll know this and hundreds of other choyce titbits after reading this excellent, fun, and well-written book on the author who most impressed Joyce (Dante was second to the Englishman).