This is not a fluffy book. The first sections are the best guide in micro and macro-nutruients for the layperson that I have read. (I should explain that I have a teaching license for biology, physics, and chemistry.) The recommended diets made my doctors perk up and smile, and nod and strongly agree.

The one caveat is that the supplementation information has not been updated to include some of the most recent research - other than that this book is the first resource I recommend.

SIVE- I love Sive it is an extremely sad story about a young girls who is being sold into marriage by her uncle and aunt. Her grandmothewr is againstit especially because the man is about 70 and also bercause Sive is already in love with Liam Scuab. On the eve of her wedding sive makes a decision that will chande everything-Forever!

THE FIELD- Everyone knows the bull but the bull will go to whatever lenghts he must to get the most important thing in the world(to him) and that is land. But will he succeed and will Mrs.Butler-the widow who is selling theland get a fair price. Main characters include the bull,the birtd and Tadgh. Is tadgh like his father-Is he his fathers son?

BIG MAGGIE- Now widowed ansd free Maggie decides that she will wear the trousers but she finds that the harder she gets the childrenb just fly thenest and all move away. even her son(the homebird) has to choose between his mother or the love of his life. His decision will also change what is to come. Will Maggie continue to fight alone? Does Maggie even know.

Sarah Sydow
Far From Nowhere
www.farfromnowhere.com

Living within the truth is the ultimate act of citizenship, and such living, even in the face of totalitarian repression (as in Czechoslovakia) or consumerist subversion and corporate corruption of the political and financial systems (as in the USA) can ultimately empower the powerless.

This is an *extraordinary* book that is directly relevant to the circumstances that we now find ourselves in--what Ralph Nader calls "corporate socialism," where the nominal owners of both the federal government (the voters) and the corporations (the stockholders) find themselves disenfranchised, abused, shut out, and their life savings looted by the most senior chief executive officers and politicians.

The book is slightly mis-represented, with "et al" in small print after Havel's name as the author. I was even tempted to skip the additional small essays (his leading essay constitutes 44% of the total book, with ten other essays each being roughly 6% of the book) but that would have been unwise. There is real value in the other essays.

Both Eastern Europe prior to the revolution, and the USA in particular but Western democracies in general, share a common overwhelming problem, that of the silenced majority. As both Havel here and Nader elsewhere observe, the word "progressive" is contaminated and diluted, while democracy and capitalism (or socialism) in the ideal are completely compromised by a combination of asymmetric information (keeping the people uninformed) and corporate or bureaucratic or political corruption.

Havel opens by noting that "the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for ...nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures." This forces the vast majority of the public to "live within a lie," and accept, either consciously or unwittingly, the huge chasm between political freedom and economic fairness in the ideal, and what the totalitarian or hijacked capitalism models offer in reality.

Brutally stated, from the point of view of the normal wage earner, there is no difference between totalitarianism and corrupt capitalism. In page after page, Havel, poet and president, documents this truth.

Speaking specifically of the West, Havel notes that Western leaders, "despite the immense power they possess through the centralized structure of power, are often no more than blind executors of the system's own internal laws--laws they themselves never can, and never do, reflect upon." Who does that remind us of? Clue: it makes no difference which party is in power. Havel specifically relates the Czech and Eastern European experience to the West, "as a kind of warning to the West, revealing its own latent tendencies..."

Havel places most of his emphasis on reform at the individual and community level, outside of politics and economics. He is especially encouraging in speaking of how unlikely it is to predict the moment when widely differing groups can come together in truth and freedom to overcome an oppressive regime, and yet how likely it is, in today's environment, that such a change might occur.

In many ways his long essay reminded me of George Will's collection of thoughts published as "Statecraft as Soulcraft," except that Havel has found the state (either communist or capitalist) to be a failure at its most important function--the people must instead constitute an alternative polis that is initially side-by-side with the state, and ultimately displaces the state with a fresh new start. Incumbents beware, Havel finds that more often than not a clean sheet fresh start is the way to go.

As the USA confronts terrorism and a right-of-center approach to law enforcement, Havel offers a clear warning to citizens at risk of being labeled as terrorists when in fact they are only dissidents and speakers of truth. He speaks of the communist regime "ascribing terrorist aims to the 'dissident movements' and accusing them of illegal and conspiratorial methods." Shades of the present in the West, where anti-globalization activists and legitimate Arab and Muslim personalities have been tarred with the terrorist brush, held without recourse to lawyers, and generally abused in the name of an ill-defined and badly-managed counter-terrorism program.

Among his deepest thoughts, and I will stop here for the essay needs to be read by the same thoughtful people that are reading "Cicero" and "What Kind of Nation" and "Crashing the Party" and "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy", is the following: "The 'dissident movements' do not shy away from the idea of violent political overthrow because the idea seems too radical, but on the contrary, because it does not seem radical enough. For them, the problem lies far too deep to be settled through mere systemic changes, either governmental or technological." Havel, perhaps in concurrence with Lawrence Lessig and his "Future of Ideas" finds both the law and the legal code to be oppressive and abusive of the people--the recent effort to modify bankruptcy laws to reduce the protections of the people from abusive credit card companies, are but one small example--the outrageous extension of copyright and patent laws to keep innovation from the marketplace are another.

Havel anticipates the "whithering away and dying off" of traditional political parties, "to be replaced by new structures that have evolved from 'below' and are put together in a fundamentally different way." He speaks briefly of technology being out of control, and of the ultimate war now taking place, between state control and social control. He concludes that parliamentary democracies are essentially institutionalized forms of collective *irresponsibility*, and that only a moral reconstitution of society, the resurrection of core "values like as trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love" will show the way out of the "classic impotence of traditional democratic organizations."

The other authors are not to be missed, and provide complementary but distinct views that are helpful to sparking debate and reflection. This volume will in my opinion stand as one of the great basic texts for political science and public administration, and it has great value for courses and reflections on ethics, citizenship, sociology, and economics.

For Donal Hallapy, devoted father of a large family, times are very tough. But Donal is a bodhran player, an expert in the ancient drums of his Celtic forebears, a musician in great demand whenever the once-a-year wrendances take place, all-night singing and dancing hooleys which can be traced back to pagan times. This paganism, the secret nature of the celebrations, the drinking that takes place, and the fact that the church has no control over them has made them anathema to "the clan of the round collar," in the person of Canon Tett, an ultraconservative and downright sadistic priest determined to bring the free spirits of Dirrabeg to bay by ending the fun of the wrendances.

The prose is straightforward and earthy, the dialogue salty and realistic, and the interactions of the characters so natural that one can share the joys and sorrows, the humor and anger, and the frustrations and all-too-brief personal satisfactions. The natural world, which is exquisitely described, even in its harshness, takes on almost human dimensions, influencing the action directly, while providing a vivid canvas upon which the contest between church and village is played out. The humor is broad, almost slapstick, but tempered by an overarching feeling of melancholy and impending doom. Though some may find the clergy to be caricatures and the message a bit too didactic, Keane provides us a rare glimpse of the last days of a now-vanished world.

The book is a solid biography, and I can very well see Paine enthusiasts flocking to this as one of the best biographies ever written about him. As this is the only biography of him I've read, I'll reserve my judgment on that question, but I will admit that it is an exceptional study of a peculiar man. What the general public knows of Paine is often just his authorship of Common Sense, but of course there was so much more. He penned not one but three of the best-selling books of the 18th century, and, arguably, he initiated modern political thought on the subject of democratic republicanism. Paine was born an Englishman but for most of his life considered himself a "citizen of the world," which prompted a major change in how we view national citizenship - no so much as a gift from the state, as was the 18th century perception, but rather a promise from it to preserve certain rights indigenous to its people. Yet despite his cosmopolitan leanings, Paine managed to ostracize himself from all three countries in which he declared citizenship - England, France and America - thanks to his revolutionary ideals and his fervent insistence on airing his views publicly regardless of their popularity. He would eventually face public execution in both England and France - the story of his brush with death in La Luxembourg prison during the French Reign of Terror is decidedly spine-tingling - but would survive both to end up back in America, ostracized by the generation that remembered him, and nearly forgotten by the generation that followed.

Keane doesn't devolve into hero-worship, despite several initially-worrisome hyperbolic descriptions of him as "the greatest American revolutionary." Instead, the author deals with each of Paine's failings in a forthright manner. Paine was certainly a man driven by ego, though certainly an ego unaffected by cares for money, power, or public approbation. To put it simply, he just knew he was right, and he would never back down from any of his arguments, regardless of their popularity. Even his most unpopular anti-Christian sentiments displayed in the Age of Reason could not be moved, despite the efforts of many to make him recant on his deathbed. As for Paine's legendary alcoholism, Keane suggests it was just that - a legend. According to Keane, Paine never drank to excess when in social situations. He only drank himself into stupors later on in life when the pain of gout and bedsores became unbearable. This may or may not have been the case - I lean towards may not - but in the end it is of comparatively little importance when calculating the worth of a man whose ideas have arguably shaped many of our own modern ideas on government and civil rights.

All told, the biography earns four stars from me on a scale of five. The rating falls short of the final star more because of style than substance. Keane's prose is certainly readable, and in most cases enjoyable, but it was a bit dry and academic for my tastes in several places. On top of that there was some strange editorial snafus, including several instances of sloppy repetition and an imprecise policy of when and when not to translate from the original French. In one chapter Keane includes an entire paragraph of French extracted from a letter (p. 405), with no accompanying translation, and yet in the next he feels it necessary to include a parenthetical translation of the decidedly uncomplicated Dissertations sur les Premiers Principes de Gouvernement as, surprisingly, or not, "Dissertations on the First Principles of Government" (p. 423).

Regardless of my editorial trifles, the book is strong and well recommended to anyone interested in picking up a book on the life and works of Tom Paine. You'll find his life, in many respects, reads like an adventure novel, and his ideas on government and society are surprisingly, shockingly, modern.