This book is great for anyone looking for a readable yet profound way to enter into spirituality. As the title says, it is a "guide" to contemplation. Instead of reading someone else's thoughts and experiences--however powerful and moving those can be--the style of this book easily leads the reader to reflect on his or her own life. Fr. Kennedy uses gospel passages, stories of people he has known (incarcerated youth, gang members, immigrants), and beautiful poetic descriptions of gospel scenes to invite the reader into a deep place of prayer. The setup makes it very easy to enter into the meditation, whether one spends a long period praying or is looking for a simple and quick method to squeeze prayer into a busy day. I've done both, and the effects go beyond just the prayer. Fr. Kennedy's meditations change the way I go through the day, since they open the heart and mind to find God in the process of living life, even ordinary daily life. The best feature of this book is that it leads so naturally to prayer and reflection, especially important if, like me, you're busy or struggle to find a method that works for you. I can't recommend it highly enough.

This book and Mike's methods of meditation continue to help the kids of juvenile hall, the prisoners of death row and prisoners all over the nation. It gives them spiritual healing.

Iknow because I am one of those he healed, he was the presence of Jesus in physical form for me. My name is found when you turn to page 92. I was the only lost sheep that was able to leave the concrete and steel cells of the California correctional system.

Guide To Musicals is an in-depth history of nearly 200 musicians selects productions from late 19th century works to Mel Brooks' The Producers. Each entry lists composer, lyricist, and major performances. Guide To Musicals is a strongly recommended pick for followers of musicals who want background data and recommended readings.

Over a decade has passed since "The Crisis Years" was published. Since then, additional details about The Cuban Missile Crisis as well as JFK's personal life have floated into public view. Yet, despite the availability of this "new" information, even a cursory re-reading of excerpts from "The Crisis Years" confirms how accurate, comprehensive and riveting this account of two Cold War titans remains.

Moving at the fast clip of a smoothly written novel, this exhaustive summary of the Kennedy Years focuses on the thorny foreign policy issues that beset the Kennedy Team, some possibly of their own making. Beschloss does a wonderful job fleshing out the pros and cons of particular policy decisions as well as the personal interactions between the president and some of his key advisers, and offers plenty of nuance with regard to the nature of communications between Washington and Moscow during the Missile Crisis.

Perhaps the biggest single revelation in "The Crisis Years" was JFK's relationship with "Dr. Feelgood" and the extent to which the president was medicated on a regular basis, even as he prepared for the Vienna Summit. In our post-Watergate, post-Clinton era, one wonders whether public disclosure of JFK's steady reliance on pharmaceuticals would have been enough to push Nixon into the "win" column - and what that would have meant in terms of executing plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion, with all its fallout.

"The Crisis Years" has already stood the test of time. It will continue to do so for years to come. I recommend it to anyone who wants the unadorned facts - good and bad - about America's most legendary president.

Glimmer Train features up and coming talented writers, and boy have they have one in Daniel Wallace. What a great writer. The folks at the Train have the ability to spot talent, so look for these authors elsewhere for other good reads. This is the new crop of the biggies. Especially Wallace. A++

Not only have I read his works, but Dr. Michael Kennedy, Chair of the History Department at Winthrop University is probably one of the greatest men around. His classes are insightful and interesting, and the gentleman knows how to be just that, a gentileman. His intellect on France as a nation and the Revolution as a topic is vastly superior to almost any that i have read or heard from. Truely a leader in this topic.

I recently read the book John F. Kennedy-President Of The New Frontier. I thought that this book was well-written. It provided a lot of information on the history of our 35th President John F. Kennedy. I learned a lot of interesting things about J.F.K. that I never knew before. One thing I learned was that Kennedy was involved in World War II. He was in the navy and worked as a commander of the ship PT 109 in the Pacific. He was also decorated for his many acts of bravery after the PT 109 sank. Another interesting accomplishment of Kennedy was that he published a book titled Profiles In Courage which won him a Pulitzer Prize. It was very depressing to hear of the tragedies that Kennedy and his family faced during their lives, such as the deaths of Joseph Kennedy, Jr., who was killed in a plane explosion and Kathleen Kennedy, who was killed in a plane crash in France. Another personal tragedy was the death of his newborn son Patrick Kennedy. I thought that the information provided that lead up to the events of John F. Kennedy's death were very informative. This book shows how Jacqueline Kennedy exhibited a lot of courage as she was about to face the world alone as a mother with children to raise without a father. I found Michael D. Cole's writing-style excellent and easy to read. One event flowed into the other, holding interest all the way to the end of this book. If you want to learn about the life of John F. Kennedy as Cole takes you through a step-by-step journey, I recommend that you consider reading this book sometime.

Elgar's reputation suffered for a long time because listeners had trouble reconciling the exuberance of pieces like the Pomp and Circumstance marches with works like the Violin Concerto. (Pinchas Zukerman has described that work as the most psychologically complex violin concerto in the repertory.) In short, people couldn't decide whether Elgar was a crowd-pleaser or a poet.

Michael Kennedy's biography, first published in 1968 and now in its third edition, traces the contradictory impulses in Elgar's art and shows how they contributed to its vitality. He also explains how Elgar became one of music's finest orchestrators, despite a lack of formal training. He describes Elgar's varied apprenticeship as a "jack-of-all-trades" musician--playing organ, violin and bassoon in his native Worcester--which gave him a thorough knowledge of how instrumental sounds combine.

Kennedy, who has written books on Mahler, Richard Strauss and Vaughan Williams, offers valuable insights into the music as well as its composer. His judgments on the respective value of Elgar's works will be especially useful to anyone exploring them for the first time. The book contains four appendices, including a detailed list of Elgar's recordings, which give us, for the first time in history, a record of how a major composer wanted his music performed.

This book played an important part in the Elgar revival of the sixties and seventies. (Recordings by Adrian Boult and John Barbirolli, subjects of two other Kennedy biographies, helped too.) It's a measure of this book's importance that Elgarians still consider it essential today.

An infinite help for individual contributors to charities. In a completely up-to-date (includes information on September 11 charities) and easy to understand format, the book teaches the reader how to be socially responsible in their donations and also to save tax money during a trying economy. The charts, examples, and lists of deductible and non-deductible items were the most useful.

Michael Kennedy has created a most entertaining and informative book which explores an, heretofore, unexplored aspect of why Toyota, and companies like Toyota, excel at bringing new products to market with 4 times the efficiency of their North American competitors. The book is written in a fictionalized style, ala "The Goal", and conveys the philosophies and paradigms that Toyota embraces which set them apart, in time-to-market and profits, even in this post-bubble economy. Kennedy draws from his life experiences, both as an organizational developer of concurrent engineering processes at a Fortune 100 company, and from his involvement with an NCMS collaboration which studied and documented this subject. His volume chronicles how IRT Industries, struggles with their product development processes, their discovery of how Toyota uses knowledge-based paradigms, and how IRT grudgingly realizes that major paradigms shifts, not process changes nor process compliance is required to be a world class product development company. And, maybe best of all, he provides a detailed plan and methodology by which enlightened companies can implement what they learn from this volume.

Studies of Richard Strauss have a tendency to hover between enthusiasm and mealy-mouthed criticism. Or else they are so voluminous (multiple volumes) that only the most serious scholar or eager enthusiast can imagine plowing through them. Michael Kennedy's volume has two great strengths that place it at the top of the class when it comes to finding a good introduction to Strauss: It is compact, yet invitingly enthusiastic. Kennedy has the knack of highlighting precisely the unique strengths of each different work. Perhaps this is not so rare when he speaks of the leading masterpieces that others praise as well. But it is his special gift that he makes the reader want to listen to those works that have not been blessed with extreme popularity. All of them offer something that sounds interesting and inviting to the music-lover. Not only is it a superb guide to Richard Strauss; I think this book is a veritable model for the way that the non-technical music lover should be introduced to an important composer.